Part Forty Five

When they got into the little dusty town, all three of them placed telephone calls. Dylan to his agent, Cass to her office manager, Preacher to the Major. The two who had been missing a week spent longer on the phone explaining the situation than the one who'd been missing for five years. All of them had money wired to the local bank. Even though their rescue would arrive in a few hours. But neither Harding nor Finch had any ID, and the bank wouldn't give them their money (although the teller recognized Finch well enough to ask for his autograph.) Haywood, with his expired Florida license, was able to get his money when the two multi-millionaires could not. He rented a motel room so they could all take long hot showers and he went to the town's only barbershop for a haircut, and shaved his beard off. The three of them sat in the town's only diner and ate cheeseburgers and Preacher made them laugh with a story about being a gunslinger at a dude ranch.

It takes roughly six hours to get to Gethsemane from LA, maybe seven from San Francisco. There is no place in Gethsemane to rent a car, that's for damn sure, and no municipal airport or even a usable landing strip. Fresno is probably the nearest big city, as the crow flies, but because there's no good highway through the Sierra National Forest it takes almost five hours to drive there. It's only about two and a half hours to Tonopah, Nevada, however. Cass Hardesty's office manager was smarter than Dylan Finch's agent. She chartered a flight to Tonopah, went to Cass's apartment, packed a bag for her boss, watered her plants, flew into Tonopah, rented a car, drove to Gethsemane, and got there two hours before Finch's people arrived from LA in his agent's new Land Cruiser.

Haywood politely declined her heartfelt entreaties to return to San Francisco with her, but promised that he would visit her soon.

He had a couple of beers with Finch after that and then politely declined both Finch's, and Finch's manager's, heartfelt entreaties to return to Los Angeles; in fact, much to the chagrin of Finch's manager, Preacher requested that neither his name nor his face be associated with the story that the manager had shopped to People Magazine all the way up the road from LA. Even more to his chagrin, Finch agreed -- you can milk the story, he said, and even mention that I was rescued by a hermit, but his name and face stay out of it.

For the five hours back they worked on their client, tried to get him to relent. He didn't. The story made headlines for a little while -- there are a lot of clippings in the archive -- and Haywood isn't mentioned by name in any of them. An intrepid tabloid reporter tracked down both the teller and the waitress in Gethsemane but since Haywood paid cash for the motel room there was nothing with his name on it there.

For the next few months Preacher drifted slowly southwest toward San Diego -- the same trip he ostensibly began when he left Virginia four years earlier -- working a few days here and there as a day laborer or a busboy or a janitor. He later recounted that he was uncertain about jumping back into human society. He said "I slept alone, said little, kept my head down, and avoided crowds." He also spent a lot of time in libraries, reading voraciously, not just trying to make sense of what had happened to him in the desert but also -- and this is so typically him -- catching up on the pop culture he missed. ("Do you realize," he told someone much later, "that while I was... absent, Uncle Tupelo disbanded?") He was in no particular hurry, which is why it took him until late April of 1999 -- almost eight months -- to show up just 250 miles to the southwest. In Bakersfield, California.

Bakersfield, California, is the Richmond, Virginia, of the West. Without all the flash and glamour. I would never have been there voluntarily except that I had to speak to the men and women of Pacific Athletic Surfaces. To take their life stories and turn them into footnotes in the biographical archive of Preacher Haywood.

Their life stories were no more tedious than mine. Certainly they deserved to better than footnote status. The Glassings and the Clarks had turned a failed tennis court repair company into a successful business. And I'm sure the story of Marvin Clark's and Keith Glassing's inter-racial friendship, dating back to the first grade, could form the basis of some inspiring movie-of-the-week story in its own right. But neither of them managed to escape Kern County for long and both of them now work on other people's tennis courts all day. In the end that doesn't get you your own biopic. If it wasn't for the accidental hiring of Preacher Haywood it wouldn't even get them this footnote.

At the end of the day Haywood's primary appeal was that he was a legal US resident. That's the beginning and the end of it. And now I find myself having to do what I'd hoped to avoid, which was discussing the Pacific Athletic Surfaces business model.

So, with a sigh: most of their work came from working on country clubs and public courts, schools, parks-and-rec fields, things like that. From Bakersfield north, because there was a lot of competition from LA south. Which meant (a) they had to be low bidder and (b) much of their work came when school was not in session, which in turn meant (c) it had to be done fast, because summer was when people wanted to play tennis. So they had a hard time handling contracts more than an hour's drive from Bakersfield. Which meant there wasn't enough business. So Sandy Glassing, Keith's wife and the brains of the operation (she had an AA in business from Bakersfield College), developed this plan wherein a series of contracts moved the operation from one job to the next, day after day, all summer long. They could cover the entire northern and central state in one long road-trip that lasted all summer. Keith and Marvin (whom everyone but his wife and mother called Boom, a nickname from his days as a fullback at Stockdale High School and later as a defensive end at UCLA) would take Keith's brother Jimmy and an equipment operator and in each new town they would hire a few day laborers and get the job done, then move on to the next contract where Sandy would have everything from motel rooms to diesel fuel ready and waiting for them.

That was the plan and it worked well for a few years and then the state started cracking down on using illegal immigrants to perform state contracts. Which meant that the school districts and recreation departments suddenly wanted all kinds of paperwork for the day laborers. Who didn't have it. The State of California's insistence that its tennis courts could only be properly patched by people born in the U.S. threatened to sink the little American success story that was Pacific Athletic Surfaces.

But everyone had to rebid under those rules, and they got their contracts, and Sandy (who apparently is some sort of logistical idiot-savant) put together a road-trip, and all that remained to be done was to hire enough legal laborers to haul around with them from job to job. Wanted: people willing to engage in back-breaking work for long hours in the summer sun, living out of motels and not seeing their families for three months. Mediocre pay, no benefits. US citizens only, please.

Haywood wandered into Bakersfield, a few weeks after leaving the desert, two days before the P.A.S. road trip was supposed to start. Saw the want ad. Walked to the industrial park where PAS was located, into the low cinder block building, and got the job. Boom drove him to the DMV so he could get a valid California driver's license. They were that desperate. They were so desperate they rehired a drunk named Roger Michaels, who had been their equipment operator a few years earlier. Michaels promised to stay sober the length of the road trip. Neither they nor Michaels actually believed that he would. They also had Robert Redcloud, a Yokuts Indian (he hates the term "native American," for reasons he probably would have explained if I'd cared enough to ask him.) With Jimmy and the two principals that was six men, when they needed (and budgeted for) eight, and had hoped for a minimum of seven.

So they rolled out of Bakersfield and started working on these jobs. Note for prosperity: having a bodhisattva on your construction crew boosts productivity in the short term, but in the long term leads to some East Coast intellectual like me turning your life into a footnote.

While all this was going on, I should note, Dylan and Cass were back in Los Angeles and San Francisco, respectively, trying to make every act an act of worship. With limited success, although they apparently phoned and e-mailed one another often for support in their spiritual quests.

Anyhow, Jimmy Glassing was a little bantam-rooster of a man who, at one time, was a big fan of hair metal and Federal Schedule I, II, and IV Controlled Substances (he skipped Schedule III entirely. I don't know why.) Now he's still a small, wiry man, but he's renounced his prior devotions and instead focused his attentions upon his wife and the Lord Jesus Christ. Not necessarily in that order. When Haywood was in the crew, Jimmy was going through what his sister-in-law refers to as a "phase" with a roll of her eyes. That "phase" entailed trying to convert everyone he met to his particular brand of born-again nuttiness. It had gotten so bad the year before that Redcloud had threatened to split his head open with a shovel, so Keith had forbidden him from proselytizing on company time.

Thus when this road trip started Redcloud asked to share a room with Michaels, leaving Preacher and Jimmy as road roommates. That Robert Redcloud would specifically ask to bunk with a racist drunk as indifferent about his hygiene as Roger Michaels told Preacher that there was something even worse about Jimmy Glassing.

The second day on the job he was working next to Redcloud. "How was your night with Reverend Jimmy?" Redcloud smirked. Haywood chuckled and shook his head. "He try to convert you all night?" Redcloud pressed.

Haywood laughed out loud. (By this time he'd been out in the real world long enough that he was, apparently, able to carry on a normal human conversation). "All day long yesterday I was trying to figure out what was wrong with Jimmy that nobody wanted to room with him," he said. He never stopped working as he spoke. "So I came out of the shower with a towel wrapped around me and he's sitting on the edge of the bed with a Bible in his hand and he says to me, 'have you accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal savior?'"

Redcloud laughed at this, having endured the same thing the summer before.

"So I took the towel off," Haywood continued, "because in my experience nothing discombobulates an evangelical like the sight of a penis. But it didn't work. He just sat there patiently waiting for my answer."

"There's nothing you can do to shut him up," Redcloud said, laughing. "Each night he would kneel there praying at the top of his lungs, mostly things like 'Jesus, help Robert Redcloud find you.'"

"Yeah, well," Preacher said, "I figured as much, so I tried to circumvent all that. I said to him 'don't you really mean, have I found the oneness with God that Christ promised we could attain through him?' He wasn't expecting that. So we talked about the Bible for a little while and he calmed down some." Preacher shrugged. "It'll take him awhile before he figures out there's a difference between agreeing with him and not disagreeing with him."

That conversation is mostly second-hand fiction, I should point out. Redcloud told it to me pretty much the way I related it to you. I doubt he remembered it verbatim. But then again he's not the sort who would use the word "discombobulates" on his own. In fact that sounded more like something I would say.

So they toured middle- and upper-California, fixing tennis courts and discussing pantheism. And today they all agree (except for Roger Michaels, who is dead, which is a pity, because I wanted to get a fellow drunk's perspective on Haywood), when asked years later, that Preacher Haywood was a hell of a nice guy and worked his ass off and...

Keith told me: "You know, there was something about the way that guy thought, something about the way he approached life... you just felt a little better being around him. I mean you wanted to work harder. I didn't think anybody worked harder than me and Boom, I mean, hell, it was our company, but Haywood never seemed to get tired and always did everything so... effortlessly. Like it wasn't even work. Like it was... it was..." He couldn't finish the thought, but told me that he got everyone on the crew working harder and faster and better by the end of the trip.

Boom told me: "He used to say that working a shovel was like cooking a meal, which was like singing a song, which was like saying a prayer of thanksgiving. That sounds kind of dumb when I say it but it sounded pretty good when he said it, and dumb or not, it's something I've always carried with me since."

Of course. While I am always studiously objective and clinical and detached when I interview people, I was extra-careful not to let any of my personal feelings about Haywood show when interviewing Boom Clark, because twenty years after his playing days were over he still looked like he could have snapped me like a toothpick. I understand -- from those who follow such things -- that Clark was very good and would have gone to the NFL except that he blew out his knee in his senior year at UCLA. It was while rehabbing his knee that he met his future wife, another college athlete of some renown, a basketball player for the University of Tennessee. She teaches high school history now. She read two of my books. She said.

And she said "they were... different, somehow, when they got back. I couldn't really put my finger on it. More relaxed. A little... gentler, in a way that only someone who knew them really well would notice. Marvin had lost weight, something I could never get him to do at home. Keith was reading The Mapmaker's Dream. I'd never seen him read anything more philosophical than the technical specs for composite compound before that."

Haywood was 32. They all thought he was in his 20s.

Close enough.

