The Astral (7 page)

“Can I offer you a glass of wine?” my son asked Karina and me.

“Yes,” I said. “Please.”

“God yes,” said Karina. “Hector, what’s the deal with this place?”

Hector smiled at her. “There’s no deal,” he said.

“You all live here?”

“Yes,” he said. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

“Sure,” she said. “What do you do all day?”

Hector looked as if he were about to burst out of his skin with happiness. “We men work on a construction crew together,” he said as if he were telling me he’d been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, “and we set up portable cafés at events around Long Island, but that’s mostly in the warm months. In the winter, we do a lot of praying, talking, that kind of thing. Look, you’ll see, I’ll give you a tour and describe the whole thing. But for now, relax, meet everyone, it’s a great night. Lark and Mesquite are engaged. This is a truly ordained union. I’ll be right back.”

“Truly ordained union,” Karina said to me. “I want some freaking wine.”

As if she’d heard this, a woman who could have been Mantle’s sister arrived with two glasses of red wine and delivered them to Karina and me with a smile so warm it seemed a bit psychotic, given that we had never met her before.

“I’m Plum,” she said. “You must be Bard’s family. We’ve all heard so much about you! Welcome.”

“I’m Karina. Who is the leader here?”

A cloud passed in front of the beaming intensity of Plum’s face. “The what?”

“I’m just wondering who’s in charge here, of you all, of this group. So far, it’s hard to tell.”

Plum’s eyes were an intense shade of blue; I realized that they were the same shade as Mantle’s and surmised that they must have been wearing the same color of tinted contacts. “Oh, you must mean Christa, but she’s not really a leader, she’s more like a guide. She’ll arrive very soon. I’m sure you’re excited to meet her.”

Karina’s arm and my arm were informing each other that this whole place and everyone in it and everything they wore, said, and did smacked of cultness, it reeked and stank to high heaven. Plum turned to say something to another eerie-blue-eyed clone of herself and I muttered to Karina, “You are right.”

“I know!” she said. She gulped some wine. “Hey, this is good wine.”

I took a gulp and felt it warm my chest and spread out to my whole torso like a mild flame. “Let’s take him home with us,” I said.

She snorted. “He’ll never come. This is his dream come true. Ever since he was like twelve I’ve predicted that he’d end up in a place like this.”

Three bearded young men approached us then with those intense, seemingly self-willed smiles of warm, loving welcome I was beginning to expect from everyone in this bunch. The men’s eyes were not the eerie blue of the women’s: two of them had normal brown eyes, and the other guy’s were a nondescript hazel. They introduced themselves as Track, Wing, and Umber. I was beginning to enjoy the faux-Chippewa prophetic-shamanistic quality of these names. The underlying humor I found in them made me think this whole way of life was just being made up as it went along, and that allowed me to relax and imagine that this place was like an ongoing children’s game, with a similar kind of collective imagined reality that bordered on hypnosis but essentially did no harm.

“We’re so thankful you came to join us for tonight’s feast,” said Track. He had a Long Island accent and looked Italian.

“We’re so thankful that you invited us,” said Karina.

“I’m looking forward to this feast,” I said.

“It’s such a tremendous occasion,” said Wing, who was blond and slightly frat-boyish, with a snub nose and ruddy complexion. “I’m so glad to meet you both. Bard is a beloved brother of ours. It must seem strange, our style of living, how we dress and talk, and all of it. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask. We love to talk about our way of life. Nothing makes us happier.”

“Can I sit with you guys at dinner?” Karina asked. “I have a lot of questions.”

All three of them regarded her with interest and, I thought, speculation, as if they were scoping her out as wife material. There was a strong atmosphere of mating fever in this place. The absence of babies was no doubt temporary and something they were all seeking to rectify.

I was tempted to inform these fellows that my girl was queer as a lopsided fish and had her own strong, unshakable ideas about how to live that most likely would not dovetail with theirs in any meaningful way, but I forbore. Instead I said, “I’ll join you, as well.”

“Great,” said Wing with a gleam in his eye.

Just then, all the air in the room seemed to flow toward the French doors, along with everyone’s gaze and attention. The room went silent. A woman who must have been Christa, the nonleader guide-type person, entered without flourish or fanfare. She was dressed all in white and her blond hair was loose around her shoulders. Her eyes blazed blue. She raised one arm in greeting to the room at large and said, “Let’s celebrate! Here’s to the loving couple!” The room erupted into applause and laughter. Someone handed Christa a glass of wine. Hector appeared at her side.

