by James Abel
She was a kid but also an adult. She was, like Eddie, my partner. She was the only one who had believed me during the dark time. She had risked jail to help me. She would, I knew, receive a Presidential Medal, too.
“Guess what, Joe? A bunch of colleges called,” she said. “And offered scholarships to any one; for after I’m a senior, even in two years. Eddie made a joke about it. He said some kids will do anything to get into the right school.”
It was a pleasure to talk about something normal. “Which colleges are you thinking about, Aya?”
“I don’t know. Princeton has a good chemistry program and it’s not too far from Mom. Yale called, like, four times. But they’re further away from Mom, and I worry,” she said meaningfully, “about leaving Mom alone.”
“Don’t go there, Aya.”
“She just wanted to protect me!”
“Just let this stuff stay between the adults.”
She bristled. “You didn’t mind that I was fifteen when you wanted help! You know what I learned in English class, Joe? I learned that a writer once asked a priest what he learned from all his years of taking confession, and the priest said there’s no such thing as an adult, and no one is as happy as they seem. You know why I think that is? It’s because some people like other people but pretend they don’t!”
“Interesting point,” I said, and smiled.
“Mom said you were engaged to get married last year and your fiancée got killed.”
“You’re worse than Eddie. But, yes, that happened.”
Chris walked in and, seeing me awake, almost dropped the bag of sandwiches. She looked from my face to Aya’s. But she addressed me. “Aya wanted to visit.” Meaning, I took it, that she wouldn’t have come otherwise. That she knew I did not want her here.
“I’m glad you both came.” But I said it for Aya’s benefit, to let Chris know that her daughter was welcome, but not her. Seeing her irritated me. She’d stabbed Galli in the back to steal his job. She’d told Burke that I’d gone AWOL. Some voice inside, my own voice, was asking me why I could forgive a Marine stranger for shooting me, but I couldn’t forgive a kindhearted mother for trying to protect her kid.
“Aya and I have to go now,” she said. “The high school is open again. They want Aya to give a talk about what happened, to the whole school. She’s nervous about it.”
“Three,” I said, addressing Aya by her new nickname. Eddie was Two. “Three, you saved the world. Who cares about giving a little speech?”
Aya blushed. “Me.”
—
The Very Reverend Nadine Huxley of the National Cathedral was considerate enough to have a nurse ask if I would care to see her before entering my room. She brought along a meatball hoagie from Curtis and Jody’s Deli on Wisconsin. Curtis and Jody were from Alaska and their Tundra Special included elk and caribou meatballs. Extra peppers. Extra onions. Extra tomato sauce. Extra cheese.
“I was going to say no, Nadine. But I can’t turn down the Tundra Special.”
Nadine pulled up a chair. On the TV, CNN was showing a commercial jet from the United States landing at Orly Airport. American travelers welcome again in France. The Sixth Fleet had withdrawn from waters off North Africa. Roads in quarantined states were open. Supplies of Harlan Maas’s cure were making their way across the nation by rail, truck, car.
“Medical stocks are up,” said the economics correspondent. “The Dow went higher today than it had been before the outbreak.”
“I also brought a King James Bible,” Nadine said. “If you want it.”
“I think I’ve had enough prophets.”
The TV announcer said, “The search for Orrin Sykes centered today on Crystal Lake, Illinois, where the fugitive is believed to be hiding. He grew up there.”
“I haven’t changed my mind about God,” I said.
“Up to you. But millions of people are thanking the Lord for what you did.”
“I think we’ve had enough heavenly messages to last the next hundred years. Keep me out of it.”
Nadine unwrapped her sandwich. “Do you mind if I start first, Joe?” She took a bite. “I see a man who is alive, and triumphed, and who walked into my church and found answers. If that’s not a message, my friend, you tell me what is.”
“I’m too sick to have this conversation.”
“I think you have it with yourself all the time.”
“If you don’t shut up, I’ll tell the nurses to eject you. But I’ll keep both sandwiches.”
She smiled. She ate with healthy bites. She wiped her mouth with a napkin. She opened a couple of Dr. Brown orange sodas and put one on my tray. The TV was now showing the Sixth Prophet’s Cult compound, once a Quaker farm, then sold to the Defense Department, then auctioned off to the public during a budget-cutting bout.
“Tasty sandwich, Nadine. Thanks.”
“God willing.”
“He made the sandwiches, too?”
Nadine laughed. You could never faze her. She was one of those missionaries who would keep coming at you, but she was so good-natured about it that I didn’t mind. There was something solid about Nadine, and I appreciated her. She’d always protect a friend’s back, whether you agreed with her or not.
“He provides sandwiches, Joe. He even made you.”
TWENTY-THREE
I’ve always loved the first moment of spring in the Berkshires. It’s an almost instant rotation away from the winter world. One day, the trees are bare and gray and the soil muddy from snow melting. The air smells of wood smoke drifting from towns and weathered houses. The lake where I kayak is ringed with brownish trees, the waves have white caps, and the blue herons seem to shiver when they watch me pass, stork-like, perched atop dead beaver lodges.
