Beyond Belief (26 page)

“Yes, I think so,” I agreed.

And, with that, we hugged for a long time and said goodbye.

In the next room, Mr. Rathbun was waiting for me. He looked at me expectantly and gestured for me to come in. When I gave him the news that Mom wanted to do her program now, he looked shocked.

“Are you serious?” he asked, taken aback.

“Yes,” I said.

Stunned as he was, he was clearly very pleased about Mom’s decision. He went to speak to her himself, then came back and told me he couldn’t believe that I had taken care of this whole problem for him. He was astonished.

The next morning, Mr. Rathbun came to see me again. He told me that he thought I was such a good Ethics Officer that he wanted me to talk with my father, who hadn’t been doing well on his post since Mom’s out 2D. I wasn’t sure if he was right about me, but I would if he wanted me to.

However, the conversation with Dad was really awkward. When I asked him how he was doing, he said he could be better. I told him things similar to what I had said to Mom, that I believed in him, that he was capable, and that he would be able to pull himself together. He was happy to see me but not at all interested in my opinion or advice. He was closed off and didn’t want to talk about it, which, to a degree, was understandable. Apparently, my Ethics Officer skills were not quite as good as Mr. Rathbun had thought they were.

C
HAPTER
E
IGHTEEN

THE QUESTIONS BEGIN

I
RETURNED TO
F
LAG WITH MY FEELINGS IN A TANGLE—PROUD OF
the work I’d done in convincing my mom to stay, but concerned that I hadn’t done enough to help my dad. I’d barely settled back into my life when the news I’d been dreading landed: one of my family members was leaving the Church. It wasn’t my mom; it was Justin.

After everything I’d been through with him, I wasn’t surprised that he was finally leaving. My lack of surprise, perhaps more than anything, showed how far I’d come in a short period of time. I remembered how shocked I’d been that first time Taryn had told me that Justin had even considered leaving the Sea Org, how nervous I’d been just to hear someone mentioning the thought of leaving the Church. At the time, it had been nearly impossible to fathom that a member of my family wouldn’t be in the Church. Now, not only could I fathom it, his decision made sense to me.

My acceptance didn’t make it any easier to say goodbye. For my entire life, I’d been saying goodbye to people—friends, my parents. People moved out of my life, often just as I was getting to know them. But, at least when people left, I always had a sense that they were staying within the Church, that somewhere down the line, I would get to see them again. As I watched Justin prepare to go into the Wog world by himself, I had none of that optimism. I didn’t know whether he would be declared an SP or not, but there seemed a good chance that he would. The rule was that anyone from Int who left the Sea Org was declared an SP, and, prior to his RPF, that’s where he’d been stationed. I knew I had to recognize the possibility that we would never again speak to each other.

Making things harder was that my other brother, Sterling, was not much of a presence in my life; in fact, I didn’t even know if he was aware that his own twin brother was leaving. Sterling was stationed at Int and we didn’t really keep in touch. While we’d never been terribly close, in recent years, before I left for Flag, Sterling had become very caught up in the hierarchy of the Church and his own status. As a result, there was a distance between us. I knew I couldn’t rely on him for comfort.

Finally, I got word that it was time to say goodbye to Justin. I went to his berthing at the Hacienda, and from the moment I walked in, I was struck by how happy he seemed. Despite my sadness, seeing him smile was a relief. I gave him my Discman and a magazine that he had asked to borrow. He didn’t even consider trying to convince me to leave with him. He didn’t think what he was doing was right for everyone; he just knew it was right for him.

We chatted a bit, hugged for the last time, and then I left. I barely made it out the door before I burst into tears. Upset as I was about losing my brother, my feelings were more complicated than that. My family was getting smaller with every step. Justin had been a much more frequent presence my life than my parents; at the Ranch I used to see him every day, something that hadn’t been true of my parents for more than a decade.

Seeing him leave the Flag base for good and knowing the trouble that he and Mom had been in, I realized all at once that the people I loved could leave me behind, that maybe, someday, I would find myself the last one here—the final believer among us.

