“It’s Not About the Sex” My Ass (12 page)

When the testifying ended hours later, it was time to
re-launch the True Order of Prayer. Once again mustering volume and tremolo,
Harmston told the Holy Order to send in Jesus, get on with destroying the
wicked, hand over the temple, and ring the dinner bell.

This may surprise you, but once again, nothing happened.

Not to worry. We all attested to an inner conviction that
everything was OK. Jesus was going to come. Harmston told us to go home and
wait by the phone. We had a calling tree. The moment Jesus came, everyone would
get a phone call.

A phone call?
I
thought that seemed a little odd. There would be trumpets blaring, heavens
opening, and angels descending. Would a phone call really be necessary? What
would the caller say?
Hear those
trumpets? Go outside and look up. Duh!

Jeff and I went home. The truck was still humming, but this
time I was too tired to stay awake. I drifted off, wondering if I would awake
in the middle of the night to the screams of the wicked and unrepentant.

The next morning, Monday, the phone rang. It wasn’t the
calling tree. Jesus wasn’t at the temple wanting to know where the hell his
dinner was. It was just Harmston. He wanted to meet, this time only with the
Inner Circle—his family, a few apostles, and their spouses. No need to
bother with the ceremonial garb, he told us.

Harmston paced and sputtered before the Inner Circle. He
didn’t know what had gone wrong. He had been so sure! “What are we going to
tell everyone?” he worried aloud. I had never seen him so fraught, so
devastated, so confused. “Maybe not enough of us are worthy yet,” he said. But
wait a sec. Wasn’t not waiting for the unworthy, but for Jesus to get on with
destroying them, part of the plan?

Suddenly Harmston stopped pacing. His face brightened. He
was getting a new revelation from God.

“Jesus came!” Harmston cried out. “He came after all!”

In case you are too blinded by the cares of the world to
instantly assimilate this great truth, let me tell you about the phone call
that Harmston received earlier that morning from Sir Isaac Newton. I’m not
kidding. One of our converts, a
Star Trek
junkie, had learned that he was none other than Isaac Newton himself,
reincarnated. It was he who had called Harmston that morning. At the time,
Harmston hadn’t paid much attention to the call. Now, as he paced before us,
what Sir Isaac Newton had told him that morning began to sink in and make
sense.

Maybe Newton was onto something. All that remained was for
God to confirm it to Harmston.

Which God did, then and there, on the spot.

The heavens
did
open, Harmston triumphantly announced. Jesus
did
come. The wicked
did
die.
(Sorry, but that includes you, gentle reader. Bear with me. You’ll be back.)
The earth
was
thrown into turmoil and
mayhem. The temple
was
handed over to
us. We
did
sit down to feast with
Jesus.

Harmston didn’t say if Jesus liked the cookies. I guess you
can’t have everything.

You may be curious as to how the several hundred members of
The True and Living Church of Jesus Christ of Saints of the Last Days missed
all of that. You may also be curious as to why you’re still here, seeing as how
you died and everything, and why the world isn’t in the middle of all those
apocalyptic horrors foretold in the Bible, Book of Mormon and Doctrine and
Covenants.

The answer has to do with the space-time continuum.

All of those events unfolded on Saturday, March 25, 2000. We
all witnessed them. But then God did something merciful.
He folded time back on itself by exactly one day.
That was why none
of us remembered anything. The Second Coming, the deaths of the wicked, the
Feast of the Bridegroom, the works—they all happened. But by folding back
time, God effectively erased those events, our memories along with them, and
sent us back in time to relive the whole day—this time
without
the Second Coming.

Thank God for sending Sir Isaac Newton to live among us.
And, I suppose, for inspiring the prophet Gene Roddenberry to come up with
Star Trek
. Otherwise, we might never
have known that the Second Coming really happened, much less how it happened
and, equally important, how it un-happened.

The good news, in case you missed it, is that you’re not
dead anymore. You were restored to life the moment God folded time back on
itself.

I for one am grateful. Dead people don’t buy books.

