Soulmates (22 page)

Willow looked like she was heading for the building where we had our classes. I crouched behind a big cactus twenty feet
away and watched. A few other people trickled into the building behind her. I saw Bodhi among them, but he was the only one I knew by name.

I waited until it seemed like no one else was coming, and then I counted to one hundred and snuck into the building. All the lights inside were off. I groped along the wall, feeling the outlines of sconces and Buddhas and doorknobs.
This is crazy,
I told myself. But I pushed forward. I hadn't found out anything about Ethan during my stay so far, and I wasn't going to change that by wussing out the second things got really weird.

Finally I saw a tiny flicker of light coming from a small window in the door of one of the classrooms. Cautiously, I looked into the room, hoping no one would be able to see my face in the blackness of the hallway. The room was lit by candles, so it was still dim inside, but I could see a row of decorative samurai swords stacked neatly on the wall. Then, as my eyes adjusted further, I made out twelve men standing naked in a circle. After staring for a few moments I realized they had symbols painted on their torsos. For a second I thought the symbols were marked in blood—maybe carved out with the swords? But then I realized the paint was purple, not red. Bodhi, who was close to the door, had a crab on his stomach, its pincers caught in his ample body hair.

I looked around for Willow, and it took me a while to locate her, because she was on the ground, with eleven other women. Why were they crawling around like penitents on the floor? They looked like they were in a choreographed formation, and I wondered where they were getting instructions. Then I heard a voice from the back of the room. It took me a moment
to recognize the voice as Yoni's because he was speaking too quietly for me to make out his words. I recognized it only from the cadence—he had all those pauses. His quiet was an ominous hum.

As I watched, Willow grabbed Bodhi's penis and started furiously jerking it. All the other women did the same with their male partners.

Yoni increased his volume. I could finally understand him: “
Spill the seed, sow the seed. Spill the seed, sow the seed
.” The other men in the room began to chant with him. Their voices were almost screaming when Yoni interrupted the mantra to yell “
FINISH!
” At that moment, every single man in the room ejaculated. Their come went everywhere, all over the women, all over the floor. I looked at Willow's face, and she was ecstatic.

I saw Yoni emerge from the shadows to stand in the middle of the circle. He was naked, too. His penis pointed directly out, at a ninety-degree angle from his body. “Your seed is now sown,” he said. “Let the earth reap your spirit.” He walked over to one of the girls in the room, someone I'd never seen before. She sat still on the ground as he approached her. Faster than I'd ever seen in any porn, as if propelled by an inner force, Yoni was inside her.

I couldn't watch any more. I turned around and broke into a run. The sweat dripped down my back as I took wrong turns in the darkness. Finally I found my way back to the outside door and burst into the desert night. I kept running until I was back in my bed with the covers drawn over me. My heart continued to race and the scene I had just witnessed looped through my mind. I started touching myself to release the pent-up energy
and fear. I came hard and felt my entire body unclench. I fell asleep immediately after.

“What's with you?” said Willow at lunch a few nights later. “You've barely said a word to me for two days. Are you okay?” She seemed genuinely concerned.

I glanced around the table. Maria and Bodhi were looking at me expectantly. I could barely make eye contact with Bodhi. “Nothing's with me. I'm just processing a lot of my experiences here. It's a lot of spiritual work. It feels heavy.”

Willow seemed satisfied with my bullshit explanation. She nodded. “That happened to me when I first started my work here, too.” She started telling a story about how all her instructors were blown away by the quality of her efforts, and I zoned out again.

For the past two days I had been having a very slow panic attack. I was equal parts turned on and creeped out by what I'd seen. I was seduced by my work with Lo. Two months ago, I would have found everything here either deeply silly or intellectually bankrupt. I kept wrestling with the same question: Who was I anymore?

