The Astral (19 page)

He looked at the ceiling, then at his hands, then at me. “I just thought of it now.”

“The answer is no, but thanks.” I stood up.

James hugged me at the front door, a manly hug in spite of his silly apron. It felt genuine if slightly theatrical. “Come back again when you can stay and eat,” he said.

“Some night when Lisa isn’t home?” I said. It galled me. It was my right to dislike Lisa, but she had no right to dislike me.

Chapter Sixteen

  I
can’t believe you forgot!” said Karina as I got into her car. “They asked if we could be sure to be there on time because they have another meeting scheduled at nine.”

“They’d better be good. James was making rabbit with bacon and some kind of cream sauce.”

“Yes, they’re good, they’re cult-exit specialists. They know all about Christa. They helped get three other people out last year. They used to be in another cult she was the leader of.”

“I am not looking forward to seeing your mother.”

“Good, because she won’t be there.”

“What?”

“She refuses to be in the same room with you. I said you’re willing to be in the same room with her, and this is for Hector, and she doesn’t have to talk to you or even look at you. She said she’ll meet with them on her own if she has to, she will not be in a room that also contains you.”

“This, from the woman who supposedly loves Hector above all other living things?”

“She’s not exactly speaking to him these days.” Karina made a sour, half-amused face. “And she wouldn’t listen to me.”

“She never listens to anyone. Your mother is like a bug caught in its own excretions.”

“Hey, I’m not taking sides,” said Karina. “Just reporting the facts.”

Karina and I had made another pilgrimage out to Long Island in late April to visit Hector and his group, who were now calling themselves the Children of Hashem. On this second visit, things were all very different. The atmosphere was more intense. Since our first visit, they had, Hector told us, amped up their prayers for the Rapture and the return of Yashua. Hector was somehow at the center of all this activity, but it was unclear how or why. Karina pressed him for information as much as she could, but the more she poked him, the more he clammed up. Christa was nowhere to be seen, and the group members were apparently no longer under orders to try to convey the impression of being frankly forthcoming with us. Instead, they were edgily detached and aggressively evasive. The men’s ponytails seemed tighter, their beards looked more biblical. The women seemed altogether more severe and puritanical and much less pretty. Karina thought their changed manner toward us was due to the fact that they suspected that we knew they were a cult and maybe had even caught a whiff of the fact that we were thinking about trying to yank Hector out of there, but I wasn’t so sure. In fact, I seriously doubted they thought about us much at all. They showed no sign of curiosity or interest in anything but their own internal schemes and goings-on.

Since that visit, Hector was rarely available to come to the phone and never returned my calls, which I now made several times a week. The two times I did manage to get him on the phone, he’d sounded manic and full of himself. In all the years since he had learned to speak, I had never heard him sound either of those things. Hector had always been the most unassuming, humble person I had ever known. This sudden change in my almost pathologically heartfelt son alarmed me far more than the odd behavior of his cohorts, people I didn’t care a fig about and who frankly gave me the creeps, at least en masse.

In Forest Hills, Karina parked on a leafy little side street lined with narrow semidetached houses, early-twentieth-century mock Tudor. We rang the doorbell of one of these identical houses and waited for several seconds, and then the door swung wide open and a voice issued from behind it: “Come in! You must be Karina and Harry.”

Karina went first. The hallway was too narrow for two people to stand side by side, and it was dark. We followed the dim person into the living room, which was brightly lit. “I’m June,” she said in a high, quick voice, turning to smile at us, “and this is Emery. Sit down, please. Would you like tea? It’s already made. And I put out a plate of sandwiches, in case anyone’s hungry.”

“How kind of you,” I said. “I didn’t have time to eat.”

June was a tiny, anxious-looking blonde with flyaway hair. Her accent was perkily, earnestly midwestern. She wore a pink sweater and high-waisted jeans. Emery was a massive, swarthy man with muttonchop sideburns and a unibrow. He wore a flannel plaid shirt and work pants, and he took up most of the couch. June and Emery’s living room, with its crocheted lace antimacassars and chintz curtains, could have been in a farmhouse in Iowa in 1956, which is to say, it was identical to many of my neighbors’ houses when I was growing up. In fact, I thought I recognized the needlepointed cushion of the footstool by the whatnot as the same flowered pattern that had been in Mrs. Jones’s living room.