He worked with his shirt off on some of those hot summer days and I relate this not to add a homoerotic air to the whole tale but to point out that none of his coworkers recall there being a scar from when he was shot.

Part Forty Four

OK, so I begin recounting Finch’s visionary experience with some… trepidation. This is really where it begins, not with the story of the tree in Virginia, which I can chalk up to fatigue and hunger and the sort of bullshit for which Preacher apparently became famous. But when I get to these otherwise sincere and rational people uttering this kind of crap I don’t know whether to simply ignore it as raving or dutifully record it without comment and let its absurdity speak for itself.

The former would be unfaithful historiography and the latter would be far too subtle for the likes of me. Hence the trepidation.

Keep in mind that what I’ve been writing about – Finch and Harding and the desert and everything – is garnered from two primary sources, namely, Dylan Finch and Cassidy Harding. Both of whom seem like eminently normal human beings. They're both rich, but I don’t hold that against them. Finch went on to do some good work after he got out of the desert – dying, or at least thinking you’re dying, apparently sharpens one’s artistic sensibilities. Harding was proven prescient in the way she avoided the dot-com collapse and she is still making a fortune designing software interfaces. They both credit Worship in a modest, off-hand way, although it is certainly clear that both of them had achieved success in very competitive industries long before they fell into the clutches of a deranged desert hermit with a degree from St. John’s.

So when they tell me soberly and casually of miracles…

At any rate, back to the desert.

Finch groused about wanting to go home even as he hobbled around the little shack, and Harding floated about the green patches with a beatific smile as if she was on drugs, and Preacher continued almost as if they weren’t there – working his garden plot, patching a hole in the roof of the shack, pounding out cornmeal with a stone mortar and pestle. And he said to Finch: not tonight, but the next night, we will walk out of here.

Finch snorted. “Which one of you is going to carry me? I couldn’t make it to the end of the ravine without resting right now.”

Preacher squinted up at the sky. It was late afternoon. “I want to show you something,” he said. “Come on.” He stood and started walking toward the hills at the end of the caldera, opposite the entrance.

Finch just watched him for a moment, but curiosity got the better of him and he started hobbling after Haywood. Cass looked up from where she was teaching herself how to roll out a tortilla from his stone-ground meal.

“I want to take a bath,” she said.

Finch raised an eyebrow and prepared a caustic remark.

“Use the trough,” Preacher said. “You know where the soap is.” It was homemade liquid soap that Preacher concocted from boiled pine boughs and carrion. It smelled like ammonia and probably had twice as much lye as was safe. “The trough needs to be cleaned out anyhow. When you’re finished scrub it out with sand.”

She nodded and went back to rolling the tortilla. She had already, Finch noticed, picked up Preacher’s deliberate, thorough approach to the chores of the place. He didn’t know what she was like before the desert. Maybe she was always like that. But he suspected not, and he understood that part – even he, who was much more skeptical of Haywood than she was, found himself unconsciously emulating Preacher’s silences. Mimicking his easy, diligent approach to simple tasks would be an obvious next step.

“So what is this thing you want me to see?” he said, struggling to keep up. Even before he said it he knew Haywood would ignore him. He said it more out of defiance than anything, the words coming on the heels of his unwelcome recognition that he had been reflecting Preacher’s Zen silences.

They went into the low hills and the terrain grew rockier and harder to navigate and the incline grew rapidly steeper.

“Wait up,” Finch gasped after a bit. Haywood ignored that, too, angering the actor, and he struggled with the cane, stomping it down harder than necessary to make his point. “Wait up,” he said again, “my leg is killing me, and I have to drag this fucking thing.”

Haywood kept on walking.

When they were about three-quarters of the way up the mountain that marked that boundary to the caldera Preacher led them out onto a ledge and sat down. Finch stumped up to him shortly thereafter, panting, sweaty, furious. “What in the fuck are you trying to prove, Haywood?” he demanded. “My leg hurts. I’m not used to this desert nomad bullshit anyhow. It’s hotter than hell. Christ, there’s no way I’ll be in shape to make that walk tomorrow night now. I don’t even know how I’m going to get off the mountain tonight. And isn’t it going to be dark before we’re down? I don’t know about you but I’m not in the mood to get bitten by another snake. I…”

Preacher just pointed to the spot next to him on the ledge.

“What?” Dylan demanded.

“Sit. Quiet. Watch,” Haywood said softly.

Finch sat down, more clumsily and noisily than he really had to, just to make a point. The caldera stretched out below them, unobstructed. The sun was almost at the peaks to their right, and shadows stretched almost to the shack. Peering closely, he could see Harding sitting in the tub. At that distance, it was hard to tell she was naked.

“All that just to watch her take her clothes off?” Finch said. “Jesus, Haywood, I know you’ve been out here a long…” and his voice trailed off.

The sun touched the ridgeline to the west and golden twilight was suddenly refracted around and down into the little canyon. It was as if the light trickled down the mountainside and into the valley, filling it from the bottom up as slowly as the sun sank; golden light covered the valley floor, so that the ground vanished into a golden haze, and then slowly the squash vines vanished under the tide, then the water trough and with it, Cassidy; the cornstalks went away, the roof of the cabin sank beneath the slowly rising tide of gold and fire. And as Finch peered wordlessly into the optical illusion it seemed to him that he saw currents in the light beneath his feet, and within the currents things moving and taking shape. He peered into the caldera, fascinated. The shapes and eddies and specks within the light took form before his eyes and the light – sun-lava, he called it later – filled the valley until it was just below his feet, and then suddenly the effect ended and it was just a dark desert night.

He was aware of a pressure on his arm and suddenly realized that he was leaning far, far over the ledge, the better to peer into the light. Haywood was holding onto his arm to keep him from plummeting over the ledge.

Finch turned his head and looked at Haywood, and moved his mouth a few times, but nothing came out. Nothing seemed right.

“Did… did you see…?” he gasped, finally.

“Nice sunset,” Haywood answered.

“No, no… In the light. I saw – I mean there was a…”

“Just an optical illusion,” Preacher said, dismissively, and started back down the hillside.

Years later, in a Beverly Hills coffee shop, Dylan Finch said to me “He didn’t want me to say what I was in that scrying-tank. It was for me alone, I suppose. And I haven’t told it to anyone, and I’m not going to tell you. But it was something I had to see. Things I wanted to see and things I didn’t want to see. Wonderful and terrible and welcoming and horrifying. And I’ve tried to tell myself that it was fatigue and hunger and that maybe Preacher even hypnotized me but I don’t think it was any of those things.”

“What was it?” I asked him.

And he just smiled, quietly, powerfully. As if possessed of secret knowledge. I report this here because him smiling doesn’t come across on the taped interview that’s in the archives.

I should have used video, I suppose.

At any rate, Finch followed Preacher back down the mountain, moving carefully in the dark, and it wasn’t until they were back amongst the green growing things and a newly washed Cassidy was smiling at them that he realized he’d left his cane up on the mountain. And that his leg didn’t hurt at all.

That night Preacher disappeared after they ate. Fire-roasted peppers and black beans in the tortillas that Cass had made. The discussion they had seems silly, even to them, safe and secure in the civilized world, but they both recall that they were dead serious about it at the time – whether their speedy recovery from their injuries was from Preacher or from the water. She thought the former. He thought the latter. He tried to tell her about what had happened on the mountain. She said the same thing had happened to her when Preacher stood with her in the garden at dawn and showed her a bean blossom opening to the first light. He was certain that what he’d seen was nothing like that at all.

“When we get back to the world,” she said, suddenly tired, “how much of this is going to stay with us?”

“Nothing, I hope,” Finch said. “I will never set foot in the outdoors again.” He laughed.

“Seriously,” she said. “I mean if we had never met Preacher – if a rescue helicopter had found us instead of Preacher – we would have gone home, and we would have talked about the effects of a near-death experience, and after a few days or weeks it would have worn away and we would be back to the same old bullshit that we did day-to-day before all this happened. But will it be different with Preacher? I mean… can I still make everything I do a prayer, the way Preacher does? Will the sight of a blossom opening suddenly give me an insight on the nature of God? Will watching the sunset erase any phantom pains and obstacles that are plaguing you? Or will all of this fade away?”

“Fade away,” Dylan said, thinking he was being honest.

She looked at him. “You wish,” she said. “I think that the next time you are in a film we’re going to see you praying. I think you’re as impressed with him as I am, only you don’t want to admit it.”

Finch looked into her eyes and said nothing for awhile. Then, slowly, he answered her.

“I think,” he said, “I need to be away from him and you and all of this for awhile before I can answer that question. Because I don’t know how much of it is him, and how much is me, and how much is just the situation.”

They talked about Preacher and the things he’d said and the way he acted until they could no longer keep their eyes open. Finch insisted that she have the cot, now that he was feeling fine.

When he awoke at first light, on the porch, Haywood was sitting next to him in the lotus position with his eyes open. Finch hadn’t felt a board tremble, hadn’t heard a squeak.

The rest of the day Finch set about preparing the place for his absence. Banking the embers, he called it – being ready for the next unlucky traveler who stumbled across it, whether it was two weeks or twenty years later. He stripped down the entire windmill turbine, slathered a thick coat of axle grease on everything, and put it back together. Put good seed stock in bags in the metal footlocker in the shack. Made sure the handles on his tools were in good shape, and that there was cornmeal in a rat-proof ammo box, and before they left he restocked the tiny woodpile with sticks and logs he scavenged from a deadfall up in the mountains.

They ate well. Preacher was, for him, loquacious. They were laughing at his stories as the sun sank and they all headed out of the caldera. Haywood, Finch noticed, didn’t even glance over his shoulder; just walked out nonchalantly. For his part Dylan couldn’t help but look back as the sun his the peaks to the west, wondering what it was like to see the caldera fill from the bottom. But he didn’t see anything but deepening shadows.

They walked for a few hours, keeping the ridge to their left. With plenty of water and their feet wrapped tight it didn’t seem nearly as difficult, but Cass again wondered how Haywood had managed to carry Finch all that way. At one point they stopped and there was a metal canister of water half buried in the sand.

“You put that here last night,” Finch realized.

“I hated to take it out of the valley,” Preacher said. “The next person might need it. But we need it now.” He refilled their canteens – more army surplus – and carried the canister with them until it was empty. The ridgeline was, at long last, easing back down to the desert floor.

“How far have we walked?” Cass asked. “In miles?”

Haywood shrugged. Dylan had no idea. I do. I told you, I found the place. They walked twenty miles that night. Something there was no way they could have been strong enough to do. So I’m not sure who’s bullshitting me on this one.

When the ridge faded to nothing, Preacher made a left and they walked for another twenty minutes before finding something Dylan and Cass had despaired of ever seeing again – asphalt. With telephone poles strung out along side it. They walked on the interstate for maybe fifteen minutes before getting a ride in the back of a pickup truck filled with migrant workers. Haywood chatted with one of the men in Spanish, and started laughing suddenly and loudly and – judging by the startled reaction of the man he was speaking to – inappropriately.

“What’s so funny?” Finch demanded.

“I just asked him the name of the nearest town,” Haywood said. “It’s Gethsemane.”

The Worshipers will be pissed that I revealed the name of the town, but it is pretty funny that Preacher spent time there before going back into the world.

