The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014 Page 6

  He told her again about Kati, who had been raised by religious parents and found it difficult to “open herself up sexually.” But he had treated her, and now she was taking many photographs of herself. First she relaxed in front of the camera. Then she was able to relax in bed.

  “Poor Stella. You still have so far to go. This is part of your deprogramming. This shyness about your body is not you. It is what the world is telling you to do.”

  “Yes, Teacher.”

  “I’m trying to help you to be free,” said Dr. Robinson. “But you have to work at it, too.”

  Stella sent him naked photographs of herself. They were demure, low exposure, her legs crossed, her hands over her breasts, though in one photograph she revealed a nipple.

  “This is just you being closed,” he said. “You’re not trusting me enough. You are disappointing me so painfully. You will have to prove yourself to me in another way.”

  When an acolyte absolutely cannot be deprogrammed, when she is too far gone to be reasoned with, there is only one strategy left: destroy the entire cult. Several years ago Sullivan received a call from a man in Marin County who owns a chain of retail stores. The man’s niece, Judy, had become a devotee of someone who called himself Swami Sebastian. The Swami was a tall, good-looking black man who wore turbans and flowing white robes, spoke in a Nigerian accent, and claimed to be the reincarnation of Christ. He named his group the Mother Divine Love Foundation and placed flyers around Marin County:

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  The Swami’s disciples, mostly young women, lived with him in a house in Bayshore, just south of San Francisco. They called him Abba. He explained that he was the personification of all good and all evil. In Nigeria he had been an African warrior, and when he was a young child Haile Selassie had touched his head and pronounced him a divine spiritual being. Judy had conceived a son with Abba.

  The Swami owned a juice bar on Capuchino Avenue in Burlingame called Sebastian’s Take Outrageous. He used it to recruit new members. Judy, who was in her late thirties, was his oldest and plainest disciple. But she was also the richest. Abba rechristened her Blessing and told her that her role in life was to bestow blessings. This meant that she was to fund his refuge for women and babies in Jamaica and to support him with a monthly income. So far she had given him more than $35,000. Judy’s family had succeeded in getting her to leave the Swami once before, but after three weeks she returned, and the family began to receive threatening calls and letters. Cars with tinted windows would drive slowly past their home.

  “I promised my wife I’d help Judy,” said Sullivan’s client, “but we have two young children, and I don’t want to put them at risk. I’ll pay you to get her out, but I don’t want this maniac to know I’m involved.”

  Sullivan staked out the Swami’s house. In addition to Blessing, the Swami spent a lot of time with a stunning young woman named Heather. Heather had long, dark hair, pale skin, and dark eyes—an ideal temple love goddess. The Swami had renamed her Hathaya.

  When the Swami arrived home one day, Sullivan took photographs with a telephoto lens, then sped away. He made sure the Swami saw him.

  “Come back here!” screamed the Swami, running after Sullivan’s car, middle fingers raised. “Who are you, motherfucker?”

  A funny thing happened when the Swami cursed: his accent disappeared. He didn’t sound like a Nigerian anymore. He sounded like an American.

  Sullivan had his operatives tail the Swami. They reported that he left home each morning with three or four of his acolytes and drove to different houses in a white Cadillac. Every stop was the same: he’d knock, a woman would greet him warmly, and he’d enter the house, sometimes with the girls, sometimes without. He’d stay about an hour, then leave, often carrying a bulging envelope.

  Sullivan visited Sebastian’s Take Outrageous while the Swami was on his rounds. There were bags of oranges piled up in the bathroom, bundles of wheatgrass stacked on the floor, and the serving area was grimy with rotting fruit. Sullivan noted that the business license was expired, so he called the local health board. An officer showed up the next day and ordered the juice bar to close until a new license had been procured.

  Sullivan researched the LLC listed on the business license and discovered it was controlled by a man named Delroy Miller. He ran a background check on that name and found that Miller had a criminal record in a small town outside Fort Worth, Texas. Sullivan looked up the number for the police department there.

  “Delroy!” said the sheriff when Sullivan called. “What’s ol’ Delroy up to these days?”

  “He’s in California now.”

  “Better you than us.”

  “Tell me, what kind of trouble did he get into back in Texas?”

  “Delroy was just a flimflam man. Sometimes he cut fraudulent checks. Sometimes he was a preacher accepting donations. Sometimes he had an aluminum-siding and roofing business. He’d get the deposit and skip the work. Or he’d case the house and send his buddies to burglarize it a week later. He did some time, and when he got out I told him he better move on. So he did. Has he been arrested?”

  “No. He’s found a new calling.”

  “What would that be?”

  “Well, sir, Delroy isn’t Delroy anymore. He calls himself Swami Sebastian, and he has a sex cult in a small town south of San Francisco.”

  “No shit. A swami.” Sullivan heard the sheriff talking to another officer. “You remember Delroy the Jamaican? Yeah, well now he’s a goddamned sex swami in California!”

  “Do you have any background on the guy?” asked Sullivan. “Do you know where he came from?”

  “He had some trouble in Georgia, if I remember correctly. Savannah.”