And I still wondered about Ethan and Amaya, who rolled into my consciousness like a rogue wave at odd times. I tried to game out my stay here. I had about two weeks left before my month was up. I had basically given up on finding out anything from Willow and her pals, because they didn't care about anyone or anything but themselves and how they could get ahead here. I could still talk to Lo, but I had no guarantee that would get me any closer to the answers I needed. She had been with Yoni
so long, who knows how she'd react to questions about their shared past?

And when I left, then what? Would I just go back to New York? Stay in that old apartment and go back to my old job? Would I even have a job to go back to? Phil couldn't fire me for taking a sabbatical that was listed in the company handbook, but he could definitely come up with some other reason. And if I did get fired, he wouldn't recommend me for dogcatcher. He was an asshole—not someone interested in human frailty or growth.

I started to truly panic as the what-ifs started screaming in my head. What if I had blown up my life for nothing? What if I left this place with nothing more than a few orange crystals and a depleted bank account? And then, the most disturbing—
what if Yoni continues to destroy lives and there's nothing I can do to stop him?
The thought turned my stomach, and I pushed my plate away.

When I walked into Lo's classroom after that unsettling lunch, my head spinning, I saw that it had been transformed. Instead of sitting pillows, yoga mats overlaid with Navajo blankets were strewn around the floor. Around the perimeter of the small room, candles were lit.

“Because we're processing our adolescence today,” Lo said, “I wanted to re-create a kind of teenage slumber party. I want your inner teen to feel at home.”

I was genuinely touched. “Thank you,” I said, and sprawled out on one of the mats.

“Though this work is always called ‘inner child' work, it
shouldn't be taken literally,” Lo said. She lay down on her side and propped her head up on one hand. “The point is to go back to any time in your past when you were innocent and suffered emotional trauma.” She hesitated. “I would like to tell you the story of my early days with Yoni. But I want to remind you that what we share in here is between us. If it goes beyond this room, it will violate the work we've done here. It will cause our inner children to feel great shame, because no child likes a tattletale.”

“I understand,” I said, feeling a pang of guilt because I didn't mean it. I had grown so loyal to Lo in our days together, I didn't want to betray her. But I had to remember that Lo might have valuable information about Rosemary, and even about Ethan and Amaya.

Lo nodded and began her story.

I started running away when I was fifteen. Our community of Witnesses had eyes everywhere in Sacramento, so someone always brought me home. Each time I got a bigger and bigger whooping. One morning, after the worst beating I'd had, I vowed that the next time I wouldn't be caught. Some friend of my older sister's had run away to San Francisco. I'd never been—I'd barely left the neighborhood—but my dad called it Sodom on the Bay and said my sister's friend was going to meet a terrible end there. It sounded like a place where no one would come looking for me.

The day after my eighteenth birthday I waited until the house was asleep. It must have been three in the morning when I crept out and walked to the bus station. I took the five
A
.
M
. bus to San Fran. I remember what I was wearing: a knee-length A-line dress with a floral pattern that I had made myself. It had a big floppy bow at the neck. I had a matching purse that I made sure to carry with me. I was small for my age and must have looked all of twelve years old.

Another girl around my age got on the bus with me. She was
wearing a micromini skirt and beads. Her hair was long and wavy and she wore it loose and unstyled. I was so scared to be alone, I sat down next to her and started talking. I have let go of my anger about my upbringing, so I can appreciate the good things about it. The best part of going door-to-door was that I learned early to be able to talk to anybody.

The girl said she was going to San Francisco, too, and that she was going to stay in the Haight. “What's that?” I asked her.

“It's heaven,” she said. “I'll take you there.”

Those first days went by real fast. I think I burned that outfit I was so proud of. I had my first taste of grass. I started meditating. The girl—her name was Veena, by the way—taught me how. She's one of the women I eat my meals with here at the Homestead. We go back a long, long time. Veena and I were living with friends of her friend. We slept on the floor in their tiny apartment, which was filled with vermin. I got a rat bite the first week I was there, and I just let it fester because I didn't know what else to do. When it started looking real infected, someone told me to go to the free clinic.

