The Astral (24 page)

“The other men are at the job site, working on a house renovation. Some of the women are working in the gardens and others are cooking and others are cleaning. The women are all over the place.” He laughed. This time, his laugh sounded almost like his real one.

“Where’s Christa?”

“She’s gone to the city on business. She’ll be back tonight for the ceremony.”

I did my best not to sound worried. “What ceremony?”

“Dad,” he said, his voice cracking a little on the old name, which, now that he was a grown man, felt like both a formality and an endearment, “I’m being tested tonight. The handmaidens are preparing me to meet the challenge of Hashem’s will for me, anointing my head with oil, washing my feet, blessing me, and praying over me. I’m gathering my strength and powers. I must rest today, for tonight will bring the truth.”

“What are the tests?” I asked my plump, supine, oily headed, clean-footed, prayed-over son with a slowly thudding heart.

“The ones Yashua passed, in our first incarnation, when he walked the earth,” said Hector without a flicker of awareness of how insane this sounded. “I must perform three miracles.”

“What miracles?”

“I must walk on water, change tap water into wine, and heal my sick sister Lake with the laying-on of my hands.”

“Lake is sick?”

“She has lupus,” said Hector.

“Do you know how to cure lupus?” I asked.

“Christa has faith that I can and will. And I have faith in her.” Under its new rim of fat, his jaw tightened, so slightly that if I hadn’t been watching him with all my attention, I might not have noticed.

“I hope she’s right,” I said. “You can’t swim, Hector.”

“I will have no need of swimming. My feet will not penetrate the water’s surface.”

“Ah,” I said. “I see.” I wanted to laugh out loud at the ridiculousness of it all, the sheer clichéd unimaginativeness of the three miracles, which were like a kids’ game, and at the way my son, born and bred in Brooklyn, was now talking, flattening his vowels with a twang; it occurred to me that he was imitating Christa’s western accent and fake-biblical diction. What a protoplasmic puppy my son was, lying there so self-importantly with his lips pursed, with fresh young handmaidens to oil him up and a former stripper hot-tamale girlfriend to convince him he was the Second Coming of Christ and entice him with promises of matrimonial, God-approved sex. We’d never get him out of here at this rate unless a better offer came along, but what could possibly be better than this?

“You have no faith,” Hector said with his ancient, lifelong impatience with me. “Therefore you cannot imagine what can be accomplished by those who possess it. ‘Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord and who has made the Lord his hope and confidence.’ ‘It is done unto you as you believe.’ ‘If you can believe, all things are possible to him who believeth.’ The Bible is the truth, Dad. It’s the only truth.”

“I disagree vehemently, as always,” I said, “my dearest son.” I could see him start to tense up and begin to marshal a biting rebuttal. “But,” I added with unctuous disingenuousness intended to soothe and placate, “I respect your beliefs, although they’re completely different from mine. Can you say the same?”

“No,” he said. “I would be lying if I said I thought your belief, or lack of belief, was a fraction as valid or true as my faith. This is absolute truth, Dad, not relative or comparative. You either believe or you don’t. You’re either right or wrong. There is no middle ground. And you do not believe, and so I fear for your mortal soul. I fear for your future, after the Rapture, burning in the lake of fire for all eternity. I wish I could save your soul, but only you can do that, by accepting Yashua as your lord and savior.”

“That will never happen,” I said. “I’m just not made that way. Hector, your mother is worried about you. Will you please phone her? Soon? Tomorrow?”

“Why should I?” He sounded slightly hurt. “She wouldn’t speak to me if I did.”

“She might,” I said. “Things are very hard for her lately. The hospital closed. And we’re getting a divorce.”

He opened his eyes and stared at me. “Are you having another affair?”

I gave an angry bark of laughter. I deserved it, I supposed, but given the circumstances, the question irked and dismayed me. Then, seeing how serious Hector looked, I stifled my hotheadedness and became appropriately solemn. “She thinks I am, but I swear to you on whatever you hold sacred that I am not. Anyway, whether I am or not turns out not to be the point. She’s through with me. She’s just using that as an excuse to get rid of me.”

Hector closed his eyes again, but his expression was no longer beatific.

“I’m sorry to spring this on you like this, on such a big day for you,” I said. “I came out here today expressly to tell you, and I know the timing is bad, but you should know that this is going on.”