Wing said in a low voice to Karina and me, “You’ve probably heard that she and Bard might be making an engagement announcement of their own soon! We’re all praying that it will be ordained. We would be so thankful. Bard is such a blessing to us.”

I heard Karina suck in her breath. When Christa took Hector’s arm as if she had already married him, I felt a pugilistic lurch of fatherly protectiveness.

“Everyone, sit and eat!” called Mantle, or someone who looked like her, and in the chair-scraping hubbub that ensued, we all sat down.

Chapter Seven

  S
everal more Mantle lookalikes whisked forth from some unseen kitchen and distributed to each table platters of sliced roast beef and baked potatoes, a bowl of green beans and a bowl of peas, a gravy pitcher, a basket of bread and plate of butter, more wine, a water carafe, and a wooden bowl of green salad. Christa sat at the head of our table. I had been placed at her left, Hector at her right. Karina sat next to him, and going down and around the table were the three bearded henchmen Track, Wing, and Umber, and the handmaidens Mantle and Plum, and another blue-eyed woman with her hair in a bun and bearded man in a ponytail whose names I didn’t know yet.

When the food steamed on each table and the serving wenches had seated themselves, Christa stood up.

“I would like to welcome our guests,” she said in a confident, husky, California-surfer-inflected voice. “Harry and Karina, our brother Bard’s father and sister. Please make them welcome if you haven’t done so already. It is a blessing to have them with us for this occasion!”

There was a rustle and general murmur of what sounded like agreement. I tried to look interested. I was about to pass out from hunger.

“We are gathered here tonight to celebrate the coming together of a beloved sister and brother. Lark and Mesquite have known for quite some time that Hashem means for them to be joined in his name. So they came to me and told me that this was on their hearts, that they both had been called to each other by the divine will of Hashem and that they said that they wanted me to make it manifest in the community. They want to marry each other as soon as possible. Praise Hashem! Thanks be to Yashua!” She raised her wineglass; we all did the same. A clinking hubbub ensued. The couple at the foot of the table bowed their heads, smiling.

“Now let us eat,” said Christa, and sat down.

As the platters and bowls migrated by me, I heaped onto my plate as much food as it would hold and began shoveling it into my mouth as quickly as the outer limits of decorum would allow. Across from me, Karina ignored her food. Her eyes were narrowed and glittery; she was paying close, potentially combative attention to everything around her. Hector looked from his sister to Christa to me, smiling with what I could only call beatific joy.

“Why do you call them Yashua and Hashem?” Karina said.

“Those are their names,” said Hector. “Their real names.”

“Why do you all live together like this?”

“We want to share everything communally and live in harmony together with like-minded believers.”

“So what do you all believe? Do you all believe exactly the same thing?”

“We believe Yashua will return,” said one of the other ponytailed guys, Lark maybe. “He may even be here now.”

“A lot of people believe that,” said Karina. “My mother, for example. But she doesn’t need to live with other people who think so, she’s happy to think so all on her own.”

There was a silence among the group members, a condescending, smug withholding. Karina felt it as much as I did. I saw her eyes glitter as she looked at her brother.

“Why not just go to church with Mom?” she said to him. “Nothing would make her happier. I’ve never understood why you wouldn’t. You’re both Christians.”

Hector smiled. “I’ve always known that the Catholic script is deficient in certain understandings,” he said. Next to him, Christa nodded, barely. “They don’t go far enough. It’s a corrupt and false doctrine. Coming here, I found others who share this knowledge. Our belief is pure. We believe in the teachings of Yashua himself, without intermediary.”

“Then what about her?” Karina asked, jerking her thumb at Christa. “Isn’t she your leader?”

They all laughed. Underlying their laughter was the same joyful smugness that had permeated their shared silence.

“Well,” said Hector, “she isn’t a leader in the usual sense, are you, Christa? Yashua is our leader. Christa’s a prophet, and we listen to her divinations because they’re helpful revelations that further our understanding of his will, but no one leads anyone else here. That’s the point. We’re all equals in the eyes of Hashem, our creator.”

Karina made a sound in the back of her throat.

“It does seem strange at first,” said Christa. “I know.”

