Soulmates (15 page)

Even though he had so many other young women, Rosie was always one of Aries's favorites. That's why she helped Aries pack the most faithful hundred or so into a series of vans and trucks one unsettlingly hot evening. She didn't know it then, but that was when things would start to go downhill for her.

Rosie said the land in Mendocino was the most beautiful she'd ever seen. It was surrounded by redwoods, and near enough to the Russian River that in certain spots you could hear a faint rushing sound. Aries had a bunch of locals make huts for his followers to live in. They were basic dwellings, but they suited Rosie just fine.

In the beginning, Aries' Children grew vegetables to eat and weed to smoke and raised their own chickens so they would have as little contact with the outside world as possible. That's how Aries liked it. It was idyllic for a month or two, but after that Rosie started hearing scary rumors about how Aries was treating some of his less favored followers.

So many believers had been left behind in the initial move to Mendocino, and a lot of them wanted back in. But there were whispers that these lesser children were allowed to join the Mendocino group only after they'd proven themselves to be devoted to Aries through a series of increasingly sadistic tests. One of the stories Rosie heard was that Aries made some of his children brand themselves with a special symbol they weren't allowed to show anybody else. She also heard stories about followers walking over burning bricks, and others having to stand alone in a room for a full day. If Aries caught them sitting or, God
forbid, lying down, they would be banned from the Mendocino compound for life.

At first Rosie didn't believe that those stories were true. Sandra told her that anyone who would tell a story like that about Aries was probably a narc sent by the San Francisco police to infiltrate the community. I know, it sounds nutty to me, too. You have to understand how sheltered Rosie was. She had gone right from her parents' home to Aries's commune, and she was still in her early twenties then. She didn't have enough experience out in the big world to be skeptical of an explanation like that.

Later, after she left the commune, Rosie reconsidered those stories. Aries's sermons had broadened to include parables about turncoats and deserters. She told me one that had stuck with her because it scared the bejesus out of her. She started getting so upset when she repeated this sermon that it stuck with me, too, all these years.

This parable was about a sacred monkey who lived in the mountains. Both humans and gods revered this particular kind of monkey. The monkey dutifully brought food back to his father for years, until he started getting ideas. “Why am I serving my father when I could strike out on my own?” the monkey wondered. He started hiding extra food at the bottom of a mountain, planning to make his own way when he had built up a big enough store. On his way to hide more fruit one day, a lightning bolt struck that monkey down. It left a burn mark in the side of the mountain, reminding others not to follow in his path.

After Aries told that story, he started up his night patrol. Aries told the rest of the followers that the patrol was there to keep
them all safe from disruptive outside forces, but really what the patrol did was make sure no one ever left the compound. The few people who managed to get away and into nearby towns were always discovered and brought back. They seemed resigned when they returned, as if they'd assumed this would happen.

Despite the night patrol, Aries was also getting really paranoid about people leaving the fold, becoming “unfaithfuls,” as he called them. Rosie suspected he was taking a lot of speed, because she'd seen a few speed freak-outs at the commune before and Aries was displaying all the signs: he wasn't sleeping, he was alternately grandiose and depressed, and his pupils had receded to little pinpricks of black in his cloudy eyes. But she never fully believed the stories about Aries's violent side until she saw it for herself.

Why? Well, I think Rosie didn't want to believe them. She had given all of her adult life to Aries, and it was humiliating to admit she had made a mistake. Rosie also didn't know what she would do if she left Aries. She wasn't about to go back home to Sacramento, and that seemed like the only option, in her blindered view.

But one night Aries called her into his personal cabin, which was much grander than the humble cabins everyone else in the commune shared. It had electricity, for starters, but it also had a real king-size bed, while everyone else slept in cots or hammocks.