I
N EARLY 1999, SHORTLY AFTER
I
TURNED FIFTEEN, THE CHURCH
celebrated the rerelease of LRH’s
Volume Zero
of his eight-volume
Organization Executive Course
set. It was met with much fanfare, but that also meant that all staff had to buy it, read it, and complete its accompanying checksheet. The price was eighty dollars, which was several weeks’ pay. I was being paid half pay, only twenty-five dollars per week, and sometimes I’d go three weeks without any pay at all.

When I did have a little money, I wanted to buy food with it, not an eighty-dollar book. We were told not to share or borrow
Volume Zero,
either, as we were each supposed to have our own copy, likely to help boost book sales. I was one of the last people on the base to get mine, but luckily I didn’t have to buy it. My father mailed me his marketing copy, which he had received due to his post, which was a huge relief.

Having recently finished a course on learning to operate the E-Meter, I was able to switch my attention to the study of
Volume Zero. Basic Staff Hat
was grueling and eight hundred pages long. One day, I was studying it with my friend Marcella in the public course rooms of the Coachman Building. At one point, I started reading a piece called “The Structure of Organization: What Is Policy?” It was an eleven-page policy letter replete with seven hundred word paragraphs, and, at fifteen, I couldn’t understand any of it. In the usual LRH style, it was full of multisyllable words and referenced obscure subjects and people from the 1940s through the 1960s. It went on and on about how some fellows named King, Nimitz, and Short were idiots and allowed Pearl Harbor to happen. I might have understood it, if I concentrated really hard, but it was so boring and verbose that I couldn’t stay focused.

Marcella and I took a trip to the library where there were extremely large dictionaries, and we hoped to find a correct definition for one of the words in the text. When I came back, a kid about my age was sitting next to our seats, and he was wearing my glasses.

“Excuse me, those are my glasses!”

“Oh, they are,” he replied with a grin. “I’m sorry.”

Clearly not sorry, he kept them on and bounced them on his nose. I was surprised at his cockiness. People were usually afraid of CMO members, and even if they weren’t, at least they were usually reserved with us.

“So, what’s up? What course are you doing?” he asked looking right at me.

I looked behind me to see whom he might be talking to, but apparently he was talking to me, even though conversation was not allowed in the course room.

“We are on Vol Zero, Martino,” Marcella said, answering for me in a condescending but familiar way. She and Martino had grown up together at the Flag Cadet Org, which was in the old Quality Inn on Highway U.S. 19. Unlike at the Ranch, Sea Org members at Flag who had children were allowed to spend nights there with their kids and were provided bus service to and from the base. Some of the motel rooms had been converted into course rooms, so the Cadets could do their schooling. Sea Org members who were under eighteen took the bus there once a week, usually on Sundays, to do our schooling, returning to the Hacienda by ten-thirty that night.

Due to the way that Martino was acting, I almost took my stuff and moved, but he was sitting with Tyler, a boy I thought was cute, so I stayed. The rest of the morning, Marcella and I endured their ridiculous antics. When they were clearing words, they used our names in all of their sentences. They called the supervisor “Sarge,” when his real name was Sergio. They kept passing my glasses between them throughout the morning, using them to do impersonations of us. Much as we tried to ignore them, Marcella and I couldn’t help but laugh.

Over the next few weeks, I went to the course room with my friend Cece. We had become friends when she was in CMO with me, but she had been demoted to the Cadet Org when she got in trouble for something stupid. Even though it was forbidden for CMO staffers to fraternize with Cadets or other Sea Org members, technically, we were just studying, so I was able to get away with it. During one drill, I got stuck, so I asked the supervisor for someone to word clear me, and he paired me with Martino. I was a little hesitant. I remember thinking Martino was nuts, but at least he was a Cadet and not a public Scientologist. They were always awkward to work with.

We went to the practical course room and sat across from each other. Martino asked me the standard first question for any worksheet, “How do you spell your name?” As soon as I told him, he abruptly asked me a second question—one that was not part of the patter: “When do you see your parents?”

