Soulmates (13 page)

Aries' Children would have gone on living in San Francisco indefinitely, but that year one of Brooks's first teen followers ran back to her family in Orange County. She told her parents just the barest details of what happened with Aries, and her father marched up to the San Francisco Police Department and filed statutory rape charges against John Brooks. Instead of facing the charges, Brooks, who by this time had raised nearly $500,000 tithing his followers, bought a parcel of land in Mendocino and took 100 of his most fervent acolytes with him.

After a few years in isolation at the Mendocino compound, Aries began to get paranoid. “By the midseventies he was taking a lot of speed,” said Rumi, who was in Brooks's inner circle by then. “And he started to have visions. They were always about us being persecuted for our
beliefs. That's when he formed the watch.” The watch was a group of the fittest men among Aries' Children. They would patrol the borders of the compound, making sure none of the other young women ran back to their families to report on Aries.

Rumi is ashamed that he participated in the watch. “What can I say?” he said. “I was swept up in the potential of the movement. I was a true believer.” Until he wasn't. One night when he was alone on duty, he caught a young female follower trying to leave the compound.

“This girl was always so devoted to Aries. She was one of his favorites. He loved blondes. So I was surprised to see her face when I shined a flashlight on it,” Rumi told me. The girl told him that while her sex with Aries and the other men she fished had started out consensually, she didn't want to do it anymore. “She was so young still,” Rumi said wistfully. “She realized she didn't feel good giving her body up like that.” And that's when Aries turned on her. “She said he raped her, and told her that unless she wanted to become an untouchable in the community, she would keep having sex with him.”

The girl was terrified. After hearing her story, Rumi let her go. Though he denied seeing her the next morning, he was nevertheless punished because he was the one on watch when she got away. Aries wouldn't allow anyone to look Rumi in the eye until the new moon appeared—nearly a month's time. He never found out if he would have eventually been forgiven; he slipped out one night himself.

The young woman pressed rape charges in Mendocino
County in October 1978. Because of the nature of the crime against her, we will not use her name in this piece. According to another ex-follower of Yoni's, this woman also carried a secret with her when she left: she was pregnant with Yoni's child. The woman could not be found for comment.

By December of 1978, the Mendocino compound had disbanded, and Aries disappeared. After a lost six months, he resurfaced as Lama Yoni in New York in the summer of 1979.

I called John Brooks several times to comment on this story. Through his lawyer, David Rappaport, he declined to speak to me. Rappaport offered the following statement: “Lama Yoni refuses to dignify the ravings of a disgruntled former friend with any response. The allegations of this ‘Rumi' person are risible and borderline libelous. If you print any of this, you will be hearing from my office presently.”

Curious things started happening to me after I received that first message from Yoni's lawyer. I started getting mysterious phone calls at home and at the office, in which no one would be at the other end of the line. I found a stack of
American Funeral
magazines on the stoop outside my apartment. Finally, my daughter's kitten, Mr. Whiskers, disappeared from our fire escape. That's when I started to get a little scared. Every time I left my office on reporting business, I felt like someone was following me. My wife was terrified, and for a moment I considered spiking the story.

But I couldn't sit back and let anyone else's daughter
follow John Brooks without knowing the truth. I asked Myra Collins what her parents thought about her life choices. “My parents are no longer a part of my natural universe,” Myra said. “They had too many inane questions about my life. And Lama Yoni says inane questions are for inane people who don't understand the importance of the work we do.” I tried to ask her what kinds of questions her family had, but she told me she had to attend to another customer. She bowed deeply to me and walked away.

When I finished reading I felt like I was covered in a film of grease. I stood up from my desk and started pacing. How had Yoni been able to start a popular ashram out in the open after something like this had been published? Had he been able to bury the coverage? I supposed it was a lot easier to run away from your past before everything was published on the Internet.

