by Matt Cardin
Me: You said your god is not alone, that there are others like him. What are their names? What do you call your god? [Mitch laughed again at this point, and the wet sucking sound revolted me even more than it had before. He was still suppressing more laughter as he wrote on his pad.]
Mitch: I could tell you their names, but they wouldn’t mean anything to you. Don’t worry. You’ll understand it all soon enough.
When I read this last line, I looked up and saw him smiling at me. It was not a pleasant expression. Up until then, I had liked him a great deal for his intelligence and good humor, even though his description of his beliefs had struck me as positively nuts. It was sounding like the theology of the Sick and Saved movement bordered on insanity, but I had still found myself liking the old guy. He possessed a palpable and undeniable charisma.
But now this had suddenly gone underground and been replaced by a sinister look that I hadn’t seen before. Being a professional writer, I thought of it as more a leer than a smile. Its menacing character was made all the more apparent by the yellow light of the lamp he had switched on when the sun went down. The dim rays slanted across his face from the left, casting his features into high relief, calling out every nuance of the webwork of lines on his skin and showing me clearly that he thought he knew something I didn’t, something that made him feel smug with superiority. It was so blatant, and it gave his last comment such a threatening quality, that I almost crossed a journalistic line and demanded to know what he was holding back. But then I caught myself and purposely returned his smile. His breathing was like the scraping of the nocturnal forest noises outside the windows as he continued to look at me.
I was about to say something, I didn’t know what, when he handed me his notepad again. He had written a new message while I wasn’t looking. “The God gives you a choice,” he said. “First He gives you a taste of the bliss He’s offering you. Then He shows you what it’s going to cost you to accept it.” When I looked at him, the smug smile was still planted on his lips. What I had taken to be evidence of an inner mirth glinting in his eyes now looked like cold calculation. I could think of nothing to say in response. Suddenly I felt hot, tired, and worn out by the conversation. My vision flickered with dark spots, and I realized with a shock that it would take only a slight relaxation of vigilance for me to pass out. This had never happened before. My stomach quivered as I wiped a hand over my face.
To hide what was happening, I ended our meeting. “Mitch,” I said, “it’s getting late, and I should get out of here and stop bothering you. I’ve enjoyed the hospitality. You’ve been very generous with your time.” My hands were shaking as I gathered my things and shut my briefcase. When I rose to my feet, the backs of my thighs had sweated through my slacks, and the fabric of the sofa cushion peeled away from my legs like the skin of a soggy fruit.
He stayed seated and wrote something. “We’re having a meeting this Saturday night,” the words said. “I’d like you to come.”
I didn’t know what to say. This was far more than I had hoped for. Sixty seconds earlier, I would have jumped at the chance without hesitating. No reporter had ever attended one of the worship services—or whatever they were—of the Sick Seekers. With the inside information I would gain from such a meeting, I might be looking at a substantial journalistic project that I could expand and sell to a national publication after I had turned in a perfunctory piece to Bobby.
But Mitch’s change of expression had filled me with doubt and distaste, and I hesitated. In the silence, the flies came back and started trying to settle on my left cheek again. Thinking they were probably attracted to a spot of sweet tea that I must have unknowingly splashed on myself, I rubbed my face and used the gesture to look as if I were mulling over his invitation. Which, in fact, I was.
“I’m very interested,” I finally said. “Where do you meet?”
“Right here at my house,” was his written reply. “You already know the way. The meeting is at seven o’clock. Why don’t you come on out and meet the rest of us? There’s lots more for you to learn.”
Despite my suspicion, I knew it was unlikely that I could turn down such an invitation, and I think he knew it, too. All afternoon as he and I had talked, I had felt that wheel in my head turning slowly and steadily. My spirit was energized by a vitality that seemed totally out of step with the tenor of the conversation and the dizziness that still threatened to overturn me. Even as I stood there struggling to understand all that I had learned, a warm pulse of well being throbbed in my chest.