I took a bit of a risk telling you about the folding time
thing. This truth, Harmston explained, was only for the Inner Circle. The rest
of the TLC members just weren’t ready for that kind of meat. He would figure
out what to tell them later. A more pressing problem demanded immediate
attention. Namely, what to do with that 26-foot refrigerated box truck sitting
in our driveway filled with food—which we’d already eaten but, thanks to
folded time, was back again—and costing us rental fees by the day.

Given that it was the combined sacrifice of the TLC members
that paid for the food, fairness demanded sharing it equally. Harmston ordered
the calling tree into action. All members of The True and Living Church of
Jesus Christ of Saints of the Last Days were invited to come and obtain their
fair share.

Their fair share, that is, of what was left. Arriving at our
home before the calling tree even had a chance to get under way, we found the
back doors of the truck thrown open. The men and women of the Inner Circle were
snarling and clawing their way through its contents like ravenous wolves.
Harmston’s daughter led the pack. Loading her and her husband’s arms with as
many beef roasts, pork roasts, and turkeys as they could carry, she fumed aloud
about those damned non-Inner Circle TLC members whose unworthiness delayed the
Lord’s coming. They didn’t deserve any of this food. It seemed she hadn’t yet
bought the folding time thing. It served them right, she raged, if only a few
remnants of badly bruised vegetables remained by the time they arrived. That
turned out to be the case.

TLC members did their best to return to business as usual.
They went to school, returned to the office, worked their farms. Harmston
convened church the following Sunday—fittingly, April Fools’
Day—and made no reference to the failed Second Coming.

But the elephant was in the room. Not even the most devout
could ignore it. Long cowed into not raising their voices in public, TLC
members throughout Manti wondered to one another in whispers what went wrong,
why Jesus didn’t come.

Rumors about the Doctrine of Folding Time spread. Harmston
did nothing to stop them. One reason was that he hadn’t come up with a more
milk-like explanation. Another reason was that the milk-drinkers seemed to be
ingesting the folding time thing without heartburn or acid indigestion. Or even
irregularity.

This convenient turn of events was a pleasant surprise for
Harmston, but it would have been no surprise at all to psychologists who study
doomsday cults. When end-of-the-world prophecies fail, as all have to date,
followers who have conspicuously sacrificed—moved, given up jobs and
worldly goods, witnessed to the world, and endured public
ridicule—usually emerge more, not less, convinced. Most default to one or
a combination of three explanations: they were right but for a slight
miscalculation of the date; they were right but God heard the prayers of the
righteous and stayed his hand at the last minute; or they were right and the prophecy
was fulfilled, but not in the way they’d expected. It’s easier than admitting,
to oneself much less out loud, “I have been a fool.”

Harmston knew nothing of that research. (Nor did I, at the
time.) He didn’t have to. These explanations are typical because they come
naturally to the minds of charlatans and the deluded alike. Harmston, in fact,
hinted at all three. Only when it was clear that the Doctrine of Folding Time
seemed to be gaining wide acceptance did he come out and make it official.

But not everyone was convinced of the Doctrine of Folding
Time. One of the holdouts, in fact, happened to be an important member of the
Inner Circle. Namely, my husband, Jeff.

A few days after March 25, Jeff and I went for a walk. As we
strolled down a quiet Manti street, he dropped the bomb on me. He had been
thinking. He had decided that none of it—the Doctrine of Folding Time,
the Second Coming, The True and Living Church of Jesus Christ of Saints of the
Last Days, Harmston as prophet, the Doctrine of Celestial Marriage and Plural
Wives, Multiple Mortal Probations, Prayer Sessions, the Church of the
Firstborn, calling and election—none of it was real. It was all a fake.
We had allowed ourselves to be duped.

You might have expected his disclosure to validate my
growing doubts, to make it safe for me to admit aloud that what I’d long
suspected to be nonsense was precisely that, nonsense. No. Jeff’s disclosure
terrified me.

