Would Arol intuit my failure? Pass it over? What would she reveal had caused the fire?
The last flame snuffed, all of us thrust into her kitchen in a seething, red-cheeked swarm, crowding the doorways and packing the floor. More than forty Zendiks thronged a room meant for five or ten.
Arol, seated with her back against the table, commanded a pocket of calm. She sipped chamomile tea as we squeezed into a breathless equilibrium. Setting her mug down, she addressed my burning question.
“I’m trying to figure this fire out, what it means psychically. And what’s coming to me is that the world doesn’t want us to have nice things. To them, our kitchen–dining hall is a threat. It’s too glamorous. It shows we’re not just a bunch of hippies shitting in the woods.”
Few outsiders would have called our kitchen–dining hall “glamorous.” It was neither sleek nor shiny. It didn’t stink of money. Instead, it testified to thousands of hours of labor: by hand, we’d laid the foundation, raised walls of mortar and cordwood, leveled a flagstone mosaic on a shifting bed of sand.
“And we’re not sure we deserve nice things either. We’re afraid to take our place as a successful, aesthetically advanced artistic movement. So the fire was a test. And you guys passed it. It was incredible how everybody pulled together.”
That can’t be it, I thought.
She hadn’t mentioned sex.
In every other tale she’d told of flames, sex was to blame.
For example: Years earlier, a candle had tipped onto her pillow and torched a house, one night when she was set to get together with someone else and Wulf was jealous. Had they faced this tension and joined to fight it, her pillow would not have ignited.
Forty-eight hours later, shredding lettuce for dinner in the Farmhouse kitchen, I spotted Arol by the living room doorway, giving an order to one of the men: “Get everybody in here. Now.”
Fear reared in my throat, plunged through my gut, pooled in my bladder. Just as it had before my father’s spankings. Just as it had when the man in the dark coat, deep underground, had advanced to attack me.
Ten minutes later, to a packed living room, Arol delivered the verdict I’d been waiting for.
“The fire,” she hissed, skin taut across her cheekbones, “has nothing to do with the world. It’s about all of you and your stupid, square relationships. All sleeping together—everybody in a couple—and I didn’t even know. Swan had to tell me. How dare you?”
Her gaze swept the forest of upturned faces, raising a guilty flush on each it touched. Though my guilt had already consumed my fling with Dylan, I, too, blazed with the common shame.
“You guys disgust me. If this is how you wanna be, you can all leave. I’ll take Swan and the kids and get an apartment. I’ll do this revolution by myself. I’m through with your bullshit. I’m through with it.”
That night, each sack in the Potato Shed held one Zendik. By the time we’d wiped the last patch of soot from the walls, most couples had dissolved.
Alone again, we could love Arol best. She would be our only flame.
[ chapter 11 ]
Arol’s Embrace
I STOOD BESIDE KRO IN THE palm of our Farm, night hiding us from other humans. It was 5:00 a.m., a month past the fire and three years after I’d had sex for the first time, with him as my guide, beneath a quilt in this same field. I’d pulled him from the trailer, hours into a marathon date, to offer him a song. This was risky. Singing exposed me. So far, as a Zendik, I’d sung only on solo hikes down sleeping roads.
Kro reached under my blouse to caress my waist. Dew crept through the hems of my long black pants. We faced north, toward the pond and woods, where the wild creatures met their own needs, mated as they pleased. Across the creek, to the east, the bucks paced their pen, snorting and grunting, awaiting the day when the does would go into heat and Arol would choose who would sire that year’s batch of kids.
Kro’s hand dropped back to his thigh. I closed my eyes, raised my chin, and poured out a folk ballad I’d carried with me since college—one of just a few songs strong enough to survive my story that only Zendik music was pure. Imitating Joan Baez, I stretched the final syllable of each line of the refrain into its own prolonged lament:
In the song, a man cuckolds a friend and dies by the rope. Yet all I heard as I sang was the lyrics’ grace and flow. My own betrayal—my journey west—had morphed into a quest for certainty: that I would die a Zendik and be with Kro. Maybe someday we’d have babies together. If I could trust him with my singing, I thought, I could trust him with anything.
But I still craved dates with other men.
In particular, I craved a date with Mason.
I’d spoken with him by phone around the time of the fire, when he’d yet to leave Ohio. Nothing was keeping him from moving in with us, he’d said—except student debt.
I’d advised default. A collection agency would buy his loans from the government and try to track him down. If they found him, they’d call and run their playbook: threat, compromise, guilt trip. Once they saw he had no income, they’d give up.
Weeding strawberries with him one late-April morning, on a slope overlooking the creek, I learned that he had indeed defaulted, that he’d lasted a scant six months at the job he’d quit to come to Zendik, that no strand of romance tied him back home.
His thread to the Deathculture was frayed enough that he might stay.
Where Kro was ox-strong—hard to budge, mighty once in motion—Mason was antelope-fleet: all vigor and sinew, poised to spring up and gallop. He leaped to the running-around jobs, the fetching-and-carrying jobs, the sweating-and-gasping jobs that Kro would only do if Arol said he had to. Feeling my own lethargy, when it rose, as a sinister undertow, I stretched toward those who seemed to surf above its current, doubt a mere cirrus wisp in their distance. Naked in a date space with Mason, I imagined, I might drink in some of his vim—then return, thirst quenched, to Kro.
Hadn’t Wulf and Arol “balled around”? Hadn’t polyamory paired with honesty begotten the union at the heart of our revolution?
Maybe so. But that didn’t pacify Kro. When I told him I hoped to go on a date with Mason, he slipped into livid silence. I bolted. As if I could avoid him in a world as small as ours.
He charged me one gray May morning, on a garden crew, as I forced a cartload of wet compost over sodden ground. Our eyes hadn’t met in days. He stopped my cart. Our eyes collided.
“I don’t see how we can be together. We can’t even talk to each other. I’m done. Unless you have a solution.”
Feeling my load sink in the mud, dreading the shove it would take to get it going again, I shook my head. Tears blurred my vision. Drizzle seeped from the haze veiling the garden. Neither source of moisture could dissolve the block between us. I had no solution.
That evening after milking, trudging down the hill from the goat barn, I crushed thoughts of Kro. His steady warmth. His creosote kiss. His gleeful grin.
I missed him.
I also missed Arol, on her knees, weeding the flower bed fronting the Farmhouse.
“How are you doing, Helen?” she called.
I started. Any other day, I would have seen her first.
I stepped over to the rail between path and bed and clutched the rough wood. She smiled up at me, eyes bright. The whale on her cheek crested and fell. Around her, snapdragons blazed in shades of red and purple. Come midsummer, there’d be cosmos, rudbeckia, sunflowers, echinacea. This bed, like the others Arol tended, was a four-dimensional painting whose colors and composition shifted with her whims and the seasons.