The Follower

by Nicholas Bowling

  “…Vivian Owens.”

  She heard her name and came to attention. Everyone was smiling at her.

  “I’m sure you remember her brother Jesse, who ascended last month,” said Glenn.

  They nodded enthusiastically.

  “Vivian will be joining us on the path, starting today, so I ask that you send any positive thoughts and energies her way in this session. As you know, Vivian and Jesse lost their father this year, so perhaps you would like to make that the focus of your healing prayers.”

  They all nodded again. Vivian stiffened, and tasted something acidic in the back of her mouth. Jesse must have told him. Why bring it up here, now, in public? The exposure was horrifying. By the time she’d made up her mind to leave, the session was already under way.

  The first half seemed to involve just sitting still for a long time, staring at the candle and listening to Glenn hit the bowl at regular intervals. Vivian never found it easy to relax but after Glenn’s little revelation it was an impossibility. Her knees, hips and the small of her back ached. From time to time, just when she was starting to get used to the silence, one or other of the initiates would gasp, as if they had experienced a revelation, or a small fright, or had just realised they’d forgotten to do something important.

  By the mid-point of the hour, Vivian was acutely aware that everyone was doing the gasping apart from her. Again she felt the urge to get up and leave. Glenn was walking around the outside of the circle, and their eyes met while she was looking over towards the stairs. He smiled indulgently.

  “At this meeting of the spheres, let’s try and expel everything that isn’t serving us…”

  Vivian glanced at the initiates on either side of her. They were practically in convulsions. It didn’t look like much fun, but she wasn’t going to get far if she didn’t at least try to play along. She inhaled and exhaled sharply. Something flew out of her nose, but apart from that, nothing. She felt stupid.

  She tried another two, three, four times with clear nostrils and began to feel pleasantly light-headed. She kept going. Yes, it felt good. Her fingers and toes drifted away from the rest of her. She felt airy, and bright, and hot; a mirror of the candle in the centre of the circle.

  Once she’d started, she found it impossible to stop. The gasping and snorting became percussive and rhythmic. The room began to slant and pitch, and the candles brightened and melted into one another, and for a brief and ecstatic and extraordinary moment she was outside of herself and looking down from somewhere way up in the rafters. Vivian watched herself rock backwards and bang her head on the floorboards, just beyond the soft edge of her mat, and then she was suddenly, painfully back in her old lump of a body and her vision was dull and her lungs were raw.

  She felt a hand under her back, and a bearded face appeared above her. A mural on the ceiling.

  “Dad?” she said.

  “Vivian,” said a man’s voice.

  “Dad?”

  “It’s just me, dear heart.”

  Her father’s features swam in front of her for a moment, then came into focus.

  “Where am I?” Vivian said.

  “You’re exactly where you’re meant to be,” said Glenn.

  She blinked a few times and saw the faces of the other initiates huddled around her. They looked at her with a kind of wonder. She hadn’t moved from her mat.

  “Are you alright?” said Glenn.

  “I think so,” said Vivian.

  “Sure?”

  “I’m good.”

  “I’m sorry. Maybe it was too soon for breathwork.”

  “Really. I’m fine. I’m probably just hungry or something. I feel…”

  She didn’t finish the thought. Glenn looked at her with concern.

  “I think poor old Vivian is tired, everyone,” he said finally. “Let’s give the girl some space, shall we? Up you get, dear heart.”

  The other initiates parted. Someone said something complimentary about her aura. Glenn extended his hand and helped her to her feet. She wavered for a few seconds, from tiredness, from too much air in the blood, from the alternating throbs in the front and back of her head.

  Glenn led her to the back of the hall. Vivian could hear a lot of excited chatter from the others. Through the kitchen and the bamboo doors were a bathroom and a laundry room, and beyond that a dozen or so bedrooms. Glenn helped her into one of these and down onto a futon.

  “You should stay here, at least for tonight. Until your head’s better.”

  She thanked him and he nodded. When he reached the door he turned back again.

  “I am sorry, Vivian,” he said.

  “It’s alright,” she said. “It doesn’t hurt that much.”