  Sullivan called the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and found an agent who remembered Delroy Miller.

  “He used to dress like a pimp,” said the detective. “He was a member of the Rude Boys, a Jamaican drug gang, and he hooked up with the local mafia down here. They run drugs from Jamaica through Florida and up to Georgia. Your man must have had some problems with these fellows, because he left in a hurry. We heard he ripped off Little Nick, the guy who runs the local outfit.”

  Little Nick owned a sports-memorabilia store in Savannah. Sullivan called the store.

  “I’m looking for Nick.”

  “Who’s this?”

  “He doesn’t know me. But I have some information he might appreciate.”

  There was silence. Then another man picked up the phone. “Yeah?” Nick was not a native Georgian. He had a New Jersey accent.

  “Do you remember Delroy Miller?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “He’s set himself up here in California as a swami. He’s got a bunch of young girls worshipping him. Some of the girls’ parents aren’t too happy about it, and they’d like to see him gone. I understand you might have some unfinished business with him.”

  “What’s in it for you?”

  “Nothing. I’d just be happy to reunite you two.”
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br />   Nick laughed and took down the Swami’s address. Sullivan called the house in Bayshore.

  “What is this about?” said the Swami in his thick accent.

  “We haven’t met, but you know who I am. I’ve been taking your photograph. I called the health board on your juice stand.”

  The Swami started cursing.

  “Calm down,” said Sullivan. “I’m about to do you a big favor.”

  “I don’t need favors.”

  “You remember Little Nick from Savannah?”

  The Swami ditched the accent.

  “You know Nick? What’s this about?”

  “Nick has your address.”

  “How did he get it?”

  “I gave it to him. He’s catching a flight this afternoon. That puts him at your doorstep in about eight and a half hours.”

  The Swami hung up.

  One of Sullivan’s operatives was at the Swami’s house. He watched as the garage door opened and the Swami’s women ran about frantically, loading boxes into a van. The Swami yelled at them to move faster. Judy was trailing him in a near-hysterical state.

  “Where are you going, Abba?” she wailed.

  “Shut up, woman! Get out of my way!”

  That night Sullivan called his client.

  “The Swami is on an airplane and he’s not coming back.”

  “Yeah, I just heard from Judy,” said his client. “She’s a wreck.”

  Abba had told Judy that she and the other disciples were unworthy of him. He had wasted too much time on them already and refused to tolerate their ignorance any longer. Only Hathaya, beautiful Hathaya, had sufficiently proved her devotion. Only she would accompany him to the promised land. Yes, Hathaya was the most holy.

  “I’m running, panicked, through a dark jungle. There are hundreds of eyes in the bushes watching me. A creature is pursuing me, something strong and extremely fast, and when I glance back I see it’s a lion. But then I notice that I have claws and fur, and I realize that I’m not me at all—I’m a puma. I don’t feel afraid anymore, because I’m big and powerful, and I want the lion to attack. And he does! The lion leaps on my back. We’re writhing around, biting each other, I feel very warm, and the next thing I know we’re having fierce, passionate sex, our bodies are merging into a single body—”

  “Yes,” said Dr. Robinson, his voice high with excitement. “You’re beginning to apprehend the undiluted truth! Finally you are allowing me to heal you.”

  “Can you explain the dream?”

  “Of course. You’re the puma. And I’m the lion.”

  “I see.”

  “You’re entering a new dimension. Your fears are vanishing. You are ready.”

  He explained that the others were excited to meet her. Especially Kati. But Stella would have to be eased in slowly. Dr. Robinson would meet her first, alone, so that he could prepare her. He had already picked out a motel.

  Stella Zrnic, thanking him profusely, hung up. And Stela Jelincic, a thirty-four-year-old writer who moonlights as an operative for David Sullivan, dialed her boss.

  “It worked,” she said. “He’s hooked.”

  Sullivan took down the motel’s address. Then he called Kati’s mother to say that he had finally captured the monster who had brainwashed her daughter.

  KAREN MANER

  Hugo

  FROM The Colorado Review

  AFTER WORKING AT a family-owned pet store in Ohio for a number of years, I took to entertaining myself by predicting, within moments of their walking in the door, what customers would buy. At first it was a matter of demographics and statistical probability. For example, slightly underweight males aged eighteen to twenty-four demonstrated a marginally higher interest in iguanas than the average customer, whereas slightly overweight males in the same age bracket expressed more interest in bearded dragons. White females aged thirty to forty-five with small children in tow gravitated toward hamsters or other small, easily squashable, unexpectedly hazardous pets, while white females aged fifty-five to seventy with small grandsons in tow often left with a bloodthirsty reptile, unassuming in appearance, that would be returned, for a full refund, later the same afternoon.

  After a while, my successes convinced me that I could not only predict what people would buy, but also intuit why they would buy it, and I divided the customers purchasing pets for themselves into two categories: mirrorers and acquirers. A mirrorer is a prospective pet owner who, knowingly or not, worships a particular aspect of his or her own personality or appearance and wishes to see the same characteristic in his or her animal companion—the combative ferret owner, for example, or the nihilistic scorpion enthusiast. Acquirers, on the other hand, select pets based on a perceived lack and what they want others to assume about them. A young wallflower might, for example, purchase a corn snake as a way of suggesting that her isolation is by choice, a symptom of her elusive and dangerous nature.