I was a little startled, because I realized he was asking me this on account of seeing that my last name was Miscavige. Nobody had ever asked me that before. I could have ignored it, but I found myself wanting to answer.

“I see them whenever they come to Clearwater,” I said honestly and candidly. “My dad was here once last year, and I saw him for a few minutes.”

Martino’s face went from jokester to disbelief. “Wait, so you don’t see your parents except once a year if you are lucky?”

“Mm-hm, yeah,” I said, somehow feeling like I had to explain why it wasn’t as bad as it sounded.

“But you’re just a kid.”

“No, I’m a Sea Org member; that’s just how it is.”

“You’re a Sea Org Member,” he said sardonically. “What does that even mean? You’re a kid. How old are you?”

When I told him I was fifteen, he continued with his observation. “Yeah, fifteen, the same as me. Just because you are in the Sea Org and wearing a fancy CMO uniform . . .” To emphasize the point, he puffed out his chest trying to demonstrate a pose of someone important. I burst out laughing, but that didn’t stop him. “Seriously, I would die if I didn’t see my mom,” he said quietly, waiting for me to respond.

“I don’t know, I just . . . we are Thetans,” I added haltingly, “. . . and Thetans can’t really be the parent of another Thetan, and so family isn’t really real, or that important.” I was reciting what Aunt Shelly had told me in her office all those months earlier after I had returned from visiting my mom.

“Yeah, but don’t you miss your mom?” he asked, almost pleading to my true self.

His genuine concern almost made me cry. Just earlier that day, Mr. Anne Rathbun had pulled me into her office and shown me an opened letter from my mother. In the letter, Mom, who was still on RPF, told me how well she was doing in getting through her program. She talked on and on about how much she loved the gardening and how certain things reminded her of me. She had enclosed some pictures and told me how much she loved me. I dared not show my emotion in front of Mr. Rathbun. I wanted to take the letter home, so I could put it under my pillow and read it over and over again, but when I got up to leave Mr. Rathbun picked it up. I looked at her, and she told me she would be keeping it, as it had confidential photos of Int in it. Of course, I should have expected as much.

It was weird that Martino would have any interest in my relationship with my mother, but I was drawn in by his curiosity, as well as by his honesty. He didn’t seem to be putting on airs, and he certainly wasn’t trying to pretend that he was more ethical than I was. There was something very natural about him that I hadn’t encountered before. I didn’t even know him, but somehow he seemed to think like me. Whereas, for years, everyone had been telling me that the way I missed my parents was wrong, that I should be accustomed to not having them around, he was the first person who seemed to acknowledge how strange the situation was. Everyone else simply said that the way I was thinking was wrong. Listening to him talk was the first time that it had even occurred to me that maybe they were the ones who were wrong, not me.

Over the next few weeks, Martino and I started working together all the time, although we hardly did any work. We talked about everything. He told me about his early boyhood in Italy, and how his parents split when he was young, and he moved to Florida with his mother. He was really close to his mom and would have been lost without her. He spoke about growing up at the Flag Cadet Org, and I described life on the Ranch. Apparently, there was a huge discrepancy between the two when it came to labor and enforcement. The Flag Cadets weren’t required to work, and if they were asked to do so, many of them would simply refuse. Instead, they might walk to the movie theaters down the street, because the Flag Cadet Org wasn’t in a remote place like the Ranch. Unlike us, they were not considered Sea Org members, although almost all of them also ended up in the Sea Org.

As much as we shared stories from our past, we were also fifteen-year-olds who liked each other. Sometimes we would supposedly work in the library, which had more space. We loved picking out random encyclopedias and reading about different subjects. Not surprisingly, Martino’s favorite subject was sexual behavior. I thought it was funny how open he was about it.

When we spoke about Scientology, it wasn’t just the usual patter; instead, we actually spoke about belief, something we never did in any of our courses. We talked about Thetans, and how he wasn’t at all convinced that he actually was one. I couldn’t believe he was saying that. I told him that I unequivocally knew that I was one.