  “No, not the breathwork. I mean I’m sorry about your father.”

  “Dad?” said Vivian, for the third time that night.

  “You know, I’ll always remember something Jesse said about him.”

  Vivian didn’t reply. She was furious with Jesse in his absence for even mentioning their home life. Glenn pushed on.

  “At Telos we talk a lot about making a connection with the infinite. You read that in the book. Right?”

  Vivian still said nothing.

  “But Jesse used to say, while the universe is infinite, it contains a finite amount of positive energy. And if the energy of the universe is finite, then it’s constant; and if it’s constant, then your father never really went anywhere. His energy is unchanged. You see?” He put his hand over her heart. “He’s still with you, Vivian. He’s still here.”

  He smiled and got up. Vivian looked at him and couldn’t help feeling he’d misunderstood what Jesse had been getting at. Knowing her brother, he had probably been thinking about mass and volume and spacetime and dark matter, while Glenn had heard the word “energy” and interpreted it in only the vague, quasi-spiritual terms that came so easily to him and the initiates.

  But then, was there any difference in the end? Whether you called the thing “Oneness” or a unified theory, hippies and physicists were working towards the same thing, really. They were just approaching it with varying amounts of thoroughness.

  “Look at you, dear heart,” said Glenn. “Your mind is going a mile a minute. Let me get you some tea.”

  He left and came back with a cup of the blue, mulchy infusion. She drank it all, more because she was thirsty than because she needed calming.

  “Don’t worry yourself,” said Glenn, watching her finish the tea with satisfaction. “You’ve just taken your first steps into a great, deep ocean of understanding.”

  He smiled again, and Vivian began to feel pleasantly sleepy. She remembered thinking, as she got into bed and someone who she couldn’t see tucked her in, that if you stepped into the ocean you generally drowned.

  11

  VIVIAN SPENT the next three days at the Sanctuary, loitering on the fringes while the other initiates whiled away the hours twirling around and sitting still and twanging instruments. She was terrified of trying the “breathwork” again. Every time she saw the lurid picture of John of Telos she thought she saw her father smiling inscrutably back at her. Everyone else was very kind to her. They spoke about her and Jesse with a kind of quiet reverence, and kept giving her compliments about her aura, which she accepted with a mixture of bewilderment and gratitude. Apparently it had a colour that no one had a name for, just like Jesse’s.

  She shared a room with a girl called Forrest – two Rs, and definitely not her real name – who was from Louisiana. She had six older brothers who had all been in the marines, and she had bug eyes and a lot of scratches on both forearms. Glenn hadn’t been able to find a robe small enough for Forrest and she drifted around the Sanctuary looking like a child in one of her parents’ dressing gowns. She ground her teeth all the time, and spoke a lot when she was both asleep and awake, mostly about how she was feeling. Vivian didn’t say much at all. Perhaps Glenn had thought that made them good roommates.

  Vivian observed the rituals and p
retended to meditate and ate a lot of seeds and salads but started to feel like she was wasting her time. She was no closer to understanding where Jesse was – or Nathan, for that matter. The nature of “Telos” still escaped her, too.

  When she’d asked Forrest what she thought, the slip-thin girl had just laughed and said, “I don’t know! Isn’t that the point? If we knew where it was, there’d be Greyhound buses headed there morning, noon and night, and if we knew what it was, then, well, we’d already be enlightened and one with the Spirit, wouldn’t we? We all just got to keep faith with the Path, and it shall surely lead us unto Telos.”

  She had a habit of slipping into this strange Old Testament vernacular, which Vivian suspected was a vestige of her Christian upbringing. Nor was this any obstacle to her advancement along the Path. One thing that Vivian learned in those first few days was the school’s insistence that all other belief systems were simply lesser manifestations of the one truth of Telos. Whether you were a Catholic or a ufologist or a Native American shaman, Telos welcomed you without judgement.

  On the third day Vivian decided to go back to the motel. She wanted to use Troy’s phone, and thought there might be a map of the mountain somewhere in among the trash of the reception desk. If he wasn’t there, she still wanted to talk to Judy. She also just needed a break from Forrest, who had become a sort of unofficial disciple of hers.

