“Oh, c’mon,” he said. “You’re being ridiculous. You can’t compare cops to cults.”
“I’m not being ridiculous at all. There are plenty of fine organizations with at least a few cult-like qualities. You know how tight-knit cops are. Have you any friends without a badge?”
“I . . . I’m sure I must.”
“And how is it,” she said, “that you and your badge mates refer to the uninitiated? What’s that belittling label everyone gets who isn’t a sworn officer? Oh, right. A ‘civilian.’ ”
“I could pick out a few labels just for you.”
She snickered. “I’ll bet you could.”
John felt too tired to mull over whether the psychologist was right about cops—or what had motivated his own career choice. But the possibility she was right itched in deep places below the skin. “So tell me,” he said, “what’s really going on now? Why is Earthbound doing this to us?” He rattled his chains at her.
“They’re stripping us of our dignity. Little by little. To make us more obedient.”
“Little by little? I’m wallowing in my own poop!”
“You’ve certainly been in deeper shit.” She topped his near hand with her own. Her voice grew soft again. “Tell me about Jonestown.”
Jonestown, Guyana, October, 1978
John had fallen asleep to the usual sounds of howler monkeys in the jungle and one of Father’s taped speeches playing—not at all softly—through the loudspeakers ringing the camp. But he awoke to sirens and gunfire.
The ceiling lights were already on, and a guard with an automatic rifle stood just inside the door.
“
Up, children, up!” he said. “It’s a white night! We’ve got a white night! Mercenaries in the jungle shooting at us! Get dressed now! Get dressed and run to Father! He’s waiting for you in the pavilion! You’ll be safe there!”
John scrambled off his bunk bed and began wrestling into his clothes, fifteen other boys doing the same. The one-room cabin wasn’t much larger than John’s old bedroom back home in America, and elbows were flying everywhere, and someone with boots on already stepped on his bare foot, but he didn’t waste any time complaining. On another white night he’d been dead last to reach the pavilion, and he’d earned a hot pepper up his butt in front of everyone.
Outside, on the trail to the center of camp, John’s ears hurt from the sirens and the steady gunfire at the jungle’s edge. His boots felt heavy, caked with mud from a rainstorm earlier that day. He kept slipping on the wet clay ground.
For a moment, Father’s voice replaced the sirens. “Hurry, children! Run to me! The mercenaries have surrounded us! You’ll only be safe here in the pavilion!”
Mercenaries were soldiers hired by the CIA, John knew from Father’s lectures. The CIA wanted the People’s Temple members all dead, the whole camp. John didn’t really understand why.
Approaching the pavilion, he saw hundreds of people already gathered and Father above them on the podium, sitting in his white deckchair. John spotted Susan, the woman he used to call Mother, standing near a pillar. He took the long way around to reach her so that he wouldn’t have to pass too near Father.
John had seen Father reading other people’s minds many times before, and he didn’t want Father reading his own mind. Father would be angry if he found out that John still missed Tony, the man John used to call Father.
Tony hadn’t come to Guyana. Tony was a traitor. And Tony was dead now, Father said, because bad things happened to traitors of the revolution.
“
Let’s sit down, child,” Susan said when he’d reached her. “I’m exhausted.” She looked it too. There were dark, dark rings beneath her eyes, and no life to her face.
She was way too skinny now, also. Susan was probably sick of rice, like John was, and wouldn’t eat it much anymore. Rice for breakfast, rice soup for lunch, rice and beans for dinner. The menu only changed when visitors came.
She took a seat on one of the hard benches and John sat on the dirt floor between her legs. He hugged Susan’s shins and she rubbed his head. Normally, he didn’t get to be with Susan much. This was as good as life ever got now.
Nearby were long tables with neat rows of paper cups, each filled with unsweetened red Kool-Aid, John knew from earlier white nights. John knew everything about to happen but one thing. Father would talk and then they’d all drink the Kool-Aid and then if they were all still alive forty-five minutes later it meant the mercenaries in the jungle were really just their own church members firing into the air on Father’s orders as part of a loyalty test.
John hoped the mercenaries were real this time. He hated this place. All he did was blister his hands in the fields by day and listen to Father by night and fear all the time about saying or doing something to get himself punished again, dropped in the well with the snakes, or stripped naked with only a wire wrapped around his pee-pee giving him electric shocks. He was ready to leave now. Ready for heaven.
Marilyn awoke from a shallow, fitful sleep, somehow knowing enough to blame a distant sound in the woods. She cocked her ears and scanned past the nearby sequoia trees and the sleeping people chained to them. Her body shivered in the cold morning air. Her chilled bones ached where they met hard earth or tree bark. She heard a steady rustle deep in the woods.
Footsteps. Shortly, a dozen or more Earthbound members bounded up the trail, led by The Wizard. They walked in a tight bunch, clapping now with the artificial enthusiasm of restaurant wait staff about to sing Happy Birthday at a dinner table.
“What the fuck?” John said, stirring to life, along with the other new recruits.
The Wizard halted his troop in the center of the grove. He spoke above their continued clapping. “Congratulations, my new friends! Congratulations on a truly impressive demonstration of commitment to the environment!”
Freed from her shackles, Marilyn stood and stretched. It wasn’t very long past dawn. The sun hadn’t yet mounted the high Sierras, and the sky was the solid gray of pond ice.
Mick’s drug-induced sleep continued—despite all the clapping and clamor, despite his being released from the chains, despite his two liberators imploring him to wake up. John stepped in and shook the boy violently until his eyes opened.
The new recruits were ushered along a winding path with paint-marked trees. It took them farther up into the foothills. Marilyn waddled along, due to the repellent sensation of feces moving across her bare, burning bottom. The wretched stench of stewing excrement nearly overcame her at times, while humiliation added weight to her arms and legs, like a double dose of gravity.