  During the time I was doing all of this sizing up of others, my own pet was a blue betta fish named Hugo who suffered from debilitating scoliosis. Viewed from above, he resembled a teal sperm, but he rarely could be viewed from this angle thanks to the unusual buoyancy provided by the gas and food matter perpetually blocked by the S curve of his body. He drifted on his side, at the surface of the water, one glassy eye forever fixed on heaven. It didn’t occur to me then to consider what owning Hugo might say about me. Rather than placing myself in either the category of mirrorer or acquirer, I believed myself to be of a rarer and better class, that of the true animal lovers, and I assumed that others would share this perception of me.

  When I found him, he had been sequestered in a cubbyhole under the cash register, deemed too hideous for public view. In all fairness, it was true that his appearance didn’t inspire confidence in our store, or in his species. Healthy bettas were a sad enough sight. Customers often lamented the drinking cups they were shipped and stored in, to which my coworkers and I would reply, “In the wild, they live in the shallow rice paddies of Thailand,” as though there existed no greater horror. Hugo was the greater horror.

  For several weeks I checked his cup daily, shook it to make sure he wasn’t dead, dropped in a dried bloodworm or two, and watched him spin in wild circles around and around the food. When I decided to take him home, my manager charged me full price and said, “Are you sure you want that thing?” It felt good to spend forty dollars on a two-gallon aquarium, colorful pebbles, a miniature Atlantean castle, and a plastic clump of seaweed, knowing that Hugo would have a better life with me; it felt even better to do so knowing that it would leave others perplexed and maybe a bit awed.

  I’d like to think that I wasn’t aware of the latter effect until after I’d already decided to buy Hugo, that I’d thought initially only of his benefit and not my own, but I can’t remember now. I might have bought him because I felt an affinity for him, seeing in him a feebleness I find harder to face in myself. Or I might have needed him to remind myself and others of my capacity for good, in which case I wasn’t being good at all.

  I’ve kept pets all my life, but over the course of my employment at the pet store, I began to question whether it was ethical to do so. It started as an occasional queasy stirring or inchoate guilt. In the way that biting into a bit of gristle transforms “food” into something harder to swallow, a small disaster at the store would remind me that many of the “goods” I was peddling were capable of looking at, and possibly thinking about, me, and for an instant, everything would seem surreal and obviously wrong. In one such moment, a coworker dropped the wrong end of an electric pump into one of the saltwater tanks while cleaning and—thanks to a shared water source and filtration system—electrified nine aquariums at once, leaving their colorful inhabitants bobbing on the surface like Froot Loops. Another time, a customer mishandled an iguana, broke off its tail, and tossed both back into the cage in shock. The tail bounced and spun on the bark substrate, leaving spots of blood on the glass door with every flip, and the young man asked for a disc
ount on either the damaged iguana or its cage mate, and a job application. There was the unmarked bag in the staff freezer containing a dead cat; the item “Pull Dead” on the nightly checklist; the flattened hamster in the stockroom that had somehow been placed in an empty aquarium that was subsequently placed at the bottom of a considerable stack of empty aquariums; the pond owner who told me, with delight, that she had dreams of decapitating blue herons with the rusty shovel she kept by her kitchen door; the man who squeezed the mouse down the length of his snake, like toothpaste in a tube, when it wouldn’t eat; and of course, the rabbit that had been kept in a cage roughly one inch longer than itself, whose owner wished to return it for a refund or instore credit when it contracted two eye infections, a respiratory infection, and a severe case of diarrhea. And there was the moment in which I heard the following story from a coworker and decided it was as likely to be true as untrue: One day the assistant manager got a call from a gentleman who said his son had just brought home a guinea pig from the flea market. The man wanted to know if the guinea pig could be kept in the cardboard box it had come in or if he needed to buy something larger. The assistant manager recommended he keep the guinea pig in either a cage or an aquarium with some wood chips. About an hour later, the man called back and said, “He swam around for a while, but he’s dead now.”

  By the end of my two and a half years at the pet store, I had developed a pessimistic outlook on human-animal relations, and I went so far as to announce to friends and family that I was quitting the job for moral reasons: I could no longer support an industry that enabled carelessness, abuse, and neglect for the sake of profit. There needed to be stricter requirements regarding who could own animals—mandatory personality tests, comprehension quizzes, documentation, or hard evidence showing that the prospective owner possessed all of the necessary equipment to care for an animal—to prevent neglect out of ignorance or apathy. But taking a moral stand implies having a sense of right and wrong, and I can’t say, looking back, that I had such an understanding. I had compiled a list of wrong ways to treat animals from very obvious examples, and my logic assumed that by preventing these things from happening, a person or industry would be promoting the right ways to treat animals. But really this approach only results in a code of conduct that is not wrong, not necessarily one that is right, or alternatively, not cruel but not necessarily kind.