Within West Virginia, Arol chose Pocahontas County, which had drawn waves of back-to-the-landers decades earlier. More than half the county’s acreage was preserved in the public trust, and its air, water, and soil were some of the state’s purest. By late July 2004, she’d purchased a 183-acre ranch backed up against the Monongahela National Forest. It came with barns, a mansion, a stone-rimmed pond—and an $850,000 price tag. Later that summer, the North Carolina Farm, split into fourteen lots and auctioned off, would net Arol roughly $700,000, more than doubling what she’d paid in 1999. She, too, would gain from Asheville’s boom.
The suggestion of West Virginia had come from Levin’s caretaker, David Gillespie, who was also thinking of relocating. It was Gillespie who’d traded Arol occasional use of his excavator for thousands of hours of Zendik sweat: Zar dug a swimming hole and septic trench with Gillespie’s giant iron claw; crews of six, twelve, twenty Zendiks built him an extensive cattle fence. Despite Gillespie’s link to the enemy, Arol billed him as a friend.
Passing the last of the range poles, Zar swerved into an oval driveway and stopped short before a hunting lodge cum palace. I jumped down from the truck bed, brushed the dust from my hair, and stared. The house seemed large for a bachelor caretaker. Our mission, as I understood it, was to help Gillespie pack for his move off the mountain.
Zar reversed and roared off, yelling he’d return for us at lunchtime. I followed the others through a side entrance policed by a pinched man with pale, indoor skin. “Watch the carpet!” he barked. “Wipe your feet!”
He said his name was Andy, then skipped to giving orders without asking our names. “I want the men to wrap the heavy stuff.” He pointed to a room full of desks, tables, and dressers. “And I want you girls on chairs and mirrors.” He led us into a high-ceilinged parlor holding multiple sets of matching chairs and a dozen gilt-edged mirrors.
I kept my gaze blank till Andy pranced out. Then, turning to a mirror propped against the back wall, I let a sneer curl my nose and lips. “I want you girls on chairs and mirrors,” I muttered, pitching my voice higher and harsher than his. Who is this guy? Where does he get off bossing us? And what’s up with giving the girls the light stuff? What are we, a bunch of fucking debutantes?
I might have spoken up—but Arol had sent us.
I attacked the packing job. Ripped wrap off the roll in rough swaths. Crushed corners. Slapped tape on botched seams.
What if a chair leg should—oops!—strike a mirror? I fantasized smiling at the fine mesh of cracks crazing its face.
After working for about an hour, I heard Andy take a phone call in an adjoining room. “Yes, this is Mr. Levin’s assistant.” Pause. “I’m getting the Deep Gap house cleared out for him right now. I fly back to Miami tomorrow.”
I bent low over the seam I was taping, to hide the deep flush heating my cheeks. No wonder this house is so huge! We are working—for free!—for the asshole who’s wrecking our home.
I wasn’t the only one who’d overheard Andy’s conversation. When I straightened up, Leah was squinting at me in livid disbelief.
“Did you hear that?” I whispered.
She nodded.
“What the fuck?”
She shook her head.
“Arol must have misunderstood.”
“Yeah,” she said. “We’ll tell her at lunch.”
By the time Zar honked from the driveway, we all knew whose stuff we were packing up. The guys didn’t care, but we girls were furious. Back at the Farm, we charged up to the Addition.
Arol, sipping tea at her kitchen table, nodded as we spilled our tale of insult. I kept expecting shock, anger, indignation to fracture her composure. But her gaze stayed calm, her grip firm on her cup. When we finished, she said, “I’ll talk to Zar about it.”
After lunch, the men returned to Deep Gap. I could not work out how this served Zendik. Arol—typically adept at stitching rips in her scrim of plausibility—had bewildered me.
Maybe she was too consumed by the move to give her weave the care it needed.
And maybe I, torn from hope for “Love” with a capital “L,” felt less compelled to mend the rips myself.
My final flame at the Farm blazed just six weeks.
Adam, like Amory, had escaped the Army by purposely failing a drug test. Then, on the G.I. Bill, he’d majored in women’s studies at a historically female college—which he’d quit, in late 2003, to move to Zendik. In my eyes, he was both sensitive new age guy and sexy ex-spy; I loved the hint of machismo in his voice when, echoing his Mexican father, he sweetly called me chica.
We started dating in late June 2004. In mid-July, when Arol announced her plan to buy the ranch in West Virginia, she cast the move as an ordeal that would break the weak. Then she zeroed in on Adam—the newest Zendik. Would he make it?
Yes, he said. He’d stick with the mission.
I wanted to trust him.
But what if he was weak? What if his weakness infected me, sucked me into disloyalty?
In early August, I heard he’d made only two hundred–something at a Projekt Revolution concert where the rest of his crew had averaged five. Uh-oh. Sure, he was new—but if he’d been with them he would have caught their wave and surfed it to breakthrough.
A few days later, my all-girl crew stopped over in West Virginia, en route to Vermont to sell what was being billed as the last Phish show ever. The guy sellers, between concert trips, would stop over as well. Arol was in North Carolina with everyone else.
The new Farm stretched vast and flat, against a swell of blue hills. The stone-rimmed pond, crowned with a fountain that lit up at night, outclassed the muddy hole Zar had gouged with his borrowed claw. Indoors, floods of sunlight poured into the open kitchen and adjoining dining room through a bank of floor-to-ceiling windows. The mansion’s past as a comfortable home for one family teased me with hope for harmony, while its emptiness pledged a fresh start.
All of this offered but a moment’s distraction from my anguish over Adam.
The morning the men arrived, I asked Noi, their leader, for a report on Adam’s performance. He confirmed that Adam had been “a drag” on the trip they’d just completed. We agreed to call a meeting.
Around noon, both crews gathered in the sun-drenched dining room, our backs to the view. I did not sit by Adam.
Noi started off with an accusing confession: “On this last trip, I caught myself thinking I didn’t want Adam to have food, he was giving so little to our crew.” He blinked in shock at the cruelty of his thought. A couple of the other men nodded. “Maybe I went there in my mind because he doesn’t want to be here.”
The men nodded again. Noi turned to Adam and popped the question every Zendik dreaded: “Do you want to go out?”
Eyes on the floor, Adam rubbed his palms against his kneecaps. His forehead shone with sweat. “I… I… I mean, no, I don’t. But I thought… I thought maybe I’d go hiking in the forest here for a week or two. Take some time to get my head straight.”