Karina stared at me as if she was waiting for me to say something. I raised my eyebrows and smiled at her and the table at large with pleasant acceptance. I had just been thinking about the shower I’d taken earlier that day in Marion’s cozy claw-foot tub, which had a circular shower curtain and lots of different soaps and shampoos, all of which I enjoyed sampling. Standing naked under the hot water, I’d taken an inventory of my flesh as it now was, surveyed the territory south of my head. Was this what my years on earth had amounted to, this skinny sack of bones and guts, those stovepipe arms and the bloated little goatskin of a stomach, these sagging man-dugs and mushroom-white shanks crosshatched with rust-colored hairs? Without this body, I was nothing. I had taken poor care of the thing over the decades; I’d never exercised much, I’d smoked for twenty years before quitting one day, suddenly through with the whole enterprise, and I still drank too much and didn’t feed myself adequately. Standing there, I suddenly envied those who scorned the flesh and sustained a faith in some kind of life beyond it. How felicitous their outlook must be! They could look at the wreckage of a half century or more of living and see it as a temporary aberration, a withering cage they’d soon escape.

But, as usual, this envy stayed with me only briefly before it turned to boredom, and I got out and dried myself off and forgot the whole thing. Now, sitting here, warm and drowsy and sated with nourishing food, listening to the stilted claptrap these clean-scrubbed dressed-alike kids were reciting as if from memory, I wanted to give them all big hugs, get the hell out of here, and escape to a big festive party where everyone was drunk and behaving outrageously and inappropriately.

I had been studying Christa throughout the dinner as covertly as possible, mostly as a potential wife for my son, if recent rumor was to be believed, but also as the possible leader of this purported cult, if Karina was to be believed. She was a common blue-eyed blonde of a type I’d never found appealing, self-serious but not intelligent, self-possessed but not noble, charismatic but not profound. She had the unnatural smoothness of a former beauty queen or cheerleader, the kind of woman determined to preserve herself by any means possible. Because it was impossible to guess her age, due to lack of motility in brow and around eyes, preternatural plumpness of lips, and perfectly gold-streaked blondness of hair, I decided she was well over forty. This in itself was no big deal; an older woman might be just the thing for a lost, searching, arrogant, sensitive mama’s boy like Hector. And if she did indeed have this bunch under some kind of mind control, so what? I didn’t share Karina’s belief that this was necessarily a bad thing. Hector had been an odd duck from birth, a wild child given to violent fevers, then an abstracted, moody teenager who tried every drug there was, then a sudden overnight convert to Jesus-freakdom who seemed likely to take up a placard and go about Times Square. This group seemed like the perfect place for him. I couldn’t muster up a head of steam about it, although I could tell from Karina’s darting glances at me all through dinner that she wished I’d back her up.

In the car on the way home, more than two hours later, she drove with borderline-reckless grimness. She had drunk a lot of wine at dinner. Afterward, the tour of the place Hector had given us seemed to upset her; there were eight bedrooms, the four largest of which were filled with bunk beds, the other four of which contained one double bed each. The rooms were all neat, simple, airy, and seemed comfortable enough, but something about the sleeping arrangements had put her into a funk.

I would have offered to drive, but I had never managed to get my driver’s license.

“It’s like the army or boarding school,” she was saying. “My older brother is sleeping in a bunk bed in a room with seven other guys like a stupid cabin at sleepaway camp. And who gets the rooms with the double beds?”

“The three married couples and Christa, probably,” I said, “and Hector will no doubt move in with her after they get married, so then he’ll be living like a grown-up, in a room with his wife.”

“And that’s another thing! He can’t seriously be going to marry that bimbo.”

I smiled at the dim reflection of myself in the passenger-side window. “Why not?”

“Because she’s a bimbo.”

“Hector doesn’t question the way you live, does he?”

“Of course he does. I’m a godless heathen who’s doomed to burn in the lake of fire when the Messiah comes. So are you, by the way, and so is Mom, which is the most incredible thing of all. That’s what they believe; that’s what they said in their little prayer circle after dinner, before the droning Yashua singing and boring Israeli folk dancing, don’t you remember? That they’re thankful they’re not among the homeowners, professionals, and godless makers of faithless art who will be condemned to the hot oil bath when Yashua the Second comes back. In case you missed it, that was a pointed reference to us, and Mom. I own a house, Mom’s a nurse, you’re an atheist and you write poetry …”

“Oh well,” I said, “if it makes them feel better about themselves to imagine us burning in hot oil, what harm is it doing?”

