1503951243 (29 page)

Things were not working out as Darius had planned. Not that there had been a plan. That would have been far too confining and restrictive. But there had been a vision. Lambs cavorting in a field, chickens scratching in the dirt, bushes laden with fruit, lush rows of green vegetables neatly tied to bamboo stakes, sweet smells emanating from the kitchen windows, a woman at a loom, another at a butter churn, the sun on the well-defined muscles of his sweating back as he showed a group of teenagers how to build a shelter from supplies found at hand in the woods.

What he had instead was a cold and muddy few acres, chickens that didn’t lay eggs and were eaten by foxes, an ornery couple of goats, diseased produce, a bunch of scrapes, and pulled muscles. Darius wanted young people, cynical and worn-out already, whom he could scrub clean, return to their wide-eyed and open-hearted state, and then slowly refill with a new way of being in the world. He wanted the satisfaction of seeing their expectant faces and empty souls absorb his nutrient-dense diet of natural law and timeless truth. He wanted to watch as they went out and seeded the country around them with his ideas and insight. Instead, what he had was a gaggle of sullen, unskilled women with soft hands and needy egos continually looking for the indulgence of his kind word or warm look.

And he had Sally still hanging around. He had thought of her for some time as just an annoyance, a stray dog looking for scraps. He had figured she’d wander off eventually, bored, hungry, sick of being ignored. But she had stayed. She had become emboldened. Especially with Miranda. He felt she had developed a superior air, as if she was waiting and watching for him to screw up, so sure of her own prophecy of his inevitable demise, on the lookout for when she could pounce. He had tried to shoo her away. He had not been able to scare her off. He didn’t know how hard he could push her. He felt that he was on her territory. She held the mortgage. She owned more of the house than he did. She was part of the “system” he despised. She knew cops and lawyers. He was concerned that her skeptical presence was making his flock of misfits more skittish than they otherwise might be. That she was keeping other, better specimens away.

Darius wanted to be sought out. He wanted to step out onto his porch and see people plodding up the path, asking for his succor and enlightenment. He envisioned himself up at a podium, heads in the audience nodding at his words, at a desk in a bookstore signing his manifesto, flipping through his busy calendar as he fielded requests that he speak at a conference or retreat. What he had instead were rape allegations, a burned-out trailer, and a few notebooks filled with a random collection of his own stubbornly disorganized thoughts and observations. He was growing frustrated and impatient.

He tried, in fits and starts, to instill discipline and structure into the few followers he had. A calendar in the kitchen with assignments—a technique cadged from grammar school—worked for a few weeks, but then the dishes, compost, and laundry began to pile up, the barn filled with manure, and the weeds took over the garden. The women blamed one another or whomever had recently left. He felt like a harried single mother with a passel of brats, not a man full of wisdom needed by a society that had lost its way. He began lecturing the women, taking cues on topics from his notebooks, and at first, their faces were rapt. But he always ran out of things to say and his sentences devolved into harangues and complaints that caused the women to bow their heads and to hide their eyes, which darted about in discomfort and embarrassment. Even Miranda, his golden girl, his own personal Madonna, full of the child he recognized was not physically his but felt was spiritually his offspring, was growing morose and unresponsive.

He felt disgust with them all rise in his throat like heartburn. He could not punish the goats or the garden, the weather or the world, but he could punish them. He could school them and show them there were consequences to their weakness and self-indulgence. It was not mockery, he told them as he tied a piece of cardboard with the word
Slob
around the neck of a woman who had been slapdash in her dishwashing and kitchen-cleanup duties. It was instruction. It was not meanness, he insisted as he used a black marker to draw an anus around the mouth of a woman who had used profanity. It was a reminder. It was not punishment, he assured them as he stomped his boots onto a collection of hairbrushes and makeup he found in one woman’s backpack. It was liberation.

And then, after the fire in the trailer, when he began his furtive forays into the women’s bedroom when they were outdoors at chores, secretly inspecting pockets and purses, shoes and drawers, he discovered that Phoenix had smuggled in a cell phone, which she was keeping in a slit in her mattress. He read her texts. She apparently had found a spot on a small ridge behind the barn where she got just enough signal to send messages back and forth to Cassandra. He found her invitation to Cassandra and Maverick. They’d told Darius they’d heard great things about the place, and he’d assumed they meant from other teenagers. But no, it was Phoenix they’d heard from. She knew them, apparently through drug connections. She’d said, in her texts, that they’d be able to lay low here for a bit. She’d told them there was an empty trailer a convenient-yet-ample distance from the main house. She’d reminded them about what ingredients and equipment to bring, and where to find the unused feed barrel in the barn that they should use to hide everything. Darius read the messages that insisted they all pretend not to know one another and that described how they should behave to win Darius’s trust. But what made his face turn red and his hands shake with anger were the texts that made fun of him. She wrote that he had “short-man syndrome,” was a “eunuch” and a “wuss.” She mocked his philosophy. She said The Source was a “dump.” It was all too much. It could not be condoned. She would make an excellent example. He began to formulate something special for her. When the appointed evening arrived, he told the assembled community there was going to be a “cleanse.”

Miranda was not there to see the cleanse. She had not been feeling well. Her pregnancy had been plagued with all kinds of digestive and sleeping upsets. She worried that something was wrong with her, that her body was not welcoming to her baby for some reason. The night that Darius had designated for the cleanse, she had taken a calming draught, gone to bed early, and fallen deeply asleep. She didn’t know that Darius had ground some sleeping pills into her tea. He didn’t want her there. He was afraid the presence of a pregnant woman would make the other women timid.