Yoni was also incredibly savvy. He seemed to understand that yoga was a trend that swept the country in the 1990s and 2000s, and he had emphasized the yoga and health food, while keeping the underage women and secret sex games as a clandestine bonus. Lots of people went to his studio and to his retreat and just did yoga, as I did. While some more devoted yoga practitioners, like Sylvia and her friends, also read Yoni's pamphlets, it sounded like they weren't privy to anything like what Ethan had described in his book, or like what was described in the
Greenwich Rag
. But at least what was going on with Ethan and Amaya was basically consensual. What Yoni—or Aries, I guess—did in the '60s and '70s was unconscionable.

I sat back down again. My mind worked methodically, and I needed to finish my timeline before I did anything else. I filled in everything I learned from the
Greenwich Rag
article, which covered the '70s and '80s. Then I jumped back to the '00s—when Ethan left me, and the Zuni Retreat opened. I looked up all of Ethan and Amaya's YouTube videos to see when they had been posted. The last one was from a year ago. I put that date down, then I added the years Ethan had been teaching at Zuni. I thought about the “dangerous things” Sylvia's friend Raina said Ethan and Amaya were allegedly doing at the time, and wished I had been more aggressive in questioning Sylvia and her pals.

The last thing I put down before Ethan's and Amaya's deaths was Ethan's visit to his dad, which the sheriff had said happened just a few months before his death. I looked at the evidence gathered up before me in my neat, even handwriting, and suddenly it became clear to me: I needed to talk to Ray.

“Get me Ray Powell of Livingston, Montana, on the phone,” I said to Katie over the intercom about an hour later.

“Can I tell him what this is regarding?”

“No!” I snapped, and then felt guilty. “Sorry, no. You don't need to. He'll know what it's about when you tell him that it's Dana Morrison on the phone.”

“Sure thing,” she said calmly, putting me on hold. I checked my e-mail six times. I went back and skimmed the
Greenwich Rag
article again. I looked at my phone to see if any messages had popped up from Beth. I tried to occupy the interminable
anxious space until I heard Katie's voice. “I've got Mr. Powell for you,” she said confidently. She really was a very good assistant.

“Yello?” Ray said. He sounded just like he always did. That he hadn't changed when everything else around me had was a relief.

“Ray? It's Dana. I'm so, so sorry about Ethan.”

There was a long silence on the other end. I was about to ask if Ray was still there when he said, “It's a very sad thing.”

“It's awful, and I'm sorry it's the reason I'm calling you after all these years.” I wanted to stumble directly into everything I had discovered, but I knew I had to hold back. I waited for some signal that Ray was ready to continue the conversation, but when all I heard on the other end was several moments of even breathing, I just started talking. “I went out to New Mexico and talked to Sheriff Lewis.”

“Is that right?” Ray sounded surprised.

“Yes. I didn't know where Ethan went after he left me. The sheriff said doing a face-to-face interview was ideal, and I was curious to see where Ethan had spent his time, so I booked a stay at the Zuni Retreat. The sheriff also said, well, he said that he thought it might be a murder-suicide, and I just didn't believe that.” I tried to say the second part carefully.

“I don't believe that, either,” Ray said firmly.

“You talked to Sheriff Lewis, right?”

“Correct.”

“And you told him that Ethan visited you a few months before he died?”

“Correct,” Ray repeated, like I was a census taker bothering him with a boring questionnaire.

“What was that like?” I asked.

“It was all right.”

Clearly I wasn't going to get anywhere asking open-ended, sensitive questions. “Did he tell you anything about his life there?” I pressed. “About Yoni? About why he left?”

Ray didn't say anything for so long I thought he had hung up. Finally he said, “I told the sheriff everything I know. And honey, it's not any of your business.”

I tried to gently cajole Ray into telling me something, anything else about what he knew. But he refused. He couldn't get why I wanted to get involved. “I guess I understand why you went down to New Mexico,” he said after we had been chatting for a little while, “but I don't see why you'd want to stay at the retreat.”

