Allison Amend

After the war, I settled in Santa Rosa, which is not where I’m from, but is warm, with a good VA hospital. I did a little freelance tech writing for a while, and then I opened the research firm, funded it with grants, and computerized it. After Waco, the government came knocking. Probably to check up on me. Then, when they realized it was on the up and up, contracted me. Now I collect statistics on Millennial cults. All kinds: Christian Doomsday, UFO Deliverance, Avenging Planet, Angry Separatist, New Age, Christ’s Coming, Asteroid, and Y2K Chaos Cults. The database is cross-referenced by members’ names, ages and races, leaders and ideologies, geography and possessions. It is this last piece of data the government wants; Uncle Sam’s just got to know who’s stockpiling ammo and who’s building fallout shelters underground.

Nothing surprises me anymore. People will believe anything, if they want to strongly enough. And that’s why I’m the one who does the research, because there’s a part of me that wants to believe, too. Wants to be so sure that if I dress in black and wear Nike shoes, the aliens will come and take me to a better place. I wish I could be that sure. Instead, all I’m sure about is that, if there is a God, he cares very little about man, or about me.

On Saturday June 5, 1999, I was at a garage sale. I’d been going to all the sales near Santa Rosa, investigating the Morningland cult, which likes to recruit members by cornering them in driveways under the California sun. It’s harder to think clearly with someone else’s junk in your grip. I couldn’t be sure if this was a Morningland sale or just a simple, innocuous method some neighbors were employing to get rid of the stuff piling up in their attached garages. I milled around, waiting for that certain vibe, that palpitation of instinct that would clue me in; I was thumbing through linens when I felt someone’s hand on mine.

“Are you going to buy this?” she asked. “Because if not, I will.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just looking.”

“Oh,” the woman looked confused. She knit her brow as if making a serious decision. “Do you think I could use this as a drop cloth, you know, for painting?”

“I don’t know if it would be thick enough,” I said. “What kind of paint are you using?”

She didn’t look like the type who would be painting her own apartment. She was kind of what they call mousy—brown hair, old formless housedress with fake hippie designs at the waist and repeated around her hemline, long straight nose. Nothing wrong with her, just nothing remarkable.  

“Oh, housepaint,” she said. “The walls are yellow, and I heard somewhere that yellow encourages mental disassociation. I’m trying to associate these days. I just spent the last few years disassociating.”

“Ahh,” I said. I was trying not to draw too much attention to myself. Cult members are notoriously anti-social, and they expect prospective members to be as well. If you speak to them they look so startled that you want to apologize, only you don’t because you worry that that will startle them further.

“I’m Naomi,” she said. I nodded. I didn’t want to say my name.

“Maybe if I buy a lot of them,” she continued. “Maybe then the paint won’t seep through.” She looked concerned as she surveyed the meager pile of tablecloths.

“They usually toss them in for free, when you buy the paint,” I said. “At least, at Home Depot they do.”

“Oh.” Her face fell and she let the hand that was fingering the tablecloth drop. “I just sort of wanted these to get one last use.”

I felt the need to cheer her up. “That makes sense. Don’t let me discourage you, then.” And then she drifted away, the way people do at garage sales.  

I sifted through a table of carpentry items, contemplated a broken level. A third of it was missing so that there were only two bubbles of liquid instead of three. The table must have been unbalanced, because the liquid rested to the right of the balance line in both. I decided not to purchase it; I hardly ever attempt to fix anything. Instead, I bought a lamp: two intertwined snakes whose heads supported a lime green shade. And at the last second I threw in a baby bib with a stained Big Bird on the front. I took it up to the woman who was running the garage sale. She kept the cash in a shoebox.  

“$3.50,” she said. I didn’t know if this was a Morningland sale or not, and nobody had approached me, nor had I seen anyone approach anyone else. But cultists are notoriously paranoid, and if they’d seen me talking to that girl they probably would have hidden their activities, and my chances at infiltration would diminish significantly. I decided not to stick around, and walked slowly to my car.

As I was putting the lamp in the backseat I caught a glimpse of the mousy woman again, talking to someone in the driveway. I made a note of it, and pretended even at the time that it was just my detective instincts taking over, pretended that I didn’t see something solid about her, something in her eccentric normalcy that indicated balance and symmetry.