“Sure,” he said. “Of course. And I will call her.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“I’m not doing it for you,” he said. “I’m doing it for her.”

“Even so. I’m glad. She will be so happy to hear from you.”

“If you say so,” he said with heavy skepticism. He looked painfully young and vulnerable to me. Maybe he always would, no matter how old he got. I couldn’t imagine a time when I wouldn’t feel this mix of fatherly tenderness for and exasperation with my son. He was so maddeningly didactic and condescending, and so endearing, admirable, intelligent. “Do you still love her?” he asked.

“I’ll always love her,” I said. “She’s been my wife since before you were born. But she’s through with me, Hector. I tried everything I could to convince her that I wasn’t sleeping with Marion—”

“She thought you were sleeping with Marion?” He laughed. “Well. That’s a new one. And you weren’t?”

Something had shifted. I could feel Hector fully present with me, his old, real self, not his new, weird, messianic self. We were lying parallel to each other, separated only by a few feet of air, both of us on our backs.

“Of course I wasn’t sleeping with Marion.”

“You’re still not?”

“I’m not sleeping with anyone, Hector. And Marion’s got a new boyfriend who’s barely older than you are.”

“Seems to be going around,” he said. “Christa’s forty-eight. Did you tell Mom you and Marion weren’t having an affair?”

“I told her till I was blue in the face, and she still wouldn’t believe me. But it doesn’t matter, in the end. She wants a divorce, and I’m giving her one. You know her. You can’t get her to do anything she doesn’t want to do. She never admits she’s wrong, either.”

“I think she might have, once,” Hector said. “Like ten years ago, when she lost a bet we made about something, I can’t remember what. But even then, she claimed that she wasn’t completely wrong, she just didn’t have all the facts beforehand. She tried to paint it as a misunderstanding. I was like, no way, Mom, pay up. I could tell it almost killed her to give me that dollar.”

We both laughed. “It’s good to see you,” I said, turning my head to look at him. “I’ve missed you, Hector. So has your sister. I wish we could see more of you.”

“I’m right here,” he said.

“I know, geographically you’re not far away. This new group seems like something you’ve wanted to find for a long time. I’m happy you’ve found it, but you know, I’m your dad. I’m a little worried about some things, a few aspects of your life here that don’t quite add up.”

“You think we’re a cult,” he said, sounding amused. “You think we’re all brainwashed, right?”

I put my hands behind my head. “It had crossed my mind.”

Hector exhaled through his nose vehemently, but it wasn’t an angry sound. “I am deeply happy,” he said, sounding like his new self again, as if the word “cult,” as he spoke it, had triggered a mechanism, defensive or otherwise, whereby he phased back into the persona of Bard and stuffed Hector back into squashed submission, like a sleeping bag in its sack. “This is the place I’ve been seeking all of my life. I was a soul in the wilderness, crying out, and now I’ve found my true home.”

“And you’re really going to marry this … Christa?”

“It has been foreordained. We are soul mates.”

“How much do you know about her?”

“Everything,” he said. “We have no secrets, she and I.”

“You know about her past?”

“She was a stripper,” he said. “She’s been in prison for embezzlement. She has repented deeply of her sins. She has come through it all and is purified, reborn in Yashua.”

“And this test tonight … I know I sound like an overprotective old hen, but how are you going to walk on water? That sounds at best impossible and at worst dangerous.”

“I’ll walk into the pond,” he said, “and the soles of my feet will be held up by my faith in God alone, acting upon the waves and changing their nature.”

“What pond? Is it deep?”

“It is pretty deep.” He laughed in his new, superior manner. “I’m not going to drown. I promise.”

“You swear?”

We were looking straight into each other’s eyes. Mine had worry and judgment in them, his nothing but unshakable conviction.

“I swear,” he said, mocking my fear, and I had no choice but to believe him.

Chapter Twenty

  W
hen Lake came upstairs, Hector told her that Karina and I were staying for the ceremony tonight.

“Have Birch give them a tour,” he told her. His voice was impersonal, smooth. His earlier intimate, frank manner had completely changed with the presence of Lake. “Father, I’ll see you at dinner.”

He had never called me Father before in his entire life. I apparently had a new name now, too.