Yes, Dana, Rosie was still having sex with Aries. Jesus. Like I said, free love was a major part of the commune's foundational ethos. When Rosie started to think about it, she realized
the love was freely flowing only in one direction: toward Aries. Because she was one of his favorites, when Aries started getting more paranoid, he barred Rosie from sleeping with other followers. He told her that her energy was getting too depleted from all that connection, and that saving herself for him was for her own good.

That night, though, Rosie just wasn't in the mood. She was tired and had pulled a muscle in her back in the vegetable garden that day. She had never turned Aries down for sex before, but that night she looked around and saw Aries's amenities, and she thought about how he was going to sleep on a nice, comfortable mattress while her back injury worsened in her lumpy cot, and she just wasn't in the mood to give him anything else.

When she said no to him, Rosie said he got a look on his face that was unlike anything she'd ever seen. She sensed a pressure drop in the room, and got up to try to bolt to the door. But Aries grabbed her by her braid and yanked her to him. She tried to resist, but he smashed her head against the floor until she lay still. She thought she might not survive if she tried to fight back.

No, no. Jesus, Dana. I don't need a hug. Just give me a second to collect myself. It still makes me so angry I could spit.

The only upside to the assault was that Aries's spell on Rosie was broken. She knew she had to get out of there, and she spent a few weeks plotting her escape. She observed the night patrol schedule and figured out which nights a certain guy was working. She calculated that he could be persuaded to let her go, and she was right. Once she was past the borders of the commune, she ran through the woods all night until she reached a highway.
She hitchhiked back to San Francisco the next day and set up camp in Golden Gate Park. I met her a few weeks after her return.

I guess Rosie's escape wasn't the only upside to the assault. There was one more blessing: Ethan.

Rosie suspected she was pregnant when she left Mendocino. The pregnancy kept her from returning. Leaving was so hard—she had only a high school education and she had no way to support herself. Those first nights when she was shivering in Golden Gate Park, she had moments when she thought things would be easier if she just went back to the life she'd known with Aries. But she couldn't bear the thought of raising a child there.

Aries made mothers separate from their children forty-eight hours after birth, because he said parental attachments were damaging to spiritual development. You couldn't become your own being if you were overly influenced by your biological forebears. New mothers would come in and nurse a different baby every day in the nursery, because Aries thought that was a way to break individual bonds. Rosie was assigned to nursery duty sometimes, and the kids seemed happy enough.

But after Aries assaulted her, Rosie was able to see his dictums for what they were—just a way to control his female followers. The paternity of the children was often in question, so fathers weren't attached to individual children as a rule. But Aries knew that devoted mothers would be more concerned with their children's well-being than with his wants, and he couldn't allow that to happen.

Yes, you can ask a rude question.

No, she never considered getting an abortion. It was legal then, but Rosie felt the life growing inside her had given her a strength that she otherwise would not have had. Even though she knew that the origins of the child were less than ideal, she was not going to let Aries take something else away from her.

It didn't bother me that she was carrying someone else's child. I loved her with all my heart, and I wanted kids myself. By the time Ethan was born, Rosie had fallen fully in love with me, too, and she wanted to settle down and start our family. And the first time I saw Ethan's face, I knew he was my son. He barely cried when he came out; he was such a peaceful little man, even from the first moment.

We got moved to housing in Diaper Gulch just after Ethan was born. I loved living there, surrounded by California poppies and happy young couples. Rosie liked it for a week or two, but then she started to get angry. She loved Ethan with all her body and soul, and she started thinking about the other women and children stuck back in Mendocino, separated from their newborns. It drove her mad. I'd come home after a day of work and see her pacing the kitchen floor, wild with rage, with Ethan strapped to her chest in a Snugli.

I encouraged her to report the rape and file charges against Aries as a way to get closure. Rosie was wary; she still had Aries's distrust of the police. And she was scared. She didn't want to have to see Aries ever again, and she knew she'd have to face him in court. But I convinced her that filing charges was the only way to help the children who were still up at the compound without their mothers caring for them.