There are some mornings when it hurts so bad that I can’t even think about getting out of bed. I wonder sometimes if I had a wife, if that would help me when it feels like there’s a fire in my stomach, like someone put a big rock on top of my abdomen, like little elves in crampons are trekking in my intestines. And if you haven’t experienced pain like this—chronic daily agony—then maybe you won’t understand this story: the instinct to grab onto someone’s hand and squeeze tightly, so tight like you’re transferring the pain to them, won’t make sense to you. And the urge to reach up and take hold of something that will pull you out of your misery, your abject suffering, won’t be one you can relate to. But maybe you will get it; maybe a small part of you might understand how those of us who are in pain have the energy to search for something, and in this quest find a palliative, if not a cure. 

I keep all the crap I accumulate during my investigations in the gazebo in back of my house. I have a ceramic dog, several sets of various religious texts, a tractor engine, the complete works of Buddy Holly on LP (including some fairly valuable German and Japanese editions), lots of large rocks with markings that could be runes but are most probably just erosion’s striations, cancellation stamps from a post office in San Bernardino, a twelve-foot cross with all the stations in inlaid lacquer on the sides, a staff and cloak, a large sign with an alphabet of black letters that can be stuck on with a special stick (lost) which reads “‘I will utterly sweep away everything from the faze of the earth,’ says the Lord—Zephaniah 1.2” (the z in place of the c because the c is long gone, it was explained to me when I bought it) and  a collection of butterflies mounted on pins beneath glass which is not an artifact but rather an inheritance from a deceased uncle. To this pile, I added my new lamp.

I wasn’t attracted to Naomi necessarily. I cut off that part of my life when I came back from the war. That physical part of me doesn’t work, and I have convinced my mind not to work that way either. Who could love a man who is no longer a man? Who could love a man who pees in a plastic bag out of his hip, and who thrashes in his sleep and cries from the pain? Only someone who loved him before, I suppose. Only someone who loved sacrifice. I know about loving sacrifice, and how narcissistic and exalted a love it is, and how its object is never a person, but rather an ideal. I couldn’t compete with that. I wouldn’t want to, even if someone wanted to love me as a sacrifice. Even if.

I ran into Naomi again the next weekend at a garage sale on Buena Vista Court. I came pretty much near the end of the sale. I’d been at another sale over in Granada Estates, which was actually a large flea market, a complete waste of my professional time, although I did come away with a working, if slightly battered, juicer, which is what my doctor recommended I do with all the fruit I’m supposed to ingest every day. I was driving home when I saw the sign for Buena Vista, a hand-lettered box top with a tomato plant stake, a red arrow pointing me right. I followed it, then followed a second sign left, a third wound me around a round-about. I made a final left down a street marked “cul de sac” which is a fancy California term for “no outlet”, and at the end of Buena Vista Court was a small garage sale. I stopped the car and noted the location in my stenographer’s book. Then I tucked it back into the glove compartment and got out of the car.

Naomi was standing by the linens again, fingering them as if, by rubbing them enough, she could make a genie appear. As I approached, she held one to her face and ran it against her chin. This time she had on linen overalls.

I remember that I was unsurprised to see her. I don’t know what that means except that it seemed normal that she would be at yet another garage sale. After all, I was.

“Oh hello,” she said. “You again.” I looked up, startled. I hadn’t expected her to recognize me, or to address me if she did.  

“Hello,” I said. “More tablecloths.”

“You were right,” she said. “About the paint. About it seeping through.”

“But you’re buying more?” I asked. “A glutton for punishment?”

“No,” she looked over my head at the street. The sun was particularly bright. It glinted off the cars blindingly. “I just finally admitted to myself that I like to collect old tablecloths and ran with it.”

“Admitting you have a problem is the first step toward recovery,” I said. In my head, it sounded like something that would be funny. Out loud, it fell like a ton of bricks.  

“Maybe,” she said. “Do you like this blue one, even though it has a chocolate stain?”

