Beyond Belief (41 page)

All this interrogation did was to make me doubt the purpose of the whole ordeal. It would be one thing if I simply had to confess what I’d done and repent, but the additional details could not have served any purpose. According to Scientology, the more details you gave, the more relief you were supposed to get, but after everything I’d revealed, I didn’t feel relieved, I felt used.

They seemed committed to making me repent for my out 2D and for my behavior, and to admit that I was wrong. It would have been easier for me if I thought I was wrong. However, for reasons that I couldn’t describe, that were out of my control and beyond my understanding, I couldn’t submit in the way in which they asked of me, and in which I had in the past.

When I wasn’t in session, I would ask where Dallas was, assuming that he was going through the same process somewhere else. After five days, I was given permission to write him a letter, but Mr. H. still had me change a few things after she read through it. Two days later, I got a letter back, which was just a few lines long and didn’t sound like Dallas. In short, he was getting through his program, I should do mine, and he loved me. The brevity of the letter worried me more than the content did.

After a few more days of questions from Sylvia, I found my attitude changing. Whereas earlier I had resented the questions yet answered them, suddenly, cooperating in any way became a struggle. Sitting in the auditing room, waiting to begin the questioning, I wasn’t sure I could handle another round of confessing in front of an audience.

“Could you please turn off the camera?” I asked Sylvia. All I wanted was a bit of privacy. I was going to do the session, but I just needed some help or comfort—at the very least, a one-on-one conversation.

“No,” she said, leaving it at that.

When she began to ask questions, I just shut down, refusing to talk to her. I had nothing to say. I couldn’t find any words to say that she would listen to anyway. As she became increasingly impatient, all I could think about was leaving the room, and how much I needed to get out of there. The only problem was, I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere.

I got up to leave the room. Sylvia wouldn’t allow me. She was strong and clearly prepared, even though she was at least fifty. I tried to escape her grasp for at least fifteen minutes, until I promised not to run if she just let me go to the back stairwell. It was the least confrontational way in which I could handle the situation. She eased up, and that’s when I made my move.

I got by the first security guard, but he radioed someone to get to the bottom of the stairs, four flights down. Practically jumping down a flight at a time, I beat the next guard to the exit.

Once I was on Hollywood Boulevard and out in public, I was untouchable. No one would dare make a scene. I started walking down the street, then I noticed that Sylvia had found me and was following me.

“Jenna—Jenna, wait! Stop!” she shouted over the sounds of passing cars.

“Get away from me!” I yelled back. “I’m not going back. I’m going to find Dallas.”

Beginning with the Hollywood Inn, I checked every floor, asking anyone I saw if they’d seen him. Back at the HGB, I charged up to Mr. H’s office.

“Where is he?” I demanded. She didn’t even open her mouth to respond, just simply looked at me. We studied each other for a minute, waiting to see what the other would do next, until I made it clear that the rapport we’d built over the last several months was gone. “I’m going to find him—and you know what else? I’m never going to sit down for another session so somebody can get off on my sex stories. I’m through with that.”

She shut the door in my face, and I tried knocking. She wouldn’t answer, so I knocked louder and louder, raising my voice until, with nothing to lose, I got a running start and crashed my body into her door, which burst open on my second try, despite the dead bolt. Her fed-up expression was replaced with shock. She just stood and watched as I began grabbing at the papers scattered around her office, looking for clues as to where he might be. In one of the piles, I discovered a report from someone who had been security checking him. It included all the explicit details of our intimate encounter, which didn’t surprise me, but it was unnerving just the same.

Glancing at one of the pages, I saw the name of his auditor, Tessa, in the Office of Special Affairs. With Mr. H still standing there, I ran downstairs to the OSA auditing rooms looking for Tessa. Nobody in OSA would tell me where she was, so I waited for her outside the building.

A few minutes later, Tessa and another woman emerged from the front door of the HGB and started walking to a car. I followed them, demanding that they tell me where Dallas was, but they refused to talk to me. They drove off, advising me that I should stop worrying about Dallas and take care of myself.

