“The website says if we can get to this railroad bridge, volunteers will drive us the rest of the way,” he said, gloved index finger tracing rural roads, coming to rest on a dot in western Massachusetts, red veins on a map, along the rail spur to Pittsfield.
“Aren’t those drivers afraid of getting sick?” the Canadian’s teenage son asked from behind us.
“No, because they have a cure.”
“Aren’t you afraid to ride with strangers?”
“I’m doing that now, and so are you.”
“This cure,” I asked. “Is it a pill? A drink?”
“I don’t know.”
“Dave, were there any companies named on that website you mentioned, that helped make the cure? Any specifics at all?”
“Let’s call up the website and YouTube and see. Rats! No reception.”
YouTube. The ultimate arbiter. Our age’s essential truth. Maybe history will one day call our times the age of information, maybe the age of rumor. When the sheer weight of complexity drove millions away from fact. Dave remained calm and hopeful. I suppose if you have to take refuge in something, hope’s not bad.
I spoke to the stranger named Harlan Maas in my mind.
If your people released the disease, and then you cure it, I wouldn’t exactly call you a prophet, Harlan. I’d have another title for you. “Prophet” surely isn’t it.
The clatter of steel on tracks seemed farther away. I jerked awake and Dave was sitting right beside me, gazing into my eyes with fascination and, I sensed, sympathy. He was eerier by the minute. He leaned close. His whisper, fogged breath, smelled of his coconut-chocolate energy bars. “I know your secret,” he said, hand half covering his mouth.
“What?” Shit! Did I talk in my sleep?
His eyes flickered down to my hand. For an instant it didn’t register. When it did, a flood of horror seized me. A long wooden splinter had pierced my glove. I took off my glove and pulled out the splinter and a burst of blood came with it but there was no feeling where it had penetrated. I poked the finger. It was numb. I poked the next finger. Nothing.
I’m sick.
Dave said, “They’ll cure you. You’ll see. There’s a reason you came.” He slid back across the lurching floor to his corner. I realized that he’d moved close to me while I slept to protect me, to shield from the others that a four-inch-long projectile had lodged in my hand.
Twenty minutes later we crawled into the hamlet of New Lenox, and sure enough, the train halted atop a small bridge over a stream. I saw four automobiles idling on a country road, waiting for passengers, us, I guessed. Dave and I were the only ones climbing out, and walking through the foot-high snow to the lead car, an idling Dodge Ram.
“Hi, pilgrims!”
The driver was a plain-looking, moon-faced woman with a bright smile, a Midwest accent, and she waved us into the rear seat. She asked if we were hungry or thirsty. She said there were ham sandwiches in back, from animals slaughtered at the farm. There was a thermos filled with hot coffee. She said that we should relax, we’d reached a beautiful place. We would be cared for.
“Are either of you sick?”
“Me,” I said.
“You will be cured,” she said.
I’d felt nothing at all against my fingers when I’d grasped the door handle, nothing when I’d climbed over the top of the boxcar. I didn’t feel the glove fabric, or the cold, or the pressure of metal.
“You will be cured,” she repeated, “by the prophet.”
We started driving.
The truck stop, our driver said, was a mere eighteen minutes away, off the Massachusetts Turnpike. I saw a pin sticking out of the backseat, and picked it up. I stuck it in my finger.
Diagnosis, confirmed.
Joe Rush, leper, pariah.
Wouldn’t it be nice if he’s really a prophet? I thought. Who is this guy anyway? This Harlan Maas?
EIGHTEEN
It is estimated that over thirty thousand children in the United States are growing up in cults. They are isolated and have no other experience with life outside of these twisted environments. Many never adjust, even after being rescued. Many commit suicide later in life.
The little girls have been named for flowers: Daisy, Rose, Tulip, Violet. The boys — Enoch, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Micah — have Bible names and first names only, until age twelve, when Brother Agabus assigns them adult identities and gives them jobs: girls to sewing, kitchen, and laundry; boys to the sugar fields or gun shows or the group-owned auto garage in the Louisiana town of New Bethlehem, twelve miles away.
“We will purify ourselves. This will lead to Christ’s return, the end of Babylon, the new Kingdom of Solomon,” Brother Agabus says.
The twelve-acre compound abuts a swamp, amid moss-covered cypress. There are alligators and gar in the black waters, and the old abandoned, long-closed leper colony consists of two rows of cheaply made bungalows that were crumbling when the isolated property was auctioned off by the state.
“In two thousand days will come the end times prophesized in Revelation 11:3,” Brother Agabus assures them. “Outsiders call us a cult, but that is a hateful word that devalues truth. This is a gathering place for those to be spared. This has been revealed to me by the Seventh Angel and by four secret messages hidden in the Old Testament.”
Harlan was born here. He has no memories of anywhere else. He’s only left the compound twice, rushed away by adults when Agabus thought that agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms were coming. After the agents left, the children were brought back.
“You are a special boy, my favorite,” Agabus always tells him when they are alone at night.
Harlan’s mother—91 IQ — quit her 7-Eleven job in Baton Rouge and moved here after hearing Agabus preach in a park one day. Harlan was born ten months later. His twenty-eight brothers and sisters were also fathered by Agabus, by fourteen women, all of whom dress as Agabus ordered, in modest print dresses and white bonnets. The men wear coveralls. No one owns private possessions. Agabus keeps the bank accounts and has a new Cadillac and better clothes. Only he can consume liquor. “To speak with outsiders, I must adopt their customs,” Agabus explains.
“Take off your trousers, my son, for more photographs. Lift your legs, please. Touch yourself,” he says at night.
Agabus is vibrant and charismatic, age thirty-five, thickly haired all over, curly black on top, with a beard that drops to his chest. He has a V-shaped torso, massively tattooed with religious symbols, saints and halos, and he has thin legs and an almost dainty pigeon-toed walk on small feet. On most nights different women go into his bungalow.
On others, Agabus soothes Harlan and whispers hoarse things in his ear. Agabus smells of peanut butter and lime. After he leaves the bed, there are curly hairs on the damp sheets, and the room smells like dirty feet.
“If you tell anyone what we do, I will kill you.”
Adults work the sugar field or gun shows nine hours a day. Sunday sermons start at six and last until two, with an hour lunch break. Phones and televisions are forbidden. Visitors are not allowed. Women sleep in one dorm, men in another, with conjugal rooms provided for the better workers. Children are homeschooled in approved subjects: math and English, Old and New Testaments, Siddhartha, and certain black-and-white 1950s science fiction films, which were, Agabus tells them, “guided by Angelic hands.”