The path emerged in a flat meadow with a stream-fed pond, about twice the size of a municipal swimming pool. On the far bank, towering oak trees hugged the shoreline. Nearby, a huge granite boulder sat imprisoned in shallow water. Brown-backed osprey sailed overhead. One made a surgical strike into the water, emerging moments later with a fish, just as the sun’s top rim peeked above the mountains, casting the first rays of sunshine.
“Strip down, people!” The Wizard shouted. “Completely!”
The diapers, he instructed, were to be emptied in a pile next to a tangle of brush at the water’s edge. Bob Marsh stood there now, gesturing the new recruits toward him with both arms.
“Over here, people,” he said. “Let’s go, let’s go! Don’t tell me you want to stay in those yucky things! Well do you?”
Marilyn was the first one out of her clothes and diaper. “Way to go, Marilyn!” Bob said. He gave her a cheesy thumbs up before handing her a small bar of environmentally correct soap.
She leapt into the pond on a run, shrieking from the water’s cold as it splashed against her skin. The sandy bottom beneath her feet turned mossy, causing her, instinctively, to tread water. She swirled her body around to face the others on shore.
A few recruits had stripped down and were now entering the pond. Most were still peeling off their clothing and diapers. Others remained fully dressed, motionless, mortified. The sight of naked backsides with wide, yellowish brown smears caused Marilyn to turn away.
She climbed atop the marooned boulder and began scrubbing every inch of skin with soap. She caught little Mick ogling her, and stuck her tongue out at him when he wouldn’t turn away.
Ugh
!
The hold-out recruits relented, stripping down like the rest, cleansing themselves in the water. Then the regular cult members, including The Wizard, stripped naked and joined them.
Another victory for Earthbound
, Marilyn thought. By stripping the new recruits of their clothes, through clever manipulation, the cult had also stripped them of their normal sense of decorum, which did not, of course, abide frolicking naked with strangers. In a matter of days, none of the rules of normal society would seem unbreakable.
A stocky man with a black carpet of chest hair climbed some wooden steps nailed to the trunk of an oak tree, unlashed a rope swing from a low branch, and swung out over the pond, dropping with a huge splash. At the same time nude piggyback fights erupted.
Marilyn stood waist-deep in the water, wondering what would happen next. A giant sex orgy?
Very little seemed out of the question suddenly. For the first time, she felt truly frightened to be in the clutches of this cult. She shrieked as a pair of powerful hands gripped her by the waist and lifted her. Higher and higher she rose until her bottom landed on a man’s shoulders, her cleft pressed hard against the nape of the man’s neck. Marilyn’s face flushed red hot when she recognized the top of John’s head. He rushed them into the heart of the piggyback battle . . .
“Breakfast!” Bob Marsh boomed from under the oak trees, drawing bodies out of the water at once. Cotton blankets of various primary colors lay beneath the tree shade in neat rows. Bob distributed white terrycloth bath towels.
After drying off and wrapping up in the towels, the group sat on the blankets eating a simple breakfast of tomato juice, poppyseed muffins, and grapes. Marilyn discovered little Mick leering at her again, and she pined for a set of clean clothes from among those neatly folded in cardboard boxes and piled only yards away from where she sat. Beside the tower of boxes, she noticed yet another set of eyes leering at her. They belonged to a forty-ish dark-haired man with a sickly white pot belly.
“That’s him,” John whispered into her ear, meaning this pot-bellied man was Tom Mahorn, the one who John thought might be Daryl Finck’s accomplice in the San Francisco deaths.
After breakfast, Marilyn reluctantly gave up her towel to go stark naked again, like the others. They all stood holding hands in a circle in the meadow, glistening from suntan lotion, participating in an exercise The Wizard called Positive Thought Bombing. Their aim was to change the world for the better by shouting out positive thoughts, targeting one city at a time.
“Amsterdam!” The Wizard shouted. Everyone else chanted in unison and at the tops of their lungs.
“Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love!”
“Louder, people,” The Wizard said. “Louder!”
But Marilyn shouted as softly as she could without attracting negative attention. She glanced across the circle at John, hoping he’d remembered to do the same. For this was no Pollyannaish exercise in New Age spiritualism. The new recruits, already stripped of their clothing, were now being stripped of their critical thought and judgement.
Loud and repeated chanting, technically known as
overbreathing
, caused large volumes of air to pass through the lungs, dropping carbon dioxide in the bloodstream to abnormally low levels. Sustained overbreathing led to a condition called
respiratory alkalosis
. Some of its early symptoms would go unnoticed, such as the loss of critical thought and judgement, while later symptoms—dizziness and euphoria were quite common—would be considered inconsequential or pleasurable. Chanting was an ancient and powerful physiological mind persuasion technique.
“Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love!”
During a brief pause in the chanting, The Wizard cried out, “New York City!”
“Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love!”
Holding Bob Marsh’s hand made it difficult for Marilyn to cheat—to chant at less than full lung capacity.
“Louder, Marilyn!” he said. “Say it like you mean it!”
And so she chanted louder for a time before reducing her volume again. But the exchange with Bob repeated itself several times, and she fell dizzy, and her mind began to wander. What they were all doing reminded her of something she vaguely recalled reading about. In the late nineteen sixties or thereabouts, some hippies had tried to levitate the Pentagon using only the power of thought . . .
“Rio de Janeiro!”
“Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love!”
Marilyn began to sweat profusely, but it wasn’t due to the rising heat of the sun. The Wizard had kept his new recruits overbreathing long enough by now for more pronounced symptoms of respiratory alkalosis to emerge. Her ears began to ring, and then her heart began to pound.