The others would be feeling much the same. Their symptoms, if at all discussed, would be interpreted to serve cult purposes. Using another mind persuasion technique, known as
reframing
, The Wizard would, in some manner, explain to the new recruits that what they were feeling was evidence of his own mystical powers, or else magical manifestations of spiritual enlightenment.
“Bucharest!”
“Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love!”
Marilyn prayed for the chanting to stop soon. Extremely prolonged and exuberant overbreathing would eventually and inevitably cause painful symptoms of respiratory alkalosis, such as severe muscle cramps or chest pains. And for those with certain medical problems or predispositions, heart irregularities or convulsions could be induced.
“Moscow!”
“Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love! Love!”
The Wizard stepped away for a private talk with Tom Mahorn. Without leaving Marilyn’s side, Bob took control of the group.
“We need a new thought bomb, people! Who has one?”
“Peace!” Kira said.
“Barcelona!” Bob said.
“Peace! Peace! Peace! Peace! Peace! Peace! Peace! Peace! Peace! Peace! Peace! Peace! Peace! Peace! Peace!”
“Tokyo!”
Sometime later—it seemed to Marilyn hours later, but time for her was hard to track now—The Wizard called an end to the chanting, and the group, sweat beading their skin head to toe, retired to the blankets beneath the oak trees. In Marilyn’s ears, a steely buzz saw whirred, and she felt mildly euphoric.
The naked Wizard stood before them, his back to the pond, and commenced another jeremiad on the state of the environment. Marilyn uncharacteristically had trouble focusing at first, but soon recognized The Wizard’s topic: chemical pollutants.
“These pollutants,” he said, “enter the biosphere through hundreds and hundreds of industrial sources. They result from the use of PCB chemicals in the manufacturing of electronics. They come from the pesticides used in commercial farming, from the manufacturing of the plastic bottles and jugs containing our food and our drink, from the chlorine compounds used to bleach our paper and clean our backyard pools. These pollutants are virtually everywhere now. In the sky, in the water, in the soil, and in ourselves. Human beings absorb them every day, simply by breathing, eating, and drinking.”
Marilyn listened passively. The alkalosis-induced diminishment of her critical faculties, she was unable to reflect, allowed her to do no more.
“What is most alarming about chemical pollutants is their ability to disrupt the most basic biological function of all. Reproduction. In recent years, chemical pollutants have been shown by leading researchers to disrupt the action of hormones that are important, or essential, for human reproduction. This finding helps to explain some ominous trends. Not long ago, a Danish endocrinologist found that, in little more than half a century, the average sperm count of adult men in twenty-one industrialized nations, including the United States, had fallen an average of fifty percent. Fifty percent!
“Women too have reason to be concerned about their reproductive capacities. Chemical pollutants have been linked to a dramatic rise in endometriosis, which is an inflammation of the uterine lining frequently leading to infertility. Seventy-five years ago, there were just twenty-one reported cases of endometriosis in the entire world. Today, there are more than five million cases in the United States alone!”
The Wizard’s penis hung at Marilyn’s eye level, and she found herself distracted by it when it slowly began to engorge and creep sideways. Never before had she spent several waking hours with a nude man who hadn’t spilled his seed at some point. Was The Wizard’s partial tumescence normal? Part of a healthy, cyclical pattern? Or was he deriving sexual gratification from lecturing to his flock of followers?
She’d nearly decided it was talk of sexual reproduction stimulating him when, again, The Wizard’s words spirited away her alkalosis-weakened mind . . .
The constant ringing in John’s ears had quit, but his head still felt like a helium balloon, high in the sky. At least it was an aging balloon by now, slowly losing altitude. Considering how much he’d cheated during the shout-a-thon he guessed that most of the new recruits would be floating in the stratosphere for another hour.
“Of all the problems I’ve recounted,” The Wizard said, “the greatest problem of all is this. That even the most enlightened people are concerned only about one problem or the other. This one or that one. They don’t see the big picture as I do. Only I have seen the big picture. Only I have heard Mother Nature’s cries for help with both ears!”
The Wizard paused. “Some of you may find what I’m about to share with you impossible to believe, but it’s true nonetheless, undeniably true. What I wish to share is that, a few years ago, Mother Nature chose me, from among her six billion human children, to speak to directly.”
John coughed into his fist reflexively. The Wizard’s claim had caught him off guard. It was one thing to know that megalomania was a virtual job requirement for cult leaders, another thing to witness it.
“I don’t know why I’m the chosen one,” The Wizard said, “but there is no doubt. You too will be convinced that I’ve been blessed by Mother Nature, if you should choose to remain here and help me with the great work that she, herself, has commanded me to complete. Now let me provide you with a small demonstration of my blessing. I will now communicate directly with the Earth’s spirit—with Mother Nature, in other words.”
The Wizard asked two of his regular followers to stand and “serve as conduits.” One was John’s recruiter, Ben, whose entire body was as freckled as his face. The other John knew to be Kira’s recruiter, Brandy, a young black woman with mahogany skin, low-slung breasts, and nipples the size of butter cookies.
The conduits took positions on either side of The Wizard, facing the others. The cult leader turned his back to the group and placed his hands on the foreheads of his conduits. He spoke slowly, solemnly.
“Mother Earth . . . Mother Earth, it is I who call you. It is your favorite child . . . Mother Earth, can you hear me? Can you hear me? Good. Mother Earth, you have told me countless times of your suffering . . . You have commanded me to try and change the destructive ways of the inhumans. I have tried so hard, Mother Earth, to help you. We have all tried, all my people. Yet it’s so difficult, so very difficult to change the ways of the inhumans. Is it still true, Mother Earth, is it still true that you must wipe out the inhumans to save yourself? Will there yet be an ecological holocaust? Speak to me, Mother Earth, speak to me now, I beg you!”
