Captive

by Catherine Oxenberg

  I’d think about this ridiculous moment years later when I found out about the branding.

  How sensitive they were about harming animals, yet they were branding women’s flesh as if they were cattle. It would be laughable if it wasn’t so tragic. They should have had one of those disclaimers on their front door, like at the end of movies: “No animals were harmed in the teaching of our program—only women.”

  Casper and I were never left alone to eat lunch by ourselves; a posse was always with us, and there was reason for that. Leaving students by themselves at mealtimes or in hotels gave them too much time to ruminate about any doubts they might have about the teachings. It interrupted the careful indoctrination process. Coaches were ordered to stick to students like white on rice and to make sure they didn’t congregate and conspire against the training.

  At night, we’d have tea with Mark and Bonnie in their kitchen and exchange updates about our days. They were both very busy “in service to the great Vanguard’s mission to save the world.” Mark spent a lot of time in the basement, knee-deep in editing a documentary that he’d been working on for four years already: Encender el Corazón (“Light the Heart”).

  It was about the kidnapping epidemic in Mexico and the ethics of paying ransom for a loved one’s return. Slipped in there, of course, was an interview with Keith and an introduction to his principles. Vanguard believed you had to say no to paying ransom money and refuse to be extorted and blackmailed. You had to be willing to sacrifice your loved one for a higher ideal, he said.

  Applying his ideology, the film implied, would make the kidnapping problem in Mexico disappear magically.

  Espians were trained to believe that Keith, the third best problem solver in the world, had the answer to every global crisis.

  Though she’d given up acting, Bonnie kept up with her music. Like Mark, she steered it toward the higher good of the mission, strumming her guitar and performing her original songs at local colleges. She had an angelic, ethereal quality about her that reminded me of India.

  Both Mark and Bonnie believed in earnest that what they were doing was for the betterment of mankind. They were good, honest, sincere people. Could they have guessed at that moment that, five years later, my daughter would be branded with a searing hot implement of torture half a mile away from their home? I don’t think so. I think their devotion blinded them to the darker elements lurking underneath the veneer of Nxivm.

  Other than giving up their glamorous Hollywood life to move to Albany “for the community” and to be close to Keith—which would make me suspicious of anyone—they seemed like a very happy, normal couple.

  I couldn’t say the same for two of their friends, another ESP couple also crashing at Bonnie and Mark’s that week.

  Casper and I were staying in the guest room across from the couple. One night, I bumped into the wife in the hall coming out of their room and I got a glimpse through their open door. On the floor next to the king-sized bed were two pillows and a pile of blankets made up like a bed.

  Seeing my confusion, the woman volunteered cheerfully, “I’m sleeping on the floor.”

  “Why? Bad back?”

  “No.” She smiled. “I’m doing penance. For being defiant to my husband.”

  My jaw nearly hit the floor.

  “What? He told you to sleep on the floor?”

  “Oh, no, no. He didn’t,” she said sweetly. “It was my coach who gave me my penance!”

  “And your husband is okay with that?”

  “Of course!” she said, nodding. “He supports whatever I need to do for my personal growth.”

  We stood for a moment in the hallway together, between the two rooms, and I wanted to take the woman by the shoulders and shake her. I didn’t understand; she seemed so gleeful about being punished. And she was acting so normal about it, as if all husbands and wives did this.

  It all made sense when I found out later that the woman had been mandated to take the Jness eight-day intensive, a more intense version of the program that had made my mother revolt and gripped me with chilling images of The Stepford Wives. Mark, too, was taking a very new, complementary course for men called Society of Protectors (SOP) that aligned with the same teachings. (Within the year, he’d start leading it as well.)

  For the rest of our stay, I went to great, almost comical lengths to hide the other couple’s sleeping arrangement from Casper—racing up the stairs and rushing ahead of him to make sure their door was shut. My husband supported my doing whatever I needed to do for my personal growth, too, but I was seriously worried he could buy into the whole subservient-wife thing, and I didn’t want him getting any ideas.

