by Jamie Zeppa
When she was at Lighthouse, all her dread melted away. Even concrete fears were shown to be faulty and insubstantial. If she said, “I’m afraid that I’m going to fail math,” the others would point out the flaw in her thinking. This was a technicality. Technicalities were conjured up and thrown down by the ego to impede progress along the path. So what if she failed math? So what if she did not graduate with her peers? So what if she didn’t get to go to university? School offered facts; Lighthouse offered truth. Yes, it was true that her mother had left and her father was gone, but everyone had to walk their own path to UC in their own way. Yes, it was true that her grandfather might die, but everyone died. Those who did not understand death could not understand life. At Lighthouse, she was floating down a river of light and warmth, and everything was really and truly all right.
The problem was after the meetings. At home, there was a new word, the ugliest word of all: “metastasize.” It meant the tumour was shedding in Frank’s veins, seeding itself in new places. The prognosis was no longer unknown. The prognosis was six months.
But Vera said the doctors didn’t know. People had been told six months and had gone ahead and lived for six years. Mrs. Klukay’s brother, for example. They opened him up and it turned out he didn’t even have cancer. She saw him just last week buying spice cake at the A&P. “It just goes to show,” Vera said to Dawn. She was washing the dishes; Dawn was drying. “Half the time, they just don’t know.”
Furtively, Dawn scraped burnt onion residue out of a pan before drying it. Every day she took dishes out of the cupboard that were flecked with dried food. The kettle boiled dry so many times the bottom burned out. It made Dawn feel queasy.
Vera’s hands were motionless in the soapy water. “The first time we met, we were standing in line for the bus, and I saw him and thought, That is a good man. I just knew. And I was right. I was right.” Her eyes were far away. “All the years went by overnight.”
“Those who cannot face death cannot understand life,” Dawn said.
Vera’s hands jerked out of the dishwater. For a moment, Dawn thought her grandmother was going to slap her. But she only hurried out of the room.
Dawn picked up a spoon and dried it carefully. She wished she could live at Lighthouse. Sitting in the circle with her friends, she would be completely connected to UC and nothing could hurt her, not even her grandmother’s serrated sobs.
The path was graded. The facilitator noticed where you were blocked and when you were ready to move up a level. Then you went into a closed-door session, which was another cornerstone of Psymetrics and for which you paid a fee. When you invested in a closed-door, you invested in yourself.
“How many levels are there?” Dawn asked. Krista told her that wanting a number was magical thinking. Suffice it to say that people above them, people at the highest level, could communicate without speaking. They could cure illnesses that baffled medical science. There were realms of knowledge so profound they lacked names. “You’re just at the beginning of the path,” Krista told Dawn, which was confusing, because earlier, Krista had told her she was advanced for her age.
During a closed-door, the facilitator asked questions. “How do you feel right now? What are you withholding? What are you hiding and what are you hiding from?” Dawn started with the outside things: “My grandfather’s cancer has metastasized. My dad hasn’t called us in a year and we can’t track him down and my grandpa’s going to die and my dad won’t know.” But Krista always led her to the inside things. “I feel like a freak. There’s something wrong with me. When people look at me, I can’t walk properly.” You could say anything, no matter how secret or seemingly unutterable. “I have dreams about Justin. Sex dreams.”
The facilitator never said anything was right or wrong or good or bad, even when you confessed to taking money from your grandmother’s wallet to pay for a closed-door, knowing that she was too worried about your grandfather to remember what she had spent between the grocery store and the pharmacy. “No judgment, no fear,” Krista said.
After the questions, the facilitator led you through a visualization exercise to dissolve your obstacles. “You are on a road,” Krista said, “and that road stretches out endlessly before you, but in front of you, there is a block. A pile of something. Look closely at that pile and tell me what you see.”
Dawn, sitting cross-legged on the floor, peered into the darkness of her eyelids. She said, “Darkness.”
“Keep looking,” Krista said.