Part Forty Three

Worshipers search for Kerith Ravine like it’s Brigadoon or something. Preacher purposefully kept its location a secret, not wanting a bunch of ersatz pilgrims in there trashing the place. But it’s not really that hidden. A little bit of leg work, a little bit of research, and anyone could find it using public documents. I found it without too much difficulty. And I went there just to satisfy myself that Preacher didn’t go back there when he vanished. I didn’t think he would – it’s not like him to retrace his footsteps – and he hadn’t. I do think one or two others have found the place since Preacher left, though, because when I got there the windmill was still running smoothly, seven years since Preacher had serviced it last.

Kerith is in the Sierra Nevada Mountains on the Nevada-California line. And it’s not, technically, a ravine – it’s a caldera, a small geological bowl marking the spot where a volcano blew millennia ago. In the 1950s and early 1960s the US Geological Survey and the Agriculture Department sponsored a joint project on desert farming there. There was a tiny spring – not much more than a spot of damp ground – which had probably saved a few Indians foolish enough to get caught in the desert, and which had supplied water for a few other passers-by, too, miners, trappers, outlaws, whatever.

So the feds sank a pipe into the floor of the caldera and built a windmill to pump water the with state-of-the-art 1959 technology, and built a little shack for the research scientist assigned to that lonely duty, and for a few years they tried to prove that the desert could be made to bloom.
It apparently didn’t work and the post was abandoned early in the first Nixon administration. Tricky Dick had other things to worry about, one assumes.

Shortly after that a Korean War vet named David Valdez took up residence there. He was from a nearby town and had, apparently, been one of the local workers hired to set up the base. When it was empty Valdez happened to be sort of between homes – his ex-wife had thrown him out of his last abode some years back, and his veteran’s disability check was entirely committed to fortified wine, leaving no other discretionary income for housing. But when the Princeton-educated, government-employed, clip-board toting farmer moved out of the caldera, Valdez moved in. He showed up in town periodically after that but his benefits check mostly sat in the bank, as the desert seemed to have burned away his taste for alcohol. He would buy a new pair of boots every once in awhile. Some canned goods. Axle grease for the windmill. But he liked going into town less and less and so his visits got pretty sporadic. And then they stopped altogether. And by that time there was nobody left who really remembered where that caldera had been, anyhow.

So now you know what you need to know to find it. Or wait a few decades until the archive is opened, because the specific location is in there, too.

Since most of us have seen Dylan Finch films since 1998, that last blog entry didn’t really create much of a cliffhanger effect, did it? And if you are even a cursory reader of People or US or Entertainment or Premiere, you knew about him getting lost in the desert. You might not have known how close he came to dying, because – to his credit – he didn’t really milk the episode for as much publicity as he could have.

At any rate, when he woke up he was still hot and thirsty and everything still smelled like sand. But he didn’t think for a moment that he was dead because he didn’t think that Cass Harding would be in Hell with him, putting wet rags on his forehead.

“You’re awake,” she said, looking into his eyes. He tried to speak, failed, tried to cough, had a little more success.

“You need to drink,” she said. She helped him sit up and then she put a tin cup to his lips. He grabbed it with both hands and took a few weak swallows. It felt good running down his throat and expanding coolly in his stomach.

“Much better,” he croaked softly, looking around. He was in a small wooden shack and sunlight filtered through the spaces between the planks. The floor was wooden, too.

“We’ve been trying to give you water through a wet rag,” she said, holding onto the one that she’d been putting on his forehead.

“Where the hell are we?” he said. “And, um, where are my pants?"

“We’re in a canyon called Kerith Ravine,” she said, “and your pants are over there.” She pointed with her head and he saw his pant – the legs cut off just above the knees – draped over a dusty metal box that looked like an army footlocker. The footlocker and the green canvas cot were the only items of furniture in the dim shack.

“No offense, but this is the shittiest hospital room I’ve ever seen.” He took another gulp of water, his hands a little steadier on the cup at this point. It struck him that his right hand felt OK. He stretched it out and peered at it in the shadowy room.

She laughed. “You’re in the only bed for many miles around,” she said, “so relatively speaking, you’re in the lap of luxury here. No roads, no telephone, no radio, no electricity. Haywood says that when you’re strong enough to walk for eight hours, he’ll lead us to the highway where we can probably get a ride.”

“Haywood?”

“The man who’s bed you’re in. The man who saved our lives, too.”

“I was bitten by a snake.”

“He told me. Your arm was red and puffy before, but it looks OK now. How does it feel?”

“OK,” he said, surprised. But there was a pulsing ache in his right leg just above the ankle. A pain he was only then aware of. “But the leg still hurts.” He looked down. There were bruises and an ugly-looking scab where the bone had jutted through the skin. But in the gloom he couldn’t see the large bump where the break was.

As he looked at his leg the shack door opened, letting in a square of bright white daylight that hurt Finch’s eyes. He squinted at the figure who came in and the door closed quickly, quietly behind him.

“You must be Haywood,” Dylan said, proffering his hand and waiting for his eyes to readjust.
There was a pause and the other man hesitantly, clumsily took Finch’s hand and shook it. It was as if, Finch said, he’d never heard of shaking hands before. As if it was something he’d read in a book once a long time ago and wasn’t entirely sure how to execute.

“Dylan Finch,” Finch said into the silence.

The dazzle of daylight faded and Preacher Haywood came into Finch’s view. He was a little under six feet, rather thin, but not in a starved-hermit sort of way; just thin. His hair was long but he was beardless and looked reasonably clean and well-groomed. At the time Finch didn’t think anything of this, but later it struck him as incongruous.

“Preacher Haywood,” the man said, after a slight pause. To Dylan it again seemed as if Haywood had to struggle to remember the words, as if he hadn’t spoken English very recently.

“Thank you so much for… for bailing us out,” Finch said, feeling a little awkward at the way Haywood’s eyes searched his. Haywood stared at him a moment later, and then bent to look at the leg. He ran his callused hands lightly across the skin.

“There are still some bruises,” he said. “Don’t bang it when you get up.”

“I’m not planning on getting up anytime soon,” Finch said, lying back down on the cot. “It hurts like hell. I mean I saw it, before. I saw the bone coming through the skin.”

“Preacher set it while you were still out in the desert,” Cassidy offered.

“That needed a – what’s it called – a – I had a friend who broke his leg. Not nearly as bad. Something Reduction and Fixation,” Finch said. “Pins holding it together. X-rays to make sure it’s positioned right. No offense, Haywood, but the longer I wait to have that operation, the more work they’re going to have to do to get set right. I don’t want it healing crooked. I don’t want a limp.”

“It’s set right,” Preacher said, rather distractedly, tipping the tin cup up to Finch’s mouth. Dylan swallowed reflexively to avoid drowning.

“Are you an orthopedist?” Finch said, when he could breath again. “I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but the sooner I can get this looked at, the better.”

Haywood shrugged. “Soon as you can walk to the road, I’ll show you the way.”

“How far is that?”

Preacher paused on this longer than usual. As if, Finch recalled, he was not only trying to recall the words, but also the concept of time.

“About as long the moon stays up,” he said finally.

“A night?” Finch said, sarcastically. To be fair, there is a difference -- moonrise to moonset can be less than an entire night.

Haywood shrugged again.

“I’m supposed to walk an entire night on a broken leg? Can’t you just walk out yourself and… and…” and he stopped talking. Then gasped. “Oh, hell, I have to…”

Preacher grabbed him under one arm and Cassidy grabbed him under the other and got him two steps out the door before his bladder let go. He didn’t pee much but it burned and it looked dark and cloudy running down his leg.

“Good thing I’m not the… modest sort,” he said, looking away from Cassidy. His good leg wobbled underneath him. He kept his bad leg bent up.

Around him he saw Kerith. It was a bowl set in the mountains, with a small garden plot and a windmill near the shack. Farther from the windmill the desert mingled back in with the green and the mountains around them seemed sere and lifeless. Finch had a sense of concentric circles going from green to brown, radiating out from the spring in the center.

The sky was blue and cloudless and hot.

“How long have you lived out here?” Finch said, as Preacher marched him wordlessly back to the shack.

“Not sure,” Haywood said slowly. “Cass said it was August of 1998. As near as I can tell, I got here in January of 1995.”

“Three and half years? What’s the nearest town?”

Haywood shrugged and eased Dylan back onto the couch.

“You don’t know?”

“Never been there,” Haywood said.

“Where do you go for supplies?”

Haywood said nothing, and Cass laughed. “I already had this conversation with him,” she said. “We’ve been saved by a genuine old-fashioned hermit. Hasn’t talked to another human being in over three years.”

“Horseshit,” Finch snapped.

“Solid food,” Haywood said. “When you’re strong enough, you can leave.”

Finch did suddenly feel exhausted. “Steak and eggs,” he said. “And… orange juice. And a latte. Skim milk.”

With that he fell asleep as if he’d been drugged.

Haywood drank from the tin cup.

“He’s not usually like that,” Harding apologized. Not that she would know. “But… I mean, he’s a movie star.”

Preacher said nothing.

“More water for him?” she said.


Two days earlier: she’d collapsed a hundred yards from the shack, and Preacher had scooped her up and carried her effortlessly to the trough – a 55-gallon drum cut in half, lengthwise. She had tried to tell him about Finch but he didn’t seem to hear her. Just carried her to the steel basin and dumped her in. The water was sun-warmed but clear and she could feel it rehydrating her one pore at a time. He took a crude clay cup from a hook on the nearest leg of the windmill and drew some cooler water from the spout, and helped her drink it. She gulped it greedily and then told him about Finch as the stomach cramps hit her. She struggled and managed to keep from vomiting and when the spasms passed he gave her another cup of water. Then he carried her into the shack, her dress sopping and clinging to her. He deposited her onto the cot in the welcome shade and disappeared. He returned a moment later with a ewer of water – made from the same unglazed red clay of the cup – and put it on the footlocker next to the cot.

“He’s by a tower of rocks,” she wheezed, referring to Finch. Haywood – although she didn’t know that was his name, yet -- turned and walked out without saying a word. It occurred to her that he hadn’t said anything at all the entire time.

If it was a hallucination, she thought, it came with the sweetest, clearest water she’d ever had.
She slept, and was awakened by the sound of a splash outside. It was still daylight, but the sun seeped through the chinks in the shack at a longer, lower angle. She sat and felt lightheaded, took another drink, and stood. She felt weak and thirsty and famished but all-in-all, much better. Her dress was dry, her long, dark hair was dry. How long, she thought, was I asleep? How long would it take me to dry out in this desert air?

She took a few steps toward the door and the man who’d saved her burst into the room with a soaking wet Dylan Finch in his arms. Even though Finch was the same height, and probably 20 pounds heavier, than the long-haired man, he carried the actor as if he were light as a feather.

“How…” she said, trying to decide which question to ask first. “Is he OK? How did you get him back here? Where are we? Who are you?”

The man placed Finch gently on the cot.

“He’ll… be… OK,” the man said, his voice even more halting and uncertain than it would be when Finch spoke to him later. “I… carried him back. You are in a caldera I call Kerith. And my name is Preacher Haywood.”

“You’re a preacher?” she said. She didn’t know why this was the first thing that popped out. Certainly she was more curious about how he’d managed to carry a man weighing 180 pounds across the desert – an expanse of desert that she’d nearly died crossing, unburdened.

There was a long pause. “No,” the man said. “That’s my name.”

She looked over his shoulder. Preacher had pushed up Finch’s pants leg and was running his hand along the black-and-blue expanse of his shin.

“How’s his leg?”

