doomsday cult
I was helping my best friend put groceries away. "That date K told us is coming up," I said.
"I know," she said. We looked at each other meaningfully.
In August, at the bookstore, a 93-year-old man had been talking with us for 15 or 20 minutes—had escalated to full-on flirting with me, and I was flirting back, just because I liked him and I enjoy giving away my surplus vim—when suddenly his face and posture had changed. "Message for you," he'd said. "Beware," he continued, and he issued a sort of edict, a doomsday prophecy.
"I think we'll make it through," I finally managed to say.
His face softened, returning to normal. "Well what else can we do," he said sadly.
We'd hurried out of the bookstore, have not returned since. I immediately felt guilty about all of it. I knew I'd caused the situation somehow. "I'm very sorry you had to see that," I'd said to my friend in the car. "That sort of thing is par for the course for me."
My friend had been very, extremely shaken up by it. I'd told her it was important to not put any stock in what he'd said. But maybe some part of me had believed it after all? As the date approaches, I've realized I'm not able to relax. I don't think I'll be able to relax until the date passes.
"I told [the caregiver] about it last night," I said. This type of interaction with strangers, I'd told the caregiver, makes running errands unusually hard on me. "We talked all last night while I wrapped presents on your mom's floor."
"I wondered what you guys talked about," she said. "Mom said it was really weird."
I laughed. "Yeah. I mean, not that weird," I said. "She was telling me what the LDS believes, some insider baseball, and I kept saying 'wow, I do believe that'."
"She might try to convert you," my best friend half-joked as I tetrissed some stuff around in the pantry.
"I honestly don't think so," I said. "I think she was just surprised because she hadn't ever met a non-Mormon who believes so many of the same things she does." I'd explained to her that I'd grown up Protestant, believing the Mormons and the JWs and even the Catholics were hellbound cults, to the point that I'd been kind of a dick to my LDS college friends. ("I've finally experienced enough," I'd told her, "to understand that everything is true.")
Exhausted from carrying pallets of water into the pantry, I leaned against the countertop now.
"I was talking about comparative religions and quantum physics, and she suddenly said to me, 'You should start a cult.' It was kind of sweet." My best friend and I laughed. "And I told her, actually, my husband and I had bonded over that—about dreaming of starting our own cults as kids. But looking back, I don't know that we meant the same thing." I hesitated. What he'd really wanted, I knew, was to build his own family. Is wanting to be the patriarch of your own family such a crime? Anyway, I'd had different aspirations, I'd thought. "I remember feeling like church was almost right, but not quite right, like they weren't reading between the lines correctly."
I frowned, reexamining all of this and feeling a profound grief. I was thinking about how much I'd loved the Big House at Christmastime, when it was full of family—they were all alive back then—and I was 2 or 3 years old, already energetic and hyperverbal, and I was so happy. At the same time, I didn't understand why we couldn't live like that all year-round, why it couldn't last forever. This is what Heaven is going to be like, I remember believing. The problem with this vision, I realized with a start, was that, in it, I'd perpetually remain the Baby, tended to and cared for by others, and that's not really so different from an evil, self-centered cult leader, the big baby in the middle of it. I leaned against the counter, thoughtful.
"I left the room to check my messages. When I came back in," I continued, "she said to me, Well, I'd join your cult if I wasn't already in one. I said thanks, and then I said 'oh'."
"She's really funny," my best friend said.
"Yeah. And then she dragged your mom into it. She said, 'You hear that? I said I'd join her cult if I wasn't already in one!' And that made your mom laugh. But she also said, 'I'd love to join a cult, in a beautiful place, like Hawaii. Farming our own food.'
"And I said, 'I think what you're describing is joining a family. One where every member is valued—"
"Ohhhh." My best friend looked at me seriously, her eyes wide, her face creased with worry. Yep.
"I know. I didn't even realize. I said, 'where every member is valued, in a beautiful place. With fresh groceries.' I didn't realize. She actually brought it up later. After your mom had gone to sleep [the caregiver] said to me, 'I manifest. I've manifested everything I have. I manifested my husband. I even manifested his family'."
My best friend looked a bit freaked out.
"But she'd only manifested what shape they'd take," I continued. Literally an imperfect creation. "She knew what they'd look like. And then she said to me, 'My mother-in-law and I are cordial. But we'll never have a connection'."
My best friend nodded rigorously.
"And she started to explain this. She said 'My mother—' and then she saw the look on my face, and then she said 'I'd always hoped to have—'"
My best friend was nodding even more rigorously.
"Yeah," I said. "The same thing I used to weep over in therapy." I sighed. "And then she said, So I've decided I just have to be my own mother figure."