Dawn’s forehead furrowed as she strained against her own eyelids. “Papers and books,” she said finally. She saw her overdue history essay. Her last math test: 23%. Dictionaries, notebooks. Newspaper clippings. A piece of paper with a phone number on it. A tear slipped out of one eye and plopped onto her wrist.
“Good. Good. Now, light a match,” Krista said softly.
Dawn tried, but the papers were soggy. They wouldn’t burn. She tried again. She tried a lighter, gasoline, a blowtorch.
“The facilitator can only facilitate,” Krista said. “Only you can clear the block.”
In Dawn’s mind, it started to rain.
She opened her eyes. “It’s not working.”
For a brief moment, Krista looked irritated, but she only said, “No judgment, no fear, Dawn.”
“No judgment, no fear,” Dawn said. But she judged herself, and she was afraid that if she couldn’t get through, she might be blocked for good.
She tried to get Jimmy to come with her to Lighthouse. “It would really help you,” she said one evening when they were watching TV. “It’s really helped me to see things properly. Like how I always wanted Dad to come back. Or to have a normal family. And that caused me to fall off the path.”
“How is wanting Dad to come back falling off the path?”
“Because it’s judging, and judging is falling off the path.”
Jimmy thought about this. “But if you judge judging as bad, isn’t that still judging?”
“Oh, Jimmy,” she said, exasperated. “I’m talking about having expectations that arise out of fear and cause more fear.”
For some reason, this irritated Jimmy so much that he jumped up and began pacing in front of the TV. “Yeah, well, parents are expected to look after their kids. That’s their freaking job. It’s not like a kid can go, ‘Oh, okay, no problem, I’ll just be over here in the corner, raising myself.’ ” He jammed his hands in his pockets and actually glared at her.
“Jeez, settle down. Sometimes people have obstacles, okay? The parent can be blocked.” Krista had taken her through an exercise for this. She had visualized her mother, her father, her grandparents, and had painted them over with the white light of acceptance and forgiveness, the clear light of UC.
“Well, it’s not my fault they’re blocked. They should still raise their goddamn kids.”
“See, Jimmy? See how this is all your own judgment and fear?”
“No shit, Sherlock! No shit it’s judgment and fear. I was fucking terrified.” He was practically yelling.
“You mean the brownies?”
Jimmy’s face contorted. “The brownies. Not the brownies. Everything! All the time!”
“That’s what I mean. Come to a session with me. I feel completely happy when I’m there.”
Jimmy sat back down and turned his eyes to the TV. “I have my own counsellor. Anyways, no offense, Dawn, but it sounds like crap to me.”
When Dawn arrived at Lighthouse the next day, everyone was in the back room, talking all at once. Krista repeated the excellent news for Dawn: next week, Andre was leading a ten-day retreat outside of Toronto, for senior practitioners and above, and Krista would be one of the facilitators, and everyone was invited. Although Dawn wasn’t nearly far enough along the path to work at that level, she would still benefit from sitting in on the sessions, and Krista would ask Andre to conduct an individual session with Dawn as a special favour.
Dawn said, “Ten days? Next week?” Her final projects were all
coming due, and her math teacher had set up a bunch of tutorials so that she wouldn’t fail the course. And what would she tell Vera?
“We’ll take care of transportation and accommodation, Dawn. All you have to do is pay the retreat fee,” Krista said.
Justin winked and raised an imaginary glass. Krista rang the bell for meditation.
There was no way she could ask Vera for a thousand dollars. Vera didn’t even know about Lighthouse. Dawn had told her she was attending a study group after school, which was true, because what was a session if not a form of study, but Vera would not understand a retreat, and she would certainly not understand a thousand dollars.
She asked Laura, who looked startled. “Lighthouse?” she said. “That hippy-dippy religious thing downtown?”
“It’s not a religion,” Dawn said. “It’s a philosophy.”
Laura said she would have to think about it. Instead, she called Vera, who greeted Dawn after school with “Your mother tells me you’ve gotten involved in a cult and you asked her for money to go to some camp or other in southern Ontario. Well, you aren’t going, and that’s final.”
Dawn put down her bag, too stunned to say a word.