  I’d done the three-day seminar, and this woman had done the eight-day-intensive: that was only five days’ difference between me sleeping on the floor or not!

  I went to bed that night confused. If these programs were supposed to teach people how to think more effectively, as Mark had preached to India and me a year before, why did it sometimes seem as though they weren’t thinking for themselves at all?

  —

  BACK AT HEADQUARTERS, there was no sign of Keith. Around day four, we were alerted that our lucky day had arrived: it was time to meet the great and powerful Oz.

  By then, most devotees were brainwashed into thinking the guy was a demigod, after having bowed to his image and thanked him hundreds of times already. The insane anticipation the coaches built up about Keith was another way they strung you along. Maybe you’ll see him, maybe you won’t.

  Our big meeting with the man who held the keys to the kingdom was an invitation to watch him play volleyball one Monday night. He played regularly with a group of Espians, and it was considered a privilege to watch him play, the coaches told us in hushed voices.

  A bunch of us piled into a car near midnight and drove out to a gym in the suburbs. Casper thought the whole thing was overkill, watching some guy play volleyball, but he perked up when they invited him to join Keith’s team. (I was not invited.) Here was a chance to get a workout and flex his pecs! Casper was a good athlete, known mostly for his enthusiasm—he’d won awards for his enthusiasm. He wasn’t a regular volleyball player, but he’d played one in a movie, Kill Shot, more than a decade earlier, which is almost as good.

  As for me, I was conflicted about meeting Keith. I was still disturbed about what he’d concocted for the Jness program, but I was curious to meet him after the endless hoopla.

  We weren’t the only spectators when we arrived. A gaggle of women of all ages from the ESP community were lined up in folding chairs along the perimeter of the court, watching Keith direct the players.

  I rubbed my eyes and squinted. Was that him? Maybe my vision was still blurry from the botched surgery I’d had months earlier. I blinked and looked again.

  There he was: a short, stocky, nerdy-looking guy wearing Coke-bottle glasses, Velcro sneakers, a headband, short shorts, and striped tube socks circa 1975. He looked fiftyish and unremarkable in every way.

  This was the almighty Vanguard?

  Casper dashed onto the court, and the men began to play. The female fan base at courtside jumped up out of their chairs and cheered every time Keith made contact with the ball, which wasn’t so often—especially because he kept stopping the game.

  What we didn’t know was that Keith had made up his own rules for the game, just as he’d dreamed up his own words in the English language and invented his own warped moral doctrine. Keith had to be the Conceptual Founder of everything he did.

  So every ten seconds, he stopped, irritated and slightly impatient, to correct my husband on the rules. Casper’s footwork was wrong, he was moving out of bounds, he wasn’t supposed to hit like that. Everything Casper was doing was incorrect because the official volleyball rules and choreography had been Vanguard-ified.

  Casper tried to be a good sport and follow Keith’s nonsensical instructions, but fifteen minutes into the game, he leapt high into the air to take a shot and accidentally rammed his
elbow into another player’s head—and not just any player, but the best player on Keith’s team. The guy crumpled to the ground, knocked out cold with a concussion. You might say Casper made a Kill Shot.

  The rest of the players—all nonviolent, non-meat-eating pacifists—were horrified by such uncouth, aggressive barbarianism. They didn’t understand he was just being enthusiastic. I couldn’t help but think: That’s what happens when you pit a real man against a team of beta males.

  Keith gave someone a nod; Casper was escorted (for the second time that week!) off the court. He went to the sidelines to check on the guy he’d knocked out, and Keith took that moment to come over and greet his fans.

  The women rushed to him, fawning.

  One blonde in particular reached him first, threw her arms around him, hugged him full body, and kissed him on the lips like a lover. I’d noticed her when we first arrived but didn’t know who she was. Someone whispered, “That’s the actress from Smallville,” but I’d never seen the TV show, so I didn’t recognize her—her name was Allison Mack.

  After he finished kissing Allison, he tended to the others. One by one, he gave each a tight, extended hug and a kiss on the lips—long, lingering, deep kisses, with plenty of penetrating eye gazing. It was bizarrely intimate.