“Bad break,” Preacher said. “I reset it out there while he was still unconscious. Less… screaming that way.” He didn’t look as if he was making a joke.

“What happened to his arm?”

“Snake bite,” Preacher said. He stood. “Take his pants off.”

He came back in with a knife and cut the legs out. “Keep out of the sun,” he said to her. “I’ll bring you some food. Soak these rags and keep his skin moist. Use this bit of cloth to let him drink – keep it saturated, and he’ll suck on it reflexively.”

“How will I know when to stop?”

“When he wakes up, or stops sucking,” Preacher said.

And so the last two days. She nursed Finch, and Haywood seemed to keep to his own schedule – tending the garden, making food, and disappearing entirely for short periods.

“Is he going to be OK?” she said to him after Preacher shook his head “no” in response to her watering question.

“Yes. Leg and hand are fine, kidneys are working. He’s drinking on his own. A little food for strength, he’ll be fine.”

Cassidy was a little nervous still around Haywood. They hadn’t spoken much while nursing Finch. Initially, he said so little she wondered if he had some sort of mental disability. Later, she realized that he only spoke if he felt there was some important and non-obvious piece of information to give her – he would respond to direct questions, tersely, and usually with the most obvious and narrow answers imaginable.

But as time had gone by Haywood had seemed to remember the art of, well, if not conversation, at least speaking to other human beings. She had spent most of the time in the shack, and he had spent most of the time out of it; nights she spent sleeping on the floor with a rag pillow, days she spent keeping Finch as hydrated as possible. He worked in the rather dense and tangled garden mornings and evenings, avoiding the midday heat, and prepared two meals a day, and what he did at night was a mystery to her. She was aware of him sitting on the tiny plank deck in front of the shack – about three feet wide and uncovered, it was exaggerating to call it a porch, although he referred to it as such – when she woke up in the middle of the night the first night. And she was aware of his absence when the same thing happened the next night.
But she’d managed to get some information out of him when their paths crossed. That he was born in 1967. That he’d been there since 1995 without any outside contact. And sometimes – rarely – he spoke on his own. About living in the desert. About tending to his garden. About a growing awareness of being just a small link in a big chain.

Even about cooking. Her first night there he gave her a tamale that was exquisite. He showed her the stones he used as a mortar and pestle. She could see the corn stalks behind him. The twining vines of pumpkins and squash. Bean plants on trellises made of steel rebar, leftover from one of the prior occupants.

He told her his story of arriving at Kerith. An abbreviated version. He said, “I left Chicago with some demons. Decided to go back to San Diego. The closest thing I have to a home town. Catch up with some old friends, you know, try to figure out where things went wrong. Hitchhiked my way to a rest stop in Nevada and decided, what the hell, I’d take a little hike in the desert. Couple days later and I woke up face-down in about two inches of water in the trough. Leaky pipe. Saved my life. Of course I fixed it later. Probably shouldn’t have. Anyhow I got the hand-pump working – the windmill was nearly frozen – and went into the shack and found the previous owner. Been dead awhile, I guess. A few years. Pretty well mummified by the desert.” He stated this very matter-of-factly. Cassidy recalled that she had slept on that cot – the cot upon which, apparently, some guy had died, the cot upon which his remains had dry-rotted for a couple of years – and had a strong urge to go writhe in the sand until the cooties got off of her.

“At any rate,” he said, “there were some canned goods. All gone now, but enough to keep my alive then. And lots of seeds. And a garden gone wild, pretty parched. At one point there was some sort of drip-irrigation system to keep everything alive, which probably worked until the windmill seized up. I strip it down and lube it pretty good every six months or so, but I imagine that it ran for a year or two after the last guy died.”

“Lube it with what?”

“That other shed on the other side of the garden has all kinds of stuff. Most of it government issue, but not all of it. The axle grease is plain old Mobil, but none of the cans are dated. I think the last person here probably had a little more contact with the outside world than I do. Maybe not, because nobody came looking for him when he died... but I think he was getting supplies from somewhere.”

There was more. About living in the desert. About feeling connected to the natural world, and at the same time being acutely aware of his intellect – of self-awareness setting him apart qualitatively from everything around him, even as he felt so physically interconnected with it. I can’t tell you, he said, why the corn grows, or how. It is a sort of natural miracle. But the corn wouldn’t be planted at all if I wasn’t here to do it. It wouldn’t get the water it needs to sprout if I didn’t direct it there. When it sprouts and produces kernels of its own its genetic survival is not ensured unless I agree to help – and the trade-off is, I will eat most of the kernels it produces. So do I exist because of the corn? Does the corn exist because of me? Both. But I am aware of this. The corn isn’t.

The next morning Finch awoke with the sunrise, just as Cassidy did. She brought him a thin corn gruel.

It wasn’t bad, Dylan had to admit. The gruel, that is. There were little bits of fire-roasted squash in it, and salt, and some sort of desert sorrel. Plus, he said to Harding, I am so damn hungry that I am ready to start eating the cot.

But within 30 minutes he has Cassidy and Haywood help him hobble to the little lean-to outhouse a couple hundred feet from the house.

Haywood insisted that Finch’s leg was fine. Finch just needed food and water for a couple of days to get his strength back. Finch disagreed. His leg had been badly broken and he needed professional medical help. Haywood didn’t argue with him. But he didn’t give in, either. Just walked away. Came back with a bent piece of rebar that was left from the windmill construction. “Cane,” he said. “Use it, if you want.”

Finch spent his first awake-day inside the shack. Gruel for breakfast, panbread for lunch, some sort of tamale for dinner. He was convinced that it wasn’t actually delicious. That its deliciousness was an illusion caused by his hunger.

Harding was a little more accepting. “This guy,” she said, “is like the hermit Wolfgang Puck. He’s got a cast iron skillet, a big stew pot, and his garden. That’s it. I don’t know how he does it. But everything he makes has been delicious.”

“He’s full of shit,” Finch opined as he finished dinner. “There is salt in that. And some sort of seasoning. Where does he get salt unless he goes into town? Leftover salt from three years ago?”

“Salt lick in the hills, over there,” Haywood said. They hadn’t known he could hear them. “All natural. Got a little potassium in it, I suspect.”

He sat down on the narrow deck with them outside the shack.

“So how do you stay out here for three and a half years without getting completely nuts?” Finch said, rather accusingly. He figured if he was obnoxious enough, Haywood would go get help just to be rid of him.

“Do you know if you’re nuts?” Haywood countered. “If I was really nuts, I probably wouldn’t realize it. For all I know, you two are hallucinations.”

Finch and Harding looked at each other nervously and Preacher laughed. It was the first time either of them had heard it, a full, deep, cheerful laugh. Rather infectious; Cassidy laughed with him, and even Finch smiled.

“The truth is that I was worried about that when I got here, too,” Haywood said. “I thought about the fact that there are two types of hermits – the ones who get wiser and the ones who get crazy. I wasn’t so much searching for wisdom as I was trying to avoid psychosis. And it occurred to me that the ones who didn’t go nuts had one thing in common, which was a very disciplined, tightly scheduled approach to each day. You know, latins, matins, vespers, nones – the religious hermits worked hard, had prayers at regular hours, adhered to a strict rule. And it seemed to help them keep from getting nuts. At least I thought it did.”

“Are you religious?” Finch said. “I thought you said Preacher was just your name.”

“No, I’m not particularly religious,” Haywood said. “But I admired that discipline. So I adopted my own schedule. Gardening, washing, cooking, things like that. And time for meditation during the day. I tried to stick to the schedule and it helped. It helped keep me focused on the tasks at hand and… and it didn’t keep the demons at bay so much as it forced them to approach in single file. Where I had a better chance against them.”

Finch wasn’t sure they were all defeated. Haywood seemed more than a little weird.
The next afternoon he opened the footlocker and found Haywood’s wallet. There was a dust outline around it. Inside was an expired Florida driver’s license and $120 in small bills. None of them were dated later than 1993.

No photos. An expired insurance card from the federal government.

Almost against his will he started to be convinced.

When Preacher said they would be walking out to the road in two days neither of them believed him, because Finch was still leaning heavily on the cane. And both Finch and Harding remembered the desert too vividly. Feared it too much, still.

But the night he said that, he and Harding sat up talking until the moon was high overhead, and whatever they spoke about changed her mind. When Finch awoke and came outside he found Cass wandering around the entire valley in a sort of euphoric daze that he found more than a little unsettling.

“Did she find some peyote or something?” Finch asked, as he and Haywood ate a breakfast of beans and corn tortillas.

“It’s an epiphany,” Haywood said, not paying much attention to her. “I’m going to take the windmill down and service it. It’s a few weeks ahead of schedule but it should be done before I go.”

“You can do it when you get back. We don’t want to mess up your sanity-saving schedule.”

There was a pause.

“I might not come back,” he said. “It’s time. It’s time to go.”

Finch didn't know how to respond to that. So he looked out across the caldera. Cassidy walked languidly between the cornstalks, letting her fingers trail upon the leaves. They could hear her laughing.

“Seriously, what’s wrong with her?”

“It’s an epiphany,” Haywood repeated. “A sudden awareness of the presence of the Divine. She doesn’t have that one-ness, yet, but she can sense that it’s nearby. All around her. It’s good. She’s not ready to understand that she’s it, too.”

“What the hell are you babbling about?” Finch said.

Haywood laughed. “Nothing,” he said. “Just babbling.”

He went out into the garden while the morning sun was still manageable and gently hoed away weeds and let the irrigation tubes drip small amounts of water onto the plants before the scorching sun was high enough to evaporate it instantly. Finch sat there in front of the shack looking at them both suspiciously. I think, he thought, that I need to get better fast, or Cassidy will be as crazy as he is.

Finch’s classical education was… well, lacking. For a graduate of Akron’s public school system it wasn’t too bad, I suppose, but it wasn’t good enough for him to instantly think of the lotus-eaters. He thought, instead, wasn’t there that story, about that Greek guy, where they ate something and wanted to stay on the desert island?

Close enough.

Cassidy sat down next to him with a beatific smile.

“What are you so delighted about?” Finch asked her.

“Everything,” she said. “Let me tell you, I don’t know if it was the near-death experience, or the fresh air, or the healthy diet, but I am seeing things a lot more clearly now.”

“I can tell,” Finch said. “Haywood thinks you can see God.”

“No,” she said, “but I can feel Him holding me at the moment. I mean… I mean look. Look.” She pointed at what seemed to be random spots around the caldera.

“I think your sunstroke has returned,” Finch said.

In the end the best she could explain it is this:

“Preacher says,” she said, “that when you realize that there is no distinction between the Divine and the non-Divine, then you realize that your every action should be an act of worship. And right after he said it I took a breath and then suddenly all this was obvious.”

I double-checked this. Dylan Finch distinctly remembers that she told him that. She remembers telling him that, and remembers that Preacher told her that. The semi-official motto of the Worshipers is “let every act be an act of worship,” and as near as I can figure, that started with a throw-away line he laid on Cassidy Harding when she was still under the effects of dehydration and sunstroke back in 1998.

For what it’s worth, I guess this makes Cassidy Harding was the first Worshipper. Before anyone called it that.

Finch was the second, of course. Much more reluctantly.

Part Forty Two

In Las Vegas, Nevada, in August of 1998, there was a lavish party to mark the premiere of a big-budget heist picture.

