The Adam Enigma (8 page)

Summer 2004
Eugene, Oregon

R
amsey listened to the phone message a second time. “Jonathan, I'm flying into Portland this morning. Don't bother coming up to get me. I'll rent a car and drive down. I have something important to tell you.” He'd tried calling her back but she didn't pick up.

This is probably not good
, he thought. Both of them always looked forward to the reunion that occurred during the hundred-mile trip from Portland to Eugene. It was sort of their thing. Besides, he had something important to tell her too. He was disappointed he would have to wait.

Paige and Ramsey had met at UCLA, while he was working on his doctorate. She was getting a Masters in psychology. A mutual friend introduced them at a Christmas party. They were perfect for each other. Neither had had any real serious romantic relationships before so everything was experimental and exciting. Paige was bumptious and playful in strong contrast to Ramsey who often displayed a serious and often dour demeanor. Paige was Southern California through and through. She talked and he listened. She described her parents as late baby boomer hippies living in the hills above Los Angeles.

Like many such children, she went in a different direction than her parents. She was open and liberal on social issues while at the same time being ultra-conservative in many of her religious beliefs, in contrast to Ramsey's agnosticism. Yet the glue that held them together was that they shared a strong sense of justice and basic goodness.
Their relationship grew stronger and closer when Ramsey supported Paige through a dark period. Her beloved sister had suffered a surfing accident that left her paralyzed. An infection had led to a slow death. Where the couple disagreed was over children. She wanted children, but he wasn't so sure. And they argued about religion. Ramsey had no respect for those who took religious dogma on blind faith. As he told her, “I plan on becoming the world's greatest human geographer of religion and I'll do it while never stepping inside a church.”

Paige countered his argument with, “I can't become a complete psychologist knowing that people's problems are always in part problems of spiritual growth. I have looked everywhere for the best way of bringing spirituality into my practice and I found it in the words of the Desert Mothers and Fathers. They said, ‘Jesus spoke about God, Jesus spoke to God, and Jesus spoke as God.' I have tried to practice that everyday since.”

At that time Ramsey gave her a little smirk as if to say
if you say so.

Now after six months of travel around the world he was eager to tell her he understood, or at least he was on his way to understanding what she meant.

There was a knock on his office door. She looked more beautiful to him than ever. Her splendor was not in her physical appearance but in a radiant spirit Ramsey felt as love for him. The smile she gave him when they saw each other melted his heart afresh each time. He stood to hug her but she held up an umbrella. “I bought this in the airport. Let's walk. Coming from sunny southern California I love Eugene's gray mist.”

They walked across the campus until they came upon the arboretum. It was Paige's favorite spot in Eugene. Ramsey said, “I know you have something important to tell me, but I have something important also.”

“I do, but you first.”

Ramsey recounted his mystical experiences at a number of the sacred sites he studied and how this unusual man in England had directed him to a shaman practitioner in Santa Fe. “Here's the best part. I signed up to travel with a group to Peru to participate in a
weeklong ceremony with his teacher Don Julio Davila. He is a master of visionary medicine.”

“I'm surprised and a little worried,” she said.

Ramsey shook his head in confusion. “Why? I thought you'd be excited. I'm starting down a spiritual path. Isn't that what you wanted me to do?

Turning away so their eyes didn't meet, she said, “It just doesn't feel right. You have the money to do this?”

Ramsey looked around as if he was fearful somebody might be listening. “I talked Myriam into having the grant pay for it. I told her I needed to go to Machu Picchu. Which is sort of true. Some of the people in the group are going there after the ceremonies.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Remember you told me that one day the divine would call me and if I answered our relationship would move on to a whole another place. It's happening.”

“Shit.”

“What do you mean, shit?”

“What I came to tell you is I've fallen in love with somebody else, an older Christian man who shares my values. He asked me to marry him and I said ‘yes.' We set a date in August.”