By the time Miranda awoke the next day, Phoenix had disappeared. Miranda began to inquire. Where had Phoenix gone? Why did no one seem to care that she’d disappeared? She’d heard a bit of a commotion in the night. What was that all about? The others dodged her questions. But she pieced things together through murmurs and whispers. It was a tale shared behind hands and with eyes averted. It became the stuff of myth. There was the time before the cleanse, when The Source was polluted with the likes of Phoenix, Cassandra, and Maverick, and the time after, when evil had been purged and purity restored. It was a pivotal experience the other women had shared with Darius, and Miranda had not.

Miranda was put out. She felt pouty. She thought that having missed the event, like her once-long hair, marked her as separate from the others. They’d all bonded over the test that Phoenix represented, and she’d been excluded from both the challenge and the victory. Miranda was also deeply disappointed in Phoenix. She hardly knew the other woman but felt sure she should have stayed on after the cleanse, contemplating the lessons the experience certainly had to teach and, having been scrubbed clean of her past and embedded notions, evolving her spirit in fresh and new ways.

I would not have left,
Miranda thought.
I would have benefited deeply. I would have embraced the opportunity.

Thoughts of the cleanse became an obsession for Miranda. She pressed the women for details, collected the whispered bits of information, and reassembled them into a fantasy mosaic. She imagined the excitement of so many hands circling her body at one time, the bittersweet taste of soap in her mouth, the cascades of cool water flowing over her face, breasts, and legs, the chills and shivers met by a bracing scrub with rough towels and then comforted away with a cocoon of warm blankets and bodies curled in on hers. She wondered what she could do wrong in order to be singled out by Darius for the treatment. She considered ways to provoke him and was strangely delighted by this fresh rebellious streak she found in herself. It was a new toy she wanted to play with. One evening she allowed a plate to slip through her hands as she dried it. She was looking forward to the resulting crash, the flash of anger in Darius’s face as he turned to her, the feeling of the hard floor against her knees as she picked at the scattered, broken bits of crockery. But the dropped plate hit her foot, bounced, and merely wobbled in place a few times before coming to rest. The resulting sound was insufficient to arouse Darius from the conversation he was having with Violet about how to redistribute Phoenix’s chores.

Miranda would set aside her dark fantasies and perverse longings for a time. She would tell herself to focus on the tasks at hand. She would discipline her thinking. She would succeed for a few days, but she invariably grew restless and agitated, full of physical and emotional discomfort. She became increasingly fearful that the baby growing within her was feeding from a vessel polluted with all the psychic toxins she had taken in throughout her life. She wanted to bring her child into the world with a purity of intention she felt unable to attain just by meditating and puzzling over passages in the Tao. She needed something that would shock her system and her senses into a new relationship with the world. She wanted a cleanse.

The image of Miranda so full of child and yet empty of beauty rattled endlessly in and out of Dix’s head. He would be frying eggs for breakfast, and the smell of them burning untended in the pan would bring him back from his painful reverie. He’d find himself driving down the road, a mile past where he had intended to turn. Or still in bed, staring out the window, long after the sun had crept its way into the slow-to-warm spring sky. He wondered how far along she was. He wondered when she was due. He wondered how she had become pregnant so easily by Darius, and, if she had become pregnant by Dix, whether she would have stayed. If that would have been a good thing in the long run. If things weren’t better this way. If it wasn’t better that she left when she did, before their lives were even more entwined. He told himself to put her out of his mind just as she had put him out of her life.

One day, some two months after his last visit to The Source, he was out in the barn sharpening mower blades on his grinder. As he stared at the long blade, guiding it carefully along the spinning stone, watching as it ground away the dull metal and created a new, shiny, sharp surface, Miranda’s silhouette clouded his vision, dulled his hearing, and pulled him down. Pain snapped his senses back to attention. He dropped the blade, and it landed with a thud against the top of his boots. He watched as drops of bright red blood began to decorate its surface. He changed his focus and looked at his hands. Both were bleeding, one from his knuckles where a bump into the hard stone had instantly scraped away soft flesh, the other from a precise incision where the blade had caressed it as it fell to the ground.

Enough,
Dix thought.
She’s taken enough of me already. I can’t let her have my hands, too.

He began to banish the thought of her when it came, shooing her away as if she were a buzzing insect. But still she persisted in her insistent, noisy need for his attention. So he began to go through the house, packing up reminders of her. Gradually, he filled a couple of boxes with her clothes, then another with her toiletries and jewelry, trinkets, and hairbrushes. He kept another box open and dropped things into it as he happened upon them: a pair of sunglasses from a drawer, a small bottle of lotion she kept by the sink, a favorite feminine coffee mug, a nail file on the side table, a framed snapshot of her with her brother, her knitting basket. Then finally, the small stuffed bear she had kept propped up in a rocker in the bedroom. Her father had given her that bear. It was the only sentimental thing she had kept from her family. Everything else from them—remarkably little once they had cleaned out the house and put everything up for auction—was in a small self-storage unit they had rented. As Dix taped up his boxes and carried them to the garage, he remembered Miranda murmuring the single word
someday
as she had lowered the door on the storage space and locked her past away.