One of the people there was Dylan Finch. He had finished shooting a big-budget thriller of his own, called Ravens. Ever seen it? Sucks. But in August of 1998 nobody knew that yet. Well, Finch might have suspected, but he was paid handsomely to appear in the picture so he didn’t admit that it sucked. Plus, it was still in editing at the time of the party, so one could always argue that he didn’t yet know it sucked.

(Right. The Magnificent Ambersons was ruined in editing. Ravens was doomed from the beginning.)

At any rate, appearing at film premieres was a sort of pre-promotional effort on behalf of Ravens. He wasn’t officially plugging the film yet. It was scheduled for release the day after Thanksgiving. He was just sort of… reminding people that he existed. It had been a year since he was named one of People’s Sexiest and almost two years since his last picture. Of course it had been five years since he did work he could be proud of, but that’s another story entirely.

I’m an alcoholic ex-history professor, not a film critic. What the hell do I know?

At any rate, Finch went to be photographed and he went to get out of LA. And he went to get away from his ever-swelling entourage. He only told two people where he was going – his manager and his personal assistant. And he swore them both to secrecy, saying, if anybody I know shows up at this thing, I will know you told, and you might as well not even be here when I get back.

He drove.

It takes about four and a half hours to get from Malibu to Las Vegas. The easiest part is also the longest, that big stretch of I-15. Finch noticed a little hesitation in his Range Rover when he was moving out of traffic heading east-north-east on the highway. It struck him then that it was a bit absurd for him to have four cars. He thought that he might get rid of everything but the Porsche when he got back. Movie star with the Carrera, he thought. What a cliché. But then again so was the SUV and the entourage. Those he would gladly give up. The Porsche… he liked driving the Porsche too much.

He arrived. Got his picture taken. No starlet on his arm, this time.

At the party – before Finch’s fashionably late entrance – was a woman named Cassidy Harding. She was there on time – which is to say, early – because she didn’t know any better. She was there, period, because she had done some work for the studio, designing specialized software, and they were so happy with her work that they offered her the trip and an invitation to the premiere.

She knew nothing at all about the film, and didn’t care to.

It was unlike her to be at a party in Vegas wearing a little black dress. All three of those things were unlike her – party, Vegas, dress. She worked too hard, she never went away (her home and office were in San Francisco), she favored jeans and tee-shirts.

She was petite and very pretty with fair skin from her Irish father and jet-black hair and eyes from her Argentine mother. She was 28 and in 1998 (as now), a dot-com millionaire. Several times over. Despite the fact that she had an annoying habit of mostly refusing to work for stock options, and when she did accept them, she almost always turned around and sold them within a few months.

Finch saw her early. She pretended she didn’t recognize him. Then she allowed that she might have seen Dogs Of War, a film he’s made five years earlier, the one that put him on the map, the last real bit of acting he did before doing three successive high-paying “blow things up” films. Including Ravens.

He pretended to understand her when she said she designed user interfaces for software applications. Which was sort of like saying that Bobby Orr ice-skated.

Anyhow they talked and they flirted and she made him work harder than he usually had to, which he appreciated.

She knew that he would.

And it turned out that they both like blues music, or at least she did and he was willing to fudge it a little bit, and so around midnight they took it into their heads to leave the party and hop in his car and drive all the way to Bakersfield, California, to see BB King.

All the while silently patting themselves on the back for being wild and impetuous and free. Finch was just glad to finally be by himself, and was all the more determined to purge himself of a few hangers-on when he got back.

Harding just wanted a little more time before deciding if she wanted to sleep with him or not.

They stopped at a Circle K and bought bottled water and she got a Snickers bar. And Finch asked the night clerk for “back country” directions into California. He felt self-conscious about the fact that he’d driven a car that got 10 miles to the gallon from Malibu to Vegas. She didn’t say anything but he thought that she thought that…

Dylan Finch, the actor, the movie star, had done a lot of scenes that were rewritten even as the cameras were being positioned. And he paid careful attention to the directions the night clerk gave him. So I don’t think he got the directions wrong. I think the night clerk at the Circle K on Boulder and Sahara Avenue was just an idiot.

But regardless, country highways turned into country roads turned into dirt roads turned into mining access roads turned into, by the time the sun came up, a broad expanse of arid wasteland marked by the occasional tire track. The occasional skinny tire-track of an ATV, not even genuine wheel-ruts.

They both knew he was lost.

Just before noon, he admitted it. “I’ll just follow the GPS west until we find a highway, or a fence, or a building,” he said.

The Foo Fighters were in the CD player. She took another pull on her bottle of water, smiled, tapped her fingers to the music, said nothing. She thought to herself “too bad they don’t put longitude and latitude on Texaco roadmaps,” but she said nothing.

Just after noon, as the big SUV lumbered down an incline, the engine suddenly revved higher while the vehicle slowed down. Finch pushed down on the gas pedal and the engine roared but the car continued to freewheel. They drifted toward the bottom of the hill.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

He frowned at the dashboard. “Don’t know,” he said. “Think it’s the transmission. The engine’s running but the wheels aren’t getting any power." He thought back to that little hesitation he’d felt in the car when pulling out of traffic on I-15 earlier.

They rolled to a stop. He downshifted into both low settings, turned off the four wheel drive – nothing.

“Put it in reverse,” she said. “My father used to have an old truck and when the transmission got so bad we couldn’t climb hills anymore, he used to put the thing in reverse to get going.”

Finch moved the gearshift to “R” and stepped on the gas gingerly. The wheels engaged for perhaps two revolutions and then stopped, and the engine revved higher again.

They sat, motionless, and watched the shimmer of the midday heat bounce off the hard-pack around them.

“Now what?” she said.

“Now we use the cell phone and the GPS and get someone out here,” he said. He took out his cell phone.

“I can’t get a signal,” she said, staring at hers. His was to his ear. “Anything?” she asked.

After a second or two he shook his head. He was just the kind of person who would try it even when it showed no signal. She, on the other hand, was the kind of person who wouldn’t even try if the display showed no signal.

Incongruously and utterly inappropriately, it was at that moment she realized she wasn’t going to sleep with him, no matter how soon they were picked up.

“I’m going to try the top of that hill,” he said, gesturing with his head to the top of the incline they’d just rolled down.

“Take mine, try them both,” she said, handing him her cell.

He left the engine running and was gone longer than she would have guessed. Long enough that she got nervous and climbed out on the running board and squinted up to see him.

Jesus, it was hot.

When he made it back she said, “well?”

“Nothing,” he said. They sat in silence for another moment.

“So now what,” he said to her.

She liked the fact that he asked her opinion. Not that she wouldn’t have given it anyhow.

“So we sit here with the AC running and wait for someone to come along. There were tire tracks not far back. If nobody’s here before it gets dark, we put out your emergency flares. They should show pretty far from the top of the hill, out here in the desert.”

“No flares,” he said. “I had a flat tire on the freeway a couple of weeks ago.” It was more like six months ago. He’d just never bothered to replace them.

The Gin Blossoms were playing on the CD player.

“Well, then, when it gets dark we walk out of here. Like you said, if we walk in a straight line we’re bound to hit something sooner or later.”

He looked over at her in her little black dress and fuck-me pumps.

“How far can civilization be?” she said, reading his mind.

“I guess we’ll find out,” he said. “You might want to save the last of that water.”

“Nope,” she said. “So long as I don’t drink so much I have to pee. Hydrated is hydrated. I’d rather carry it inside me than in the bottle.”

Later, before the sun had dipped below the horizon, she went into the back of the SUV and pulled out the little tool-kit and used a screwdriver to pry the heels off of the shoes. They weren’t really her style anyhow. Her friend and office manager Desiree had helped her pick them out. While she was back there she picked up a baseball cap.

“Ravens,” she read aloud. “Is this from the football team?”

“No,” he said. “It’s a film I just finished.”

“What’s it about?” she asked, mostly because the silence was unbearable.

“There’s this… secret security force that works for the UN,” he said, “and we have to stop a plot to blow up the UN buildings in New York and The Hague. And, um, Geneva.”

“That must have been fun, working in Europe,” she said.

He shrugged. “Sure.” He hadn’t had a lot of time to be a tourist. Short shooting schedule.

“Let me guess,” she said, “it turns out there’s a traitor in your midst.” She laughed and he glowered at her. He hadn’t even read the script in advance. Big-name action director and big-time paycheck. And his name above the title.

“It must be hard,” she said, trying to make amends, “to have to co-star with explosions all the time.”

“I co-star with Mira Sorvino in this one,” he said, snapping a bit more than he’d intended.

“No,” she said, “I meant that as a compliment. I mean…”

“Most of the time I’m not even there when stuff blows up,” he admitted. “I have to spend a lot of time throwing myself through the air and landing on mats. But sometimes I’m there when it happens. It takes a really long time to set it all up.”

She finished prying off the heels on the shoes. “How are we doing for gas?”

“It will run out right around the same time as nightfall,” he said, looking at the gauge.

“Even with the AC going it’s hot as hell in here,” she said. “Good thing it was just the transmission.”

“I guess,” he said.

He felt like it was his fault. Ignoring the bad transmission. Deciding to drive across the desert. No flares.

She never really thought that. Even when things got bad she didn’t blame him. It was just an accident. Accidents happened.

It got dark and the engine sputtered out and they got out of the truck wordlessly. The water was gone by then.

“Which way?” she said when they met in front of the ticking grille. It was still hot as hell – the air was cooler but there was still a lot of warmth coming up from the desert floor.

“We’re pointing straight west,” he said. “We know it’s too damn far to go back the way we came. Might as well keep going. There might be a Howard Johnson’s right on the other side of the horizon.”

“Might be,” she admitted. She looked to her right. “That’s the Big Dipper,” she said. “That’s the north star. Keep it right there in the sky.”

He looked at where she was pointing, and then looked at her. A little surprised. A little impressed. He wrote a note on a scrap of paper and turned the headlights on. “Just in case,” he said.

At first, things went well. They were both in pretty good shape. They were really inappropriately dressed, of course. Removing the heels from those sandals hadn’t made them any more comfortable. The little black dress didn’t have much fabric but it wasn’t really meant for hiking. And he was wearing long pants and Gucci loafers. Again, not optimal hiking gear.

So the night wore on and they both grew exhausted and sore and they couldn’t see the truck anymore. Whether it was from distance or a dead battery, they didn’t know.

When they got to the pile of rocks it was a welcome relief from the monotonous terrain. They were dimly aware of mountains ahead and to the right but they didn’t seem to be getting much closer despite a lot of walking. The pile of rocks told them that they were actually making progress, that the landscape could and would change. The pile of rocks gave them a little hope.

“Let’s take a break,” he said, and she was happy to agree. They squatted and rested and then he straightened and began to climb the rocks.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“If there’s anything ahead – anything man-made – I might be able to see it if I get a little higher,” he said.

She looked at the rocks doubtfully. “Be careful,” she said, “there could be rattlesnakes in there.”

He looked down at her. “Thanks,” he said, after a moment. “I wasn’t nervous enough.”

He kept on climbing and then something shifted – his foot? A rock? Whatever it was, he pitched backwards off the pile, not very far, just three or four feet, and came down hard on his left leg, which broke with an audible pop.

He screamed and clutched at it as he rolled onto his side, as she raced over to him.

For a moment he couldn’t say anything, just held his leg about two inches above the ankle and writhed, his forehead pressed into the grit and sand.