The prosecutor was all set to take Rosie's case. She was a great
victim, he said: a young, beautiful mother who was married to an army man. These guru-grifter types were so common in the Bay Area in the sixties and seventies, and the D.A.'s office was desperate to nab at least one of them and make an example out of him. Because of an earlier statutory rape charge against John Brooks, the prosecutor could make it look like all the sex Rosie had was coerced, even though Rosie told him it wasn't.

But then, no one could find Aries. Rosie got word from another female follower who fled to San Francisco that the compound had disbanded and John Brooks had disappeared into thin air. That's when she stopped being angry and started being terrified. Aries—John Brooks—could do the math and realize that Ethan was his son, and Rosie was convinced he'd try to take Ethan away from her.

Months went by and Aries did not reappear. My commitment to the army was over, and Rosie and I decided together that I would not re-up this time. She wanted to get the hell out of California, and she wanted us to have more control over our lives. So we decided to move to Montana, which has long been a place where people go when they don't want to be found. Right, like the Unabomber.

Once we were settled in here, Rosie made me swear that we would never, ever speak about the past. It wasn't as hard as you might think. Aries had no bearing on our daily lives—the changing of diapers, the commute to work, the clearing of dinner plates. It really is possible to start over.

That doesn't mean that Rosie didn't carry some baggage with her to Montana. Sometimes we'd be at a store, and Rosie
would just hightail it outside without even saying anything to me because she thought she caught a glimpse of someone from Aries' Children and wasn't about to stick around to make sure. She still woke up in the middle of the night sometimes, screaming Aries's name. Rosie had the same nightmare over and over, about a monkey chasing her through the California woods with Aries's face.

What? No, no
Greenwich Rag
reporter ever contacted us. What is the
Greenwich Rag
?

Christ. I didn't realize parts of her story were told in a newspaper. Did they have her name? No? That's good.

No reporters and no one from Rosie's past ever found us, as far as I know. You're the first one to put it together. It was much more difficult to find people and information before the Internet, obviously. Rosie took my last name when we got married, and none of the commune people knew who I was. Besides, Aries—Yoni—John Brooks, whatever you want to call him, was on the run from those California charges.

Yes, I get that he harassed that reporter from the
Rag,
but there was no incentive for him to find and then harass her. Rosie knew all his old secrets, so why would he disturb that hornets' nest? When she died, I swore to myself that the secret would die with her. I just didn't think that it was relevant to any of our lives.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Dana! Of course I don't think Rosie's death had anything to do with John Brooks. She was in a car accident during the middle of the winter. She was driving back from visiting a friend who had moved to Missoula, and she hit a patch of black ice. Her car spun out of control and flipped over.
The cops said she must have been driving pretty fast because of the skid marks her car left.

No! No one was following her that day. C'mon. It had been more than a decade since she saw anyone from Aries' Children, and as we both know now, John Brooks had reestablished himself in New York. Why would he bother tracking Rosie down? It just doesn't make any sense.

I didn't know anything about the Zuni Retreat or John Brooks's involvement with it until after Ethan's death. When he came up here a few months back, all I knew was that he was living in New Mexico with Amaya, teaching at a yoga spa.

I mean, I was wary of his talk of spirituality. It sounded like some of the stuff Rosie had encountered, and obviously that put me on edge. I tried to speak to Ethan about it when he first moved to New Mexico, but he waved me off and stopped mentioning it in our phone calls. I told myself that that New Age stuff is lots of places now. There's yoga in even the most one-horse town in Montana, and one of the guys I go hunting with meditates. It's not as fringe as it used to be.

Ethan did seem a little disturbed when I saw him. I asked him if anything was wrong, and he said no. I hadn't seen him in the flesh since you two split up, but he did call me once a month or so to see how I was and catch up. He told me he was visiting because he wanted to reconnect with his old self a bit. I wasn't quite sure what that meant, but he did seem like he was working through something big. I would look at his face over dinner and see his eyes cloud over.