I followed Lake downstairs. She looked perfectly healthy to me, but then, how did I know what a person with lupus was supposed to look like? To my knowledge, I’d never met one before.

“I’d love to show them around,” said Birch when Lake found her folding clean napkins in the dining room and informed her of Hector’s instructions. I followed them both into the kitchen, where Karina and two other women were sitting at a worktable, picking through an enormous pile of mussels. A heap of fish lay on the sideboard.

“You don’t catch your own fish?” Karina was asking.

“Not always,” said one of the women, yet another fresh-faced girl with nut-brown hair in a bun and bright blue eyes. Someone in central casting was due for a raise. “Sometimes we do. But we always get our own clams and mussels.”

“So are you self-sustaining here?” Karina asked.

“No,” she said, sounding slightly defensive. “But we’re becoming more and more so all the time. The end times are upon us. The earth is going to erupt in famine and disease. Until we’re taken to Hashem’s eternal shining kingdom, we will be safe here.”

“I’m Birch,” said Birch to Karina. “Your brother asked me to give you and your father a tour of the place.” She added to Lake, “I will of course be back for my kitchen duties.”

“No, women’s prayer is before that,” Lake said.

“Yes,” said Birch. “Of course!”

“She’s a new member,” said Lake. “It takes a while.”

Birch’s face was stony. I could tell she was mentally knifing herself in the gut for forgetting. Something had darkened here since our first visit, when they had been so festive and welcoming. The air felt bluer and heavier; everyone looked tense. Well, today was a strange day for them, portentous, high stakes, and Karina and I had shown up unexpectedly, uninvited. It had been up to Hector, apparently, whether or not he would see us. And it had been at his directive alone that we’d been allowed to stay. No one seemed to question his authority. His standing here had obviously skyrocketed since last time. It made sense—he was probably the Messiah, after all, and he was about to marry their leader and guru. It occurred to me that maybe what I was feeling from these women wasn’t censure or dislike but shyness mixed with apprehensiveness.

“There’s a lot to remember here,” I said, feeling sorry for them, knowing what I knew about their lives here. “I would imagine, anyway. You work so hard and have so many responsibilities.”

Birch said with eager alacrity, “My life here is so joyous! I am thankful for every task I perform in his name. Every moment here is full of the presence of Hashem. We don’t want to sleep, even, for fear of missing a conscious moment in his grace.”

“That’s for sure,” said Lake. “I pinch myself at night in bed to stay awake!”

“Sometimes I slap my own cheeks.”

“I take off the covers so the cold keeps me awake.”

“Sleep is good for you,” said Karina. “I get eight hours a night, and if I don’t, I’m a raving bitch.”

The women looked at her with smiling pity.

Birch led us out the mudroom door onto a recently built screened-in porch whose beams were still green with newness and that smelled equally of fresh wood and animal droppings. One wall was lined with metal cages. In each an enormous, immobile rabbit sat humped and quiet. Sodden bits of lettuce littered the wooden floor. “These are the bunnies,” she said. “We are their stewards, and they reward us with meat.”

She led us outside and showed us a huge wooden bin with a hinged lid. “The compost,” she said, opening the lid to emit a rich, vegetal stench. “Everything organic goes in here, returning earth to the earth.”

“You should get some worms,” said Karina.

“I know,” said Birch. “I’m working on it. I can’t wait to get some red wigglers in there.”

Outside, away from the group, Birch had dropped some of her stiffness. I could begin to see the person she had been before she’d turned into a Hashem freak: earnest, slightly overbearing, easily excited. I couldn’t tell much about her figure in that long skirt and loose-fitting smock, but she seemed to be built like one of the ripe-breasted, strong-limbed country lasses I’d tumbled around with as a teenager. She was pretty in a moonfaced, bright-eyed way that I could imagine might have had a lot of allure for some men if she hadn’t been under mind control. Actually, come to think of it, a woman under mind control might be a turn-on for the type of man who liked moonfaced, bright-eyed nature girls. I could imagine my old nemesis Dan Levy blowing a lot of hot smoke in her direction, for example.

“You joined this group recently?” I asked as she led us to a small, neat outbuilding beyond the sheds.

“About a month ago,” she said. “Everyone is so thankful for our brother Bard. We trust that he is our lord, come back to lead us.”

