“Hey. Hello? I can still see you.”
Vivian took a step towards the door and the man melted into the shop’s darkened interior. She stuck another poster up where his face had been.
By the time Vivian reached number 125 she was at the end of the street, almost out of the town. The road and the pavement were in bad shape, broken and split by the roots of the cedars. The address was a small, ranch-style bungalow with primrose yellow walls and a broken picket fence. The front yard was overgrown, bright plastic toys scattered in the long grass like the ruins of some lost civilisation. The garage was open and there was a child’s bike lying on its side in the driveway.
Vivian went to the front door. There were two stickers in the living room window. One said: “Telos welcomes YOU!” The other said, “We heal pets.”
She pulled back her hood and knocked. Somewhere inside, a toddler was screaming. Vivian heard the sound of cutlery dashed against a table, the scrape of a chair on the floor, and hurried footsteps in the hall.
The woman who opened the door was in her forties, Vivian guessed, wearing a hoodie and track pants. Her face was deeply seamed, her hair somewhere between blond and grey. She had the bluest eyes Vivian had ever seen.
She opened her mouth and made a tiny, soundless gasp. A moment of silence passed between them before she said, “Can I help you?”
Vivian looked over the woman’s shoulder at the hallway strewn with toys. Back in the kitchen a toddler was smashing his tiny fists into his dinner.
“I think I’m in the wrong place,” she said. She made to leave.
“Do I know you?” the woman called after her.
Vivian stopped and turned back. Someone else who seemed to recognise her.
“Why do you say that?”
“You look like someone I used to teach.”
Vivian came back to the doorstep and showed her a poster. “Him?”
“Oh, Jesse!” said the woman, as though Vivian had shown her a picture of her own son.
“He’s my brother,” said Vivian.
“Yes. Of course he is.”
“This is the House of Telos?”
The website had promised a pristine temple of the One Cosmic Spirit, with photos of jade gardens and crystal-clear pools and scores of initiates sitting cross-legged on bamboo mats, but Vivian couldn’t see any of that.
The baby in the highchair threw his cup to the floor and began wailing. The woman gave a tired smile.
“He was a wonderful student,” she said.
“Was?”
“He’s not here anymore.” She looked dejected all of a sudden.
“He left town?”
“Oh no,” said the woman, “I’m sure he’s still in town. With his energy, there’s no way the mountain’s letting him go.”
Vivian didn’t know what she meant by that.
“Then where is he?”
“I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
The toddler had amped up his screaming again and was rocking backwards and forwards in the chair so violently it looked like it might fall over.
“I think he’s going to hurt himself,” said Vivian, pointing to the kitchen.
The woman blinked her huge blue eyes, sighed, and said, “You’d better come in.”
She led Vivian through the hall, whose walls were hung with a mixture of Christian and Buddhist and Native American bric-a-brac – crucifixes, yin and yang tapestries, strings of eagle feathers. Vivian found the combination puzzling. The House of Telos seemed to be hedging its bets, spiritually speaking. They passed the doors to the living room and another room that boomed with the bass of a stereo turned up too loud. The whole house had a strange odour of incense and cooking oil. In the kitchen the woman pulled out a chair for Vivian and then went around the other side of the table to try and coax her child into eating his bowl of pasta shapes.
“This is Chason,” she said, gently probing the boy’s mouth with the spoon.
“Chason?”
“Troy is in his bedroom. You probably won’t see him.”
“Okay.”
“I’m Shelley, by the way.”
“Right. Look, I don’t want to take up your time—”
Chason swatted the food from his mother’s hand again, and she said, “Sorry,” and got down on her hands and knees to retrieve it. She was gone for some time.
“Thing is, Jesse’s not been in touch.”
There was no reply from under the table.
“Hello?”
“Hold on.”
Vivian looked around the kitchen. More mystical bits and pieces. Crystals and tripods and strange totemic carvings, in among the microwave and the cereal boxes and Chason’s fire engine. Next to the door that led out to the back yard hung a framed picture, luridly airbrushed, of a man who looked part Jesus Christ and part extraterrestrial. His face reminded her of her father in a way she couldn’t grasp; but then, since March, everything seemed to remind her of her father.
“Seems someone’s caught your eye.” Shelley had popped up while Vivian was staring.
“Who’s it meant to be?”
“That’s John of Telos,” she said. “The first of the Earthly Masters.”
“Oh,” said Vivian. “I thought maybe it was your husband.”
Shelley smiled.
“No, no. He’s long gone. No pictures of him anywhere. Would you like something to drink?”
“I’ll take a coffee if you’ve got one,” she said. “Black. Really black.”
The last thing she needed was another coffee, but she thought she deserved it: a kind of penance for the nap she’d had earlier.
“Coming up,” said Shelley. She put on the kettle and looked in the cupboards for a pot, speaking over her shoulder. “So do you know much about Telos?”
“Not really,” said Vivian.
“Would you like to learn?”
“I don’t think it’s really my sort of thing. We’re quite different, me and Jesse.”
“But you’re twins, right?”
Vivian nodded.