“Is that where you’ve been going after school? That’s the study group?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “I’m at the end of my rope, Dawn. Just when we get your brother turned around, you start. Thank goodness your mother had her eyes open, that’s all I can say.”
“It’s not a cult,” Dawn said finally.
“I don’t care what it is,” Vera said. “You aren’t going.”
“Fine.” Dawn picked up her bag and went upstairs. In her room, she lay on her bed, her mind whirling.
Jimmy knocked on the door. “Dawn?”
“What?”
“They only want money, Dawn,” he said through the door. “A real religion doesn’t make you pay to join.”
“What about the envelope Grandma puts in the basket every Sunday?” Dawn said to the ceiling. “Anyway, it’s not a religion.”
She listened to his footsteps on the stairs. Not going on the retreat meant she would never progress. Worse, she would be left behind. She had a feeling they would all go to the retreat and not come back. Justin wouldn’t come back. Her mind strained for a way to go. Then she remembered her university money.
RETREAT
It wasn’t actually running away, since she was legally an adult. Dawn thought the age of majority was eighteen, but Krista said it was seventeen. Anyway, legality had nothing to do with it. The law was a technicality. Commitment to the path meant rejecting the technicalities, and even certain relationships, in order to grow more fully. You couldn’t drag people along the path with you, but you couldn’t allow them to drag you backwards, either.
Dawn left a note beside the phone. She just said retreat, not where, and Krista said that non-members wouldn’t have access to that information. Please don’t worry about me, she wrote. I am with people who are not only my friends but also my mentors.
They left in the evening and drove through the night. Dawn went with Justin and Krista in Justin’s car; Annette and Cassie went in their own car. Perry refused to miss his summer session courses, and Krista said Perry’s lack of commitment would have prevented him from gaining anything from the retreat anyway. Dawn tried to find out what exactly they would do on the retreat, but Krista wagged a finger. “Don’t anticipate. Participate.”
When it got cold, they gave Dawn a sleeping bag and she watched the lights well up and fade on the car ceiling. She hoped her grandparents were not awake with worry, but then she reminded herself: if they chose to worry, that was their decision. She slept and dreamed that the retreat was in an actual lighthouse, a white wooden structure capped by a red roof, with curtained windows all the way up the sides. When the door opened, everyone was there: her grandparents, her parents, Jimmy, even Geraldine and Amy. “Surprise,” they said. “Surprise!”
The car bumped along a rough road and then stopped. “Wake up, sleepyhead,” Krista said, but Dawn was already awake. They were parked outside an old farmhouse.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“Where do you think?” Krista said and opened the door. Cold air swarmed in. Justin smiled at her. “Uxbridge,” he said.
It wasn’t a lighthouse at all, just a crumbling brick farmhouse with narrow windows made of old yellowed glass and a tarpaper addition that had no windows at all. The yard was full of rusted things half-sunk into the wet earth: an old bed frame and part of a plough. Seven or eight other cars were parked around the farmhouse, along with a dirty white van. Dawn followed Justin and Krista, hopping from stone to plank to root to avoid the squelching mud. The grey sky was breaking apart over low rocky hills to show a golden sky. Be a beacon, Dawn reminded herself. No judgment, no fear. But the wooden huts at the end of the driveway looked like outhouses, and where would everyone sleep?
Inside, the rooms were crammed with boots and sleeping bags and boxes of pamphlets and people standing, sitting, eating bowls of cereal, working an adding machine, reading a novel called The Fountainhead. “Krista!” everyone shouted, and there were hugs all around. Everyone flurried and hurried into another room, and Dawn could hear cries of excitement from deep inside the house. Justin had disappeared too. Dawn stayed where she had stopped in the kitchen, repeating No judgment, no fear against the other voice in her head that was judging the filth of the floor and the sour smell from the overflowing garbage can, and fearing the next ten days, and wishing she could go home. Finally, Justin came back. “Let’s see what there is for breakfast,” he said. He looked at her closely. “You okay?”
She nodded. “Just tired.”