F
OR THE NEXT TWO WEEKS,
I
CONTINUED MY SEARCH FOR
D
ALLAS,
enduring exhausting days of combing through Sea Org buildings in L.A. and hoping to find where they’d stashed him. Wearing my regular Sea Org uniform, I’d wander the halls, quietly doing my own detective work to see what I could discover. While I wasn’t smashing down doors or sprinting down the street, with each passing day I became more agitated and my resolve grew.

Though my approach had little to show for it, my investigation gave me time to look back at the last several weeks and consider their treatment of me, treatment that, in many ways, had been unusual. Once upon a time, an outburst like the one I’d had with Sylvia in the auditing room would have easily landed me a severe punishment, most likely RPF. Instead, they made constant threats of putting me on RPF, but it appeared to be all talk and little follow-through. If there had been a time to crack down on me, it would have been after that session with Sylvia. Instead, here I was, walking through the corridors of PAC Base. Although someone was following me, she was not trying to stop me.

The disconnect in their actions was hard to understand and made me wonder what was going on behind the scenes. Clearly there was conflict on their side; they seemed to want to punish me but something seemed to be preventing them from actually doing so. It didn’t take much to see that most likely my parents factored into all this. After all, if the Church put me on RPF, they’d have to explain that to my parents, who likely would not be thrilled, not to mention anyone else who would wonder why a Miscavige was disobedient enough to get the Church’s most severe punishment.

While my family was surely part of it, it didn’t seem like the whole story. After all, I’d refused to accept my punishment for the out 2D; anyone aware of that knew I was in a major violation of the mores of the group, and, instead of contrition, I gave them spite. Yet their actions seemed to show a larger ambivalence on their part, almost as though they could not make up their minds about how to deal with the situation.

Perhaps, in the end, the powers that be knew the reality as well as I did: I would not accept being sent to the RPF. They already had Dallas, and I didn’t feel I had much else to lose. I would have sooner called the police and filed a missing-person report on Dallas than submit to another punishment that I didn’t deserve. Though I doubted that they had any remorse about preventing Dallas and me from getting married, it seemed like at the very least they didn’t know what to do about it now. To allow us to wed now would essentially condone our actions; they couldn’t punish us for an out 2D and let us stay together. Instead, they seemed to think they could just keep us apart until I decided to give up; as my persistence was making clear, that was not going to happen.

Finally, I grew so desperate and depressed that I went back to Mr. H for help. It didn’t take long for our conversation to escalate into a screaming argument that ended with her slamming the door in my face again. Undeterred, I broke it down a second time, even though it had just been fixed. Within minutes, three security guys grabbed me by the arms and legs, pulled me into a small room, and held me down. Even then, I tried breaking free as best I could. I kicked one of them in the balls and almost got away.

My bad behavior must have been reported up the chain of command, because two days later I got a phone call from Greg Wilhere, a top executive in RTC who said he was already en route from Int to see me. He made a deal with me: if I stopped going nuts, he’d let me talk to Dallas. A few minutes later, he kept his end of the bargain. I was on the phone with Dallas.

I quickly broke down in tears, the emotion of the moment and my exhaustion being too much to control. Dallas was on the verge of tears himself, but something sounded wrong in his voice. He was being very weird and deliberate in what he said; there were exceptionally long, extremely noticeable pauses in his speech. I knew that someone was standing over him and telling him what to say, a very common practice for people in trouble. It only made me angrier. I wanted to see him face-to-face. I was furious that they felt like they owned us

“Tell me where you are,” I demanded.

“Jenna, I can’t,” he said before another long pause. “I’m going through the program. I’m getting there bit by bit. If I finish this, the word is that we can be together again.”

“Do you believe that?” I asked him.

“I think there is a chance, and that is all I have right now,” he said rather hopelessly.

“Just tell me where you are,” I begged. I’d been through too much to simply leave it to chance, but he was adamant.