“I like it because it has a chocolate stain,” I replied. She smiled. I hadn’t made anyone smile in a long time. Suddenly, I remembered that I was working, or should have been, and I smiled again, sternly this time, and walked away.

I was looking through the record collection, no Buddy Holly but some nice 70’s classics, when I felt a shadow on my back. When I turned, a large bearded man held out an early Elvis vinyl.  

“Looking for some oldies, Guy?”

“Beatles,” I said. “I’m looking for The White Album.”

“Can’t look here,” the man pointed at the table where the records were fanned like cards.  “Gotta look here,” he pointed at his heart. “Or here,” he pointed up toward the sky.  

The man was sweating heavily. Under his blue shirt, I could see the strained lines of a high-cut sleeveless undershirt. 

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Thus says the Lord: Learn not the way of the nations, nor be dismayed at the signs of the heavens, because the nations are dismayed at them, for the customs of the peoples are false.’ That’s Jeremiah 10:1.”

“‘You shall indeed hear,’” I returned, “‘but never understand, and you shall indeed see but never perceive. For this people’s heart has grown dull, and their ears are heavy of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest they should perceive with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart. Acts 28:26.’” One thing I’ll say for me: I know my Apostolic Scripture.

The man nodded at me. His face grew suddenly serious, and he held his Elvis record like a shield. “Are your eyes open, Guy?” he asked me.

“I’m trying, but the sun’s so bright I have to squint.”

“Come into the shade,” he said. “The Maplewood City community center on Wednesday night.”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m interested.” The man walked away quickly and whispered to someone turning plastic plates over carefully to read their undersides.

I took a Bee Gees record and went over to the table where a woman was presiding over a cookie tin. “Seventy-five cents,” she said. “That’s a good choice. How Deep is Your Love, and all.”

I paid her silently, triumphantly. I had gotten what I wanted, an invitation to a meeting. A fortuitous detour of my day.  

“I’m Naomi,” a voice said behind me. I turned. 

“I remember.”

“Do you know anything about plumbing? Because, well, this may sound forward, but I need someone to help me move my couch away from the wall so I can get in to paint behind it.”

“What does that have to do with plumbing?” I asked. Talking with this woman was threatening the groundwork I’d laid. I worried now that they would be suspicious, or wary. 

“Nothing. My faucet is leaking. They were two unrelated thoughts.”

And so to hurry away, I agreed to follow her back to her house.

This won’t be a story where I tell you about the war. You’ve already heard too many of those. They saturate the consciousness, until they’re so commonplace as to be banal. I’m not going to describe the heat, or the fear, or tell you horror stories of the villages we burned, or what we made the women do. I don’t even remember most of that stuff anyway. I couldn’t even tell you how I got injured, probably, if it weren’t in my file. In all those academic medical terms, along with lists of numbers, records of my fluid levels, my medication frequency, numerical archives of my health. 

Never thought I’d be a man who works with numbers. I don’t believe in numbers necessarily. I remember in math class when I was 14 and we learned imaginary numbers. I went to see the teacher about that, after school. I wasn’t the kind of student who would normally do that, go see the teacher, and I asked him about it. “Imaginary? Like it’s made up?” I asked. “They’re all made up,” he said. “Every one of them. Someone made them all up, arbitrarily.” I think I must have stormed out of his office. I felt betrayed. They were all made up, huh? Then what could you count on, pardon the pun? Since then I’ve not trusted numbers, because I’ve been one, a statistic. One of 35 surviving members of my squadron, one of the 303,704 who returned from the war imperfect, unwhole.

So I know they’re all bullshit, but I compile them anyway, because it makes the government feel better. For example, there are 1,243 self-proclaimed prophets in modern America. There are 123 cults in Northern California alone, which has the highest cult-per-capita ratio in the fifty states. There are no cults in North Dakota, although some would argue that those lodges like the Elks are cults, or that the air bases are the government’s version of cults. I’m not a suspicious person; I think that the quickest way between two points is a straight line and that the simplest explanation is the truest. I don’t care if our atmosphere is being eaten away by toxic gas. I know that my computer system won’t crash on midnight Dec. 31, and I won’t care if it does. If this is the age where any schlemiel can broadcast his opinion on the internet, then no one’s voice is any louder than anyone else’s. So this tale is just a hit on my website, just a little something that happened to me, once.

