She peeked at John. He was bearded now. He hadn’t shaved in the three days he’d been gone. He looked like holy hell. But at least he was back.
John’s dancing consisted of jumping and drooping, like a marionette at the mercy of a poor puppet master. It worried her that Tom Mahorn, standing just outside the circle of dancers, kept such a close eye on John’s movements.
Without ceasing his drum rhythm, Bob instructed the new recruits to chant “Rain!” in unison and as loud as they could and without let-up. It was a double-barreled approach to inducing a trance state, she recognized, a combination of repetitive motion, via dancing, and hyperventilation, via loud chanting.
“Rain! Rain! Rain! Rain! Rain! Rain! Rain! Rain! Rain! Rain! Rain! Rain! Rain! Rain! Rain! Rain! Rain!”
It wasn’t long before Marilyn tired, along with the other new recruits. The silly grins disappeared, and the dancing slowed and grew increasingly awkward. Distant thunder clapped.
“Sister Marilyn’s not shouting very loud!” Kira announced. The new recruits had begun tattling on each other and otherwise waging fights for the affections of the cult leaders.
“C’mon, Sister Marilyn,” Bob said. “Let’s hear it!”
“Rain! Rain!” Marilyn shouted. “Rain! Rain!” But gradually, ever so gradually, she let her voice trail off again.
Tom Mahorn walked up to John from behind and barked directly into his ear. “C’mon, Brother John, louder! Louder!”
John had no choice but to comply. His voice was strained and raspy, she noticed. What had they done to him?
“Rain!” John croaked. “Rain!”
Lightning flashed. Thunder cracked. The sky opened wide. As the first fat raindrops pelted them, the new recruits stopped their chanting and cheered.
“More!” Tom shouted to Bob Marsh.
“New chant, everybody,” Bob said. “Thank you, Mother Earth! Thank you, Mother Earth!”
“Thank you, Mother Earth!” shouted the recruits. “Thank you, Mother Earth! Thank you, Mother Earth!”
John fell to the ground as swiftly as a gunshot victim, landing on his back, his head bouncing once off the wet earth before settling there. Marilyn screamed.
She could only watch helplessly as John writhed on the ground at Tom Mahorn’s feet in the agony of advanced respiratory alkalosis, flailing like a fish on a dock, his face frightened, his muscles cramping, his hands claw-like, clenching over and over again. The rain lashed at him unmercifully. Marilyn prayed for him to lose consciousness.
John awoke flat on his back in some dim place, staring up at what he took to be a low ceiling painted black. His clothing felt wet and heavy. His eyes stung with sweat, and the smell of sweat filled his nostrils. His ears rang, and his heart pounded as if he’d been chasing a fleeing suspect for ten miles. Was this the heart attack his doctor had begun warning him about?
He tried to sit up, but found his arms and legs pinned. Fear—that universal fear of immobility—shot through him. He yanked his head up as high as he could and peered down the length of his body. He was strapped to a table, a cushioned table, by leather four-point restraints, the same type that he used to see when, as a uniformed cop, he’d deposit crazed criminal suspects in secure psychiatric facilities for evaluation and treatment. He strained to break free, but could barely move a muscle. It was pointless trying.
The room was small and windowless, not much larger than a bathroom. Not only the ceiling, but the walls and the floor too had been painted black. Everything was black, even the cushioned surface he glimpsed between his legs, and the metal fixtures high on the walls housing recessed lighting.
“Hello!” he called. “Hello!”
He heard a door click open behind him. A moment later, The Wizard stepped into view beside John’s table. Behind him lurked Tom Mahorn and Bob Marsh.
The Wizard bent down till his face hovered inches above John’s own. “You want to reach your full human potential don’t you?”
John nodded, even as he wondered whether that was the right response, even as he struggled to fully recall who he was, and who he was supposed to be.
Have I been found out? Is my cover blown? What exactly are they doing to me
?
“Pay attention to me, Brother John,” said The Wizard. John met the cult leader’s gaze, at the same time catching a whiff of the man’s breath in the stale air. Tuna fish for lunch.
Music suddenly blared from all directions, as if speakers were embedded in the walls, floor, and ceiling. Rock ’n roll music. John recognized the song as
Abracadabra
, an old hit put out by the Steve Miller Band in the early 1980’s.
Abra, abra, cadabra . . .
I want to reach out and grab ya
Abra, abra, cadabra . . .
Abracadabra
!
Bob Marsh danced in place. Tom chuckled at him. The Wizard ordered Bob to stand still, all the while keeping his eyes fixed on John. The music abruptly stopped playing.
The Wizard said, “So, Brother John, do you believe in magic?”
“I . . . I don’t know.”
“What about your soul? Do you believe in that?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll bet you go years without ever remembering—or thinking about—the presence of your own, everlasting soul? Don’t you?” John nodded. “Well guess what, Brother John, that’s where the magic is! All the magic to be found in this world resides within your soul!” Bob gave a fervent nod. Tom’s face was blank.
“I know what you’re thinking,” The Wizard said. “You’re thinking there’s really no such thing as a soul. And you’re thinking there’s really no such thing as magic. Well, I feel sorry for people who think of soul as simply a kind of music and magic as nothing more than sleight of hand. For such people are like thirsty travelers in a desert, who pass by an oasis without stopping to drink, believing that it surely must be a mirage.”
Reflexively, John fixed the desert travelers in his mind. The ringing in his ears was letting up now, his heart rate too.
The Wizard’s voice lowered and softened a bit and grew melodious. “The soul is like a hidden oasis. You must believe it exists in order to find it. And only when you find it, may you drink a cup of ambrosia from one of its many, magic pools. There are seven deep and eternally self-replenishing pools. Spiritual knowledge. Absolute freedom. Utter joy. Inner peace. Ultimate truth. Supreme justice. And reverent awe.”