Ramsey had spent the next week before his departure for Peru in a state of endless anger at himself. For the first time in his life the fire and drive that had moved him forward was gone. Yet he had to go. The flights, the accommodations were all paid for and nonrefundable.

José Luis the Santa Fe shaman practitioner led the group of about 20 men and women of all ages. Ramsey kept to himself on the plane and during the bus ride to the camp where they met up with guides and llamas that would take them into the rain forests. It wasn't until they entered the jungle that Ramsey suddenly came alive. There was something about the light, the beautiful butterflies, and the monkeys in the canopy that transformed his experience into a world where everything held magical potential. This was so much unlike the mystical experience he associated with the sacred sites, and more like returning to the simple joys of childhood.

Eventually the party reached a small village. Everybody was excited and happy to see Don Julio the great Peruvian shaman. José Luis introduced Don Julio to the group. The two men couldn't have been more different in appearance. José Luis was a small bulldog like man. His Hispanic features were like those of an itinerant farm worker. Yet he spoke fluent English and held a PhD from San Diego State. Don Julio was tall. He had a perfectly symmetrical long face with an aquiline nose and flawless smooth skin. The facial grooves paralleling his mouth projected a perpetual welcoming smile. Ramsey sensed he was like a force of nature shifting the state of everyone in the group to a higher level of awareness.

For Ramsey the shaman seemed to glow with a bluish luminosity. He noticed that José Luis spoke to Don Julio while pointing at Ramsey. Almost instantaneously and without a word everyone began an elaborate purification ritual centering on Ramsey. They smoked
mapacho
, jungle tobacco, profusely while he prepared a brown liquid. There was great laughter and happiness. Ramsey took a giant puff from what appeared to him like a stubble of burning straw. He coughed so deeply that he thought he was going to lose consciousness. But the tobacco had done its job. The world became like a dream for Ramsey. He felt radiant love emanating from everyone and everything. When they were done, Don Julio took Ramsey by the hand and led him to a large Palo Santo tree outside of the village. There he handed Ramsey the sacred Ayahuasca liquid.

As he swallowed, Ramsey's perception of the world changed even more dramatically. He saw himself with a resplendent golden body. He felt invincible. Peering around him, Don Julio and the others had disappeared. The verdant rain forest was whisked away and before him appeared a swirling multi-faceted gateway. At first it seemed impossible to pass through the razor sharp edges of the doors whirling in the entryway. It seemed they were rotating so fast they would slice his skin to ribbons in seconds. But as he watched, an unknown force entered his body, coursed through him, and shot straight for the gateway. Each door it touched slowed and then stopped twirling until all of them hung like a beaded curtain in front of him. He easily strode past the jeweled-doors and walked out onto a precipice. A westering
sun shone down upon a lush valley where palaces of pulsating light waited. Each one beckoned with whispers of untold knowledge awaiting within. Ramsey found a wide stair zig-zagging down the cliff face. He climbed down, his heart and mind overjoyed to enter the first golden palace at the bottom. Suddenly the furious beat of many wings filled the air. He looked up and saw circling above him the strangest people he'd ever seen. They were beautiful, voluptuous women, their hair streaming golden behind them. Wings sprouted from their well-muscled backs. They seemed to be escorting him down the steps. He took these angelic beings as a good sign that he was on the right track and that the Ayahuasca liquid was indeed opening a new dimension for him.

He continued downward happily. But as he descended, the sky blackened. The wind turned cold. The sound of his winged escort slashed through the air. He looked at the bird-like women again. Their cherub-like faces were gone. Their full lips were pulled back over fangs and their eyes gleamed with the rapacious look of hawk predators. Long-tipped claws sprouted from their hands. They swirled around him more and more tightly. Too late, he knew he had been fooled. These weren't angels but
harpies
, female monsters from ancient Greek myth.