And then, as if a switch was flicked, brown is green. The herons move more languidly. Bald eagles soar above the lake, near their nests in the tall pines. The bad-tempered moose who crosses my property at 5 A.M. each morning appears with the regularity of a clock. He disappears like a snowbird in the winter, and comes back in the spring.
It’s time to walk past Joe’s house again.
I could move around again. The scars and pucker marks remained, and sometimes I heard bones rub inside while I worked on the house. I repaired a water pipe that had cracked while I was away, cut a hole in a bedroom wall and severed six inches of copper, then welded in fresh tubing. I put new shingles on the roof. The deck needed painting. A couple of cathedral-style double-paned windows had fogged up inside with condensation. The airtight seals had weakened so I replaced them. I liked the physical work and went to bed each night exhausted. It was good to be out of rehab, or rather, good to be on the self-imposed kind, working the shoulder with a hammer, instead of having a stranger’s hands kneading it. Relearning the touch of a steering wheel while driving when there was no feeling in one finger. Taking pain pills without a nurse bringing them in a paper cup.
Sleeping in my own house.
I turned down the reporters who wanted to interview me. I shut down the investigators at a certain point, too. You can only go over the same story so many times. The only people that I allowed to come to the house after that were two men—different as night and day—scheduled to testify in the upcoming trials of the apprehended cult members. One of those experts was a forensic psychologist who worked for the defense team. The other was a man who had studied cults, and the damage they do, for the past twenty years. They both wished to question me about Harlan Maas. I wanted to talk to them, too. I wanted answers.
The psychologist arrived first, on a May afternoon, when mud season was over and the first buds bloomed on the birches outside. He was a kind-faced, soft-spoken man with penetrating eyes, wet lips, and an open, vulnerable manner—a Yale University professor who’d worked on numerous high-profile cases over ten years. He had testified in the trial case of a Minnesota man who’d sent
letter bombs to Senators, a Kansas woman accused of kidnapping four thirteen-year-old girls, a Miami heir who had murdered his parents one night and burned their home to the ground, a respected major in the Army who had shot nine soldiers at Fort Bragg.
“You don’t believe evil exists?” I said, astounded. “You don’t believe that any of those people were guilty?”
“They did it,” the psychologist said as we sat on my deck. “They were not rational when they did. Something happens in the brain. It’s no different than any other physical disability. It’s chemistry. It drives you to do things. It’s clear that Harlan Maas was abused as a boy, severely. He grew up in a cult. He loved his abuser. The most traumatic event of his life was watching his abuser being arrested and led away. There was schizophrenia in his family to start with. He tried to live a normal life after the raid, was adopted by loving people, and it worked for a while, and then his adopted parents were killed in an accident and a college love affair went bad. Trauma triggers schizophrenia, and Maas was the right age. He thought he got a phone call from his adopted father one day at college, telling him he was calling from heaven. Remember, this boy didn’t grow up like you or me. He grew up being told by the people he trusted most in the world that the man who abused him every night was God.”
“A phone call from a dead guy?”
“In the lab. At SUNY. On an old-style table phone.”
“He really believed this?”
“The lawyers say I’m not supposed to go into more detail.”
“You want answers from me? Then talk.”
“Look, we can only reconstruct by talking to the people at SUNY. He thought it was a cruel joke at first. He went to the other students, demanding to know who was pretending to be his birth father on the phone. He was referred to the medical center. We’ve got the old reports. He thought he got a call at the medical center while he talked to a school psychiatrist, ordering him to get out. This is classic. Son of Sam—who shot couples in their cars in New York City—thought his orders came from a dog. Dennis Sweeney was a civil rights volunteer and big fan of Congressman Allard Lowenstein. But in 1980, he pumped five bullets into Lowenstein, believing that he’d received orders to do it through a radio receiver in his teeth. For Harlan Maas, it was phones. Old, clunky phones. He bought them at yard sales. It could have been a jam jar. It could have been a shoe. It could have been a magic coffee cup. That’s the definition of insane.”
“But he was rational enough to do research.”
“Yes.”
“And attract followers who murdered for him.”
“So did Asahara and Jones.”
“But he invented a whole new disease.”
“You don’t get it. IQ has nothing to do with it. In fact, high IQ made him more effective.”
I shook my head. “You’re coddled up there at Yale, Doc. You just can’t conceive of evil.”
He shrugged. “Other people have said that. You know, I watched a stranger shoot my parents to death when I was seven, watched them lying on the street in San Diego. The man who did it smiled at me. He didn’t even know them. He’d been told to do it, he later said, by an Angel. That man actually offered me a piece of fudge, and then he walked away. He offered me fudge! So, Colonel, who knows? Maybe I came to this point of view to protect my own sanity. But if that’s the case, I like the world just as I see it. Please tell me exactly what you talked about with Harlan Maas.”
—
The following day—after the doctor left—a Honda Fit with Delaware plates pulled into my dirt/grass driveway and the middle-aged man who got out in a dark suit, tall, lanky, and harder looking, was the cult expert named Bobby Boyd. Boyd was a self-educated Kentucky man who said that his first experience with cults occurred when his mother was in a nursing home, and a cult took hold inside. Someone convinced half the residents there that he could turn back time and, if they followed his beliefs, make them younger. But that man stole money from the residents. Then he fled.