“Then you’re the same. You’re the same spirit.”
“We’re really not.”
Vivian hated this sort of stuff. Everyone asking her if she and Jesse thought the same thoughts. If she felt pain when he did. The answer was always no, she did not, and she was glad of it.
Shelley fidgeted.
“Wait there,” she said, “let me get you something.”
She abandoned the kettle and went out of the room, leaving Vivian with the baby. While they were staring at each other over the bowl of cold pasta, a door opened in the hallway and the throbbing bass and electronic bleeps and bloops became suddenly louder. A teenager who must have been seven feet tall lumbered into the kitchen and began rummaging in the fridge. He pulled out a can of something fizzy, turned, clocked Vivian. He kept his eyes fixed on her as he tugged on the ring-pull, drank at least half of the can, and then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” said Vivian.
He was very pale and looked like he hadn’t slept. His hair was almost down to his waist, which was a long way for a boy of his size. His eyes were all pupil.
“Oh, hi Troy!” Shelley had appeared back in the doorway holding a book. She practically had to shout over the music. “This is… I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.”
“Vivian,” said Vivian.
“She’s Jesse’s sister. Remember Jesse?”
The giant teenager took another swig from his can and shrugged, then pushed past his mother and went back to his room. The door shut and the music went back to sounding as if it was coming from underwater.
“Apparently he’s forgotten how to speak,” said Shelley, and laughed a weak laugh. Vivian suddenly found her, and the teenager, and the house, unbearably sad. It was Jesse-type sadness; a kind of disappointment with the world that made a horrible counterpoint with Shelley’s hippyish positivity.
Shelley gave Vivian
her coffee and sat next to the baby again, who was now squirming to be released from his chair. She handed Vivian the book she’d been holding. Vivian examined it. The cover displayed the same hyperreal figure from the portrait on the wall, thumbs and forefingers joined in a triangle just above his navel, out of which shot a beam of violet light. She flicked through the pages without reading it. It had the high gloss of a sales brochure.
“What is this?”
“Just an introduction to the Violet Path.”
“What’s the Violet Path?”
“The path of Telos. It’s what your brother’s started on.”
“Oh right.” Nonsense, then. She put it face-down on the table and slid it to one side. “I want to talk about my brother.”
Shelley looked put out by Vivian’s disinterest in the book.
“Sure. We can talk about Jesse if you like.”
“When was he last here?”
“Maybe a month ago.”
“A month?”
That was longer than she’d expected. He could have gone a long way in a month.
“He didn’t stay very long,” said Shelley. “He was with us for maybe two weeks. He outgrew this place pretty quickly.”
“What do you mean, ‘outgrew’?”
“Maybe that’s the wrong word.” Shelley frowned slightly. “He just thought it wasn’t the right fit.”
Vivian glanced around the kitchen.
“Maybe he was expecting something else,” she said. “It doesn’t look much like your website.”
Shelley lifted Chason from his chair and put him on the floor. He went grubbing around on all fours, eating most of the pasta he’d thrown between their feet.
“We’ve had to scale things back in the last couple years,” Shelley said. “There’s a lot of competition around here these days.” She picked at the edge of the table. Vivian saw her fingernails were ravaged. “People out to make a quick buck.”
“I mean,” she said, “no offence, but you’ve made a few thousand quick bucks out of my brother in the last three years.” She took a sip of coffee. It was bitter and disgusting and exactly what she wanted.
“I’ve got to make money somehow, haven’t I?” said Shelley. She nodded to the child under the table. Her voice had changed. “I’m not going to bag groceries when I’ve been given this gift. I want to help people, Vivian. I want to help people like your brother. We’re trying to change the world here.”
Vivian looked around the mess of the kitchen again. She drank from her coffee cup again, to stop herself from saying anything.
“We’re waking people up, Vivian. To a new reality. A new peace. A new harmony. Of course, I say ‘new’ – it’s really the old harmony. The only harmony. The oneness of Telos.”
Shelley spread her fingers as if the whole thing was self-evident. She fixed Vivian with her weird opalescent eyes and for a moment Vivian thought she could, indeed, see some other reality, some deeper understanding in them; then she realised that things were probably the other way around, and that having mesmerising, otherworldly eyes recommended you for a career in spiritual charlatanism in the first place.
The baby banged his head against the table leg and started crying, and Shelley abandoned her hypnotism to pick him up again and dandle him on her knee.
“And Jesse was into all this stuff, was he?” Vivian asked.
“Jesse had committed himself fully to the Path, yes. He was always looking beyond. What I like to call a searcher. You know?”
That was Jesse alright. Vivian had visions of them playing together when they’d been not much older than Chason. Jesse had made a point of dismantling every one of his toys (and after that every one of Vivian’s) to discover how they worked, and then always sat forlorn and inconsolable among the pieces, as if he’d expected and then failed to find the very soul of the thing. At school, his grades had been uniformly poor because he always insisted on investigating some esoteric detail way beyond the syllabus, while misunderstanding or choosing not to understand the basics. He couldn’t follow instructions. He would start his maths homework when he got home at five p.m. and by midnight have filled his whole exercise book with a critique of Quantum Entanglement. He was the cleverest person Vivian knew, and the most useless. When he left school no university would have him, and he’d stayed under his parents’ roof ever since, totally absorbed in his complex and futile research projects.