  Just as bizarre was what wasn’t happening. Here was Casper—a hunky Hollywood celebrity in a gym in suburban Albany, New York—with dozens of female groupies in the room, and none of them gave him a single glance. Not one! I had never seen this happen before; he might as well have been invisible. Keith had a Svengali hold on people that eclipsed everything and everyone else.

  Now Vanguard headed toward me. Casper watched from the other side of the gym, eyeing us like a hawk. Keith came up close, too close—I could smell his bad BO—and fixed his Casanova stare on me. That’s when I saw . . . this Don Juan was cross-eyed! He leaned in, lips puckered, and I put up my hand like a crossing guard that tells kids: Do Not Cross This Line. As if I was going to let a stranger who’d just French-kissed the entire cheerleading squad and thought women were “entitled, overemotional, self-serving, weak-willed, and indulgent” kiss me?

  Never going to happen, my friend. I stuck out my hand.

  “Hi,” he mumbled, giving me a moist, limp handshake.

  Keith was soft-spoken with a high-pitched voice, like a ten-year-old choirboy. In other words, he was no James Earl Jones.

  We made small talk for about ten seconds. I don’t even remember what we said; that’s how memorable it was. And then it was over. Seven months of building him up as mankind’s salvation, the missing link, the fulcrum of humanity, the holder of all secrets, and I get this cross-eyed messiah? It was a total lunch-bag letdown.

  Vanguard went back to his fans, Casper came over, and we plotted our escape. We looked over at Keith, who was again deep-kissing all the girls.

  “He’s having sex with all these women,” my husband blurted out.

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “What woman would want to get naked with this guy?”

  We tried slipping out of the gym inconspicuously, but that was impossible with Elvis still in the building. We got the stink eye from a bunch of them for making such a blasphemous exit. But we didn’t care. Between Casper’s volleyball mishap and my anticlimactic meeting with the Oompa Loompa boy wonder, all we wanted to do was get in our rental car and run for the hills.

  —

  AFTER WE RETURNED home from Albany, India emailed me a photo of a mural she’d seen on a brick wall while stopped at a light on Beverly Boulevard:

  Cheap Lobotomies: Call 323-906-XXXX

  It was so her wacky sense of humor, and I laughed.

  But as a woman who believes that the universe sends us signs, I wish I had paid more attention to that one. Had I taken it as an omen, I would have realized that India and I were unwittingly enrolled in a lobotomy procedure of sorts, only it was far from cheap.

  But I didn’t pay heed, because, on the surface, everything still looked fine.

  The leader of the program creeped me out, sure. Mobius was humiliating at times, yes. But my final days were about self-love, reclaiming my innocence, and self-forgiveness, so when I finished, I was drunk from love bombing myself. I was sure I’d improved my “love state,” and I left that program on a high.

  India was happy, too—very much so. As we entered the new year, she was excited, busy, and growing up before my eyes. This year she would turn twenty-one.

  She was working as a freelance photo assistant and a model, recently nabbing lucrative campaigns for JCPenney and Nike. We went on a family outing to Macy’s to see the display of her floor-to-ceiling lingerie ad, and she looked stunning. (“Ooooooh, India, you’re naked!” Maya and Celeste squealed. “Why are you in your underwear?!”)

  And she attributed her success, she told me, to a new confidence and assertiveness she’d acquired because of her ESP classes.

  So it seemed India was attaining exactly what we’d hoped she would gain when the two of us embarked on our journey together a year before.

  But it was the sweet before the bitter pill, as they say.

  The day when we first signed up for ESP, they promised us it would change our lives, and they would keep their word: it would change our lives. Just not the way that either of us could have imagined, and definitely not for the better.

  5

  * * *

  TWO ROADS DIVERGED

  ESP was starting to spread in Los Angeles—not like wildfire but enough to graduate from its previous pop-up venue and merit its own new center in Venice, still close to the carnival-like atmosphere of the boardwalk.