“Shit,” he panted when he could. He felt hot and cold at once, clammy and nauseous. He breathed hard through his mouth and concentrated on not throwing up. Can’t lose the water, he thought to himself fiercely. Can’t lose the water.

“Let me see,” Cass said, but didn’t try to touch him until he stopped writhing, sat upright, and nodded his OK.

She eased his pant leg up gingerly. The moon was fairly bright. Bright enough that she could see a large bulge in the lower part of his shin, an extra joint in his tibia that hadn’t been there before.

“Shit,” he said again, rocking slightly. “It’s broken, right?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I think so.”

“Oh, Christ it hurts,” he said. He looked down at it. “And I tore my pants.” She laughed despite herself. He chuckled, too, and then winced as even that slight vibration made the leg hurt worse.

“This isn’t funny,” she said. “How are we going to walk out of here now?”

“We aren’t,” he said. “You are. This is the only damn landmark for ten miles. You’ll be able to find me again. Go get help and come back for me. I’ll be OK.”

“I don’t like leaving you here,” she said.

“You don’t have any choice. The best hope for both of us is for you to keep walking until you find somebody. Because if we’re still out here when it gets hot again, we’re both screwed.”

He was right.

“Take my shoes and socks,” he said.

“What?”

“Take my shoes and socks. The socks, at least, will help your feet some. Maybe the shoes. I’ve got little feet. They’ll still be too big but you can decide if they’re better than those sandals you’re wearing.”

It made sense. She put on his socks and stepped into his shoes. They were way too big. But not as uncomfortable as the pumps.

“Now get going,” he said, hissing a little around the pain. “I thought I saw something straight west from here. We’re going in the right direction.” That was a lie. She knew it, and didn’t press him on what he saw.

“I promise I’ll get back here,” she said.

“I know,” he said. “I’m too famous to die in the desert. So get going. If someone happens along, I’ll know to send them straight west. So don’t change directions.”

“I won’t,” she said. She glanced up at the North Star, looked at him again, and set out.

Finch dragged himself over to the rocks and leaned against them and tried to focus on the pain shooting up his leg. It was a distraction from the thought that he was likely to die alone in the desert, famous or not.

Dehydrated, terrified, exhausted, and slipping in and out of shock from the injury, somehow he managed to sleep when he could no longer see her moonlit form receding away from him. And he had no idea what time it was when he screamed himself into wakefulness, hurling his body away from the rocks and swinging his hand away from the fire that shot through it.

Rattlesnakes are reptiles. They can’t control their body heat in the desert. So they hunt at dusk and at dawn, and look for rocky, shady places that can protect them from the sun during the day, and that offer some residual heat during the night. They look for places like that pile of rocks. The surprising thing is not that Finch was bitten as he slept there. It was that it took him that long to be bitten.

As he rolled away from the stones he heard the rattling, too late, and his leg shot a fire up that touched his belly and the little bit of moisture left in him stained the front of his pants. The bone that had bulged against his skin broke through with this frenetic movement and he could do nothing but scream wordlessly, almost soundlessly, paralyzed by the agony in his left hand and left leg.

Calm, he told himself. Calm. You get scared, your pulse races, your blood pressure goes up, you just spread that venom through your system faster. Lie still. Still. You’re motionless. It doesn’t hurt.

It was the best bit of method acting he’d done in a long time. But he convinced himself, at least enough that he could feel his pulse rate slow and the pain seemed to float outside his body.

He lay on his side on the hard-packed earth, motionless, and wondered where the snake was.

Not all that far away -- not all that far, considering how long she’d been walking, and how tired she was – Cass Harding shuffled in a line that was surprisingly straight and true west. She wondered, not for the first time, if splitting up had been a mistake. If she should have stayed with him. If he got picked up, of course, he would tell them which way she had gone. So she had to stay straight west. If he didn’t get picked up, then it was up to her to save them both. But if he was unconscious when someone found him, he wouldn’t be able to tell them which way she went. Or that someone had even been with him. Nobody knew that they’d left together. Not that she could think of. Should she have stayed with him?

This looped thinking was interrupted by her first fall. The oversized loafer caught on something and she fell straight forward and landed on her face.

For a moment she lay there, stunned, tired, thirsty. She heard her father’s voice in her ear. “Get up, Cassidy,” he said. It was just like when she was a kid, after her mom died, when her father would get her up for school. “Get up, Cassidy.” It was a gentle voice but one that did not allow for defiance.

She got up and continued walking. Were the mountains a little closer? The mountains looked a little closer.

Right when the sun came up she fell the second time. The shadow she cast, with the sun at her back just peeping over the horizon, made the ground look uneven and she took a false step and she fell again.

This time her mother was there. “Just get some rest,” her mother said.

Cass struggled to her feet. “You’ve been dead for 15 years,” she muttered.

“You know I’m an hallucination,” her mother said. Or the voice said. She didn’t actually see her mother. Just heard her, just to her left. But she resisted the urge to turn her head.

“Yes,” Harding said aloud, through clenched teeth.

“So why go and ruin it with all of this, this… objectivity?” her mother said. Cass didn’t answer and there was no follow-up from her mother.

The mountains were definitely closer. Jesus, she was thirsty. She knew she was bleeding, her knees and palms and forehead, from the falls. The sun was already fierce and it wasn’t completely above the horizon yet.

What if they’d found Dylan, but he wasn’t able to speak?

No, it was just a broken leg. That doesn’t render you mute.

The sun went higher and she grew hotter and she could feel her skin reddening. She tried not to think about water. For some reason oranges were stuck in her head. A cool, sweet, perfectly ripe orange. The flesh beneath her teeth. The juice on her tongue. That acrid smell when her fingernails broke through the peel.

She was thinking about oranges when she came to the cliff wall. Doddering, blank-eyed, just a few stages shy of heat-stroke, she came to the cliff wall like a zombie, as if she walked simply because she’d forgotten to stop.

But the wall stopped her. It was sheer and rose sharply perpendicular to the desert floor, and stretched north and south as far as she could see in either direction. She stood in front of it, just a few feet away, and blinked at it stupidly. A wall. How could there be a wall in the middle of the desert? She looked up and saw that she’d reached the edge of the mountains, reached them at a point where there were no foothills and gradual slopes but just this giant upthrusting of rock.

A wall.

She collapsed.

When the sun came up Finch awoke. His throat was dry and sore. His leg was a throbbing horror. His hand was numb and when he looked at it he saw that it was swollen and purple and that the swelling was reaching toward his elbow.

And yet it was the sun that awakened him. It touched one bare foot with an almost-gentle, almost warm probe and he saw the red lip of it above the horizon and he was afraid.

Shock? He thought. Dehydration? Snakebite? No, the sun will kill you quicker than those other things. He watched the sun rise, watched his shadow move a little.

Might as well make a race of it, he thought. Dying of snakebite seems somehow a little more… fitting than dying of thirst or shock or sunstroke. Yes, I think I should work to let snake venom win the contest. Then that fucking snake will try to eat me and choke and die.

He tried to say something out loud but couldn’t. Too dry. He worked his mouth a few times and then settled for glaring at the rock pile. Hear that, fucking snake? Eat me.

With an inaudible groan he tried to use his right arm and leg to drag himself into the shade of the rocks. Every pebble, every grain of sand sent exquisite bolts of pain shooting up his leg and from his arm across his shoulders. It seemed as though he’d dragged himself a hundred yards by the time he got into the shade, but when he looked back across the sand he saw that it had only been six feet or so.

Fuck you, snake, he thought, settling in close to the rocks. We’re just going to have to share.

The sun rose up behind him.

Thirst – a distant third behind the pain in his leg and the pain in his arm – began to move up in the standings and before too long it stood proudly in first place. To distract himself from that desire he stared at his arm and was disappointed when he could see no further progress from the snake venom. Fucking snake, he thought again. Wasted all your venom on some rabbit before you hit me. Could’ve had a movie star for dinner. Wasted it on some rabbit. Come here and finish the job.

The sun was almost directly overhead when he finally understood, really understood, that he was going to die. He’d told himself before that he was going to die but some part of him hadn’t really believed it. Hadn’t quite accepted it. But now it was right there. Tomorrow the sun would rise, and he wouldn’t see it. Everywhere on earth people would go on living their lives, his friends and family would get up and do things and new movies would come out and someone else would drive his Porsche and there would be, be, current events, people would become President and just life, life would go on and he wouldn’t be there. It would go on without him.

He felt utterly insignificant. Had he the moisture, tears would have flowed. It was so… unfair. Unfair. That everything would continue just fine without him. Maybe he would be remembered for Dogs of War. And the fact that he died would sell a few more tickets to Ravens. But the fact that there would be a Ravens premiere after he died…

Selfishness, he realized. That was really it. The urge to live, fighting death – it was just self-centeredness. It was an inability to accept the fact that the sun would continue to rise and set long after you were dust.

When you freeze to death, he recalled, you stopped feeling cold as you drifted off to sleep. Maybe he would stop feeling thirsty.

It was the last thing he thought.

On the ground in front of the cliff wall Cass heard her parents arguing.

Let her sleep, her mother said.

It’s time for school, her father replied.

What difference does that make? She’s going to be dead soon.

She has perfect attendance, her father sputtered. Why should she throw that away? She made a commitment to finishing this. No excuses.

“Perfect attendance” she whispered, and opened her eyes, and got to her knees, and stood, weakly, tottering.

Her parents were nowhere to be found.

She stood there for a moment, her feet spread wide apart for balance, her eyes closed, until things stopped spinning. Then she looked at the cliff wall. North, or south?

She turned north, thinking, it’s cooler up north.

After about a hundred yards she went down again. She lay on her side, facing the cliff, her eyes closed, waiting for her father to get her up again. But she heard nothing. Felt nothing. Just a tiny puff on her face, the hint of a breeze. And then a faint, faint squeak of metal.

Her eyes snapped open. A breeze from the cliff? A metallic squeak? She listened intently but didn’t hear anything else. Felt no more breeze. Her eyes scoured the cliff wall in front of her and then she saw it pop into view, like one of those 3D images that she’d gone cross-eyed trying to make out.

An opening. A path. Maybe three or four feet across. Camouflaged perfectly by the coloring of the rocks and the angle of the sun… an opening all but invisible unless viewed at exactly the right angle.

When she tried to stand she found that she was now too weak to do it at first. Even the idea of a passage through, the squeak of metal that said “humans,” the breeze – her arms and legs trembled and wobbled and would not lift her up. She had to crawl to the opening and then grabbed hold of the rocks and pulled herself up.

She took a step inside. There was a word painted in something dark on a rock. Kerith. It meant nothing to her. She staggered onward, leaning on the rocks for support, and followed the thin defile through the cliff wall and navigated a dogleg and then the rocks on either side of her were gone and she was standing in a small box canyon, one that seemed green to her eyes grown used to the barren brown waste of the desert. And ahead of her was a deeper, fuller green, and she heard the metallic squeak again. Her eyes focused on the windmill and she staggered toward it, and as she fell for the last time she became aware of a figure rushing toward her very fast.

Part Forty One

Talk given at the second Worship convocation, St. Michael’s, Maryland.

When Ramakrishna touched the Divine, he sat in a speechless trance for six months. When he had a vision of Jesus, he wept for three days.

Ramakrishna had spent his life working in the temples of Kali and being trained by priests and pilgrims alike; he’d been on a spiritual trail for decades before Tota Puri shoved him that last little bit into the arms of the Divine.