This had been our life
for seven years.
I no longer knew any other way to live. I had committed my
all, standing up to family, neighbors, and friends. I had paraded myself before
incredulous reporters and, therefore, the world. Besides, what if Jeff was
wrong? What if The True and Living Church of Jesus Christ of Saints of the Last
Days and Harmston were the real deal?
Holy
shit,
I thought,
what if Jeff
apostatizes and I have to marry Harmston or lose my salvation?

“Let’s not throw out the baby with the bath water,” I
cautioned. Even as I said it, I knew that it was panic, not reason, doing the
talking. Of course the whole thing was a fraud. I had known for some time.
Still, daring to know is one thing. Daring to act is quite another.

“There was no baby to begin with,” Jeff replied.

We strolled and talked. Panic gave way to reason. It helped
not to have to face the truth—not The Truth Harmston-style, but
the truth
reality-style—alone.

Would I have come to my senses and found the strength to
stand up to the insanity, sooner or later, with or without Jeff? Throughout my
life, my main strategy for getting along had been to fold, not to stand up. My
children are right—I am a (recovering) lawn chair. Maybe I would have
continued repressing my doubts and resentments for as long as Jeff remained
steadfast. But maybe not. I was getting fed up and, in the process, finding my
spine. I had been acknowledging Harmston’s personal flaws, failed prophecies,
and laughably flimsy dodges to myself for some time. More recently, I had been
acknowledging them aloud, not holding back on sarcasm, even in front of Harmston
devotees whom I knew would waste no time rushing back and ratting me out.
Damning Harmston’s torpedoes and speeding ahead—without consulting
Jeff—was an act of newfound, defiant courage for me.

One thing is certain. Jeff’s change of heart helped me act sooner
instead of later.

The reality and implications of our realization didn’t take
long to sink in. Jeff said, “I don’t want our children growing up in this
environment. I don’t want them deprived of a real education. I don’t want to
raise our daughters to become plural wives.” Suddenly the horror of that
thought dawned on me for the first time.

Staying in Manti was an option, but not a good one. Members
of the TLC would shun us as apostates and traitors. The Mormons might have
welcomed us back into their fold, but we didn’t want to re-become Mormons any
more than we wanted to remain with the TLC.

What we needed was a fresh start.

The wise course was to leave Manti. It meant giving up my
beloved Victorian dream home. I cried.

Harmston didn’t have a reputation for being gracious to
sheep who departed the flock. Jeff and I agreed it would be best to keep our
decision private until we solidified our plans as to when we would leave and
where we would go. When the time was right, we would announce our decision, and
announce it our way.

Sometimes we slipped. When one of Harmston’s wives showed up
for an adjustment at Jeff’s chiropractic office, Jeff let escape a word of
doubt about the Doctrine of Folding Time. It was too juicy a tidbit for her not
to rush home and share with Harmston. The following Sunday at church, there was
passive-aggressive hell to pay. Taking the pulpit, Harmston launched into a
discourse on the Doctrine of Folding Time, which quickly morphed into a tirade that
his body language directed at Jeff. “There are some among you,” Harmston
thundered, “who won’t accept it.
Even
some of the apostles
don’t believe what really happened.” Not wanting to
tip our hand, we sat there and took it. It wasn’t easy.

It took several months to plan and execute our move.
Desperate for a break during that time, we loaded the kids into our van and
headed to Disneyland for a few days. It was a relief to find ourselves in a
make-believe world that was actually
fun,
and that everyone, even the adults, actually
acknowledged
was make-believe.

Back in Manti again, I drove to the elementary school to
join my children at a last-day-of-school party. In the parking lot I spied
Elaine Harmston fussing with something in the trunk of her car. For seven
years, I had revered this woman, held her in awe. She was the reincarnated Mary
Magdalene, who, we believed, was the First Wife of Jesus himself. She was the
reincarnated Emma Smith, First Wife of the Prophet Joseph Smith. She was the
First Wife of our Prophet. To me, she had represented the acme of womanhood.

Not this time.

I saw only a silly old woman.

Man,
I realized,
all of these people are loony.