That was the problem with their dad’s death, Vivian thought. Jesse had tried to approach it using his own unique brand of logic, as a puzzle to be solved, and had found his brain wanting. He’d taken his grief to pieces like one of his toys, and, as usual, had found nothing at the centre.
“He does think a lot,” said Vivian.
Shelley nodded sympathetically.
“That was a habit we were trying to get him out of. He was making real progress, with the meditation, and the breathwork. But, you know.” She shrugged. “The Path took him somewhere else.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. One of the other schools, I imagine.”
“What are the other schools?”
“He might have gone to the Temple of Telos. Or the Telurian Mission. Telos Centre for Spiritual Living has closed down but Glenn – he’s the guy who ran it – he started the Telos Sanctuary last month, so Jesse could have gone there. Angels of Telos is cheap, that’s an option. The Way of Telos has just opened, above Wing’s. You know, the Chinese place? I don’t know much about them but they seem a big draw.”
“There’s a lot of you.”
“We used to get along. Some of us still do. But there’s a lot of bad blood. It’s hard to achieve oneness when everyone’s fighting against each other, you know?”
Vivian looked down at the book again. The man on the cover stared back at her with a vague and knowing smile. The violet triangle above his groin was mirrored and expanded in a picture of the mountain itself, Mount Hookey, which served as a background to the figure of John of Telos. Incredible, she thought, that Jesse could have been taken in by such a wild fiction. Or perhaps not. He’d tried absolutely everything else. Abandoning reason altogether was perhaps the last route open to him.
“I need their names and addresses,” she said.
“Sure thing,” said Shelley. “Best not hang about, though. A spirit like Jesse?” She whistled. “He’ll be ascended in no time. Then there’s no way you’ll see him again. Not unless you fancy ascending with him.”
Vivian scowled so hard her forehead hurt.
“Ascended.”
“Gone up the mountain. Once he’s up the mountain, no point losing sleep waiting for him to come back!”
“What? Why not?”
“Well… why would he want to come back?”
“Why would he not want to? What’s up the mountain?”
“I feel like you should maybe read the book, Vivian. It’s difficult to explain from scratch.”
“Can’t you just tell me?”
“Bless you, there’s no reason to look so worried! He won’t have gone anywhere yet. I’m sure you’ll find him somewhere around town. Then maybe he can explain. Better coming from him than from me.”
Vivian looked into the dregs of her coffee. The hand that held the cup was shuddering slightly, and not just from the caffeine.
“I don’t get it,” she said.
“Don’t get what?”
“This.” She gestured around the kitchen, at the portrait, at the crystals. “All of this. I’m not trying to offend you. But, you know. I just don’t.”
“That’s okay,” said Shelley. “That’s normal.”
There was a condescending note in her voice that made the back of Vivian’s head itch.
“I should go,” she said. “I’ll take the names of those schools if you’ve got them.”
“You really should read the book, too. It’ll help you to understand.”
Vivian capitulated. She picked it up from where it lay on the table.
“T
hey’re twenty dollars,” said Shelley.
Vivian stared at her. “You serious?”
“I’m not making profit from that. Just breaking even.”
“I don’t have any cash.”
“Oh, you don’t?” said Shelley. She sounded disappointed.
“Someone stole my wallet. That’s how I got all this.” She pointed to her bruises.
Shelley gasped. “Here? In Mount Hookey? This is such a safe town. People don’t get hurt here.”
“Lewiston.”
“That’s awful! Bless you.”
“I’m okay. I’ll just have to get some money, somehow. I’ll work it out.”
“Well. Let us know if there’s anything we can do to help.”
“You could let me have the book.”
Shelley smiled again, but this time it seemed forced.
“Of course,” she said. “Just pay me back when you can.”
Vivian looked out of the window, saw a lilac dimness had come over the sky. She pushed back her chair and collected up her pile of posters with the book on top. Both were now smeared with Chason’s pasta sauce. Shelley gave her the names and addresses of the various schools of Telos she had mentioned, drew her a rudimentary map, then led her back through the booming hallway to the front door.
“Vivian’s leaving, Troy,” she hollered through her son’s bedroom door. “You want to say goodbye?”
There was no answer. She shrugged, and smiled once more, and Vivian felt that sadness creep over her again like the coldness of the evening.
“Thanks,” she said. “I might be back.”
“The House of Telos is always open.”
“I’m going to stick some of these posters up around the street.”
“It’s a free country.”
Vivian pulled up her hood again and tramped into the wildness of their front yard. She’d reached the picket fence when Shelley called out to her.
“Blessings, Vivian. I hope you find your brother. We all do.”
Behind her, Chason had started crying again. Vivian was back on Vista Street, and had passed another three houses, before she realised how strange those last three words had been.
3
The Follower Page 2
