Soulmates (12 page)

Since I left my old life and the shell of my old “Ethan” self, I have learned that after honesty, the most important thing is spiritual support. When you have a partner who supports you fully, you can go places—physically and metaphysically—that you did not think were possible. You can walk right up to the edge of darkness, stare into the abyss, and know someone is there to catch you if you fall.

If your partner doesn't love your soul in all its fullness, that is not a partner who you want to take with you on your life's journey. You may regret shedding those negative souls, but remember, they are just hindrances, potholes on the road to enlightenment that need to be paved over with positivity.

I hope that Dana learned to forgive me, in time. I truly believe that if she'd let the honesty of the world in, she could be free.

I got back to our apartment late at night. On the plane ride back I had tried to make sense of everything that happened at the retreat. I had learned more about who Ethan had become, and a bit more about the woman Amaya had been. This knowledge comforted me, kept me warm in the recycled air. I was already less angry than I had been a few days ago. Still, I had no idea how they died. I wished I had pressed Sylvia more about what she knew, but I liked her and her friends so much. I didn't want to upset them with morbid questions when they'd made it clear they didn't want to talk about the deaths. They were having such a good time together.

I went in to work the next morning extra early so that I wouldn't chance seeing angry Phil in the elevator all hyped up from his morning workout and full of coconut water. I also wanted to get a head start on what I had missed. But I couldn't concentrate. Katie kept coming in and dumping more files on my desk. “Sorry, Dana. Here's another,” she'd chirp, ever cheerful. I'd open one and end up reading the same sentence over and over again, not comprehending or absorbing any of it.

What I kept coming back to was this: I needed to find out more about Yoni. Whatever had happened out there in the desert had to be connected to the “enlightenment” Yoni was peddling. I had read about the changes he'd made while we were still married in his book, but after years at the Zuni Retreat, there had to be even more profound shifts that I didn't know about.

I considered calling Beth for a reality check—she'd certainly give me one. I had texted her to tell her I was back in New York, so she wouldn't worry. I saw that I had a missed call from her. But I hesitated. I wasn't sure I wanted to be talked out of my thoughts. Of course Ethan's death was horrible, and it had brought up all the things I had spent so much time and money working through. But these thoughts, and the renewed sense of mission I had about figuring out who Ethan had become, were more vital and exciting to me than anything I had experienced in years.

I finally pushed my work aside. I wasn't getting anywhere with it. I had long feared that I would lose my ambition and my competitive drive. You needed to be unendingly motivated to make partner here, and I'd seen so many people, especially women, lose that push when they hit their thirties. But now that the desire to work was missing, it wasn't scary; it was tremendously freeing.

I took out a legal pad and started listing everything I had learned about Ethan from his book, from the sheriff, and from my time at the retreat. It was like working on any other case. I suppose I'd thought I might do something like this, because I
had put my copy of Ethan's book in my briefcase right before I left the apartment.

Sylvia said that Lo had been with Yoni since the seventies, and Lo told me she'd been in the spiritual business for forty years. After that I had a long blank space before Yoni's resurgence in the nineties. I did a little research, cross-referenced with Ethan's book, and found that Enlightened LLC was incorporated in 1996, and that they leased the location of the Urban Ashram in 1998. The Vikalpa commune that Amaya told Ethan about, that he talked about in his book, was purchased through the LLC in 1997, and sold in 2002 for a tidy profit. I tried researching Yoni under his real name, John Brooks, to see if he really had made his money through smart tech investing. But his name was way too common to net me any quick results, and it was possible he traded through some other entity I didn't even know about.

I tried deep Googling Yoni again, as I had right after I found out about Ethan's death. Ethan's and Amaya's demise didn't seem to get much national traction after that big story I saw on the cover of the
New York Post
. There were a few more follow-up articles in the local papers about the investigation, but because there wasn't any new or salacious information, the updates in the New Mexico press were brief.