Swiftly, and with a theatrical sweep, The Wizard removed his hands from the foreheads of his conduits. Within seconds the faces of Brandy and Ben grew pouty and they began to cry. Real tears—or so it seemed to John—trickled down their cheeks.
The Wizard’s shoulders slumped. He turned to the group. His face, though dry-eyed, registered great dejection.
“That,” he said, “is one of Mother’s many ways of communicating. Those simple tears tell me that nothing we’ve accomplished thus far has made a difference. Enough difference. The Earth remains on the verge of its greatest calamity yet. Unless we make enough difference, one day very soon, Mother Earth will have no choice but to save herself at our expense.”
The Wizard looked skyward, his arms outstretched. “The world’s climate will spin out of control. The polar ice caps will melt. The Amazon jungle will burn to ashes. Where there is now desert, there will be unceasing floods. Where there are now green fields and flora, nothing but brown, barren dirt shall remain. The ancient plagues of Egypt will return. Pestilence will decimate every continent. Famine too. Every grown man and woman will become sterile, and so will most of their children. In the first year of the ecological holocaust, ninety-nine of every one hundred human beings will die . . .”
As The Wizard continued with his vision of devastation, John noticed that both Ben and Brandy continued crying. Hard. Ben put a hand to his face to wipe one of his shiny cheeks. His arm rising up caught The Wizard’s attention. He gripped Ben’s wrist and yanked his arm down.
“Let that water fall as it will! Let these people see the sainted tears of Mother Earth!”
The Wizard continued with his apocalyptic vision. He described in horrid detail what the coming devastation would do to the Earth’s non-human creatures. Then he moved on to the plant kingdom. Twenty minutes elapsed, and through it all the conduits wept! The flow was so heavy with Brandy that water now pooled at her nipples, dripping to the ground in slow drops as if from leaky spouts. Her face, however, no longer appeared to be in pain, nor did Ben’s. They had truly become passive conduits.
John knew that cult leaders, in trying to live up to their godlike billing, often performed magic tricks in front of their followers, but he hadn’t a clue as to how The Wizard’s trick—It had to be a trick, right?—was being pulled off.
A desperate thought came to him. Hollywood movie props. The cult leader, he reasoned, could fly to Los Angeles in less than an hour. Maybe The Wizard had contacts at a movie studio.
He scanned the corners of Ben’s eyes, and then Brandy’s, seeking tiny, clear plastic tubing, or something like that. But he could see nothing, and then he recalled that the two conduits were, like himself, nude. Where in the world would they conceal their water supplies? In their hair? No, not possible. Ben’s hair wasn’t thick or long or curly, and Brandy wore a buzz cut.
John glanced from side to side at the audience around him, finding saucer-eyed, open-mouthed faces. One such face belonged to Marilyn. Poor Kira cried nearly as hard as the two conduits.
John cast his gaze up at The Wizard. A powerful emotion swept over him, one he hadn’t felt in a very long time, so long that he couldn’t name it at first. Then he remembered the name.
It was awe.
John worked feverishly, picking the lock to the Women’s Guest Quarters. He heard the click, turned the knob, and cracked the door open. Marilyn slipped outside through the opening. He shut the door softly and took her by the hand.
They tiptoed around the side of the building and down a narrow lane between the outer row of dormitories and the woods. No motion detectors found them because, during the daylight hours, when the electronic security system was never activated, John had stolen away into the woods and managed to bend a full bank of motion detectors off target by hanging from a tree limb and kicking the aluminum backing. Now he led the way through the crack he’d created in one of the invisible walls.
They passed beyond the last row of dormitories, soon reaching the black edge of the clearing, and plowed into the woods. Underbrush crackled beneath their feet and at times tripped them up. But it couldn’t be helped. Where there were no paths there would be no armed guards on patrol.
A low-hanging tree branch scraped across John’s forehead, and he worried that it would mark him and require an explanation in the morning. They emerged from the woods and ran all-out across a barren field and into the apple orchard’s perfumed cover. They slowed to a walk. John caught his breath and spoke.
“Okay, Doc, tell me about what happened today at the pond. How’d The Wizard do that?”
“Do what?” she said. “I’m a bit cloudy on what happened out there. I contracted a bad case of respiratory alkalosis.”
“I’ll give you a hint. Two bare ass fire hydrants.”
“So that really happened?”
“It really happened. But how’d he manage it?”
“I haven’t a clue.”
John froze in place. “But you’re the expert!”
“Sorry,” she said without breaking stride. “I can’t know all the tricks.”
He scurried forward, catching up to her in a few steps. “You think maybe the Wizard really
does
talk to Mother Nature?”
“Not funny, John. Not one bit funny.”
They walked on, The Wizard’s words reverberating in John’s mind. He saw the fires and floods again, the extermination of humankind, watched the tears of the conduits falling, saw true believers all around him. Felt the awe again.
They crossed a small stream, skipping over shiny moonlit rocks. The trees shrunk all at once and changed their shape and the air blew sweeter still. A piece of fruit plucked from a low branch verified for John that they’d entered the peach orchard.
Minutes later, he saw the outline of double-rung wooden fencing, the northwest perimeter of Natural High Farms. Beyond the fence would be a narrow, unlit farm road and the rendezvous point with Deputy Roger Fry of the local Sheriff’s office.
John located the deputy’s cruiser, slanted in a ditch on the side of the road. The engine wasn’t running and no lights were on. He hopped the fence. Marilyn followed suit.
A car door clicked open, feet struck pavement, and a flashlight beam shimmied up and down John’s body. He halted.
“Fry?” John said, displaying his empty palms. A cop worried about hands in dark places more than a cocktail waitress with a good backside.