He hugged her and his hands made circular motions on her back. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said, and his chest was so warm and solid she wanted to melt into him. He held her arms and pulled away to look at her. “You’ll feel better after you eat something.” She did feel better, watching Justin set down bowls and spoons and a bag of unsweetened puffed rice.
In the mornings, they attended an open-floor session before getting into a van and driving into Toronto, where they handed out pamphlets on Yonge Street. Krista and Justin stayed behind to facilitate the advanced practitioner sessions with Andre, but after the first day, Justin came into the city with them. On Yonge Street, they were divided into units of three, and no matter where Dawn stood during the count-off, she and Justin always ended up in different groups. At least she managed to sit next to him in the van, and once, he put his head on her shoulder and closed his eyes. She thought she would float up out of the seat with the sheer joy of his curls against her neck.
Toronto, Dawn repeated to herself each morning as they drove into the city. Toronto! All those years she’d spent imagining the city Dean had conjured for them, a blaze of lights and billboards, everybody dressed in black, hailing taxis between clubs, and now here she was. She scanned the passersby for Dean, imagining his delight when she fell into step beside him and said casually, “Hi, Dad.” It would be the kind of surprise he would orchestrate himself. And she didn’t think he would have a problem with Lighthouse. In fact, out of everyone in the family, he was probably farthest along the path to UC. But she didn’t see Dean on Yonge Street, and in the evenings, they were too busy at the farmhouse for Dawn to figure out how to find him.
In the evenings, they were divided into either work groups or session groups. Dawn was often in the kitchen with Justin, who was struggling with the fact that Krista said he just wasn’t ready to advance. “No judgment, no fear,” he said, “but Jesus H. Christ!” He hadn’t come all this way to hand out pamphlets. Why had she brought him if he wasn’t going to do advanced practice? He knew why. It was because she needed a ride and he had a car. He stopped washing dishes and braced himself against the sink, staring into the water. “I’m sorry, Dawn,” he said. “I’m having a hard time with this.”
Krista had already confided in Dawn about this very subject. “I’m afraid Justi
n is slipping off the path,” Krista said. “Sometimes people advance too fast and they aren’t ready, so in a crisis, they slip back to where they actually belong.” She put an arm around Dawn’s shoulder. “I want to ask you a favour, Dawn. I want you to keep an eye on Justin and tell me what he says.”
“Everything he says?”
Irritation flickered in Krista’s face. “No, Dawn. What he says about me.” Her face smoothed itself out. “I think you can really be a beacon for him, Dawn. He has a special connection with you.”
Dawn’s heart missed a beat. A special connection. She promised Krista she would try, but now, drying soapy plates with a filthy dishtowel, she wasn’t sure how to reach him.
Justin dropped a pot into the sink, splashing them both with greasy water. “I don’t know,” he said to Dawn. “Sometimes I think I should just go.”
Dawn grabbed his sleeve. “Go? Go where?”
“Nowhere. I’m just … complaining.” Justin patted her shoulder. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Do you promise?” She couldn’t think of what else to say, but it worked, because Justin gave her hair a playful little yank and said, “Promise.”
She slept on a mattress on the floor in one of the upstairs rooms with three women from Quebec, all of whom ignored her. She lay awake, thinking up ways she and Justin could end up in the same room, and then the same bed, and fell asleep with his imaginary arms around her. On the fifth day of the retreat, she woke up from a dream in which she and Justin were driving down a highway, just the two of them, and he reached over and took her hand and told her, “I love you, Dawn. I have always loved you.” When she opened her eyes, she could still feel the dry warmth of his fingers. She got dressed and went to find him. He was chopping wood behind the barn. “I’m off kitchen duty,” he said, wiping sweat out of his eyes. “It seems I was lacking kitchen commitment. Actually, this is better for me. Physical exertion. But can you bring me some juice?” She ran and came back with a glass of Tang. They sat on an unchopped log. Justin tilted his head back and drained the juice. She watched his Adam’s apple bob. When he put the glass down, he looked at her curiously and said, “What?”