But I still couldn’t bring myself to accept his invitation at the moment. I thanked him and said I’d think about it. He seemed satisfied with this, for he rose from his chair and extended his hand. His skin was rough and dry as sandpaper, and his grip felt like a vise. My own hand was soft and smooth from years of desk work, and was practically swallowed whole by his enormous grasp. I tried not to look him in the eye, but I couldn’t help noticing that he was still watching me closely, as if he were waiting for something. When he released my hand, I headed immediately for the door.
Outside, darkness had taken complete hold of the house and the highway. The daytime buzzing of insects had given way to the nighttime screeching and whirring of crickets and tree frogs. It had been a long time since I spent an evening in the country, and the sounds and smells of summer night conjured up nostalgic memories of long-ago childhood evenings filled with creek swimming and backyard barbecuing and chasing after lightning bugs.
At the bottom of the porch steps I turned and gave him a wave. Crunching through the gravel toward my car, I still had a thousand questions to ask him. I had failed to follow up on all kinds of details that needed filling in. On first impression his beliefs struck me as nothing so much as a perverted mysticism, not far from the spiritual attitude I had embraced while in college, but in a horribly twisted form. His determination to give himself up to his cancer paralleled my own erstwhile attitude of detached transcendence. But he didn’t just give himself up to his disease, he conceived of it as some kind of deity, and he identified himself with it, just as a Christian mystic might identify his soul with God or a Vedantic Hindu might identify himself with Brahman.
My head boiled with these thoughts as I settled into the driver’s seat and inserted the key in the ignition. I looked up briefly and saw Mitch seated once again in the porch swing. He hadn’t turned the outside light on. The pale light of the lamp in his living room shone feebly through the screen door, illuminating him again with a chiaroscuro effect. I found myself searching reflexively for that inner wheel, and there it was, turning in the shadows of my psyche, drawing up fresh water from a well in my soul. I felt a pressing need to write about it in my journal, for it had been years since I was so spontaneously aware of my inner spiritual state.
As I started the engine, I saw Mitch reach up for the first time since my arrival and probe gently at his throat. It was a gesture I would have expected from a man whose medical charts said he should have already been dead from cancer of the larynx. But from those same charts, I never would have expected him to touch that diseased area of his body with such an apparent attitude of affection.
4
. . . those sorrows which are sent to wean us from the earth.
—Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
The next day, the first person I thought of turning to for my post-interview research was Dr. Baumann from the religious studies department at Terence University. The last time I had spoken with him, I had been writing a profile about the local Baha’i group, whose worship center was located on the university grounds. He was the natural choice to call for a scholarly comment on such matters, since his specialty area was comparative religion. As the son of Methodist missionaries who had raised him while living and ministering in India, he was the perfect source of information and opinions on such matters.
But beyond his professional qualifications, currently I just wanted to talk with him as a friend. He was more than a former teacher, he wa
s a mentor, a status he had assumed when I lost my mother to cancer during my second year of grad school. He had noticed how distraught I was, and had offered me some free pastoral counseling. Although his orthodox Christian outlook hadn’t coincided with my mystic-cum-agnostic one, I had deeply appreciated his moral support and words of wisdom. After I graduated, he was always the first one I approached when I needed a quotation for a story. Now I found myself seeking his advice once again for personal reasons. I didn’t know how to understand what was happening inside me, and I hoped to get a grip on it by having him explain to me the obscurities of all that I had learned from Mitch. Somehow the two were connected, the Sick Seekers story and the wheel of peace that was turning in my head. I needed input from an objective source to make sense of it.
Wanting to surprise him, I went directly to his office on the second floor of Markham Hall without phoning ahead. Then, standing there in the hallway before his locked door, I called myself an idiot—out loud, and then looked around to see whether any passerby had heard me—for not having called to check on his summer office hours.
