Saturday night we’d gotten drunk and lost sleep at a rare Farm-wide alcohol party. I’d made the mistake of staying up till three, after pulling Kro away from the dining hall for an impromptu date. Worse, I’d spent part of the date having Kro play oracle. Raising questions about the fates of various Zendiks—Would this one leave the Farm? Would this one?—I’d insisted that he answer yes or no, without thinking. Worst of all, I couldn’t shake a hunch that Rayel—a crewmate who Kro had said would leave—was about to betray us.
Was this a thought crime I ought to confess?
Was I wrongfully condemning Rayel to soul death?
Or was it a psychic nudge?
If it was and I let her wreck our trip, I’d be liable. If it was and I spoke up, I’d climb a little higher.
By midday, I was low on cash and craving a breakthrough. Dazed and sunburned, I scanned the food court for tie-dye, dreadlocks, dime-size lobe holes, thick zippers slashing black leather. I replaced the sweat-stained magazine in my hand with a fresh one from my pants pocket. I flashed a STOP BITCHING START A REVOLUTION sticker at a man in a West Coast Choppers jacket. He smirked through his shades and kept walking. I didn’t chase after him.
Tarrow strolled over, then Leah, the sole power seller on our trip. Even she was dragging. Her eyelids drooped under blotched eye shadow. The double-XL T-shirt hooked to her belt loop brushed the ground.
One by one, three more sellers drifted toward us. A huddle formed. No one—except maybe Toba, who was roaming the lawn—felt like selling. No one was doing well.
Was it Rayel’s fault? Was it her vibe? Or was I dulling us with my thought crime? She was right there in the huddle. If I spoke now, I’d at least close the question of whether to speak.
“Hey, guys? I wanna say something. I bet it’s bullshit, but I feel like if I don’t say it I won’t be able to sell.”
Five pairs of eyes widened. Five heads nodded. Five necks stretched my way.
“I was up super late with Kro last night, and we were playing this game where I asked him questions and he gave the first answer that came to him. One thing I asked was if Rayel was gonna leave. He said yes.” I glanced at Rayel, then glanced away. “Now I can’t get it out of my head that Rayel’s on her way out.”
Five heads swiveled toward Rayel. Her face fell. My heart sank. I knew how it felt to be singled out for doubt.
She took a quick step back, shrinking from attack. “Maybe you’re sensing some kind of weakness in me. I know I’m not as strong as I could be. But I’m definitely not planning to leave.”
I apologized, assuring her I hadn’t bought my story; I’d just had to tell it so I could sell. Everyone seemed to accept this. Yet I didn’t sell any better the rest of the day, and neither did anyone else. Each of us totaled two to three hundred—far less than we’d hoped.
I knew Arol and Swan would hate how little we’d made. But, I thought, the drubbing I was in for wouldn’t crush me—all seven of us would share the blame.
The next morning, gathered at the dining hall table with every adult Zendik except Arol and Prophet, I learned I’d misled myself: I alone was going to pay.
The table, built to seat all forty of us, with room to spare, was a heavy wooden parenthesis with a cat-pupil slit down the middle. I called it the Eye of Sauron table because this slit mimicked the void, irised by fire, through which Tolkien’s formless villain keeps watch over his kingdom and those who wear his rings.
Swan, at the table’s head, stretched forward and pressed fingers crowned with polished nails into its glossy finish. Jaw clenched, she addressed us.
“This meeting is about Helen and the utter bullshit she pulled in Charlotte. We lost thousands of dollars because of what she did, trying to take Rayel down. Why no one had the balls to call home and turn her in—or boot her off the trip—I don’t know. But the bottom line is, we can’t have people betraying us from the inside.”
The collective gaze swept to me. My eyes popped wide open, as if someone had duct-taped my lids to my cheeks and brows. I will take this, I thought. I will look straight at what I did. I will not look away.
Seconds later, Arol appeared at the top of the stairs to the kitchen, Prophet at her shoulder. Every head swiveled toward her. “It’s her relationship with Kro. They’re smug and superior. You all leave them alone ’cause you see them talking to me. That’s not enough. They have to open their affair to the group. They can’t keep running their own show.”
With that, Arol let go. Of me, of my union with Kro.
Years earlier I’d written of Zendik, “There is no illusion here of unconditional love. No bond not dissoluble, in a culture based on survival.”
Survival of what? Of all life, I would have said. Of our outlaw tribe. But really it was Arol’s rule that fed on dissolution. For it to last, each of us had to love her best and stay possessed by how to please her. Stretches in her shitter upped our desire to suffer for her favor.
I may have hastened my fall by assailing Rayel and hitting on Prophet. I could not have stopped it.
I could have tried to flee with Kro.
I could have crept up to his space, late one night, roused him with a touch, crouched by his pillow to whisper, “Kro, I want to be with you. That can’t happen here. Let’s leave. Now. Let’s just go.”
I could have left alone, hoping he would follow.
I could have formed a scheme to lure him out.
But I wouldn’t buck Arol for Kro. Or babies. Two months after the Weenie Roast, we broke for good.
Arol hadn’t taken a hammer to our relationship. She’d just dropped it—not looking down—from a cliff littered at the base with shattered remains.
By December 2003, I was mourning my story of love enduring with Arol’s support. If I couldn’t swing this with Kro, I thought, I couldn’t swing it at all.
What was left? Service to Zendik. From then on, I vowed, I’d surrender any love I found the moment a clash rose between union and group.
The day after my break with Kro, Arol approached me in the dining hall and addressed me kindly for the first time since the morning before the Weenie Roast. “You look so much better,” she said. “So much more relaxed. I think you made the right choice.”
I nodded, grateful for her imprimatur. Maybe, soon, I’d write something she’d want for the magazine. Maybe I’d do better on the street. Surely the circle-Z around my neck was the only ring I’d ever need.
“Thank you, Arol,” I said.
[ chapter 12 ]
Crazing
ZAR’S PICKUP TORE DOWN Regan Jackson, bed crammed with fifteen Zendiks. I stood behind the cab, clutching the front crossbar of the truck’s rack, hair rough with dust. The morning sun warming my skin warned of a sweaty day to come.
As Zar hung a right onto Deep Gap, I craned my neck for a longer look at a green velvet dell enveloping a stone-rimmed pond that belonged in a fairy tale. Past the pond lay a meadow edged by a stream—and pimpled with a grid of range poles. Wildcat Spur had been sold, and the new owners meant to stud the ridge with houses and reduce the meadow to a hole on a golf course. Every day, flatbed semis packed with tree trunks thundered down the mountain.
The seller, George Levin—described to me when I’d arrived in 1999 as “some rich jerk from Florida”—had realized a hefty profit, thanks to soaring demand for housing in and around Asheville. His greed, Arol said, was bleeding our ecosphere. She’d decided to move the entire Farm, animals and all, to West Virginia. Having fled first San Diego’s and then Austin’s boomtown sprawl, only to face the metastasis of Asheville, she sought respite in a backward state with a shrinking population. Plus, West Virginia was hours closer than North Carolina to markets like Boston, New York, and Washington, with their perpetual flows of fresh prospects.