He grabbed the barrow’s handles and pushed off for the woodpile. I corralled Toba a few steps from the porch and spilled out his wristband story. “He’s making that up, right?” I searched her eyes for a dismissive flicker. “I mean, it’s not true—is it?”
She fingered a frayed end of the dusty-rose strip tied to her wrist. She nodded. “Yes, there are levels. Shown by the different colors.”
The sagebrush waste in my gut sent up a fresh grit-gust. Oh no. Sure, I’d noticed that some Zendiks kept to the Mobile, even for meals; that I wasn’t free to enter there without permission; that work assignments flowed downhill from the stubby house on stilts. Still, in the absence of clear tiering by grades or other measures, I’d assumed equality—something I thirsted for after years of being ranked.
“But why?” I asked Toba. “I thought the idea here was that we’re all working together, that everyone cooperates to get things done. Now I feel like all of a sudden I’m at the bottom of some ladder I have to scramble to climb.”
A tendon twitched in Toba’s neck. She stilled it with a deep breath. Sandstone calm steadied her gaze. “Helen. There is no ladder. There is no hierarchy. It’s not that some people are above others; it’s just that some are more committed. They have more experience living the Zendik philosophy. That doesn’t mean they get special privileges—it means they take more responsibility.”
The grit-gust rose to my throat. “But… but… I hate that. I don’t wanna live in a place with that kind of division.”
“Listen,” she said, “I know it’s hard not to see Zendik through the lens of your competitive conditioning. I mean, you’ve been competing all your life. That’s how you got through Harvard. That’s what you have to do to survive in the Deathculture. Of course you’re gonna make this another contest.” She shrugged, as if to say I’d be the loser if I didn’t believe her. “But it’s not. We’re coming from a totally different place.”
A totally different place. A place whose story made sense to the rest of its inhabitants. For my story to match Zendik’s, mine would have to change.
[ chapter 3 ]
Dim Chambers
SHORTLY AFTER LEARNING WHAT the wristbands meant, I gained one of my own: green, for Zendik Apprentice, the bottom tier of the Zendik tower. Above me, in ascending order, were Kore Apprentices (brown), the Kore (royal blue), Family Apprentices (gray), and the Family (royal purple). Also above me, but shunted off to a scaffold hanging at no fixed height, were Family Warriors (dusty rose)—Zendiks who’d evolved to a certain level of consciousness, then stopped.
With my wristband I received a double-sided sheet, dense with single-spaced text, listing the criteria for reaching each level. This document, like most of the Zendik writing I’d read, lacked precision. It defined neither the mysterious process of “evolving” nor the elusive prize called “evolution.” It did not explain how I could win a brown wristband, or a blue one; it did not light passages from one tier to the next. I assumed that the veteran Zendiks had developed the etheric equivalent of night vision, and that once I’d done the same, the hidden stairs and ladders would emerge from the shadows. In the meantime, I combined glances at Zendiks’ wrists with what I knew of their histories to pick out patterns that seemed useful—if too superficial, I was sure, to reveal the real story.
Position in the hierarchy corresponded roughly to time spent at Zendik. A year or so earned you a brown wristband; two to four bumped you up to royal blue; five or six pushed you to gray; seven or more vaulted you to royal purple. But there were exceptions. The Farm’s three children, all younger than seven, were in the Family. Prophet, the flint-chipped man I’d seen with Arol the day I’d met her, had been at the Farm only about a year; Lyrik, consort to Arol’s daughter, Swan, had accrued about five years. Yet both wore royal purple. With no men matching Arol and Swan in status, I couldn’t aspire to so swift an ascent. But I could find a lover a level or two above me to accelerate my climb. Estero’s band of royal blue—hugging his oak-knot wristbones, kissing his olive skin—made him only more alluring.
By mid-November—despite my donation, my decision to stay, my acquisition of a wristband—I still hadn’t earned a bunk in the Farmhouse. I hadn’t even mounted the steps from the living room to the loft where the women slept. So I was torn—between fear and excitement—when Eile invited me, at lunch one day, into their sanctum. “The girls are all getting together for specs tonight. Do you wanna join us?”
I knew what “specs” were—Eile had already walked me through the Zendik protocol for birth control. I didn’t know if I was ready to participate in, or witness, so intimate a ritual.
“Spec” was short for “speculum”—the tool Eile and her mentors, Shure and Loria, used to check Zendik females for signs of fertility before each date. If a woman’s cervical fluid was clear and stretchy and her os, or cervical mouth, was open, then she couldn’t “ball”—that is, have intercourse. As a backup, Zendik women tracked their waking temperatures; a rise in temperature, sustained over a few days, indicated ovulation. At Eile’s urging, I’d put a basal thermometer on the communal shopping list and begun recording my readings on a chart she’d given me. I wasn’t aware that it was possible for women to check their own cervical fluid, and assess their own fertility, in private.
Nor was I aware—never having used a prophylactic other than abstinence—that some women might have preferred condoms to specs and thermometers. Zendiks didn’t use condoms. Later, I would hear the cover story: condoms reduce pleasure and intimacy; pausing to apply one breaks lovemaking’s flow. Later still, I would glimpse some of what this cover obscured: Wulf, who’d shunned condoms, had fucked most of the women on the Farm. Mandating fertility awareness helped prepare them to deliver the kind of sex he desired. (Five years after Wulf’s death, Arol would finally approve limited condom use.) Further, specking reminded lovers that even in seclusion they were not alone: the tribe had penetrated the woman first; the tribe decided who had sex and who bred; the tribal eye saw all, even in the dark.
But it wasn’t the tribal eye that prickled my spine with anxiety as I considered Eile’s invite. It was my own eyes. Where would I rest them when the women dropped their pants to get specked? Would they all bare their crotches at once? Would they expect me to bare mine?
Sensing my apprehension, Eile flashed a reassuring smile. “You don’t actually have to get specked if you don’t want to. It’s totally fine just to hang out, be social, watch how it works. You can try it yourself some other time.”
I still didn’t know where I’d rest my eyes. But it helped to hear I wouldn’t need to drop my pants. And I wasn’t about to pass on a chance to advance toward the Farm’s heart. “Sure, I’ll come,” I said.
Climbing the stairs to the loft that night, warmed by the blaze in the woodstove, I took wistful note of all that was missing from my dorm in the barn: soft quilts and comforters draping the dozen or so beds; collages—of birds, jungles, sunsets, waterfalls—brightening the dark paneling; Oriental rugs cloaking the hardwood floor. In the corner farthest from the railing, lounging on a few beds in an oval of lamplight, were all the women on the Farm except Arol and Swan—about twenty in total.
Perched at the oval’s edge, I watched as the others grabbed their speculums, each wrapped in a pretty scarf, from a green plastic basket stowed under Eile’s bed. I watched as they took turns shedding jeans and underpants and stretching out on her quilted mattress, heads and shoulders propped by pillows, legs crooked and spread. Kneeling between their knees, she had them slide in the speculum and squeeze it open to afford her a flashlit glimpse of the os. Was it closed? Open? Slightly open? Next she used a Q-tip to retrieve a strand—or dab, or smudge—of cervical fluid. Was it clear and stretchy? White and sticky? White and creamy? Open and stretchy meant no balling. Closed and dry meant ball away. In-between states triggered questions—What day are you on? Has your temperature risen? How long’s your average cycle?—and then a consultation with Shure, who’d been gauging fertility for about as long as Eile had been alive. Shure said yes or no when Eile couldn’t decide.