She’d only been here a month, and she was already talking like this with a completely straight face.

“But what if he isn’t?” Karina said. “What if he fails the tests?”

Birch’s face went joyfully blank. I could see a door slamming shut in her brain at the very suggestion. “Oh, he won’t,” she said. “Christa has foreseen it.”

“I’ve known Hector all my life,” said Karina. “He’s my brother, he’s a great guy, but the Messiah? I think not.”

Birch looked at her as if she might have argued with this, once upon a time. Something kept her from it; maybe she realized how futile it was, maybe she thought Karina and I weren’t worth engaging in this discussion, because we obviously weren’t likely new members.

“These are our girls,” she said, opening the door to the chicken coop. A soft explosion of tiny pinfeathers erupted from the doorway. I heard rustling and a broody, throaty noise within. “Cluck cluck, little sweeties! Oh look, eggs.”

We dutifully regarded a flock of large, golden chickens, then trooped off to a nearby greenhouse to admire burgeoning lettuces and tomato plants. Karina began to ask a lot of pointed, half-didactic eco-freegan questions about pesticides, planting cycles, and chicken feed. Birch answered them with apparent openness: no, they used no chemical pesticides, only natural repellents; yes, they mixed their own chicken feed and it was all organic; no, they didn’t plant by the moon’s phases, they didn’t believe in that.

“This is a great setup you have out here,” said Karina. “I wish I could do the same, but I live in Brooklyn.”

“You should move out here,” said Birch.

Karina smiled. Their gaze held for a second longer than necessary.

Were they flirting? Aha! I would have bet that lesbianism wasn’t accepted here at Hashem House. So she was either closeted, in denial, or determined to overcome it.

“Are you married, Birch?” I asked her.

“Not yet,” she said with a wide smile. “I am praying that Hashem leads me to my soul mate very soon.”

“Is everyone married here?”

“Oh, not yet,” she said. “We have been blessed by four unions, and now three of my sisters are pregnant. Hashem is revealing to us in the fullness of time the paths we might take together in married unions. The union of husband and wife is the mirror of the perfect blissful union of the soul with Hashem. Not until we’re married are we truly one with him.”

“I see,” I said with an odd, entirely unexpected pang for my wife. The strangeness of not being with her anymore hit me in the gut out of nowhere. I couldn’t remember for a moment why we were apart.

“And now, the gardens! Over here,” she said. We followed her up a path through some scrubby trees into a cultivated field ringed with chicken wire, mirrors winking everywhere, a finely crafted scarecrow in the middle looking very much like a man being punished for some socially deviant crime, dressed in idiot’s clothing and hoisted up on a stake. Inch-high plants grew in neat rows. The field glittered and shone with different shades and shapes of green, rows of ruffled, pointed, or broad leaves in emerald green, dark green, pale green.

“Wow,” Karina said. “This is just fantastic. Did you do this? You’ve only been here a month!”

“They started before I came, of course, and Lake and I and two other sisters have been working very hard to get in a really good bunch of stuff,” said Birch. “We work from dawn till dusk, practically.” Something changed then; she slid back into her less authentic-seeming persona, the ecstatic, wide-eyed personality everyone around here seemed to imitate and affect. It seemed to me that this shift was usually triggered by a negative thought or a niggling doubt. “I just love this life,” she was saying. “I am so happy here.” She opened her arms to indicate the gardens, the house, the ocean, the sky. “It’s heaven on earth to live with my brothers and sisters in peace and harmony. I never dreamed this would be possible.”

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“I grew up on a farm upstate, in Columbia County, near the Berkshires, which you’d think would be great, but I hated it there. My family was so decadent and atheistic. My parents smoked pot, they believed in social freedoms, but they had no moral basis. Then I moved to New York and worked in an office for three years and tried to save up enough to buy my own land. It was death, living death. Now I awaken with the sun and my hands are in the earth all day, growing things, and I pray with my best friends, my new family. What could be better?” She put the flats of her palms together under her chin, prayerful. “I love Christa so much. She’s our spiritual mother, a true child of Hashem. Now I’ll show you the orchard.”