  Early that year, India had enrolled me in a yearlong program, “Ethos,” a few weeks before my underwhelming meeting with the mighty Vanguard. Again I was hoping that she and I could find a way to travel this bumpy trek through the bizarre world of ESP together.

  “Ethos” was an ongoing, twice-weekly class in which, I very soon discovered, those same old Level One module videos of Nancy were being rehashed over and over; nothing new was offered. The repetition was essential, the coaches emphasized, so that the material would sink in as deeply and as irrevocably as possible.

  “In order to fully integrate,” they explained, “you need to do each module three times at the very least—if not more—because the concepts are so, so complex and so, so advanced!”

  If you didn’t agree with a concept, here was a chance to simply redo that module over and over again until you convinced yourself that you did. And if that sounds to you like indoctrination and brainwashing, you’d be right.

  But here’s the rub: every time a new student joined the group, we had to start all over from the beginning of the first module—so we stayed stuck, frozen in time, in the world of modules one and two. The repetition was like a Groundhog Day nightmare loop in which each class seemed to consist of the same questions, the same heated discussions, followed by the same debrief every time.

  To the newbie, it might have been provocative and new. As for me, I was like Bill Murray’s TV weatherman character heading out to Gobbler’s Knob yet again to see if Punxsutawney Phil the groundhog would see his shadow, when I already knew he wouldn’t. I wasn’t feeling more integrated, as promised, I was feeling increasingly bored and suffocated. Once I knew the debriefs by heart, I started tuning out and daydreaming—waking up just in time to give the perfect answer to the module, thereby impressing the new kid.

  India loved it, but the whole setup seemed like a money scam to me. I forced myself to go for a while because I’d prepaid for a year of classes, and I hated wasting money or bailing on a commitment. Also, in the beginning, I enjoyed driving to and from class with India. But after a few months, she began going early and staying late, so even that was taken away from us. I started tapering off until, finally, it got to the point where I had to either stop or chew off my arm.

  That didn’t stop them trying to recruit me for more, though.

  Once you’d signed up for Level T
wo, the coaches started badgering you to become a coach, too—their urgings were a constant chorus on a broken record set on endless repeat.

  “The work really only starts when you join the stripe path,” they’d say smugly. That was Keith’s wonky phrase meaning that you’d signed up to be a coach; you were “on the stripe path.” It made no sense to me, but as I said, he labeled things at whim. He ruled a kingdom with its very own language. Creating his own jargon for the program made members feel like they were part of their own community, with outsiders unable to understand them.

  The coaches impressed upon the students that, because they’d been given the greatest tool ever offered to mankind, they owed it as a debt of gratitude to pay the teachings forward for the good of others. Recruiting new students wasn’t enough anymore: you had to teach this crap, too.

  “That’s never going to happen,” I told them. “Don’t even bother with me.”

  My refusal to commit further to the cause, I’m sure, was frowned upon, and forevermore put me in the category of lightweight dilettante to the higher-ups. India, however, had been toying with the idea of becoming a coach since they began luring her a few months earlier. The topic came up only once between us, and I uncharacteristically gave her my unfiltered opinion. I usually try hard to not give my kids unsolicited advice and allow them the freedom to explore without me interfering or robbing them of the dignity of their own process. But in this case, the words slipped out before I could rein them in.

  “If you really want my opinion, India”—which she didn’t—“I think this program should be used as a tool, not a lifestyle. Becoming a coach means it will consume your life.”

  India was quiet. She clearly felt very close and anchored to the group members after having shared so much with them. I felt that way about the people I’d met, moduled with, and EM-ed with, too. But for India, those feelings went deeper. She loved the sense of community she’d found with Espians and had even been socializing with the coaches, attending regular Humanities Events—Keith’s term for group hikes and potluck dinners. (He not only made up words but was also a walking malapropist.) I suppose the insinuation was that when Espians hung out, they were evolving humanity somehow through their very convergence. My daughter was hardly ever home. Her schedule was jam-packed with Espian classes and events.