“Well . . .” I considered lying, because I knew it would sound nuts to him, but I figured we weren't going to get anywhere unless he knew the whole truth. “The sheriff said that he was having trouble getting a warrant to search the Zuni property, and I thought that I could go to the retreat and find something that might be helpful to the case.”

“That ain't right, Dana,” Ray said sternly. “It's not your job. You shouldn't be getting involved in this.”

“Why not?” I said, a little imperious. I had slid into my tough-gal work persona without thinking; he didn't have the right to tell me what to do. Besides, I had spent so many years after Ethan left feeling powerless and clueless about what had happened. I finally had some agency and I wasn't about to give it up.

“You just shouldn't!” Ray snapped.

“Well, I also wanted to find out more about Ethan, what he was like after he left me. Can you tell me anything about that?”

I kept trying to ask the question in different ways, but Ray wouldn't reveal more. Finally, to get me off the phone, he agreed to let me come out to Montana and talk to him in person. I am very, very good at arguing, and I felt eerily confident that I would be able to break Ray's resolve. I could hear a little falter in his tone and just knew he wanted to tell me the truth. I don't know if it was spending too much time in the company of the spiritual and faux-spiritual, but this trip seemed fated.

I was so wrapped up in convincing Ray to talk to me that it wasn't until I got off the phone that I remembered I was still at work, and that I had just come back from a vacation that had been only grudgingly approved. I tallied up all the vacation days I'd saved and thought about the potential excuses I could give Phil that would force him to let me go without censure. Thinking about that conversation made my heart start to race. He was going to be so angry.

I took a deep breath. Maybe there was a way to do this without losing my job or having Phil go nuclear. I took out my employee handbook from the bottom drawer, where it had been languishing since I started at the firm seven years ago. In the back section where they had the information about maternity leave, there was one short sentence tucked under the paternity leave policy (five measly business days) that could be my savior: “Employees that have worked for the firm for five uninterrupted years are entitled to an unpaid sabbatical of six weeks.”

Unsurprisingly, no one had ever mentioned this benefit to me. I knew how big law firms like mine worked: they kept
these things on the books to pretend that they catered to work/life balance but never actually spoke of them. I bet none of my workaholic peers had ever availed themselves of the sabbatical even if they knew it existed, because taking a leave meant not making partner. There was only one woman who was a partner anyway, and she famously took three weeks of maternity leave, even though we were supposedly entitled to four paid months. Word around the office was that she answered her cell phone as they were wheeling her into the OR for her C-section.

I took out a yellow highlighter, marked the paper, and left my office to go talk to Phil.

Phil thought I was, quote, “out of my fucking mind” when I announced that I was taking the six-week sabbatical, which I had earned. As I suspected, he'd never heard anything about the sabbatical before, and his mouth hung open as I pointed out the passage in our employee handbook. He was, for a moment, at a loss for words, reduced to a very controlled head shake. When he regained his voice, he sputtered, “You will never make partner this way, ever. And you were so close.” I shrugged. A month ago, making partner was one of my top-five reasons for dragging my carcass out of bed every day. But now, it seemed irrelevant. “I need this time,” I told him, “and I'll worry about making partner later.” I knew, as I spoke to Phil, that making this choice not only ruined my chances for a partnership but also put my current job in jeopardy. And I was a little surprised to discover that I didn't care.

I was able to get a flight to Bozeman the next day. As I made the arrangements, I felt more secure in my hasty plan. I packed
clothing for the massive weather changes that happen in late spring in Montana: rain gear, a big puffy jacket, long underwear, shorts, and T-shirts. I packed Ethan's book, my legal pad outline, a tape recorder, and several pens.

I wasn't just getting physically ready. I was also getting emotionally ready. As much as I had convinced myself that I had moved on from Ethan's departure years ago, I was starting to realize I hadn't. I was still living in the apartment we used to share. I wasn't dating. I hadn't even made any new friends. I simply bludgeoned myself with work and called it a life. Ethan's death, no matter how searing, had woken me up. And my experience at the retreat had nudged something else awake, too. I wasn't yet sure what that was.