My best friend gasped. "That's so sad," she exclaimed.
"I don't think it is," I said. "In fact I said, That's great. That's it, that's exactly what you're supposed to do. This really is your best life."
My best friend looked bewildered.
"OK," I said. "It means that she has to decide what she thinks a good mother looks like. My therapist had always asked me to reconstruct the ideal mother's qualities, using people I admired as examples," I continued, "and I was at a complete loss, because I'd never really been told or shown." I shrugged. "But that's great. That just means I get to decide for myself."
Anyway, I'd sat down in the doorway cross-legged, talking to the caregiver while I ate my soup. "Cults don't work," I'd finally said to her. "Do you know the term gnosis? An inner-knowingness. You can't just tell people things. People can't be told."
Later my best friend and I hopped into the car to buy powerball tickets. My friend had watched my TV episode the night before, she told me.
"It's crazy," I said to her, "but out of everyone in the studio audience, I'd chosen to go along with the woman who reminded me most of my adoptive mom. It's so obvious now."
"The woman in the blue wig!" my best friend exclaimed. "I noticed they cut to her!"
"Yeah, it's an establishing shot," I said, nodding. "They're trying to show you who I was listening to. I didn't even realize it at the time but, out of everybody, out of the whole crowd, I'd picked the woman who most reminded me of my adoptive mom, like, OK, I'm gonna let her decide my next moves for me. It's so obvious now. Anyone can watch the episode and see how codependent I am. And you hear her little voice, they kept that in, too."
By now I'd hit the ATM and was mulling over what combination of lottery tickets to choose for myself. I'd never done this before. My best friend was pointing at the screen, explaining how it all worked, when a father and his young son appeared behind us. We both stepped out of the way for them, but the father gestured at us to carry on. I realized he was explaining to his son how the machine worked, too. "Oh," I said, snorting, "they're having the same conversation we are."
I pored over my enormous menu of options, knowing the machine was cash-only and that it didn't dispense change.
"Here's the thing," I said to my best friend. "In the episode, I'd literally pointed the finger at that woman. You can actually see me in the broadcast, still pointing everywhere. Afterward, when I got back to my seat, I was feeling fine about everything, great even. But she was feeling awful."
"They cut back to her face," my best friend realized. Tight in frame, the woman in the blue wig had clasped both hands over her mouth in horror.
"Yep," I said. "And back in my seat I suddenly realized, the only reason I got to feel okay was because she felt so horrible. She was suffering. Decision fatigue is real, for sure, but the only reason we ever outsource our decisions to others is so that someone else will have to feel responsible for the outcome." To potentially be the bad guy.
I paused. "I've been blame-shifting all my life, and I never even realized." I said this as I was staring at the giant touchscreen, trying to pick.
"You did that to me once," my best friend said suddenly, a flatness in her voice I've rarely heard before. I looked up at her, startled. She had a strange smile on her face. "New York? I never thought about it before," she said. "I felt so awful."
"New Year's Eve?" I asked. She shook her head. No. No, the trip where I'd gotten mugged at gunpoint.
"I told you to do it," she said. "I told you to go. I thought it would bring you closure. Afterward, you blew up at me."
I had no recollection of this. I stared at her in horror. She provided more details. It was a complete rewrite of my sense of autobiographical history. I was aghast.
"I am so, so sorry," I said to her.
I bought my ticket and we hopped back into the car. We were on the open road when I slightly melted into my seat, a collapse, like a marionette with its strings cut. "I'm an authoritarian follower," I exclaimed, livid.
"What?" she asked me, shocked.
"I am!" I said. "It's a psychological profile. I don't fit the profile exactly, and it's a survival pattern that is learned, but that's absolutely part of it: wanting to follow someone else just because they seem so certain. Auugh!" I was in agony now.
We returned home, where the youngest was deeply immersed in her new activity book. I sat down at the table with a glass of orange juice. Her mother asked how the school gift exchange had gone. Really good, the child said. Everyone loved their presents.
"I've noticed she's an excellent gift-giver," I said.
"She is," her mother agreed.
"And the card she gave her grandma today was amazing," I continued. "I was amazed by how detailed her drawings were, especially the drawing of herself with her grandma." Her drawings were clumsy scribbles, but the most important details were included, and the shapes of things were very clear. "This is a very sophisticated talent, one that can't be taught. It's the quality of clearsightedness."
The child's family agreed.
I hesitated. "Adults might get really upset with her down the road," I said quietly.
Her mother looked stunned. "That has never happened," she said firmly.
"No," I agreed. "And she's so fortunate to have a family that will protect her gifts." I propped my face up in my hands, watching her carefully.