The orchard was a field of small, wind-gnarled apple, plum, and peach trees. “They don’t look like much, but Lake tells me they produce enough fruit to keep us canning around the clock during the hottest days of the year.” She laughed. “It might sound crazy, but I can’t wait. Now I should get back for prayers. You two should feel free to walk or just sit on the porch, up to you.”

Karina and I wandered off to the beach. I shivered. The wind was stiff and chilly and briny smelling.

“Oh my God,” said Karina as we came over the dunes. “I feel like my head is going to explode from being in the kitchen with those women. They’re so incredibly scared to say anything wrong. I asked them all these direct questions, and I felt it was like talking to a corporate customer-service person, the answers were all scripted and fake and programmed. How can Hector live here?”

“I think he loves it here,” I said. “I feel like it’s a dream come true for him. He gets better treatment than the rest of them. He’s like their puppy or something. They take care of him. I’m much less worried about that aspect of things now. But while you were in the kitchen, he told me that tonight is the night he has to pass these Messiah tests. He has to walk on water. That, I’m a bit worried about. I’m glad we’ll be here, just in case.”

Karina hunched into her hoodie and shoved her hands into the pockets. “Maybe he’ll fall in, and they’ll laugh at him, and we can pull him out of the pond and take him back to Brooklyn.”

“Best-case scenario, I guess,” I said.

“But then, on the other hand, do you ever wonder what would become of him if he left this place? It’s not like he had so much else going on before he joined. It’s not like it’s so great out there, either.”

“I think about that a lot,” I said, “and I keep reaching the same conclusion. It’s better to be lost and floundering and in full possession of your own mind than to be controlled by fundamentalist belief. If I believe anything, it’s that. And a few other things.”

“I agree,” said Karina, “but I have to keep reminding myself.”

The damp beige sand was stippled with tire marks and footprints. Here and there, plastic bottles and tampon applicators had washed up to the high tide mark. We passed a dead seagull, a scraggy mass of dirty feathers. A transparent, shallow wave of seawater rushed up the beach and nipped at our shoes. The sunlight was watery and diffuse. I inhaled the air deeply through my nose and felt the atomized salt spray invigorate my lungs.

Into my mind came a few lines from García Lorca’s hauntingly sinister “Malagueña”:
“Y hay un olor a sal / y a sangre de hembra / en los nardos febriles / de la marina.”
Luz used to love to recite that poem to me in as close to a fiery, soulful trance as she ever got, postcoital, inhaling the smells our bodies made together: the salt smell of menstrual blood, the feverish spikenards … what were spikenards? I had always imagined they were some kind of slippery seaweed, waving underwater like a woman’s long black hair. It was strange and hard, remembering Luz naked with flared nostrils in our bed, reciting Spanish poetry, to believe that our marriage was over. I kept catching myself thinking about her as if she were still my wife. I wondered now how long it took for a finished marriage to clear the synapses.

When Karina and I got back to the house, the kitchen was full of clattering pot lids, female voices, and the smells of roasting meat and baking fish. Hector was still upstairs preparing for the night’s ordeal, I gathered; the men had returned from their construction job, sweaty and dirty, and were rushing around carrying things, building some sort of wood structure outside, bringing in wildflowers and flowering branches from some other garden we hadn’t been shown by Birch; evidently the flower garden was not her province.

Karina and I sat on the porch in two Adirondack chairs while the men dragged the tables and chairs outside onto the freshly mown lawn, set them with the full formal regalia of tablecloths, cutlery, glasses, and china, set out vases full of flowers as centerpieces, and prepared a makeshift sideboard.

“Christa is back!” someone yelled, and there were cries of joy and excitement. Several of her followers gathered to greet her car as it pulled up. She emerged from the backseat holding bags and packages marked “Calypso” and “Anthropologie.” When the driver got out, I thought I recognized him; he might have been one of the men we’d met last time, the blond, frat-boyish Wing, but he looked like all the other men in his beard and short ponytail, his plain cotton pants and shirt. He opened the trunk and took out more bags and parcels and followed Christa up the steps. She was wearing a long white dress that showed some cleavage and the kind of gold, strapped sandals that used to be popular with Greek goddesses. Her hair was so blond it was almost white. She looked artificial and sexy and shrewd. She smiled when she caught sight of Karina and me, but not before I’d registered a tiny flicker of something other than utter joy at our unexpected presence here. She disappeared into the house without a word to us.