I pushed past those pages, and then the pages of home birthing and vagina power results, and did find some commentary about Yoni's spiritual leadership. But none that was nearly as revealing as Ethan's book. All I could find were glowing reviews of experiences at the Urban Ashram and one partial PDF
of the pamphlet that Sylvia had me read at the retreat. Someone must have scanned it—incompetently—and put it online. You could barely make out the text on many of the pages, and the last half was cut off.

There had to be deeper research I could do. I would have grimaced out loud in frustration, but I didn't want Katie to hear me and come rushing in, ever eager to help. The last time I had done serious historical research on anything was in law school, but back then I had access to an endless array of academic journals and primary sources.

Like Beth still did.

I sighed deeply and picked up my phone. I knew she was going to give me a world of shit for not calling her over the past week.

She picked up immediately. “Goddammit, Dana. Why haven't you been returning my calls?”

“Well, hi, Bethy. How are you?”

“Seriously, Dana. What happened in New Mexico?” The anger in Beth's voice turned to concern.

I hesitated. I couldn't tell her everything, but I didn't need to totally ice her out, either. “It was actually fine. More than fine; positive. I went to see the sheriff investigating Ethan's case, and I think I really helped him. Also, I got a break from New York and took a bunch of yoga classes. That was really nice for me.”

Beth hesitated a moment before saying, “I'm glad. So does this mean you got closure? Can you move on from this part of your life that is so, so over?”

“Well, that's part of what I'm calling you about. Could I
borrow your password for JSTOR and the other primary source sites you use? I just need to figure out a few more things about the guy Ethan followed to New Mexico, Yoni. The sheriff's department out in Bumblefuck is woefully underfunded, and they don't even have the resources to do this kind of search. I really want to help them.”

“You're using that voice,” Beth said, clearly irritated.

“What voice?” I snapped back.

“The same voice you used when we were kids and you were trying to convince me to trade my Malibu Barbie for a piece of ‘magic paper.'”

I remembered that. The paper in question had been a piece of purple construction paper with the words
MAGIC PAPER
! scrawled on it in metallic silver. Beth had happily traded me the Barbie. Ten minutes later she'd realized the error of her ways, sat down, and cried. “This is different, Beth. This is a real thing,” I said quietly.

Beth sighed. “I think they're more similar than you realize. But I'll give you the password, because I love you, and because I know you won't leave me alone until you get it. Just please, please remember to take care of yourself.”

I logged into Beth's accounts and started going through the databases of newspapers and magazines. At first everything I found was info I already knew about: Yoni's big move to the Zuni Retreat in New Mexico, which was covered in various yoga and meditation journals; old reviews of the Urban Ashram when it had first opened in New York, in
Time Out
. I found an aside about Yoni in an academic article from the
Journal of the
Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies,
but it didn't give me anything to work with.

Buried on the hundredth page of database results, I found a headline from the
Greenwich Rag,
dated 1982:
IS LAMA YONI A MONSTER OR A MESSIAH
? The subhead read
The most popular yoga guru below 14th Street has a sinister past
. My heart started racing. There was a short description of the
Greenwich Rag
in the database: it was an underground newspaper that published in downtown New York from 1959 to 1987. I clicked on the headline and read on.

Myra Collins was just your typical art history graduate. After matriculating from Barnard last year with no particular plan except a vague desire to eventually find a husband and have kids, she fell into work as a gallery receptionist. “My life had no purpose,” Collins, 23, said. “Until my girlfriend took me to one of Lama Yoni's yoga classes at the Jane Street Ashram.” By her own description, Lama Yoni changed her life. She quit her job, changed her name to Luna, traded her trousers for a diaphanous robe, and went to live with Yoni and several other acolytes in a dilapidated brownstone on Jane Street.

The Jane Street Ashram is an exercise in complete
communal living. Every morning its residents—except for Lama Yoni—wake up at first light for a sunrise round of sun salutations. They spend their days studying Lama Yoni's texts, listening to his lectures, and running a macrobiotic restaurant on the parlor floor of the building. That's where I met Ms. Collins, who was my server. “I always thought I wanted to be liberated from the kitchen,” Collins said as she set down a plate of millet. “I didn't want to turn into my mother. But Lama Yoni has shown me that nourishing people doesn't have to be a gendered task, and that sustaining life is the greatest gift you can give to the world.”