Plummeting down the stairs, he tried to reach the palace before the bird-women attacked. The palace gate slammed shut moments before he reached it. The harpies tore at his golden body. The pain was unbearable. Terror gripped him. He couldn't move. He couldn't scream. In a terrifying moment just as he disappeared, the harpies flew away and a strange, gray, swirling cloud dove out of the trees and swallowed him whole. That was the last thing he remembered until waking up in a Lima hospital.

In the days following his recovery, Ramsey discovered that during the ceremony he had physically disappeared. Nobody from the group could say exactly how it happened, but within two days elaborate search parties had been sent out to scour the jungle for him. His disappearance became an international story. Finally on the seventh day a party of leopard poachers found him barely alive sitting by a
small stream. Unable to speak he was rushed to the hospital. By the time he got there he had fallen into a coma that lasted for two weeks.

When he finally woke up, Ramsey had no memory of what had happened. However, the first thing he said was, “Tell Paige I entered the temple.”

March 24, 2016
Rio Chama, New Mexico

M
yriam waited until Ramsey's rental car disappeared down Rio Chama's dusty main street before making the call. The deep baritone voice on the other end said, “Did he take the job?”

Myriam hesitated. She didn't know if Ramsey would take it or not. The way he brushed off any of her subtle probes to see how he felt suggested he didn't want it. And then there was their history. His body language seemed to be screaming that he still hadn't forgiven her for never coming to his aid personally after Peru. Yet there was something about the way he had stood beside his car looking off in the distance toward the shrine that intimated he was interested in uncovering the facts behind the mystery. Then, after Rosa spoke with him, he turned his car around and headed out of town toward the shrine instead of across the street to his hotel.

I wonder what she said?
Myriam would have to ask, but not now. Hiram wanted an answer and she could practically hear his impatience coming out of the phone.

“I don't know, Hiram. It's hard to tell.”

“I should have been there,” Beecher grated.

“No . . . no that would have turned him away for sure. Give him some space.”

“How long?”

“A couple of days. Come over to the café, we'll talk about it.”

The phone went dead.

Myriam took a deep breath. She loved Hiram Beecher for his masculinity and strength. He was a natural-born leader and self-made millionaire. He could be as hard as nails, befitting for the CEO of a major West Texas company. But he could be as soft as a box of newborn puppies.

They had met in Dallas four years previous. He was the keynote speaker at a sustainability conference where his company's recycling and landfill practices were presented as a model for the future. She had just lost her funding at the University of Oregon and had been hired by the city of Portland to investigate whether Beecher's company, Great Western States Waste Management, should bring their innovative practices to increase Portland's already green image. Beecher had just lost his wife to breast cancer. Myriam had not been in in a serious relationship since her divorce, unwilling to take the risk again. But something about Beecher had made her fall for him deeply. They had been together ever since.

Now sixty-five years of age, Beecher was a man of contradictions. He loved to hunt and fish but was a vegetarian. He married his high school sweetheart while on furlough from Vietnam. She had been a rock for him but there was very little love reciprocated and no children. And there was a strong streak of moral righteousness that ran through him.

His father had been an itinerant, evangelizing preacher in east Texas, with a heavy reliance on the spare-the-rod-spoil-the-child rule of parenting. Beecher had left home at sixteen and never looked back. After his stint in the army, he returned, bumped around Texas and finally ended up in Abilene. The missing two fingers on his right hand were a constant reminder of the war and the bad things that had happened over there. His Christian faith was one the first casualties.

The only thing that had saved him was his uncle's garbage collection business in Abilene. It was a steady sunup-to-sundown job. Nights were a blur of bars and women. But two years into it, he had attended a Reverend Billy Paul revival prayer meeting with a group of guys who drove dozers at the local landfill and a few bar girls they'd picked up in town. At one point, half drunk and falling out his chair,
he heard the preacher call for witnesses. The girl he was with said, “You're pa's a preacher why don't you go on up and show ‘em how it's done.”