“I can’t tell you where I am.”

I felt a flush of anger. I had risked so much trying to find him, yet his loyalty seemed to be more with the Church than with me. Despite my best efforts, the Church, it seemed, had already won. He was their puppet, and they seemed to be enjoying throwing this in my face.

Hysterical and desperate, I took the phone with me and climbed halfway out the window.

“Listen, Dallas, and whoever else is also listening to this—if someone doesn’t tell me where you are, I’m going to jump out the fifth-floor window. I’m serious.”

“Jenna, I can’t tell you!” he said.

Standing on a ledge five stories up and looking down on the cars speeding by, I couldn’t believe it had come to this. It was starting to get dark and the wind tugged at the hairs of my sweater, the streetlights below merging into a blur. I had no control over anything, but the prospect of taking my own life was a way to change that. I knew that the Church had great fear about what happened when someone died or committed suicide on their watch. They didn’t need another PR flap; they would likely do anything to prevent it, especially after Lisa McPherson. This was my last-ditch effort to regain what they’d taken from me, to use the only leverage I felt that I had left—their fear of bad PR and my own life.

Still, Dallas refused to reveal his whereabouts. I was just hanging up when Mr. Wilhere called someone else in the office asking for an update. He had someone tell me Dallas was coming over now, and I would see him, so I came inside. Finally, someone had taken me seriously enough to let me see Dallas.

About an hour later, Dallas got off the elevator, looking miserable and worried. I wanted to hug him, but, all at once, my feelings of fury came raging back.

“Where have you been?” I demanded through tears. “Why haven’t you been looking for me?”

“I’m sorry, Jenna, I just can’t tell you.”

With those words the relief that I’d felt upon seeing him evaporated, and all that was left was the painful reality of the choices he’d made. He could say he wanted to be with me, but when he’d been forced to choose between me and the Church, between my safety and obeying orders, we both knew that he’d chosen the Church. I had finally found him, but somehow he was already lost. It was more than I could take. I started throwing punches at him. He was bigger and stronger, so my actions were futile, which angered me even more.

And so, for the second time that night, I stepped out onto the ledge.

I know now that people who have been abandoned feel the need to test people in their lives by seeing what they will do, seeing if they will abandon them like everyone else if pushed hard enough. Thinking back to that night, it’s difficult to say whether I was testing him, them, or myself. I still don’t know if I really was going to jump each time I took up my five-story perch, but what I do know was that, in that moment, as I stood outside the window, I experienced the pain of every loss I’d faced at the hands of the Church over and over again: my parents, my brother, my friends. If the Church was going to take Dallas, too, then maybe jumping out the window wasn’t such a bad idea.

The sky was darkening, but I tried to look down not up as I contemplated my next step. I wondered how much it would hurt, or whether I would die instantly. I pushed aside thoughts of pain, and thought about the Thetan that was me, which, somehow, I still believed in. And yet, instead of giving me strength to continue in this life, the idea of that Thetan pushed me in the other direction, as I realized that, if I died, I would simply come back in another body. There was comfort in that, comfort in ending it all to start again, maybe with a new family. After all, I was in this for a billion years. What was so bad about throwing one life away, when apparently I had thousands to lose?

Dallas finally realized how serious I was when I asked him if I would die. His eyes filled with tears, and taking my hand, he promised to tell me where he had been and what had been happening. With his promise, I let him pull me in through the window and we embraced. Maybe my life did matter to him after all.

He told me he was being kept at PAC, in the basement under full-time watch, doing manual labor such as demolition and laying tiles, and had been getting security checked all the while. He said that in the letters he had written me, he was instructed what to say and to make it sound like his own words. Just as I had suspected, he said that our brief phone call had been monitored by Linda, who had told him what he could and couldn’t say. The threat they were holding over his head was that, if he didn’t cooperate, he would be declared a Suppressive Person and would never see his family or me again. He said he was just trying to do right by everyone.