And still, a six-month trance. Three days of weeping.

I am telling you this because it is possible that you might someday have your own experience of the Divine.

I doubt it. In all candor, the fact that you are here tells me that you are striving hard to know the Divine and that means you probably will not be able to master the final lesson, which is humility – that to know the Divine you must first give up seeking to know the Divine. It is downright un-American to do anything with the idea that you’re not worthy, and if you subtract humility from the equation then the idea that to find you must stop seeking just becomes New Age babble.

But let’s assume that I’m wrong and you’re right and you stop seeking and become as a child. And you have that transcendent experience we’re all here talking about.

What then?

In modern English the term “ecstasy” implies unadulterated pleasure, but the ecstatic experience of touching the Divine is not pleasurable. It is terrible. It is wrenching. It is… well, transcendent. I’m not sure how else to put it. It will strain your mind to the breaking point. By definition the Truth that you encounter will be beyond your ability to comprehend it. Even though you are that Truth, our intellects are far too limited to grasp 99% of what we are exposed to in that timeless moment that we see the fundamental reality of the Divine.

It will, to be blunt, screw you up almost beyond repair. As much work as you put into seeing and following the path to the Divine you can never be fully prepared for it. There are hermitages and monastery cells all around the planet filled with gibbering anchorites who found the Divine and went mad as a result. You will be speechless for a time afterwards because what you have encountered cannot, for obvious reasons, be put into words. There was a time when people were more accustomed to divine madness, and were better able to deal with it, culturally. We're not those people. In modern America, there's really just one kind of insane; that your particular mental illness was caused by the Divine and not by too little lithium in your blood is really not relevant. Nuts is nuts.

Think about it – once the direct experience of something has passed, then the way we know that something is by the use of symbols. Right? These symbols may not be words – they may be physical sensations, or notes, or colors, or images, or smells, or tastes – but they exist in our minds, as symbols of what has passed. And the only symbols our minds understand are those rooted in the physical world. All symbolic thought – which is to say, all of our conscious thought, all that makes us sentient beings, self-aware and aware that we are aware – is rooted in the five senses. This is something that philosophers like Locke figured out centuries ago. People like Noam Chomsky rephrase it in terms of semiotics, but it’s not a new concept. Conscious thought is expressed in symbols that depend upon the notion of a physical reality to have meaning. This is something the Buddhists, in particular, understood well.

But the Divine transcends the physical. Therefore you have no symbols with which to describe it. No words, no images, no notes. No touch, taste, smell. Your mind is left struggling with this experience which has overwhelmed it and for which it has no… no process, no tools for processing.

You will be able to suppress the memory somewhat. But just barely. It’s too powerful. Psychiatrists tell us that repressed childhood traumas express themselves in strange ways during our adulthood. Well, whatever childhood trauma you’ve experienced, the conscious awareness of the Divine is more traumatic. And more powerful. And when you try to deny it and squelch it and pretend it didn’t happen, it festers. It gnaws. It corrodes your mind like an acid volcano; you can let it explode, or you can keep a lid on it, but either way it’s going to rip you apart.

Let me tell you what doesn’t work to fix this problem.

Drugs, including alcohol, don’t work. You might be able to manage brief moments of weightlessness, where you don’t CARE that there’s an acid volcano stripping away your sanity, but the drugs will be increasingly ineffective until you’re back to making a joke of the whole thing by killing yourself.

Flight doesn’t work. It sounds odd, but everyone has the impulse to run. You associate what happened with where it happened, or who was with you when it happened, and you have this irrational urge to just get away from the scene of the crime in the hopes that a little distance will fix things. It doesn’t, for obvious reasons: the thing you’re running from is you, after all.

There are only two things that seem to work, and they both have their pros and cons.

One is to immediately resume walking upon the path that led you to the Divine to begin with. This can be very hard to do, and it seems counterintuitive – you want some distance between you and that awful crushing Truth that you stumbled upon. But if there are rites and rituals that have become habit to you, returning to them will be soothing. And the circling of the Divine that the path necessarily entails will help sort of step you down from the ledge; you wean yourself instead of dropping it cold turkey.

Like I said, this is hard for most people to accept. They want it out of them, they don’t want to start the non-search again.

Which brings me to the second option, one which I discovered sort of by accident but which explains the abundance of inaccurate roadmaps to the Divine that we have.

You can talk the damn thing to death.

When it happens to you, you will reflect upon what I just said and laugh derisively. Because… well, because of what I said earlier. The symbols we use are so utterly inadequate to describe something which transcends the physical that every attempt seems like a caricature, at best. You are taking the square pegs of that Divine experience and trying to fit them into the round holes of your conscious, symbolic thought.

Do it anyhow. Hammer on those square pegs until you force them into those holes. It will stretch the holes out some and at the same time shear the sharp edges off of those pegs.

It doesn’t have to be words. Whatever form of expression you’re most comfortable with. Dance. Sing. Paint. Whatever. Do it, and start doing it right away.

What happens is this: the inadequate, inaccurate, misleading caricature of the experience that you create symbolically will start to supplant the real thing in your mind. Even as you recognize that this symbolic version is little more than a parody of the real thing. But this symbolized version of Truth is something your mind can handle. And you will slowly neutralize that acid.

At the same time your reformed, easier-to-swallow version of events will serve as both a guidebook and a barrier to having the experience all over again. A guidebook, because now you’ve done it once and so you have a better idea of what the journey entails. But a barrier, because now your mind has this misleading, dumbed-down idea of the Divine that it clings to like a life preserver.

You might re-encounter the Divine later. That’s so strange to say. As if you would run into God walking down the street, hey, God, haven’t seen you in awhile. You never stop encountering the Divine. Let's say, then, you might again have a full realization of the Divine. That’s better. And after your brain can’t take it anymore and you are spit back into ordinary limited consciousness you will have to go through the same exercise. And you’ll come up with a different inaccurate rendition of the experience. But now you can use the two different flawed symbolic versions of Reality to help you triangulate on the Truth.

This is, really, all that Worship is. We take the flawed symbolic renditions of Truth that other survivors of the Divine have left behind, and we use them to try to figure out where we’re supposed to be looking. Lots of people find the Divine just by using the Bible, or the Koran, or, hell, the Sermon of the Flower. No one source did it for me -- I needed a little bit of everything to find my way.

Part Forty

Let me just say this, before continuing: I am not THAT heartless. The whole Kara/Karen name-game? Neither one of them is her actual name. This is probably the only part of this memoir where I will quite deliberately falsify someone’s identity. Her real name is, of course, in the archives, but I trust Harkin and the rest of them to keep that sealed until it doesn’t make any difference. And who knows? In this culture, tomorrow Kara/Karen might publish her own tell-all, making all this secrecy meaningless.

But Kara’s husband was the president of a small local bank, which made it ridiculously easy to find them. And she was active in her community and in her church bulletin, which was conveniently posted on the Internet, which made it even easier to find them.

I sent her a letter, carefully worded: I am doing some research regarding a number of people who lived in Chicago in the early 1990s, could I please just have a few moments of your time.

It was ignored.

But I was in Kentucky anyhow, to interview Sally Stubbs, and I’d seen both pictures of Kara as a model (very pretty, Grayson understated things) and as a mom (still very pretty, and only heavy compared to the fashion model she used to be), I knew where she lived, where she went to church, where her husband worked…

I was face-to-face with her at a church bake sale and I said – when no one was around to hear – “did you used to know Preacher Haywood?”

She bit her lip, every blood cell drained from her face, and she shook her head no. This was not a “no I didn’t know him.” It was a “no don’t talk about it.” I told her it was important that we talk about it, that I could promise her complete confidentiality, and then some moron wandered up to buy coconut cake and that was the end of our conversation. I gave her my card.

The next day I followed her as she dropped the kids off at a church-run preschool and then went to the grocery store. She saw me walking down the aisle toward her and she looked around as if she was seriously contemplating running away. Instead she just hunched behind her cart and kept it between us.

“You sent me that letter, didn’t you,” she said so softly I could barely hear.

“Yes,” I said. “I work for the Worshipers, and they’re trying to figure out what happened to Preacher when he lived in Chicago, and that’s led me to you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, so haltingly and unconvincingly that I laughed out loud.

“You don’t understand,” she said, and tears welled up in her pretty blue eyes.

“Try me,” I said. “I was serious about complete confidentiality. We’re not going to publicize any of this. This is just academic research.”

“Maybe to you,” she said. “It’s not academic to me. I have to live in this town. My church… my husband… my kids…”

“Look,” I said, “make me understand, then. Why can’t we talk? In complete confidence?”

“Is Preacher in some sort of trouble?” she asked.

“Not to my knowledge,” I told her. “But you do know what happened to him eventually, right? He became the founder of…”

“I know all about Worship,” she said. “At my church, Worship is one of those things like communism, and witchcraft, that they use to scare children straight.”

Really? I thought. One of those? Were they snake-handlers, too? I have to admit that this made me more, not less, interested in her story. Finally, someone who not only wasn’t a Worshiper, but actively worked against the group.

“I think it’s not so bad, really,” she said, dashing my hopes, “but if I even admitted that I read the book online they would probably want to kick me out of the women’s auxiliary. Let alone if I tried to defend it. Or admit that I knew him. Even if… I mean even if I didn’t tell them about…”

“I learned about you from a number of people in Chicago,” I lied. “The story, and your name, have stayed private thus far. I don’t know how long that might last. Don’t you want to make sure your version of things is down beforehand? And I think that if I got it straight from you, probably that would mean less turning things over in Chicago. Which would probably help you stay anonymous, in the long run.”

She was scared enough, or dumb enough, to buy that. She left and said she would think about it but the next day she called me on her cell phone and arranged to meet with me in a Burger King about twenty miles from her house – so that, she said, nobody she knew could possibly stumble upon her having lunch with a strange man.

When I got there she was, dear Lord, wearing a hat and sunglasses.

“Listen,” she said, nervously nibbling at a French fry, “I want you to know that this doesn’t have anything to do with you or those Worshipers.” Her Kentucky drawl was rather pronounced, her voice soft and high. “I am doing this for my family. I will do anything to protect them. I took that release you gave me and erased a few words and had a lawyer friend look at it. He told me that if you release this tape, and I can show real damages, I can sue you and Worship for everything you’ve got.”

I shrugged. Everything that I had? I had nothing. And I didn’t care what happened to the Worshipers any more than she did.

“So I’m counting on you to keep this confidential, but with one exception, and that’s this – if I ever come out about this, if I ever make statements about what happened with me and Preacher in Chicago, I want you to release the whole tape publicly.”

“What?” That didn’t make any sense.

She sighed. “Look, I don’t care about the Worshipers, but there are people – you know this – people who think the Worshipers are about the worst thing that ever happened, and think Preacher’s the Devil himself. You know we had a guest pastor who gave a sermon and called him the Beast from the Sea? Can you imagine that? Preacher Haywood, the Beast from the Sea.” She shook her head sadly. “Like you said, if you can find me, anyone can. Including someone like that, someone who will lie, cheat, and steal to take Preacher down a few pegs. I let Jesus into my heart a few years ago and I’ve tried to avoid doing anything to jeopardize my soul after that, but if they force me to lie to spare my family – to tell an, an altered story, or an incomplete story, to make Preacher look bad – I’ll do it if they threaten to go public. You know? I can see one of those old boys telling me I can tell the story the way they want it, and remain anonymous, or else risk having everyone in my family, my children, my church – everyone know what I was and what I did in Chicago. And I’m just a sinner, Jesus knows – I am weak, and I will do what I have to for my family. And if that means lying about Preacher, I’ll do it. So this,” and she gestured at the tape recorder, “this is just… this is an insurance policy. This is to keep me honest. And to keep them away. If they come and ask me to lie, I will tell them about this tape and that you will release it. What I’m going to tell you is the complete and unvarnished truth. So I won’t be tempted to lie to someone else, knowing this is out there to show me as a liar. And someone else won’t be tempted to ask me to lie, either.”

