This is a short-term, situational solution. It is not uncommon for couples—particularly following C-section evacuations or births requiring vaginal incisions—to request that the implants remain inside the cranium of both parties during the first few days of recovery. Though this decision is always left to the purview of the involved parties, it is strongly discouraged. The highest risk involved with this procedure is the possibility of the source patient injuring herself due to a lack of awareness (i.e., casually placing her hand on a hot stove or failing to recognize the symptoms of appendicitis). Pain exists for a reason. We advise removing the implants as soon as possible.
Infant implantation is not recommended. Many parents, upon the birth of their child, feel an overwhelming (and understandable) desire to place an implant inside the newborn’s brain and absorb all discomfort from the vulnerable child’s early maturation. This, while possible, is strongly discouraged, unless the newborn faces a medical threat that is terminal in nature.
Some pain is unknowable. The transfer of physical pain through this procedure is precise and objective. The transfer of emotional pain is not. If the individual giving birth experiences profound emotional distress (such as scenarios where the newborn is deformed or not responsive), the pain recipient may experience a high degree of unspecific menace. The residue of this exchange can sometimes be permanent, even following the removal of the implant. If this occurs, ask your physician to place you in contact with a therapist or psychologist specializing in this rare condition.
The office door opened and the doctor returned. He stepped behind the desk and pushed a stack of paperwork toward the couple, along with two pens. He joked that the process of transferring pain between two human bodies was only slightly less complicated than applying for a mortgage. The man was not amused.
“I’m not so sure about this,” said the man. “This last point on the list—the thing about emotional pain that can last forever—that seems bad. Is it like PTSD or something? It never goes away?”
“It’s extremely rare,” said the doctor. “Extremely. And honestly, we haven’t been doing this long enough to verify that it never goes away. It might, over time. It might fade. We only know that it can last after the implant is removed. But it’s complicated. Since it only happens if the mother experiences a traumatic event, we don’t know if her partner’s symptoms are due to the transfer of the pain or a by-product of the event itself. I mean, God forbid, let’s say there’s an intrapartum death. Let’s say, God forbid, that the child is stillborn. Your wife will comprehend that event intellectually, and a massive spike of existential despair will jump into your body. That’s going to hit you like a ton of bricks. But then a nurse will take you aside and explain what actually happened, and that conversation will hit you just as hard. And then the implant will be removed from your wife’s brain, and she will have to confront the emotional consequence of what has just happened for the first time, and you will have to help her through that. So the sense of doom that lingers with the recipient might be how any normal person would feel in the wake of any tragedy. We just don’t know, and we can’t know.”
The man listened to this and felt better, although not much. The Procedure would be fine, probably. Nothing would happen, probably. He wanted to do this. It seemed like the right thing to do, and there was nothing worse than seeing his wife in pain. A few of his male coworkers had gone through the Procedure and bragged about it constantly. The technology was fascinating, and he viewed himself as the kind of person who adopted new ideas before they became standard. Yet something about the concept still worried him, even though he couldn’t explain what it was. He and his wife had talked about this at length, always framed as a choice they both perceived as obvious. But now he was staring at the paperwork and holding a ballpoint pen, and he started to wonder if perhaps he had not thought about this decision with the depth it demanded.
“Can I ask a possibly dumb question,” the woman said politely. “The fifth item on this list. I know it says you shouldn’t—”
“I wish they wouldn’t include that at all,” the doctor interrupted. “It’s on the list for the express purpose of telling people not to do something, and all it does is plant the seed. Here’s the thing: It will be bad for your baby’s development if you take away its pain. I realize it’s always difficult when a baby is teething or has a fever or gets circumcised. It’s hard to hear them cry when there’s nothing you can do to help. You can only be as happy as your least happy child. But taking pain away from an infant always ends badly. I know of one couple in Tokyo who didn’t remove the implant from their son’s brain until he was almost two. That was over three years ago, and he’s still having a hard time adjusting to reality. He can barely walk. Kids need pain in the same way they need milk. Kids need pain.”