Reeling, Beecher got to his feet and stumbled toward the small stage. Some bouncers tried to escort him out but it was as if nothing could stand in his way. They seemed to brush past him or trip over their own feet. He found himself unmolested at the foot of the short stair leading to the stage. He climbed the steps and when the preacher reached out, Beecher was all set to tell him to go to hell. But the man's hand was like a match and it was as if it set him on fire, burning all the alcohol out of his system in an instant like a piece of flash paper. Beecher stood blinking at the crowd. He saw his girlfriend and the other boys from the garbage hauling business, hooting at him to “give ‘em hell.”

But as he had staggered toward the stage, a voice spoke to him in resonant tones. “Be healed, Brother Hiram, and go make a garden of the Earth.”

Struck dumb by the otherworldly command, which he heard inside his head, Beecher swayed on his feet. His friends jeered at him, but their voices were tinny and small compared to the one in his skull. “Be healed, Brother Hiram,” it repeated.

Beecher fell to his knees and prayed for forgiveness. He became a born-again Christian that night. With Billy Paul's help he reformed. He stopped drinking and whoring. He dove in to his uncle's business learning everything there was to know about running a trash collection company. Then three months later he walked into the shop one morning and found his uncle dead from an overdose of heroin. Spurred by his uncle's untimely death, Beecher decided at that moment he would dare to be even better and succeed. Over the next fifteen years he had built the small garbage hauling business into the leading waste management company in Texas and the third largest firm of its kind in the country.

The door to the café swung open and Beecher strode in. He smiled at Rosa and said, “Coffee.” His boots clicked against the tile floor, the metal taps sending sparks in front of him like fireworks at a parade.
Myriam stood and he gathered her into his arms. “Babe!” he said and kissed her on the cheek.

She held on, liking to be close, enjoying the smell of him like old leather, warm and agreeable.

“So,” he said, “Ramsey's unsure of what he wants to do.”

Myriam nodded. She sat down and watched Beecher straddle a chair as if he was riding a horse. She kept the amusement from her face. Beecher hated horses even though he owned a ranch with ten-thousand head of cattle and cowboys to run them. When out on the range, he rode a Harley and could make it do anything a quarter horse could.

“Are you certain I can't do anything to sweeten the pot?” he said.

“I'm sure you could incentivize him, but it would be better to have him reach the conclusion of working for us on his own. Ramsey has always been like that. When he believes the project is his own, he'll work like the devil's after him to find the answers.” She smiled at Beecher. “He's a little bit like you that way.”

Beecher returned the smile. “You know everything about me, babe,” he said.

The warmth of his smile drew her to him and she reached across the table and squeezed his hand.

He studied her face. Strong with a softness about the eyes that hid her true strength —the ability to get a project working and find the right people to make it move along smoothly. Once Myriam had joined his company, she streamlined the operation until they became the most profitable waste management company in the world. She never took a cent in salary. She was five foot seven inches tall, the perfect height for him: Tall enough to nestle in his arms but not tall enough to look him straight in the eyes. Her other quality, complete loyalty, was something he thought he'd never find again after his wife Samantha passed away from cancer.

Beecher squeezed Myriam's hand in return.
I'm blessed, oh Lord, by thy bounty.
He kept the smile on his face, the words coming automatically to him, yet he no longer felt them in his heart as he had at the beginning after his conversion in front of the Reverend Billy Paul.

Eight years previous an unexpected visitor had come into Beecher's office in downtown Abilene. It was the Reverend Billy Paul. The hair on the nape of his neck had stood up when he first saw the renowned evangelical televangelist. The man's face glowed, cherubic-like, and he had a long gray beard, riven with dark streaks like Moses.

“Christ! What are you doing here?”

“The Lord opens doors whenever necessary, Brother Beecher,” the Reverend Paul had answered softly.

Beecher overcame his surprise and said, “You remember me?”

“Of course.”

Beecher settled back in his chair almost as if a gentle hand had pushed him there. Accustomed to running a multi-million dollar company and issuing orders daily, Beecher suddenly found himself unable to speak. Finally he managed to ask, “What do you want?”