This, John realized with alarm, was what Marilyn had called
guided imagery
. This was something he was supposed to ignore.
“I want you to close your eyes now,” The Wizard said, “and try to imagine holding a golden goblet, one a medieval king might own, and drinking a mouthful of . . . absolute freedom.”
John closed his eyes, but refused to imagine a golden goblet, and he tried his best to ignore The Wizard’s flowery, long-winded suggestion of what absolute freedom might taste like. Yet he found himself unable to block out The Wizard’s singsong voice for very long. It kept intruding, though it fell to a near whisper at times, before gently rising again. By the time The Wizard suggested swallowing a mouthful of inner peace, John found himself playing along . . .
At The Wizard’s direction, John imagined removing all physical and mental stress from his body, inch by inch, using nothing but willpower, starting from the top of his head, slowing working down to the toes.
“Now freed from the gravity of stress,” The Wizard said, “you begin to float . . . higher and higher . . . higher and higher still . . .”
The Wizard directed John to leave Earth’s atmosphere and to rotate around the planet like a satellite. “Here in space,” he said, “there is no sound, only empty silence, but you can feel nothing less than the future, including that glorious first day in the far distance when mankind will no longer be at war with the environment anywhere in the universe . . .”
On command, John gently floated back down to Earth and landed. His eyes remained closed as The Wizard continued.
“Most people never drink from the golden goblet, from the magic pools. They never, ever, enter the oasis of the soul. They spend their lives lost in a desert of distraction. Of course this desert is not made of sand, but rather the detritus of our modern era. Try to imagine now, try to imagine what your desert of distraction is made of . . .
“Imagine yourself walking in your desert. Walking up the side of a steep dune. Your feet slip and sink as you make your way along. But beneath your feet is not sand, but small pieces of paper. You look down and see small, rectangular pieces of colored paper. Underfoot now is every personal check you’ve ever written. And others you’ve cashed. You walk further. You reach the top of the drift. Now before you lay a vast sea of old bills. Credit card bills. Electric bills. Telephone bills. All the bills you’ve ever received and ever paid . . .”
The Wizard guided John’s imagination through the strange world of paper, “the flotsam of modern American life,” to the edge of a lush oasis lined with tall grass and palm trees.
“Now open your eyes!” The Wizard said.
As John did, overhead lights kicked on, bright enough for orthodontics. He turned his head to one side, squinting. He felt disoriented and calm at the same time with a vague awareness that his visual and auditory senses were being manipulated, and that he’d almost ceased fighting the proceedings. From somewhere deep within his brain, a small and shrinking set of cells devoted to independent thought fired.
What is going on
?
“Hear me, Brother John,” The Wizard said, “hear me. I’m going to help you get in touch with your very own soul. I want you to actually drink from the oasis, understand?” John nodded. The Wizard continued. “The way into the oasis of the soul is through the physical senses, specifically through the manipulation of the physical senses in ancient ways known to all primitive peoples, but largely forgotten, or ignored, by civilized societies. Now turn your head the other way, Brother John.”
John turned to his right and confronted the face of Bob Marsh at his own eye level, three inches away. Bob smiled and playfully batted his eyelashes at John.
“And now, Brother John,” The Wizard said, “I want you to stare at Brother Bob without saying a word. Just stare. Until I give you the next set of instructions.”
John stared. He felt very uncomfortable, never having stared at a man’s face so intently before. Of course, he’d often stared intently at his own face in the mirror, usually in the mornings, searching for a renegade eyebrow hair to smooth, or a protruding nose hair to cut. But this was different . . .
John’s discomfort gradually slackened. He examined a dark mole on Bob’s cheek, straight lines criss-crossed within it, as if impressed by the edge of a tiny spatula.
He slid, gradually, into an odd, and previously unknown state of consciousness. His sense of time diminished. He grew quite unsure of how long he’d been staring at Bob’s face. Two minutes? Twenty?
Meanwhile, John’s powers of perception heightened and distorted. Bob’s plain face fascinated him. It had so much detail to it that it seemed to fill up the universe. It had beauty in its imperfections. It had hundreds of freckles, every orange jot unique as a snowflake . . .
John awoke with Tom Mahorn shaking him roughly. The lights in this strange, little black room had dimmed again. Tom stepped away. The Wizard’s face appeared upside down, directly overhead.
“Hear me, Brother John, hear me. I want you to close your eyes and imagine going back in time . . . You’re walking alone on a street in the old neighborhood . . . the place where you lived when you were sixteen, seventeen years old . . . and you see that your body is going back in time too. Magically, you’re two decades younger . . . a teenager again, in every way . . . You come to your street, and now you’re standing in front of the home you lived in then . . . Where are you, John? Where are you?”
“Sutter street.” John didn’t open his eyes. “San Mateo. My uncle Tony’s house.”
“He raised you?”
“Yes. After my parents died.”
“How old were you when they died?
“Seven.”
“What happened to them?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You’re on a plane now, John, a jumbo jet. From your window seat you see puffy white clouds outside. You see the ocean below and purple mountaintops in the distance. You’re excited because you’re a teenager, and you’re not used to flying . . . Suddenly, you feel a strange tingling sensation, over your entire body.”
“I feel it,” John said.
“You feel yourself aging backwards again, growing younger and younger . . . younger and younger . . . You begin to shrink. You’re shrinking as you sit there in your seat . . . shrinking and shrinking . . . the seatbelt loosening around your middle . . . It’s getting harder to see out the window . . .”
“Yes, it is.”
“Younger and younger you grow . . . younger and younger, smaller, thinner, shorter . . . and all your cares and all your memories of adulthood and adolescence go away . . . they all just go away . . . you’re ten years old again . . . and now nine years old . . . eight . . . seven.”