“But when does that stop?” asked the man, finally recognizing the core of his apprehension. “How do we know adults don’t need pain? Isn’t it possible that childbirth is supposed to be painful for the woman?”
“Why would that possibly be?” asked the doctor.
“Yes,” said his wife. “Please explain why it’s supposed to be normal for me to experience pain while you experience nothing.”
“I don’t know why. If I could answer the question I wouldn’t need to ask it,” said the man. “I’m not a doctor and I’m not a philosopher. I have no idea why this would be true, beyond the fact that this is how it’s always been before. I realize that things change. But still. Why are we migrating the pain into another person? Why not put the reception implant into an animal? A pig. A monkey. Why not an elephant? An elephant would barely notice.”
“Because that would be cruel,” said the doctor.
“Okay, fine,” the man continued. “Then how about a convicted murderer? How about some child rapist sitting in a supermax? How about war criminals? Why does it have to go into me? You could jump this pain anywhere, into anyone. I could probably pay some college kid to take it. Why do I have to absorb someone’s agony just because I happen to love them?”
“Because we’re married,” said his wife. “Because that’s what love is.”
The papers were signed. The baby was perfect.
What About the Children
I want the classic cult shit,” said Ezra, finally expressing his central desire with a clarity we’d spend the next ten years suppressing. “We’re not doing this to break new ground. I’m a traditionalist. There’s no point in pursuing this if we don’t adopt the classic style.”
I’d love to say I tried to reason with him, but I didn’t try at all. Our relationship wasn’t like that. Even when I was twelve and he was four, I would always reinforce his worst tendencies. At the time, it seemed like I was supposed to do that. It seemed like it made me a good brother. And what can I say? His mischievous ideas amused me. He was such a charismatic autocrat. All his little friends in the neighborhood would do whatever he wanted. He would convince them to play kickball in the snow, while he drank hot cocoa and watched through the living room window.
“You think this is going to be so easy,” said Taffy, perhaps the only person who ever aspired to be a wet blanket and just couldn’t make it work. “This isn’t the 1970s. Even Jonestown would have Google. You can’t control people when they all have phones.”
“We could take the phones away,” I suggested. “That could be part of the attraction. We frame the whole thing as a neo-Luddite movement. We tell them to reject technology, for spiritual reasons.”
“I considered that, but no,” said Ezra. “For that to work, we’d need one hundred percent compliance, and that’s impossible. It’s too easy to get inside a public library. One malcontent jumps onto Reddit and the whole thing implodes. A better move is tacking in the opposite direction. We specifically target people obsessed with the Internet and convince them that the Internet will eventually cause the end of the world, which is what most people obs
essed with the Internet already believe. We tell them that this technological apocalypse is our organizational goal, and that they’ve been chosen by God to help this happen. We tell them to spend all day online. We demand it. We tell them to pump out misinformation on purpose. After a while, they’ll assume misinformation is the only information there is, and then the problem disappears.”
What can I say? Counterintuitive logic was the only logic he understood.
Taffy, to her credit, was never fooled. She’s only two years older than Ezra, so certain aspects of his personality I find charming do not work on her. I remember when she was going to be a junior at Carleton and Ezra decided he wasn’t going to college at all, and our dad said, “You know, different people can be smart in different ways.” I sometimes think that was the real reason she quit school. And then when she did, our dad was like, “Why, Taffy? Why would you do that? How will you survive?” Our father just had no sense of his own subtext. But then Taffy moved in with Ezra and never left, so maybe I misread the whole thing.
“You need to talk him out of this,” Taffy told me. This was after it was already too late. “We’re all going to end up in prison. In fact, prison might be the best-case scenario. He’s such a cement head. He doesn’t even know how to be successfully immoral.”
“You don’t have to be involved with this,” I told her at the time. We were eating spaghetti and watching Top Chef: All-Stars in the back of my minivan. We did that sometimes. We loved eating in the car. “You’re a huge asset, but you shouldn’t feel obligated.”
