Owen, the newest of the new guys, was up reading in the bunk across from mine. I scrunched deeper into my mummy bag, covering even my eyes now, to conserve body heat and block out his flashlight. I longed to be snug among women, in a bunk in the Farmhouse, the heat of Kro’s fire rising through the floorboards. Maybe a big donation would smooth my path toward the Farm’s heart.
I woke the next morning to a wave of doubt. What? Give the Zendiks all my money? Am I crazy? Shouldn’t I at least try a few other places before I commit? I rolled onto my back and studied a mark on the underside of the top bunk. Was it shaped like a flame or an eye? Maybe it would be good to go somewhere else—but then I’d have to go through the rigmarole of showing up and easing in all over again. And what if Zendik really is building a new culture? The way they do dating sure seems different. I decided the mark could be either a flame or an eye, depending on what you thought of when you looked at it. Maybe this is my chance to be part of something amazing. Maybe I’d be crazy not to give everything.
At breakfast (scrambled eggs and short-grain brown rice in a bowl with no label, now that I’d served my ten-day quarantine), I told Teal—the woman who’d taken my apprentice fee—that I wanted to give the Farm my grant money. I’d already told her and other Zendiks how much I’d received and how little I’d spent. After paying the $300, I had thirteen thousand left.
Teal blinked, then nodded. “Okay, I’ll tell Rayel. She’s the one who usually handles that stuff.” I’d met Rayel, but that was it. We hadn’t worked together or conversed. She rarely ate at the Farmhouse.
I was shelving plates for lunch cleanup, my back to the kitchen’s rear entrance, when I caught a whiff of rose oil, then the whoosh of the screen door closing and the click of cowboy boots against wood worn smooth. Rayel appeared at my side. Several inches shorter than I, she had to lift her chin to meet my eyes. But her straight spine and calm gaze made it clear who was in charge. “Helen,” she said, “I hear you have money you wanna give us.”
“I do.”
“Are you sure? I wouldn’t want you to do something you might regret.”
I’d yet to discover that Rayel, who’d moved to Zendik at eighteen from a plush midwestern suburb, had funneled large sums from her family to the Farm—most notably, an investment in the land.
Back in 1987, indifferent to college but disturbed by humans’ shaky perch on Earth, Rayel had told her parents that what she really wanted was to grow organic food. A newspaper ad her mother found led her to a homestead in the high desert near San Diego where young people could learn to farm. After Zendik relocated to a two-hundred-acre ranch outside Austin, she persuaded her dad to put up the funds for an adjoining hundred acres. He insisted the deed be in her name; maybe one day she and her mate would build a home and start a family on their own patch of riparian savanna. When Zendik moved again, first to Florida and then to North Carolina, Rayel’s ownership carried over. Upon my arrival in 1999, she owned a half interest in the Farm’s 116 acres. Years later, under duress, she would sign that interest over to Arol. Later still, she would regret it.
“Yes, I’m sure,” I said, the thrill of giving swelling within me as a wide smile lit her eyes. “I wanna stay here. And I want you guys to have the money.”
“Great!” she said. “Talk about perfect timing!”
On our walk up the hill to the Mobile, Rayel confided that the Farm was in a cash crunch caused by a delay in payment on the Florida property. I felt privileged to catch this glimpse of Zendik’s inner workings; I doubted any of my roommates had ever come this close.
At the Mobile, Rayel had me wait on the porch while she slipped inside to get the phone. I tuned to the murmur behind the blinds but couldn’t make out words. When she returned, I recited my information to a teller at Independence Savings Bank (soon to be gobbled by Sovereign Bank, which would in turn be chomped by financial giant Santander). Then Rayel took the receiver to complete the transfer, her tone calm and warm. With that, I joined the ranks of those who’d surrendered wealth to Zendik.
Details varied but not the bottom line, in ink still invisible to me: give it up or leave. “It” could be an inheritance, a car, a college fund. “It” could be good credit—on the Farm’s behalf, some Zendiks accrued credit card debt that the Farm intended never to repay. Some gave it up with ease; some succumbed to pressure. A few—like the young woman who drove off in her milk-white four-door, rather than relinquish the title—resisted and left. I was unusual only in my quickness to anticipate the Farm’s need.
My throat tightened, my heart pounded, as my balance shifted into Zendik’s account. After Rayel clicked the receiver back into its cradle, a sagebrush waste opened in my gut and sent a scrubby, thorned grit-gust up through my ribs to my chest. Sure, I could still sleep at other communes—but only if I threw myself, penniless, on the mercy of the highway.
Early November, still. Late afternoon. I parked my wheelbarrow of split oak and pine by the Farmhouse porch, where Owen and I were stacking firewood between two posts. From the kitchen drifted the scent of cumin—dinner would be lentil patties with salad and yogurt sauce. From the Music Room rumbled the muffled thump of drums and bass, under Arol’s improvised vocals, swinging from shrill to throaty to wistful. From the goat barn came the does’ nasal whine-brays, raised against the affront of being locked in a stanchion. Red with the work of powering my load uphill from the woodpile, I set to piecing the fuel into a three-dimensional puzzle. Handing me the last chunk, Owen looked up from the barrow, as if a thought had just grabbed him by the blond curls dabbing his forehead. “Hey, Helen,” he said, “did you know they have levels?”
“What are you talking about?”
I favored Owen over the rest of my roommates. If they were the trolls in my fairy tale, he was the elf. A psychedelics dealer from Charleston, South Carolina—a popular Zendik selling spot—he’d arrived in a Phish T-shirt printed with a ring of cotton candy–colored animals holding hands against a tie-dyed cumulous sky. He saw time as an ocean or a spiral; he reminded me that Y2K—just a couple months away—meant nothing according to the Mayan calendar, which revolved around the moon. Sometimes his eyes shone with the glow of waking trance. He said he’d had a revelation while speaking with Zendik sellers one night on Meeting Street: he was to break off his engagement and follow them home. That I believed. Revelations happened. But this business about levels? Nonsense. I’d been at the Farm at least a week longer than he had. How could he know something I didn’t?
“You know those wristbands they all wear?”
I nodded. I had noticed the ragged strips of colored cloth circling the Zendiks’ wrists—and dismissed them as adornment. I dropped the oak chunk into its rough nest.
“They show what level everybody’s at.”
I turned to look at him. He wasn’t doing the waking-trance thing. His pupils were a normal size.
“That’s ridiculous. Are you telling me this place has a hierarchy?”
He shrugged. “Hey, I’m just passing on what I heard.” He glanced up the hill toward the barns. Toba was crunching down the gravel path. He tilted his head in her direction. “If you don’t believe me, ask her.”