Karina perched with unusually reticent politeness on an armchair. I did the same, but more comfortably. I felt right at home here. I took a sandwich and bit into it and almost smiled with happiness. It was ham and Velveeta on white.

“We’re glad you could come,” said June, handing out teacups.

“We’re glad you exist,” said Karina. “We’re so worried about Hector.”

“Well, let’s get right down to it, then,” said June. She hopped onto the couch next to her husband. The juxtaposition was comic and sinister at the same time. They looked like a backwoods axe murderer and his sweet little victim. “Back in Taos, when we knew Christa, this is like ten years ago, she was calling herself Isis, and she was a healer and a shaman and all sorts of things, but mostly she was a thief and a liar.”

“Her real name is Kirsty McDevitt,” said Emery. He spoke much more slowly than his wife and an octave or two lower, and his dry drawl came from much farther west than hers, I would have guessed Idaho or eastern Washington State. Talking to them was like listening to alternate archival recordings on two different speeds. “She’s forty-eight years old now. She’s from Salt Lake City. She grew up Mormon.”

“She rejected all that for a while and went off to be a stripper,” said June, wide-eyed with the effort to sound nonjudgmental about this. “She did pretty well at it, I guess. She’d been working the casino shows in Vegas before she came down to Taos. For all we know she was also a prostitute, but we never did prove that and she would never admit it, for all her big talk about her dark sinful past. She had this whole story about her revelation of her powers and her life change and her link to the spirit world and how we could all do the same if we followed her example and unleashed our magical powers.” June rolled her eyes. “We fell for it.”

“Isis rooked a whole bunch of people, including us,” said Emery, slinging one huge hammy leg over the other and rubbing his belly with a hand the size of a small meat loaf. “She’s a scam artist. She ran off with everyone’s money. We went after her. We took her to court.”

“You can read all about it if you Google it,” said June. “It was quite a trial. She claimed it was a witch hunt and we were persecuting her.”

“We won,” said Emery. “She did five years in prison and got out. Now she’s up here, starting all over again.”

“Is she violating parole by being here?” Karina asked.

“She’s not out on parole,” said June. “She did her time fair and square and she can move to China if she wants. I wish she would.”

“This new group,” said Emery, “your son’s group, this is something more serious. She’s talking about end times again, but now it’s Jesus and the Apocalypse and the lake of fire, not spirit animals and sweat lodges and the Mayan calendar’s 2012 prophecy. She’s really gunning for something. She owns that fancy beach house legally. And she’s socking away money, apparently. One of the ex-members of this group was her financial planner, you’ll meet him. He says she’s got almost a million bucks salted away. She just recruited a Getty and he’s signed over his whole wad to the group.”

“She wants to marry Hector!” said Karina.

“We know,” said June. “We know. He’s a virgin. He’s pure of spirit. He’ll make her look good by association, if and when her past comes to light. Supposedly, according to Jennifer, the most recent member we helped get out, Christa has announced that among her followers, he has the power, whatever that is. They’re being made to think of Hector as some kind of messianic figure. It sounds like they’re toying with the idea that he’s the second coming of Yashua, but he has to pass three tests first. That’s all we know.”

“Tests,” I said. “That doesn’t sound good.”

“I agree,” said Emery.

“Yeah,” said Karina. “That sounds completely fucked up and dangerous. What are the tests, do you think?”

“Whatever they are,” I said, “Hector won’t be able to resist them.” I tossed my tea back with a few big gulps and set the cup on a coaster on the table next to me. “The chance to be the second coming of Jesus is not something most people could or would pass up.”

“Does Hector’s mother know what’s been going on with him?” asked June. “I had thought she would be here tonight.”

Karina looked at me, clearly waiting for me to field this one. Having no desire to do so, I looked back at her silently until she said with prickly defiance, “She says to tell you she’s very sorry, she couldn’t make it.”

“That’s too bad,” said June.