“He doesn’t even realize that cults don’t call themselves cults,” said Taffy. “That’s only what other people call cults, so that the cultists can deny it. How can someone not know that? He also doesn’t seem to realize that a cult leader has to sort of believe whatever it is he’s claiming. Rajneesh sort of believed his own bullshit. Koresh, certainly. Applewhite, certainly. Manson, probably. I suppose L. Ron Hubbard might be the exception that proves the rule, but that’s not going to work twice.”
“Maybe simplicity is his silver bullet,” I told her. “He’s cutting out the middleman.”
“You need to talk him out of this,” said Taffy. “You’re the only person he listens to, and he doesn’t even listen to you.”
“Here again, I want to stress that you don’t need to be involved with this. You really don’t, Taff.”
“I know,” she said. “But at least if it’s us, it can’t be anyone else.”
* * *
• • •
It was hopeless, and I knew it was hopeless, and I’m pretty sure I opened the conversation by saying, “This is probably hopeless.” But Taffy wanted me to try, so I tried. I’ll always do whatever Taffy wants. The three of us had spent the day strategizing, as usual, and just before Ezra left the loft (he always left early) I told him to meet me for dinner back at my house around seven. I fried up some haddock and waited for him on the porch. I could see him coming up the sidewalk from three blocks away. He was wearing a dashiki, which meant either he knew I was going to confront him (and was trying to throw me off my game) or, more likely, he was about to offer some inane, persuasive explanation as to why it made sense for an unemployed twenty-eight-year-old Caucasian to wear a West African wedding garment on a summer night in Duluth. I elected to pretend I didn’t notice. There was no reason to be clever, so I jumped straight into the crux of the psychosis: He was working off a flawed model. I told him it wouldn’t succeed, and that it might be worse if it did. I explained that these kinds of sects needed to start organically, and that people would not respond to a guru who did not give a shit about spirituality, and that people in northern Minnesota probably wouldn’t respond to a guru even if they believed he was totally sincere. He listened, and he removed his sunglasses. That was almost a win. But he behaved like we were merely having another conversation about strategy.
“Don’t worry. We’re definitely relocating,” said Ezra. “San Francisco is still ground zero for this kind of thing, both for the hippies and for the tech angle.” This transitioned into a lecture about how California would also be better suited for the sexual component of the cult, as Ezra planned on impregnating all female members who were open to the concept. I stopped him cold and explained that this was precisely the kind of thinking that concerned Taffy and me. I told him he was preoccupied with the wrong things. He agreed, but only because he thought I was criticizing his unwillingness to focus on tax-exempt revenue streams. “I think our best option is money laundering,” he said. “I mentioned this to Taffy, and she tried to talk me out of it. However, in the process of telling me why we shouldn’t do it, she explained how money laundering actually works, which—as it turns out—I didn’t fully understand. But now that I know, I’m certain it’s what we should be doing. Money laundering is our kind of crime.”
“Dammit, Ezra, this is why we’re worried. You can’t use words like crime in casual conversation. You can’t run around saying, Our cult is going to commit excellent crimes. Hermetic societies can’t be planned in advance.”
“I appreciate your candor,” said Ezra, “but I’m afraid I must beg to differ. You’re still acting like this is an innovative idea. It’s not. It’s a regular idea. Look at it like a regular job. Everybody knows what’s up. It’s like the difference between the first season of Survivor and the last season of The Bachelor. We no longer need to sell people on the premise. Only on the details.”