I should have said no. She was already starting to need me. It may be selfish, or self-pitying, but I can’t be helping people. They can’t grow to need me; I might not be around. The flipside of needing nothing is that I have nothing to offer. Nothing I’m willing to offer. 

I moved Naomi’s couch, and then I tightened the washer on her bathroom faucet with a little elbow grease. She made me a cup of coffee and we chatted, and she told me she was getting divorced, that this was a sublet from a friend who was hiking the Appalachian Trail for a year or so. It was like being in a trance, listening to her speak. As though it were all happening to somebody else, hearing her say that she didn’t just bring men home from garage sales, that she needed help because she didn’t know anyone else in Santa Rosa, that there was something restrained about me, that she knew that I wouldn’t hurt her.

She took my cup to the sink, and then patted my hand twice, friendly, which made me cringe. I stood up to leave. 

“Thanks for the coffee,” I said. “I need a cigarette.” She didn’t try to stop me as I opened the door. The ache in my belly had begun, a tight clenching of my muscles around a central pain, dull but intense, that would gather strength over the next several hours and incapacitate me for a couple of days.  

I stood in the recessed door of her building and lit a cigarette out of the wind and sun. There was another man smoking there. He nodded. I put my lighter back in my pocket and walked to my car.

When I got home the pain was already bad. I emptied the catheter bag into the toilet and flushed. The drain let the urine out slowly, so that it sounded almost as though I was taking a piss for real. I took twice the recommended dosage of painkillers and tranquilizers and got into bed, clutching my stomach with both hands, curled up into a ball.

I thought about Naomi, and how someone like that could never understand something like this, although it did seem as though she just wanted her couch moved and someone to talk to. Another wave of pain hit, like a car revving into a higher gear and, pulling my knees closer to my chest, I began to cry.

That night I dreamed that I was in Vietnam. We were in the jungle, a routine sweep and scan, fanning out in a secure zone to search for civilians or discarded weapons, when someone shouted, “Sergeant!”

I was only ever a Lieutenant, but in my dream I knew that I was the one being called. I ran to the voice, entering the deepest jungle.  

And then, below my feet, the ground turned into junk. Piles and piles of the same sort of crap I see at garage sales: headless dolls and mismatched china, rusted saws and baseball cards. I tried not to step on anything, but it was useless; the ground was carpeted.

When I reached the soldier, I saw that he was bent over a woman. I knelt beside them. It was Naomi, her brown hair darker now, the curve of her chin familiar. She was wearing the same dress as on the day I first met her, flowered and shapeless. I held her head in my arms as her breathing became labored. She had a large wound in her stomach. I could see her intestines straining to get through, and I knew that she must have been in a lot of pain.

“Naomi,” I said. She wouldn’t live much longer.

“Why?” She looked up at me, her brown eyes growing dim already. I had to strain to hear her.  “Why would you do this to me?”

On Wednesday, June 16, 1999 I went to the Maplewood Community Center. Contrary to my previous belief, the meeting was not of the amateurish Morningland cult, but rather the more sophisticated Abbadonian Dawning. High Priestess Veronica Ohm (Asian female, late 50’s, 5’1”, shoulder-length brown hair) presided over the meeting, at which there were approximately 50 people in attendance. A deli tray from Safeway was served, as well as lemonade, too sweet. Veronica said a blessing over the congregation, and read minutes. A longer incantation, in praise of the sun, was invoked by the entire assembly. There seemed to be three or four people who also didn’t know the words. She then spoke for twenty minutes regarding the environment, our misuse of land, and her vision of the utopia that would be revealed when God ended the world and took away the chosen in UFOs. Then the assembly stood up and held hands, with Veronica in the middle. She spun several times, then stopped, faced east, and screamed. She fell to the floor in a swoon.