My next stop was the religious studies departmental office, where I found a new secretary seated behind the reception desk. She was a dull, flat-eyed woman who seemed to be totally devoid of personality. This was in marked contrast to Josie, the vivacious middle-aged neo-pagan who had been the department’s secretary for the entire length of my involvement there. But oddly enough, the new woman looked a little bit like Josie, with the same stringy gray hair, pale skin, and thin nose. She might have been Josie’s slightly older and significantly duller sister. She told me in a monotone that Dr. Baumann was on sabbatical and that I could e-mail him or leave a message on his voice mail if I wanted. When I asked where he was, she mumbled, “He’s checking out those Sick Seekers down in Nevada.”
My astonishment was profound. When I pressed her for more, she told me that Dr. Baumann’s brother had become involved with the Sick Seekers after discovering that he was suffering from end stage liver disease, the result of a longtime undiagnosed infection with both hepatitis A and B. He had refused to seek a liver transplant, and Dr. Baumann was in Las Vegas to see if he could rescue his brother from the cult. He was also using the opportunity to do some research into the theology of the group, which he said deserved more attention than the mass media had given it.
By the way she ticked this information off, I could tell the new woman was probably just repeating information that she had gained by eavesdropping on conversations with Dr. Allee, the department head, whose office door was right behind her. In the past Josie had always enjoyed passing on this same kind of gossip, but she had done it with far more flair, interspersing the gossipy information with lots of smiling and flirting. I had always come away feeling pepped up and kind of turned on. The new lady, by contrast, made me feel weary and vaguely disgusted.
My thoughts were racing every which way as I left her and headed for the stairwell. Mitch and his maniacal beliefs. Dr. Baumann and his sick brother. Josie’s replacement by a pod person. The story I was supposed to be writing for Bobby. It was all a giant puzzle, or perhaps a “magic eye” picture, one of those computer generated images that revealed three-dimensional depths when you relaxed your eyes and let the hidden image coalesce like magic.
But walking down the sterile institutional length of Markham Hall’s second floor with my head buzzing with competing claims to attention, I found a new and unexpected thought jostling its way to the forefront. It was more of an emotion, really: for no good reason I was pining for the innocent passion of my college years. For a long time those years had seemed frozen in eternity, like a snapshot of an idyllic childhood. This new evidence of elements from my miserable present invading the pristine happiness of my past—Dr. Baumann, my mentor, getting mixed up with the damned Sick Seekers—felt like the most profound kind of invasion. It was like somebody had started to rewrite my past to make it conform more to the way I saw the world currently when I was in one of my darker moods: full of suffering, devoid of meaning, going nowhere.
I caught myself scratching the left side of my face as I took the stairs down to the first floor and walked outside to visitor parking. As always, the campus was dotted with lovely instances of female flesh. The fall semester would be starting on Monday, and thousands of students were in town a few days early to get settled into their dorms and fraternities and sorority houses. Always when I came to campus, I basked in the appreciative looks I got from all the girls. It was especially fun at this time of year, when the new crop of freshmen were in town. But suddenly, out of nowhere, my face was itching so badly that I couldn’t enjoy the attention.
It rapidly burgeoned into some sort of attack. By the time I got to my car, the itching had become a burning. When I looked in the rearview mirror, I saw my left cheek mottled with angry red splotches from all the rubbing and scratching I had already done. I couldn’t imagine where I might have come in contact with poison oak or ivy, but they seemed the likely culprits. I had been susceptible to their influence since I was a boy, when I had caught a rash from one or both at least once per summer.
On the way home I stopped by a drugstore to get some allergy cream. A poster prominently displayed above the prescription counseling window shouted three words in tall, white letters on a black background: “TAKE YOUR MEDICINE!” A roundabout reference to the Sick Seekers, I assumed.
The lady behind the counter was attractive in a more mature way than the girls on campus. Her hair was red and her eyes green like mine. She wore a lot of mascara, which contrasted nicely with her white lab coat. I smiled at her as she took my money and handed me my purchase in a white paper bag, but her eyes were drawn to the left side of my face, and the smile she gave me was only the perfunctory kind that she would have given any other customer.