Luna is slender and lanky, with flowing dark hair, bright blue eyes and a creamy complexion. When you learn about Yoni's past, her beauty is not surprising. In fact, all of the denizens of the Jane Street Ashram are dewy and fresh-faced young women. They bow to you when they answer the door and sit in submissive silence when the Lama speaks. Yoni's speech—which I have heard at his open yoga classes—is remarkable in its opacity. He talks in riddle-like parables about barnyard animals, but the underlying message of everything he says is the same: only the strong survive.

Yoni, born John Brooks, knows something about surviving. He came from a broken home in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. His father, an out-of-work mechanic and small-time crook, left the family when the boy was two. His mother worked as a waitress until she remarried a local fire-and-brimstone preacher named Elmer Brooks, who legally adopted John. According to locals who knew
Brooks as a child, Elmer was equal parts cruelty and charisma. “He did not spare the rod,” one school chum of John Brooks said. “Johnny would come to school with bruises all the time. Once, he came in with a broken arm. He said he fell down the stairs, but it was right after he was caught stealing penny candies from the store, so everyone knew Elmer had given him the whooping of his life.”

But Elmer was also an electrifying preacher, and his sermons drew hundreds of followers. He stood out from the other local preachers, who subscribed to a more forgiving theology. Elmer's sermons were about the evils of fornication and drinking, like everyone else's. But, understanding a primal thirst for bloodlust, he preached about the punishments that would be meted out by a righteous God: lakes of fire and screaming penitents. John listened to these sermons in his Sunday best, and bided his time with petty thievery and other victimless criminal mischief until he was 18 and could hitch a ride out of his hometown.

Like many other Americans seeking a new life, John Brooks went west. It was 1965, and San Francisco's counterculture was just starting to bloom. It's unclear what happened to Brooks over the next two years. There is no record of him getting into trouble with the law, and none of his peers from that time could be found. The next time Brooks surfaced was in 1967. He had a new look—long, flowing robes to match his long, flowing hair and beard—a new name, Aries; and a new occupation: street preacher. He was not alone in this occupation; at that time, you could
find a bearded man on any corner in the Haight preaching peace, free love, and brotherhood.

But Brooks stood out in this morass. He had been paying attention to his adoptive father's appeal. He had that same charisma, and he was savvy enough to realize he had to distinguish himself. Like Elmer, he knew his audience. But this audience did not want darkness, they wanted light. And Brooks realized that although they claimed to want freedom from capitalism, they were greedy in their hearts. So he combined peace, free love, and brotherhood with the promise of money. He told his followers that if they tithed him 10 percent of their assets, riches—spiritual and worldly—would come back to them tenfold.

That Brooks is also unusually good-looking explains why his first followers were the beautiful young female runaways who littered San Francisco then. They were drawn to the unthreatening matinee idol face beneath that beard, and he offered them a sense of belonging and protection that they deeply needed. These girls, as young as 14 and 15, left conservative towns and their disapproving daddies behind. But they were still unformed as pancake batter, and so they were the perfect target for Brooks.

“Aries went after the girls who were bent, but not completely messed up,” one ex-follower of Brooks, whom I will call Rumi, told me. “Fully damaged was too crazy, too unpredictable. But bent was easier to control.” In just a few short months, Brooks had a pack of young women who sat at his feet and hung on all his words. He convinced them that their major contribution to his community would
be to bring more people into his fold. And the best asset they had to offer the universe was their nubile sexuality. Brooks sent them out on “fishing” missions, using the pretty girls as bait to draw in male followers.

Rumi was among the first men caught on the fishing missions. “I went for the girls at first,” Rumi said, “but I was really jiving on what Aries was preaching. I was a little lost myself. I just got out of the army and I didn't know what I was going to do. This gave me something to do.” The girls kept bringing in more clueless men, fellow lost souls who were bumming around San Francisco doing odd jobs. By 1972, the Aries faithful had swelled to nearly 1,000 people, some more devout than others. Aries called them his children.