This made only a small amount of sense to me. Once I heard her story I understood why she didn’t want her kids and fellow Women’s Auxiliary members hearing the story, but I think she was maybe excessively paranoid about being exposed by one of her fellow Christians. It’s certainly true that there is a certain fundamentalist core that fears and loathes the Worshipers in general, and Preacher Haywood specifically. They raise a lot of money by invoking him like some sort of New Age bogeyman. The Family Research Council has a whole video on what to do if you kid goes away to college and comes back sounding like a Worshiper. And I am certain these people wouldn’t hesitate to exploit someone like Kara, no matter what it did to her, if they thought it would help them in their jousts against Preacher’s particular windmill. But I think Kara had, perhaps, an inflated idea of the value of her story to these people. Facts never seemed to be an obstacle to them in any other endeavor. They didn’t need Kara because they were perfectly content with inventing whole elaborate paranoid fantasies about Preacher on their own. And if they did track her down and decide that there was some benefit to be gained from modifying her story, they wouldn’t care that there was a recording somewhere that refuted their version.

But I wasn’t there to explore her motives for talking. If her calculations were off, I didn’t care. As long as she talked.

“When I was 12 I got paid for my picture for the first time,” she said. “A poster for the Pulaski County fair. I was in love with the idea of all those people looking at me. I babysat to earn money for modeling lessons. Did a few things around town, and sent headshots and a resume to a lot of agencies. Went to talent searches. In May of 1992, a week before I graduated from high school, I got offered a one-year contract by Central Modeling – one of the biggest and best agencies in Chicago. Oh, I was so excited. My mom and dad drove up to Chicago with me. Took almost eight hours each way, by car. Met the folks at the agency. They were real nice. They helped get me an apartment with one of the other girls.”

She stuck a French fry in her mouth and sort of tongued it, as if it didn’t count as food if it wasn’t chewed. “I remember the day before I left we had a party. Everybody was laughing and saying it was the last piece of cake I could eat until my birthday.” She laughed herself, then, but not a nostalgic echo of the girlish laughter from 13 years ago. It was something bitter and humorless and unlike anything I’d heard from her before.

“My feet, my ears, my wrists. My face, a few times – make-up ads. Never fashion. Never my whole body. I was always overweight and undertall. I did everything I could to lose enough weight. I remember sitting down at a restaurant and saying that we should just take our plates and scrape them directly into the toilet, and cut out the middleman. I was skinny. But there was no diet that would make me 5-8. I tried exercising to keep the weight off but they don’t want women who are toned and fit, they want bones with skin over them.”

I tried to act interested. But I was thinking, just get to the Preacher part.

“I had definitely been there more than a year, so it must have been late summer or early fall of 1994 when I met Preacher. I think he was dating one of the other models at the agency for a little while. I’m not sure. Just one day he was… he was there.

“I know we’d been there more than a year because when my contract was about up and I was desperate and depressed and disgusted, my roommate taught me the secret to staying thin and upbeat as a working mid-level model: methamphetamines. I was so afraid of not renewing my contract and slinking back to Kentucky. So afraid that the highlight of my career was going to be a few wristwatch photos in the Spiegel catalog. Afraid, and 19, and a long way away from home. And those little red pills did the trick. Didn’t want food. After awhile, of course, I needed little blue pills to get to sleep after a long hard day and night of little red pills. And after I started on the blue pills I had to start taking the red pills when I woke up in the morning. And then there were other pills for all the states in between. By that time my roommate had moved onto Vitamin H – heroin, which was supposed to be the perfect model weight-loss supplement and mood stabilizer. I was never able to get the courage to try that.

“Anyhow to ensure a steady supply of the pills I started going to the parties that I’d mostly ignored before. There were these parties in Chicago which were mostly models and rich people. I don’t know how else to describe it. There are a lot of both in Chicago. And lots of pills and other things available at the parties. That was probably the first time I met Preacher, at one of those parties. And I know it was either late summer or early fall because I already knew Jeremy Richards when I met Preacher.

“Jeremy was this rich guy who ran an ad agency in Chicago. Lots of money. He was probably 30 years old than me, but he was really nice, and supportive of my career, and he always had the best little pills. And he didn’t even want to sleep with me, not much, not at first, even though I was more than willing to. I knew he was married but I didn’t really care because it didn’t seem to matter to him.” She closed her eyes, here. “He found work for me. His A-D asked for me specifically a couple of times. That always helps you with your agency, you know, when A-Ds start asking for you by name. And Jerry found me a better apartment. Helped me with the rent. Always had the best pills. He was so nice to me… I remember that he never particularly liked Preacher. Which was kind of surprising because most everybody liked him. Preacher was smart and funny and… and wild, open for anything, the riskier the better. But at the same time he had this gentle streak. He would do anything so long as the only person he was endangering was himself. I don’t think he was talent, and I’m not sure if he was really rich or not, but he could have passed for both, and so that’s also part of why he was so welcome. And by the time I met him, at least, he was already using heroin. And cocaine. And just about anything else he could get his hands on. But even then he was a strange sort of drug addict. How many junkies do you know who ran five miles each day and worked out at the gym? Who spoke fluent French? I remember him talking to this model from Paris…

“Preacher was always sort of around that fall and into the winter. I guess that’s what I’m saying. But I wasn’t paying much attention to him. It’s not like we were friends. We knew each other and I liked him the way most people liked him and I think we’d had a few conversations about nothing in particular. He said he knew some girl from east Kentucky when he was in college. That was about all I remember. But I wasn’t focusing on much of anything then. I had gotten to the point where pretty much every minute of every day had to be regulated by some kind of drug, and increasingly Jeremy was the only person I would talk to outside of work. And even then I was mostly focused on what sort of chemical I needed to feel right. Except, of course, “right” never came. I need to the coke to get right, but there was a little too much so I needed a perc to take the edge off, but that made me feel lethargic so I tried something else to give me some energy… you get the picture.”

That, I thought, was the beauty of bourbon – one size fits all.

“The first time I had roofies I don’t know if Jeremy gave them to me himself or if it was one of his friends. He watched while three of them took advantage of me. I remembered it all afterwards because by then my system was so fu…” She caught herself. For a moment her vocabulary was going to switch back to 1994, just as her Kentucky accent had faded in the course of her narrative when her mind took her back to the time when girls said “fucked up” and didn’t have a strong drawl.

“My system was so out of whack from the drugs,” she went on. “We didn’t even have much of a fight about it afterwards. It was the bill coming due.” She shrugged it off again, physically, her small shoulders going up and down there in the Burger King as she related this part of the story. She took a long pull on her diet Coke.

“So on New Year’s Eve, 1994, I went to a big party at Jeremy’s house. I met his wife for the first time. She looked a lot like me. Just ten years older. There were a lot of people there. A lot of drugs. A band. His house was gorgeous, this gigantic thing on the north shore. I don’t know if Preacher was already there when I arrived or not. A lot of that night is still a blank to me. But I remember Lila – Jeremy’s wife – leading me upstairs at one point. Then the others started coming in the room. Sometimes one at a time, sometimes two at once. Jeremy was there watching some of it. Lila, too, I think. It’s…”

She looked down at her pile of cold French fries and fingered one. A tear rolled down her cheek.

“I don’t remember it clearly, and I wish I didn’t remember it at all. Sometimes I throw myself out of bed at night, while I’m asleep. I just yell “No” and vault out and wake up on the floor. Bruised myself pretty good a couple of times. Scares my husband half to death. I don’t remember the nightmare I have that makes me do it. But I have a pretty good idea it takes place in that room in Jeremy Richards’ house.

“Finally there was no one in the room except Lila. She put a glass of champagne on the night stand. Said ‘Happy New Year’ to me. Walked out. I lay there in that bed and looked at the nightstand and saw a bottle of pills there next to the glass of champagne. And I knew…”

For the first time a sob became audible. I didn’t know what to do. What to say. I slid one of my napkins across to her. She blew her nose noisily into it. You can hear that on the archive, too.

“I was supposed to take the pills. I knew that. And I knew that everything in that room had been videotaped. That me killing myself with pills was supposed to be the conclusion of the film. So Jeremy, that dirty old impotent man, could watch me get gang-raped and then die on film. All for his amusement.” She shuddered and her jaw set and I saw firmness there that must have been missing in Chicago. And I would feel sorry for Jeremy Richards if he ever crossed her path again.

“And I would have done it,” she said, the tears starting again. “I wanted to do it. I longed to do it. I tried to call Lila back to see if she would help me. Because I couldn’t move my arms. Whatever I’d been taking, it was hitting me pretty hard and I was stuck there in the bed, looking at that bottle like it was my only hope and crying, not because I was about to die, but because it was going to be awhile before I could move enough to do it myself. I was frustrated because I couldn’t kill myself right away.

“And after I lay there crying for a few minutes, crying softly, I should say, very softly – the door opens again and I croaked out “help me,” thinking it was Lila and she would open the pill bottle for me.

“And I heard Preacher say Jesus, Kara, what the hell happened.”

More than a decade later Karen sat in a Burger King and closed her eyes and drew a deep breath, remembering the moment.

“We sat there and talked for about an hour,” she said. “I told him everything. Everything I’ve just told you, and more. Worse stuff. And when it was finished he told me he would help me escape if I promised him that I would never come back to Chicago. I told him, absolutely, I never want to see this city again in my life.

“He picked up the telephone and called a cab, and then he called information, and then he called Frankfort, Kentucky, and then he called a train station. He might have made a few other calls, I don’t know. I remember that he after he hung up the last time he picked up the lamp on the table and smashed it through the mirror across from the bed. There was a camera. Preacher pulled the video cassette out and pulled all the tape out of the box and set it on fire in the trashcan. Wrapped the comforter from the bed around me – I still couldn’t move right, and I had no idea where my clothes were – and carried me out of the house like I was a feather. Down through the crowd and into the cab. We went to the train station and he bought me sweatpants and a Cubs t-shirt while we waited for the train. He bought clothes for himself, too. He sat there with me and held me until my train arrived and then he put me on it. Told me there was someone waiting for me in Frankfort. And to please not get off the train for any reason, not to use anything stronger than soda pop for the whole ride. I kept my promise, although it was hard. When I got off in Frankfort there was a very unfriendly woman there from Cristobel Home just outside of town. Rehab.”

She went on and on for a long time about rehab and all the other crap that happened to her afterwards. It’s not particularly interesting. She cleaned up, found Jesus, and married someone in the Kiwanis. What else do you need?

But she told me this little tidbit – she said that Preacher planned on taking his new clothes and a bag of junk food and locking himself in a Motel 6 for two weeks and quit cold turkey. “I don’t expect I’ll want to wear these after two weeks of cold sweats and junkie vomit,” he told her, plucking at the fashionable New Year’s Eve party clothing he was wearing.

I have no reason to think that he did anything any different.