“Since then, for twenty years, I’ve been after them,” he said. “The people who run these things are evil manipulators. They’re con men and women. They study the techniques. They read up on methods. Harlan Maas did the same thing. They control every aspect, every minute, of their followers’ lives. They shut out influences from the outside. They say they have the great cosmic answers, that their followers are special, that they will lead the world into a new age. You’d be astounded how many times this has happened.”
“So Harlan Maas wasn’t insane?”
Bobby Boyd laughed. “No more than you or me.”
“What about the red telephone?”
“After a while they come to believe their own bullshit,” said Bobby Boyd fiercely. “But don’t think that means they’re insane. They know what they’re doing every step of the way.”
—
My bedtime reading consisted of reports the admiral forwarded, about cults. I followed the search for Orrin Sykes on TV. I watched a PBS special about Harlan Maas and the Cult of the Sixth Prophet, which ended with a trio of forensic psychologists—talking heads—arguing about Orrin Sykes.
The first man said, “He’s hiding. Separation from the group obviously gave him distance to reevaluate his connection.”
The second said, “I think he did what the group planned. Mass suicide. He’s dead. We may never find the body.”
“Mission,” the third shrink predicted. “If you look at his mission, it was to kill Colonel Joe Rush. And because he failed, the cult was destroyed. I believe it possible that he’s trying to make up for it and complete his mission.”
And I thought, Tell me something I don’t know.
Before I left Washington, I’d hit the spy shop and spent four thousand dollars on security equipment. I put the laser alarm detectors in the trees out back, and at the foot of the driveway. That didn’t work because at night too many animals prowled around outside. I moved the detectors to the deck and the foot of the front steps. They were small white boxes, visible, but you had to know where to look.
With the detectors so close to the house, I’d get less warning if the alarm went off. But I wouldn’t keep waking up in the middle of the night because a bear lumbered past and crossed a beam.
Spring became summer and the leaves were thick that year, and my shoulder ached less. Doctors said that sensation might return in my finger. I kayaked three times a week to work the muscles. Orrin faded from the news. His photo was covered up by a bank robber’s in our post office. The trial date was set for the other cult members. Harlan Maas was not even a subject of dinner talk anymore in Washington, the admiral e-mailed me. The new crisis in Ukraine was.
A couple of my old high school buddies knocked on the door and said they had seen that week’s New York Times Magazine, “the real story of the outbreak,” and the old photo of me from the Marines. A town selectman showed up and said that he wanted to honor me in the Memorial Day parade this year. No thanks. Aya and Eddie kept in contact. Eddie was in Boston, with his family, starting the business that we’d once thought to create together. Aya was getting ready for two weeks of science summer school at Woods Hole.
Each July the closest neighbors on my dirt road hold a paella party. They lay out immense cooking pans on steel rods, perched on concrete blocks, over a fire pit. They light up mesquite-scented charcoal and stir into the pan olive oil and chorizo, shrimp, peppers, onions, chicken, and the smells drift over the forest as outdoor speakers echo with old jazz favorites: Billie Holiday . . . Art Tatum.
More than a hundred people come. Our little road fills with cars, some park in the weeds along the shoulder, or in our driveways, the license plates from New York and Connecticut and as far away as Virginia.
I’d debated with myself whether to go this year, but the gathering was the perfect kind of event for me. There would be old friends there from high school. There would be neighbo
rs who I bumped into sometimes by our grouped mailboxes on the road. Even strangers were welcome. Sure, for a few moments I’d be the center of attention for the out-of-staters . . . that’s the man who stopped the outbreak . . . but courtesy was the rule. I wouldn’t be bothered. I’d stay an hour, get the minimal amount of human contact that passed for social life these days. Then I’d walk two hundred yards home, and watch PBS, or read, or plan out tomorrow’s cement patch work on pockets of foundation gouged out by ice during the cold winter this past year.
Aya walked toward me in the crowd, holding a paper plate loaded with food.
“I made Mom drive me here. We’re taking a road trip looking at colleges. I wanted to see Williams. I made her not call you. She wanted to ask permission to come. But if we called you, you’d say don’t, Eddie said.”
“He’s not always right, you know.”
“Was he wrong, Joe?”
“No.”
“Here comes Mom. Be nice.”
She was the kind of woman that you notice even before you realize that you know her. Something about that petite body, the rhythm of the walk, back straight, hips rolling, slightly pigeon-toed steps, that drew glances. Chris Vekey made her way between the cluster of New York theater people drinking homemade sangria and the trio of town selectmen in folding chairs, stuffing brownies into their mouths. She held a paper plate piled with paella and romaine leaf and sweet walnut salad. Her eyes held me. They created a warm sensation that instantly became irritation that she was here.
“Joe.”
“Colleges, huh? Isn’t it a little early for that?”
“Aya finished up the year with straight A’s. She wanted to look now, start thinking about it.”