5
The purpose of the world is for you to suffer, to create the suffering that seems to be what is necessary for the awakening to happen.
—Eckhart Tolle
When I awoke on Friday morning, a black spot had developed on my face overnight.
I had arrived back at my apartment on Thursday afternoon in a virtual frenzy of itching and burning, and had raced upstairs, torn open the box containing the cream, and slathered nearly a quarter of the tube onto my inflamed skin. It had helped briefly with its cooling and softening effect, but an hour later the pain returned. By eight o’clock the cream was gone. Then I started with the moisturizing lotion. It turned out the antihistamine effect of the allergy cream hadn’t been doing anything, because the lotion worked just as well.
Or just as poorly. I lay awake on the couch in front of the television until one o’clock in the morning, unable to relax or think about anything except the maddening pain in my face. Right before drifting off to sleep at last, I got up for a final look at my cheek in the bathroom mirror. By that time the red splotches had swelled into burning welts from my constant scratching. On closer inspection, I thought my face looked a little distorted and rather out-of-proportion, as if the left side were bigger and heavier than the right. The thought of visiting the emergency room flickered through my mind, but only briefly. Of course I was scared and wanted to know just what the hell was going on, but those concerns were outweighed by the fact that in my current condition I didn’t want to go anyplace where I might run the risk of being recognized. I couldn’t imagine going to the hospital and running into Bobby’s wife Peg, or even worse, the virginal Lindy, and having them see me like this. Especially not Lindy. Not when I still had half-formed plans for the two of us.
So I just returned to the couch and rubbed on another layer of lotion. Then I closed my eyes and concentrated on breathing slowly and steadily while the voice of the announcer on the television news network droned on and on, saying something about the Sick Seekers.
My first stop when I awoke in the morning was the bathroom again, where I discovered the black spot on my cheek. It arrested my attention as soon as I flipped the light switch, a
nd I examined it in the harsh glare of the vanity bulbs with my face so close to the mirror that my breath steamed the glass. The red welts had disappeared and been replaced by an uneven circle about the size of a pea. It rode high on my left cheekbone, a blobby mole with a ragged border, colored with an irregular hue. Its center was black as tar, but toward the edges it thinned out and half blended with the normal peachy color of my skin to form a sickly dark brew like weak coffee.
With growing panic, I realized it was a familiar shape that had lodged on my face. The coloration touched a chord of memory. An awful thought occurred to me, one that I tried to shove down and forget, but it wouldn’t be denied.
Years earlier, when I was nineteen years old and a sophomore in college, I had undergone surgery to have cancerous cells removed from that same cheek. For several weeks I had watched with curiosity as the new moles had appeared. They had been small and faint, and I had thought they were just the aftereffects of the severe sunburn I had suffered while celebrating Spring Break on Padre Island. But when I arrived back home in May after the semester ended, my mother flew into a panic at the sight of them. We hadn’t seen each other since Christmas, so I had hoped she would greet me warmly. Instead, she pounced on the spots and drilled me over their history—when and where they had first appeared, whether they were painful, and so on—almost before she saw fit to say hello. Her behavior was typical, but I still felt disappointed.
I did what she wanted and made an appointment with a local dermatologist, who surprised me by suggesting a biopsy, which then astounded me by showing a malignancy. It surprised the doctor, too, because, as he told me, sudden onset usually indicates a benign growth. As things stood, he told me the spots had to be removed immediately.
I submitted to the operation in a kind of daze. He burned the cells off with a surgical laser and I wore a bandage on my face for a week. When the time arrived to take it off, there were only a few minor marks on my skin to show that anything had ever happened, and these faded within a few days. The moment when I stood before my mother and proudly showed her my virgin cheek glowing with new health was forever seared into my memory. She looked at it with a faintly crazed expression. Then she burst into tears and fled to her bedroom, where she refused to open the door for two days. After that we never spoke about the matter again, not even when she developed the breast cancer that would eventually kill her.
