For a month or so, Eile followed her program. Had it calmed her? I couldn’t tell. I did sense rising hostility in her vibe toward me—a healthy defense against being treated with arrogance for an illusory disease. I retaliated by complaining to Arol, who sustained my plea to drop responsibility for Eile’s therapy. “I’m not gonna try to help someone who doesn’t wanna be helped,” I declared to the group at lunch one afternoon. “I don’t deserve that kind of anger coming at me.”
In my mind, I’d done my best to save Eile—and she’d resolved to stay lost. Whatever followed was her own fault.
A week later, at lunch, Eile dropped, flushed and breathless, into the seat next to me. I was clustered with most of the other girls at one end of the long table dominating the dining hall. She seemed tightly wound yet somehow grounded, as if her manic electricity had found a central meridian.
“You guys, I’ve decided. I’m going out.”
What? No one spoke. She hurried on. “I feel like I still have fantasies to deal with. Like dancing out in the world. And marrying a rich guy who’ll take care of me.”
Eile had danced before Zendik. She’d even moved to New York City to test her chances of dancing professionally. At the Farm, she’d danced with Swan, but always in supporting roles, and for long stretches she hadn’t danced at all. She may have known, deep down, that if she couldn’t dance, she couldn’t be part of our revolution.
The rich husband? Maybe he played the same role for Eile that rape played for me. Had Zendik taught her she wanted him, even as it warned her the want was corrupt and could be crushed only through suffering?
The other girls—Karma, Cayta, Mar, Riven—peppered her with variations on the same cautions I’d heard a year earlier, before I’d left for Idaho: “Hang in—you’ll get through this.” “Can’t you work out your fantasies in your head?” “People don’t change when they go out; they just get more desperate.” “Why do you want more of the same old pain?”
None of them had ever gone “out.”
I said nothing till they left the table. Then I turned to Eile. Her face was still flushed; her breathing had calmed. “I don’t think it’s wrong to go out,” I said. “Sometimes you have to hit bottom to feel what you really want.” I described my civil war of the previous summer—how I’d wanted to want to come back to Zendik all along but hadn’t actually wanted to till after Alvin’s assault. Facing him—in the myth I’d spun since then—had both spurred my return and firmed my resolve. Maybe the plunge Eile was about to take would raise her, someday, to a perch as high as mine.
The next morning, Kro and I happened to be on the porch roof of the Farmhouse, priming a section of second-floor siding for a coat of sunflower yellow, when Eile’s mother inched her station wagon down from the dining hall and stopped at the top of the driveway. The backseat was crammed with Eile’s stuff. The passenger seat was empty. Maybe Eile was doing a final sweep of her space or saying a last goodbye. Just as she reached the car and grabbed the door pull, Kro caught my eye and waved his paintbrush at the boom box he’d set on a windowsill. The song “Mother and Child Reunion,” from the album Paul Simon, was playing.
“Get it?” he said. “The mother and child reunion?”
“Yeah.” I returned his smirk. “It’s a motion away.”
Below us, the station wagon descended the drive. I gazed out over the fields and woods sloping toward the road, my view stretching far beyond Eile’s. It would stretch farther still as my ascent continued.
Yet I couldn’t relax and enjoy the panorama. With each step up, I breathed thinner air, risked more if I slipped.
My only safety was Arol’s grip.
On September 27, 2003—while I was still trying to make “little mulatto babies” with Kro—I told Arol at her kitchen table that I wished to hit on Zar.
And Prophet.
My cheeks burned as I said the second name. No one—no one—hit on Prophet. Merely flashing on the option, the previous fall at Voodoo Fest, after imagining Arol might die, had gravely aggravated my original thought crime.
But I’d come to trust, over months in her favor, that nothing I said could rock her. That her vast view compassed much that would have shocked the less evolved.
Arol sipped her tea. “Why do you want to hit on them?”
Why indeed? I saw them as ascended beings, rendered reachable—maybe—by my recent rise. Tasting their sexual superpowers would speed my climb. And—who knew?—a surprise eruption of dormant attraction might yet rocket me to the top tier of the Zendik pyramid.
I had to make this bid—despite my story assuring me I’d grow old with Kro.
“I’m curious about what it’s like to get together with them.”
“That’s odd,” she said, chin level, gaze steady. “If you’re curious about how they are sexually, wouldn’t it be easier just to ask someone who’s fucked them?”
“I guess it’s more than curiosity. I want the experience.”
She glanced into her teacup, then back at me. “I can tell you about Zar—of course it’s been a long time—and I can definitely tell you about Prophet.”
She seemed not to have heard that I sought more than an oral report. But I wasn’t about to refuse juicy gossip. I leaned in to listen.
Arol said that Zar loved messing around, pushing boundaries. This jibed with another woman’s rave review of how he’d fucked her while probing her ass with his finger. Prophet, Arol said, wasn’t much for foreplay—he skipped straight to sex. “He’s an artist, you know?” She laughed. “Artists are like that. They know what they want and go for it. You’ve probably had the same experience with Kro.”
I nodded, despite a blip of dissonance. Kro reveled in foreplay.
She studied me for a long moment. Her speech had not cooled my cheeks. “You still want to hit on them, don’t you? Getting the rundown isn’t enough.”
I nodded again.
She shrugged. “You can go ahead and hit on Prophet. I doubt he’ll say yes—he’s a one-woman kind of guy—but I don’t mind if you try.”
Prophet painted and sculpted in a spacious studio built to suit him. He drummed in the band. He assembled collections of Wulf’s writings and collaborated with Lysis to design the magazine. He did not sell. He did not cook or help clean the main kitchen. He did not receive group input. I would never see him crumple in shame as the rest of us struck him with pebbles of blame.
These perks did not come cheap. He knew the terms of his trade.
She sat back and folded her arms across her chest. “The sooner the better, I guess. As long as you’re in fantasy about these other guys, you don’t have a relationship with Kro.”
She half-smiled at me, a hint of conspiracy in her up-twisted lip. “Sounds like you have some hitting up to do.”
I found Zar in his recording studio in the Mobile, enthroned before his massive console, mixing Arol’s latest album, Into the Oracle. Hovering just inside the doorway, I stuttered out my hit-up. After a short pause, he swiveled toward me.
“I guess I’d be into it. But not tonight.”
Prophet, at his desk in the Treehouse, stroked his goatee. A power surge through his hard drive flickered its lime light. Excitement and dread—what if he says yes?—warred in my chest.
“I’m flattered you asked me—but no,” he said.
The next day, when Zar switched his yes to no, I was more relieved than disappointed. I’d tried climbing higher by taking other lovers. Now I could fall back to Kro.
Any other year, I would have been thrilled to sell the KROQ Weenie Roast at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre in Charlotte, North Carolina. “Power” sellers had been known to make five to eight hundred dollars each at the all-day Ozzfest knock-off; being chosen to go was a vote of confidence. But on Sunday, October 5, 2003, I—like most of my seven-woman crew—was fighting fatigue and a hangover. We would have been glad to stay home.