The man who had approached me at the garage sale then motioned to me. Along with three women, I was led to a smaller room, and given literature to peruse. The bearded man stepped in and cleared his throat. Without preamble, he began to describe the cult. He was a convincing speaker, quoting Scripture liberally. From Job, 26: “Sheol is naked before God and Abbadon has no covering…He has described a circle upon the face of the waters, at the boundary between light and darkness. The pillars of heaven tremble, and are astounded at his rebuke.” Only the chosen would be saved from the rebuke, Indians and parents of young children among them. I felt almost hypnotized, drugged. His words swirled in my head, an eddy of hazy suggestion.

He took me aside. “We need her too,” he said. “The woman from Sunday. That is why I approached you. Because you could bring her to us.”

I hesitated only a moment before I agreed.

If I were a different man, I might have walked away from the cult, away from my work and lived the rest of my life with a mostly clear conscience. I consider myself a good person; I can’t explain why I did what I did, not even to my own satisfaction. Maybe I did, just this once, let others’ belief cloud my judgment. Maybe I was swayed by the historical precedent of the superstitious’ faith in the ritual of chance.  

When I thought about seeing Naomi again, I felt like I did in my dream. How could I do that to her, saddle her with my loneliness, my disability? Burden her with the expanse of my need, just because I liked the way she needed me. Introducing her to the man with the beard seemed more natural, inevitable. I had made her no promises. That’s the way it was meant to be. 

“Oh,” she said, opening her front door. “It’s you.” She looked surprised. She pushed a too-long bang off her forehead.

“Yeah, hi, I….”

“Come on in,” Naomi opened the door wider. Her living room was utterly changed. She had painted the walls a seaweed green, and added a pale blue stripe at the baseboards, another one waist-high, and a third one about an inch from the ceiling. She had draped sheets over the existing tables and set candles on them. All of the paintings were hung at different angles and at different heights throughout the room. There was a Chinese painting of the Wheel of Life hung at my chin, while a mirror was raised above my head and reflected the top of the open door. A Venetian mask hung just above a chair and a child’s abstract drawing hung next to the window, which looked across the street to a low-rise apartment complex. The windows were open, and I could hear the shouts of children playing in a pool, the splashes punctuated by the lifeguard’s whistle and the stern voice of a disapproving parent.

“Sit down?” Naomi asked.

There are things you learn in my line of work about the manipulation of people. Like numbers, if you twist them around enough, set them across from equal signs, perch them on top of common denominators, you can get them to do what you want. But here’s the irony: they’ll never do what you want. Never exactly what you want. The emotion will be there, but the actions won’t follow. Or else, the actions seem promising, but the emotion is lacking. Never that perfect symbiosis of volition and intent, never that marriage of benevolence and desire. Because desire is selfish, first and foremost. 

  Manipulation is about tapping into the selfish core of the desirous individual. Naomi wanted to want, wanted to be a member. And once she was a member, I could follow her into the Abbadonian darkness, infiltrate and inform on them. I let her want, and this is something I’ll never forgive myself for—something that keeps me up nights, when all the faces of those demoralized women, those shattered children never made me lose a second of sleep—I let her lead and then did not follow. She became the only other member of the cult of me.  

You may wonder why I’m still alive. Or at least I hope you wonder that. Why I haven’t done myself in, joined one of these doomsday cults and slit my wrists on some equinox or other, or sacrificed my corporeal being to the fire and brimstone or the coming of the mothership. Why I’ve never used the cults as an excuse to end it all.

Frankly, I simply don’t have the energy. Sometimes, my body aches too much for me even to move to swallow all those pills. Sometimes, I think I deserve this, and suffer through the pain because I’ve done something that merits it. And sometimes, life feels unfinished, the way Job needed to march on to the end. For the pain and the suffering to have meaning it must have trajectory. But mostly it’s because I identify with the cult members. We survive on God’s most meager rations. It’s embarrassing and contradictory, because I know I’ve had my chance and squandered it, and in spite of that, I dare to believe. Because, embarrassingly, I have hope.

I sat down again on her crooked couch and she made me sweet chamomile tea and we ate vanilla wafers. She told me how she wanted to be a massage therapist, or maybe study holistic medicine. She told me my chakras were unbalanced, and that she could sense a sharpness coming from my abdomen, like a sword or ray of piercing light. I talk to a lot of people about new age spiritual matters, and it’s a series of passwords like volleys exchanged outside a speak-easy. Do we understand each other? Does our speech contain the same subtext?