I disagreed; I could easily imagine how different this meeting would have been with Luz present. I pictured her sitting in ice-hot, tragic self-righteousness, the heartbroken mother, the wronged wife. She would have silently judged June and Emery, found fault with them for being too New Agey or too bossy, something. She would not have looked at me once the entire time, but her hatred would have smoldered in my direction. I was passionately glad that she wasn’t there. I took a handful of potato chips. Midwestern women always knew the best ones to buy. These chips were my madeleines; I was back in Muscatine, and it was almost fifty years ago, and I was about to go down to the river and fish for some crappies. I wriggled my feet with nostalgic contentment.

“My parents are estranged at this point,” said Karina, “having nothing to do with Hector. And my mother’s not doing well these days, emotionally, so we haven’t fully filled her in. So we’ll see what happens tonight, what we learn, before we involve her more completely.”

“Are she and Hector close?” asked June.

“You could say that,” I said.

“She’s not speaking to him since he joined the group,” said Karina, “but they’ve always been very close.”

June shook her head as if this made her even more anxious than she already was. “Then she’s got to become involved in the intervention. Also any of his friends he’s close to. The more people we have, the better.”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself, June,” said Emery. June smiled at him as if nothing could have pleased her more than being told by her husband to stifle it. “We have a lot of ground to cover before we start planning anything.” He uncrossed his legs and leaned back even farther into the couch cushions. The couch’s bones creaked, but its integrity held. “Did you two read the book I recommended?”

“I did,” said Karina, “but I doubt my father has.”

“I’ve read about half of it,” I said, shooting her a look. “It’s fascinating. I’ll read the rest of it this week.”

“So you know quite a lot about mind control, then,” said Emery. He sounded like he might have been challenging me to prove it. “That’s good.”

“Yes,” I said, bristling at the blatant skepticism in the room concerning my claim to have done my homework. I decided to unleash some of it on them. It served them right for doubting me. “I was interested to learn,” I said, trying not to sound aggrieved, “that the typical cult recruitment tactics are love bombing, a warm bath of total acceptance, and the illusion of a welcoming utopian community. Anyone can be susceptible under the right circumstances, but on the whole, most people who join cults are like Hector: bright, somewhat lost young people who feel out of place in mainstream culture and are hungry for something better, a communal, spiritually committed way of life. How am I doing so far?”

“Dad,” said Karina. “You read the book?”

I didn’t answer; I was imagining Hector going to a seemingly random place, a café or music festival or one of the other places he liked to go to find other earnestly searching kids to talk to, and there, two or three unnaturally upbeat, highly articulate people his own age had approached him and struck up a conversation. They described their lives in such glowing, idealized, bright hyperbole, Hector couldn’t be anything but intrigued. They invited him out to Long Island to see the place and meet the other members and spend a night. And when he went, he was embraced, complimented on being special, one of them, spiritually awake, made to feel part of things, tempted to stay longer. Instead of the blighted streets of Greenpoint, the sordid chaos of the Astral, instead of combating the hidebound Catholicism of his mother and numbing atheism of his father, he had found a calm, bright, ordered place where all his questions were answered and all the dishes matched and the sea grasses blew in the morning breeze.

“And then, once the person joins,” said June, “this love bombing goes away. Little by little the new cult member experiences isolation from the world, sleep deprivation, lack of solitude, overwork. He has to keep up with constantly changing rules. His personality is broken down, and a new cult self takes its place. Most times, they get new names, too.”

“Hector’s is Bard,” I said. “Which is interesting, considering that he dropped out of Bard College and his father is a poet.”

“Oh,” said June, “you’re a poet? Wow. I love poetry. Anyway, where were we? Oh right, the cult self. He feels exhaustion, fear, confusion. That’s what happened to us, and that’s what’s happening to Hector now. Anytime his real old self wakes up and starts to ask questions and feel doubts, his new cult self snaps into action and stifles it. It’s a closed system, mind control. Cult members feel like they have to act like everything’s fantastic, in order to quiet troublesome thoughts and keep other members from ratting them out. This happy-smiley act makes other people buy into the whole thing and join the group. And it convinces outsiders that people in cults are perfectly happy there, that it’s a valid belief system and way of life. But this smiling, happy mask actually hides fear and horrible self-hatred. I know, I was that person.”