“I am here to invite you to a special meeting this evening.”

“I . . . I have plans.”

“I'm sure you can cancel them.”

“And if I don't?”

“Then you will miss the greatest opportunity of your life.” The Reverend's eyes narrowed. “This is your big chance and if you don't grab it, you will end out your days behind this desk growing ever smaller until you are a used-up bit of flesh with no purpose but to keep on living your three score and ten.”

Beads of sweat had trickled down Beecher's cheek. The Reverend's words sounded like the voice of God and yet there was no danger behind them. At least no danger as he had experienced in the jungle trails of Cambodia and Vietnam, or in the soft-carpeted boardrooms of Texas billionaire oilmen. The man spoke mellowly as though offering an invitation. Beecher believed he could have declined and the Reverend Paul would have thanked him for his time and walked away. And yet, Beecher found himself nodding and saying yes.

He had buzzed his secretary and told her to cancel his afternoon and evening meetings.

That night, Reverend Paul had taken Beecher to a clandestine meeting of the Brothers of the Lord. Hardened by the destruction of the Twin Towers on 9/11, the group was focused on attempts across
the country to water down the strict interpretation of the Bible. When they found such wayward churches, they worked to bring new mega-churches into the neighborhood. They even created their own seminary to produce ministers to fill the open positions in each new neighborhood. Beecher had quickly risen to a leadership position. That leadership had brought him to Rio Chama and the Milagro Shrine.

“So we leave Ramsey alone for a few days,” Beecher said to Myriam.

“Yes, that'll give him time to get back to me and say he'll take the job. And we can set up people to help him.”

“Clever girl.” Beecher smiled.

Myriam basked under the warmth of his smile. It made her feel as though she belonged.

All her young life she had strived to become the leader of every high school and college club she joined. But once out in the real world, she had never been quite good enough to join the upper elite of the paradigmatic and theoretical thinkers of human geography. She had chosen human geography because it was open to women and because as a facilitator she could make things happen for other people's projects. Ever pragmatic, she had married for wealth, not love, and now had two grown sons. She was well off as a result of an amiable divorce settlement.

With her children out of the house, she had gone back to work at the urging of a longtime friend and of the chairman of the Geography Department at the University of Oregon to manage a major research grant directed at understanding the geographical distribution and migration of religious minorities in the country. Like everybody else who managed grants, she had used the money for many projects beyond the stated purpose, including her private project in Borneo, studying the effects of modernization on indigenous tribes living in the island's rain forests. When Ramsey nearly died in Peru without fiscal accountability, the National Science Foundation had investigated her entire project and rescinded the money.

The University would have kept her on teaching a summer class for teachers of Advanced Placement human geography, but lecturing
wasn't her strong point. Managing people and projects was. So when Portland offered her a position managing the city's sustainability efforts, she took the job.

Beecher squeezed her hand again. “Penny for your thoughts.”

“I was thinking of when we met.”

He laughed. “I bet you thought I was a fourteen-carat asshole.”

“Not at all.” His eyes narrowed. “Well, maybe a little bit. But then you bought me carnations.”

“Your favorite.”

“How did you know?”

“I guessed.”

“It's been a good four years.”

“The best,” he agreed. Beecher sipped his coffee.

The first three years of their relationship had flown by in a whirlwind of trips around the world. He quickly learned that she shared his deep and abiding interest in protecting the world's special places, from endangered ecosystems to ancient ruins. Throughout their courtship Beecher had resisted visiting the shrine because of its purported commerciality. But then a remarkable twist of fate occurred right after Reverend Billy Paul had ordered he look into the Milagro Shrine.

Beecher was astonished by the power of the sanctuary. For him it emanated an aura of purity that no other place on the planet could match. He was overwhelmed and immediately put up $50,000 of his own money to help maintain the shrine. And of course he assured the Reverend Billy Paul that all was well. That was all in the beginning before he discovered the truth.