“They’re a cult, Dad,” she said. “That means they’re all under mind control. I just know Christa manipulated one of them into giving her that house. I tried to worm it out of Hector, and he said one of his brothers gave it to the group as part of his worldly goods when he joined. Meanwhile, she’s marrying Hector, and why? He doesn’t have a dime. When I asked him, he said he has extraordinary visionary power because of his virginity. I bet you anything she’s using him for his purity. If she marries a virgin, it obscures the fact that she is obviously not one.”

“How do you know she’s not a virgin?”

“She’s got ‘tramp’ written all over her.”

I laughed. We drove along in silence for a while. Karina calmed down a little, and so did her driving.

“How old do you think she is?” Karina asked.

“Older than Hector,” I said, “but he’s a grown-up. He can marry whomever he wants.”

“It doesn’t bother you, that place?”

“I wouldn’t want to live there,” I said. “I could hardly stand to be there for just an evening. But Hector isn’t me. I always felt the best I could do for you kids was not to be a hypocrite. I wouldn’t want anyone telling me how to live. As long as you’re not serial murderers or Nazis, as long as you’re doing what makes you happy, that’s all I care about. Honestly. You’re both grown-ups now. You don’t need parents anymore.”

“Sometimes,” said Karina in a voice so quiet I could hardly hear her, “I do.”

“Yeah,” I said, “me too. But it’s better not to have them anymore after a certain age, on the whole. And on that note, please don’t think you have to take care of your mother and me, or Hector either, for that matter. You don’t have to take care of any of us. Write articles, write a book. Find a fantastic girlfriend. Rescue stuff from Dumpsters and give it to the needy. Look, if you want to do something for me, go out and have some fun once in a while. You’re so serious.”

“Life is serious.”

I smiled at her and patted her shoulder and let my arm lie against her seat back.

“So I’m dropping you at Marion’s?” she asked as we neared the city.

“That’s where I’m staying for now.”

“For how long?”

“Until I can find a job and a place to live.”

“You moved out of that fleabag hotel?”

“It was a bracing adventure before I got my face bashed in, and then it just seemed sordid. And,” I added, forestalling her from saying what I knew she was about to say, “thank you for offering me your spare room, but I need to stay in North Brooklyn. I have to stay close to home. And I am not having an affair with Marion.”

“So you keep saying.”

“And I’ll keep saying it as long as it takes until you believe me.”

She sighed. “Dad, I believe you, I just think it’s cruel to Mom that you’re living with her, of all people. What about staying with James and Lisa? What about Phil and Suzie?”

“They haven’t invited me. I think they’re on your mother’s side in all this. Karina, I don’t see how she and I are going to get through this. All I want is to make it right with her somehow and save the ship. She needs help.”

“I’ve been telling her to go to therapy,” said Karina.

“As long as she doesn’t go to Helen,” I said. I had never met Helen, myself, but I had heard enough about her through the years to know that she was a power-mad fake.

“I think she made an appointment with Helen today,” said Karina. “Look, it’s better than nothing.”

“Helen’s worse than nothing,” I said with alarm and rage.

“Well, she needs help,” said Karina, “and she’s heard about Helen from her friends, so she trusts her. She’s going to freak out when she realizes what Hector is doing there in that weird place, marrying a woman she’s never met. She’s going to have to be hospitalized.”

She stopped in front of Marion’s building and idled there, looking at me in the glimmering darkness. “Take care of yourself, Dad,” she said.

“You too,” I said. “Thanks for the ride. Thanks for coming with me.”

I kissed Karina’s cheek and hopped out of the car.

Marion wasn’t home, I knew; she’d said she was meeting a friend for dinner and wouldn’t be back till very late. I let myself in and lay on the couch and stared at the patterns made by the light from the streetlamp on the plaster ceiling. I hadn’t wanted to admit this to Karina, but the visit to my son’s new house, the thought of him marrying that manifestly unworthy woman, had left me with an uneasy, mildly depressed feeling that was enriched and augmented by the idea of my wife becoming the client of that horrible therapist and my daughter going home alone to her little house in the ghetto. My poor family was in shambles.

It had not always been thus. Ten years before, we’d been a solid nuclear unit, dollhouse style, mother, father, boy, and girl. The kids went off to high school every day, Luz to work, and I stayed home to write.