Ezra believed that people who joined cults were no longer marginalized radicals searching for a larger purpose, nor were they lost outcasts with low self-esteem and dysfunctional families, nor were they bookish slackers hungry for enforced structure or alternative spiritual pursuits. All that, he insisted, had ended with the twentieth century. Ezra believed that modern people who joined cults were simply people who already self-identified as the kind of person who might join a cult, and that they would prefer a cult that was unambiguous about its cultic tendencies. They would expect to be swindled. They would demand sexual deviancy and asinine nicknames. They would be disappointed if they were allowed to consume processed foodstuffs and wear non-monochromatic clothing. Every time I tried to counterpunch, he would use my own words against me, even if my words didn’t apply to the new thing we were debating. What can I say? His bad faith had panache. By the time we were eating the fish, I’d begrudgingly accepted the banality of his evil. It was fun to listen to him talk. I admired his resolve. You know, an older brother can’t really be jealous of a younger brother. That’s the one thing The Godfather got wrong. But I did wonder what it would be like to have his level of conviction. I could never act the way he seemed to act all the time.
* * *
• • •
The move west happened about a year after the haddock supper. San Francisco was too expensive and Oakland wasn’t much cheaper, so we ended up in San Jose (not ideal, but Ezra liked that it had once been home to an incestuous vampire coven). We rented a dilapidated Lutheran church and stopped paying rent after the first six months (eviction laws in California are fantastic). I oversaw member recruitment and day-to-day maintenance. Taffy handled the finances, the infrastructure, media relations, marketing, and the legal department. Ezra delivered a five-hour lecture three times a week, usually about the alleged technological rapture but also about his various pet interests (wind power, gerrymandering, symphorophilia, the music of Tool). The only significant conflict I can recall from those early days was a fracas over what we would call ourselves. Ezra wanted to name our organization the California Super Cult, which Taffy deemed legally suicidal and which I feared would be taken as irony (I get what he was going for, but it was too cute by half). We eventually convinced Ezra to compromise and replace the word cult with the word family, since that was almost as explicit to anyone who’d care. But (of course) he had to go further and call it the Last Family of Fire and Darkness, just to ensure no one made the mistake of thinking four hundred people wea
ring cobalt tracksuits and eating steel-cut oats in an abandoned church basement was some kind of Uber-sponsored disruption stunt.
What can I say? It was easier than I thought. Attracting members was not difficult. We just had to act trippy and make a big point of not blinking whenever we were in public. Ezra had been right about almost everything. The misinformation campaign worked perfectly and may have inadvertently rekindled the romance between Jerry Brown and Linda Ronstadt. New recruits happily emptied their savings accounts upon indoctrination, not to mention the unexpected windfalls we earned through online gambling and Bitcoin. Our drug-fueled orgies were epic and received a nice write-up from BuzzFeed. Ezra sired twenty-eight children, all of whom were named Ezra. Sometimes the conditions were tough on Taffy, as she regularly worked seventeen-hour days and never stopped being annoyed by church members’ referring to her little brother as the Hydra Yahweh, which (in his defense) wasn’t even Ezra’s idea. Still, I could tell she enjoyed the responsibility, in her own quiet way. She liked the power and believed she deserved it. Ezra spent an increasing amount of every week in seclusion, so the compound was her own private Alcatraz. He came up with the rules, but she constructed the language and enforced every policy. She was great at it. We weren’t causing any trouble, locally or spiritually. Our organized crimes were minor and undiscovered, and the only reason we committed them at all was to complete the cliché. We were happy people. There’s nothing like working with your own family. It was a wonderful decade, up until today. But now I don’t know what to think.
Like any other Monday, Taffy and I met with Ezra in his sleeping chamber to plan the week’s schedule and outline any forthcoming manipulations of reality. This weekly meeting is often dull and always frustrating, but also a nice chance for the three of us to spend some time together. I always looked forward to it. Today, however, was different. Ezra seemed like his normal self, except he kept casually mentioning guns, and the acquisition of guns, and why we needed a larger gun budget, and the essentiality of gun stockpiling within the enduring cult paradigm. Taffy and I kind of rolled our eyes, familiar with Ezra’s flights of fancy. But this was different. He just kept going. He started talking about types of poisons and the best way to control a fire. By the time he was theorizing about how the compound could be sealed from the inside and flooded with carbon monoxide, Taffy had lost her patience.
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