  Troy was on duty after all. He watched her come through the front door and stood up. He was drumming his long, skeletal fingers on the desktop. For once, he was the first to speak.

  “You didn’t leave anything valuable in your room, did you?” he said.

  “What?” said Vivian.

  “I mean, like, you had all your valuables stolen, didn’t you? So you wouldn’t’ve had anything important in your room.”

  The only things she’d left in her room were the posters of her brother and the notes she’d found in Jesse’s coat pocket. Which, yes, were valuable in a way.

  “Why do you say that?” she asked.

  “Ah,” said Troy, and leant awkwardly to one side like part of him had snapped. “Mr Blucas has been tidying up again.”

  Mr Blucas. She wanted to see him, too.

  “Tidying?”

  “Yeah. Like I said before, he sometimes takes the keys. He has this habit of going into other people’s rooms and… cleaning. And by ‘cleaning’, I mean stealing. He doesn’t just do it here. He does it everywhere. He empties all the trash cans, too. I don’t know what he does with all of it.”

  Vivian went straight up to room 30. She opened the door and turned on the light, and in the brownish, nicotine haze of the old light bulb she saw the place was spotless. The bed was made. The coffee-making area was tidied. The posters and the scraps from Jesse’s pockets had gone.

  She came out and tried 29 again. It was still locked.

  Troy came up behind her, stooping under the motel roof, hair swaying like some great black willow.

  “Is anything missing?”

  “Yes,” said Vivian.

  “Anything important?”

  “Kind of.”

  It wasn’t that the content of the notes was important – that was nonsense, decipherable by Jesse alone – but it was good to have physical evidence of his presence in Mount Hookey, however fragmentary. She also felt a kind of embarrassment on Jesse’s behalf. The notes were a private matter for her brother, whatever they actually meant. It was as if someone had stolen his teenage diary.

  “Ah shit,” said Troy. “Sorry. Expensive?”

  “No.”

  “What was it?”

  “Just some things Jesse left behind. Some things he’d written.”

  “Oh. So. No big deal.”

  Troy perched on the railing outside the room, practically folded in half under the roof, and began to roll a cigarette. Vivian came out of the room and stood next to him, facing in the opposite direction, out into the parking lot.

  “When did this happen?” she said, looking down the street.

  “What? Blucas? Dunno. He probably left twenty minutes ago.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “I haven’t got a homing device on him, Viv.”

  “Does he have a house nearby?”

  “I don’t think he has a house, period. Anyway, he was on his bike, he could be anywhere by now. If you want to get your stuff back, it’s not going to happen. You’ve seen all the crap he carries around.”

  “Isn’t that him?”

  Vivian pointed down the 55, away from town, where something with wheels was labouring up the hill in the heat haze.

  “Huh,” said Troy, taking a drag on his cigarette. “Yup. That’s him.”

  Mr Blucas’s bicycle was more of a wagon, one huge wheel at the front and two at the back with an open-topped wooden box between them. The box was piled high with his carrier bags full of newspapers and other assorted trash.

  Vivian waded through Troy’s cloud of smoke and ran back down to the highway. By the time she’d got down there Mr Blucas had pedalled past the motel and continued through the intersection, ignoring the red light, and Vivian came out of the parking lot to a chorus of car horns.

  She followed him up onto Vista Street, and he got further away while she waited for a chance to cross the road. He was pedalling furiously and she had to run to catch up. It seemed suddenly imperative that she speak with him. Jesse’s notes were a precious thing. And she wanted to talk to him about the other Mr Blucas she’d met, the Mr Blucas who was gruff and neat and had saved her life up on the mountain. And he might have had the key to Jesse’s room. She shouted for him a couple of times, but he either ignored her or didn’t hear.

  She followed him all the way along Vista, past Shelley’s house. Mr Blucas turned left at the very end of the street and disappeared, and Vivian was walking by the time she reached the junction. The road to the right was asphalt and led back to town. To the left was a rough dirt track that led into the forest. He could hardly be going any speed now, looking at the ruts and troughs in the dry earth. She might catch him yet.