Naomi spoke softly and she took my hand. I could feel her loneliness, see the artwork hanging at odd angles, hear the soft gamelon music in the background, the warped sitar and the tablas tapping out tum-tiki-tiki-tiki. And I could still pretend it was about getting her to want to be inside of me, and then transferring that newly awakened need to my work.

And to that end I told her. I hadn’t told anyone in years, and I can’t say it didn’t feel good. I told her about the women, and the naked, burned children, the discarded limbs like poppy plants in the wet fields. I told her about the catheter, and how it had been twenty-five years since I’d made love to a woman, and the last one was named Lily and her skin was so pale you could see the blue veins beneath the needle’s pock marks, and I couldn’t even pretend that we were in love or that she was anything but a ten dollar whore.

I think I cried. I don’t know whether I was acting or not, designing my face to draw Naomi in. Regardless, the desire was there. I cried because I was devoured by an immeasurable sense of sadness and loss. And selfishness. I cried because I knew that I would give her up, and that I didn’t want to.

She cried too, then, slow controlled tears of nostalgia. I laid my head in her lap, and she stroked my hairline with manicured nails until the sun started to rise. I’ll leave it at that, at those actions.  

But I’ll say this about the emotions: I felt, in that instant, in the warm touch of her fingers on my forehead, the promise and the compromise of caring. I saw in the thin rays of morning light filtering in through her curtains some sort of hope. That’s what was different about this time, about her. I began to shake, and she took her fingers away. 

She got up to go to the bathroom; right then both parts of me, the acting one and the real one, knew that it was time to leave. I stood up and Naomi came into the living room. I took her face in my hands and kissed her forehead, pressing my lips against its expanse. When I pulled away, she kissed me quickly, on the lips but with her mouth closed. She had brushed her teeth and the toothpaste left a cool mint tingle on my mouth, like the lingering sting of a scrape. I felt my face flush red from embarrassment. 

When I reached the downstairs door, I paused to light a cigarette. The same man was standing there in the dawn. He was wearing a t-shirt and pajama pants and had his arms crossed to fight the morning chill, which was drawing goose pimples on his arms.  

He nodded at me. I nodded back.

“She make you smoke outside too, huh?” he said, pointing with his nose at my cigarette.

“Go to hell,” I said.    

I read this over and I can tell, you won’t understand what I saw in Naomi, how I knew that she would do what I wanted her to. Or rather, how I knew that she only wanted to be told what she wanted. I slid a piece of paper under her door the next day, and I’m told she went to the meeting. I didn’t go back to the cult. I’m not sure why. I know my government contact was disappointed by my report that I was unable to locate or make contact with this cult. I had never failed him before. Nor had I ever lied. 

A few months later, the police responded to a complaint about a barking dog and traced the source of its annoyance to a Lawndale garage, where they discovered the bodies of fifty-three women, twenty of whom were in their second trimester of pregnancy. Among them was Naomi Perdan, thirty-five, Caucasian, six weeks pregnant with a male fetus.

I know what the policemen saw walking into that garage. The women’s faces, ashen and pale, their open eyes and mouths the only source of color in those emotionless faces. I do not envy that first patrolman’s finder’s guilt, as strong as if he’d murdered them himself, that will tie him up at night with the memory of unexpected death. The women on mats on the floor and their hands touching, maybe. These women who joined the cult because they were abandoned by fathers or husbands, or over-medicated, or not medicated enough, or just searching. Women for whom life outside Abbadonian Dawning, or Rise Up America, or Chin Fan Tsi or Outer Dimensional Awareness, was impossible, for whom hope was too intangible, too nebulous, for whom living without divine purpose was merely existing. When they abdicated responsibility for their lives, it shifted onto the patrolman who found them. I can empathize with his devastating realization of that burden, for I feel it too. When I close my eyes I see her in their midst, dark Naomi, who stroked my hair until dawn. Naomi among the rows of dead women, facing west, waiting for the sun to set, waiting for the Rapture, wanting to wait, or just waiting to want.