I was waiting in line there, with my arm in a makeshift sling made out of an old dish towel, when I first met Yoni. He had a different name back then, but he was the same man he is today. He came up to me, out of all the girls in the line that day, because he said he could feel my aura from down the block.

“You glow purple,” he said. “And purple is a regal color. I feel like you were my queen in a past life.” It was love at first sight. He asked me where I was staying, and I told him what had happened to my arm. He said that he had a big, clean house where I would get warm meals and a good night's sleep. He said
someone there would fix my arm—they had all the supplies—and that I should just come with him. I took one last look at the line and thought,
Sure, why not
.

Those first few days with Yoni were probably the best of my life. I had a warm bed to sleep in and wholesome meals. There were other girls like me in the house, and they were just as sweet as could be. They reminded me of my sisters back home, and I wasn't lonely or scared anymore. It seemed natural when Yoni came to my bedroom one night and we made love. He was so gentle, and he explained that this was how we could be celestially bonded. The other girls in the house were already bonded to him, and I wanted to be just like them. I even got Veena to join me at Yoni's. She was smitten with him, just like I was.

What? Oh, no. I wasn't jealous of the other girls. Not at all. We were all sisters, you see. We were part of this new community where no one owned anyone else, especially not sexually. In fact, we started getting more men to join the commune, and Yoni encouraged us to sleep with them, too. “No one owns your essence,” he would say.

Well, maybe I was jealous of one girl. She was actually a close friend of mine from high school. I wrote her a letter from San Francisco when I moved in with Yoni and told her to join me there, too. A year later, she did. She was so beautiful, and she was clearly Yoni's favorite. He called her Safflower, and she had just the whitest blond hair you've ever seen. She looked like an angel. It was hard to hate her, though, because she was so sweet and kind. Never had a harsh word for anyone or anything.

Things were copacetic for a while in San Francisco, but then Yoni decided that the energy had gone sour. It's true there was
a lot more violence around, and a lot of people were leaving. So he found this beautiful place up in Mendocino County, and we all shipped out there.

It was heaven on earth, at first. I'd never seen such beautiful trees, and I would spend hours napping in the shade. It felt like we were really seeing the potential of our community fully realized. Veena had a child, a little girl she named Sierra. We both worked in the nursery part-time, where the children were cared for communally. I loved caring for those babies. We studied midwifery from one of the other members, and so we birthed those babies, too.

Everything was perfect until Safflower ran off. She left in the middle of the night. Yoni was crushed. I think he really loved her, in a different way than he loved the rest of us. It turned out she was the first of many. Once people saw someone anointed leave, they started losing their faith in Yoni, which really seemed tremendously unfair to me. Like they were kicking him when he was down. He and I got closer then. I was there to salve his heart wounds. We'd spend hours together meditating, and that's when he made me his new spiritual wife. He said that we had a special bond that transcended our bodies and this world.

I'm okay. I just got a little emotional there for a second, remembering how wonderful that closeness felt. Yoni and I have a different kind of bond now. He's had other spiritual wives since me. I understand, of course. To really develop along our own paths, we must follow what the fates have laid out for us.

Ultimately Yoni decided that it was our mission to spread the word about our community, and that it was best done on the road. A lot of the community had turned out to be dirty traitors.
We left 'em behind, never looked back. It was just me, Veena, Dew—that's the other woman I eat my meals with here—and Yoni, then.

What happened to Sierra? We had to leave her behind. Veena realized that her spiritual development could not proceed if she was yoked to a child. Sierra's daddy took her away when he left. Anyway, Veena and Dew had become lovers themselves, and we traveled around as a foursome before landing in New York, ultimately. I celebrated my twenty-eighth birthday in a ceremony at our new home in the Village. Twenty-eight seems so young to me now, but I felt like I had lived three or four different lifetimes by then.

Woo! That felt good. It can be good to retell your story. In the act of retelling, our bitterness becomes smaller and smaller, until it is the size of a flea, and we can flick it away.