  She walked for ten minutes and saw nothing but trees and birds and the occasional abandoned item on the roadside – a shoe, a hubcap, the grill of a barbecue. It was late afternoon and the sun was low and warm and the forest seemed preserved in amber. The scent and the stillness reminded her of the Sanctuary. She wondered if Glenn and the others were missing her. She wouldn’t progress very far along the Violet Path if she was absent for half the sessions. She considered turning back.

  The road started to climb and she saw someone coming around the switchback at the top of the hill. It wasn’t Mr Blucas. Vivian squinted and the figure came towards her almost stumbling, animated like a plasticine miniature. It was the woman she knew as Eenoo. She was wearing a broad-brimmed felt hat, sunglasses and many hundreds of beaded necklaces. On her feet were a pair of high heels that were in no way suited to the terrain.

  “He’s coming back!” said Eenoo from afar.

  “Sorry?” said Vivian.

  “The moon is ascending and he is returning!”

  “Who is?”

  Eenoo spun on the spot and her handbag was flung outwards and orbited around her. She looked up into the sky and laughed. She was still spinning when Vivian was a few feet away.

  “Did you see someone come through here?” Vivian asked.

  “Oh, I’ve seen him!” said Eenoo.

  “On a sort of bicycle?”

  “On a what?” The woman came to a stop.

  “An oldish man. On a bicycle with a trailer on the back. Mr Blucas.”

  “Blucas?” Eenoo’s mouth went slack. She spent a moment conjuring a mouthful of saliva and then spat in the dust. “Fuck him.”

  “Oh.”

  “That’s what happens to you when you betray Telos.”

  Eenoo rummaged in her handbag and produced what looked like a luridly coloured raffle ticket. She offered it to Vivian. Vivian suspected what it was and shook her head.


  “Did you see him, though? Blucas?” she said.

  “You go up the mountain tonight, girl, you’ll see the real thing.”

  “The real thing?”

  “You bet, gorgeous!”

  Eenoo dragged the raffle ticket across her tongue and it made a sound like sandpaper. Then she laughed loudly and stumbled off down the track in her stilettos, turning her ankle every three or four steps.

  “Bless you!” she hollered when she was almost out of sight.

  Vivian decided she would walk as far as the next bend. Here, a second, smaller track peeled off and went down into a gully that the sun no longer reached. There was a building at the bottom, a barn or a warehouse of some kind. All the windows were broken, and a large portion of the roof had fallen in. Outside were rusted hulks of farm machinery, the chassis of a car, wheel-less, nettles and weeds growing up through the bonnet. In among it all was Mr Blucas’s tricycle. When Vivian stopped to catch her breath she could hear him talking, his voice amplified and distorted by the dimensions of the warehouse.

  Vivian scrambled down. The wagon had been unloaded of its cargo already. The warehouse had a huge sliding door that was as big as the end wall, with a smaller door built into it. The smaller one was wide open. She held her nose and went inside.

  There was a disorientating mixture of light and darkness thanks to the missing panels in the warehouse’s roof. It threw off Vivian’s sense of perspective. As far as she could see there were steel shelves two storeys high, and the shelves were packed with hundreds, thousands of garbage bags. There were ladders on wheels to allow someone to reach the very highest shelves. The contents of the bags were overflowing, and there were scraps of paper and plastic and clothing spilling onto the floor, but the bags themselves were arranged in such a way that suggested there was some incredibly complex filing system here that only Mr Blucas understood.

  She couldn’t see Mr Blucas, but she heard him muttering somewhere at the back of the warehouse. At the end of the aisle of shelves she could see a mattress and standing lamp and a desk, also piled with paper. Vivian inspected one of the shopping bags closest to her, whose plastic was colourless and had a powdery residue that suggested it could have been decades old. She pawed through its contents. It was mostly newspapers, but also contained some paperwork from a car body-shop, a few receipts, a menu from a restaurant whose name Vivian didn’t recognise. There was scribbling on all of them. It looked like Jesse’s torturous note-taking.