Randall and Skate stood like Secret Service agents before the stage, hands clasped at their belt lines, all-knowing by proxy.
TD paced back and forth, never breaking stride, the heads of the Pros following his movement as if attached by invisible threads. "Anyone see any brainwashed cult members in here? Anyone see any animals ready for sacrifice? Anyone here against their will?"
Screams of repudiation. Scattered boos and derisive laughter. Protective cries of indignation.
"We're not brainwashed -- they are. Obligation has been pounded into them, pounded into their cells since they were babies. They criticize The Program. Why? Because they can't believe we're this strong. That we're this fulfilled. They have to criticize us. In fact, their criticism is proof of how right The Program is."
A number of cries, the words wildly enthusiastic but unintelligible. Leah reeled, unsteady on her feet. The hall zoomed around her, a slow-motion tilt. She caught a glimpse of Chris in the back, crouching beside his chair, his sharp and lucid expression standing out from a sea of softened faces.
Shrieks of laughter. Her head buzzing with sugar, her eyes still adjusting to the dimness and the flickering lights, Leah felt her lungs inflate, her mouth open, her sides shake, and then she realized she, too, was laughing.
"Here" -- TD's arms drifted out, shadows consuming the upward drift of the footlights -- "we live in the Now."
Janie chattered next to Leah. "Living in the Now. That's so brilliant. It's so crucial to growth."
The drum continued its measured beat. Leah felt herself swaying with the crowd, with the cadence of TD's words. His sentences flowed into one another, rivers merging.
"We negate Victimhood. Those who can't need to --" He stopped abruptly, touched a hand to his ear.
"Get with The Program!" they roared.
"We are a powerhouse of resources. Attorneys. Investment bankers. Computer engineers. Recruitment is on the rise every day. Cambridge and Scottsdale will be ready to launch by the end of next month. All of our future ambassadors are right here among us."
Janie crossed her fingers, squeezed her eyes shut.
"It all starts here. Here in our utopia. This will be the model for all of California, then the U.S.A., then the world. But no matter how we grow, it all comes back to us here in this room. That's you. And you. And you. Why don't you all give each other hugs? That's right, stand up and embrace one another." TD waited, hands clasped.
A few of the wiser Pros remained seated, grinning knowingly.
"Come on, folks. If you want that self-help, feel-good crap, go to a Tony Robbins seminar and Awaken the Idiot Within. We don't need the Common-Censors. We don't need Deepak Chopra and his platitudinous spit-up. We each have within ourselves the potential to do anything. In The Program we don't even need each other. But we're stronger together." TD came to a halt onstage. "Now" -- a darker tone -- "in the past a few people have left the Inner Circle."
Murmurs. Leah was going hoarse.
"And they haven't had an easy go of it. Because once you've been fulfilled, once you've been part of this great practice, you can't turn your back on it. What's happened to those who have left the security of the Inner Circle?"
Leah's cheeks were wet; she couldn't stand the thought.
"They've gone insane, literally insane, stranded out there with the Common-Censors." TD's voice grew deep and sorrowful. "They've been abused. Abandoned. Controlled." The footlights glowed through his hair like a golden hood. "Many of you remember Lisa Kander."
Boos and shrieks. TD's hand snapped up vigilantly, fingers spread, stealing five streams of light and shooting them to the ceiling. The noise ceased. "Let's be fair. She wasn't a bad girl. She just couldn't make the grade. She couldn't --"
"Get with The Program!"
And then, quietly, "I just found out she killed herself." A mournful pause. "She threw herself into the La Brea Tar Pits. Living out in the world, with them, was so hurtful, she asphyxiated herself with steaming tar."
Hushed silence, broken by a few gasps, even sobs. A row up from Leah, Winona was shaking so hard she seemed to be convulsing. One of the oldest Pros at forty-two, Winona had made sacrifices to Get with The Program, leaving behind a Common-Censor husband and infant twins. As a strong role model, she was accorded a special level of respect on the ranch.
TD fanned his arms, a gesture encompassing the entire hall. "None of you will ever have to feel that emptiness. That loneliness. That abandonment. Not as long as you stay On Program and with The Program."
A tidal wave of emotion. Squeaking chairs and undulating arms. A moment of disorientation as Leah's view was blocked, and then she rose to join the throng.
TD lifted his hands, and the sound ceased abruptly, as if a plug had been yanked. Everyone sat and held hands, rocking gently now in preparation for the Guy-Med. Leah's ears hummed.
TD's voice came calm and smooth. "Everybody close your eyes. Take a stroll back to your childhood. Remember your mind as it was. Free of your Old Programming. Empty of adult cynicism. Empty of adult negativity. Let TD guide you. Picture yourself at five years old. You're standing before your childhood room. Let's go inside. Go ahead -- push open the door."
Leah felt her insides rear up as on a roller-coaster drop, then avalanche down and out of her, leaving her adrift in an intoxicating emptiness. When she came to, she felt drained. The formal part of the Orae was over. TD was sitting at the stage's edge, legs dangling, talking to the lucky Pros in the front row. She'd lost a lot of time, as she often did during meditation; Stanley John had told her it was a sign of her great sensitivity.
She never remembered what happened inside her childhood house during Guy-Med.
Squeezing past protruding legs, Chris made his way down the row, the others leaning sluggishly out of his way. Leah first thought he was heading for his wife, but the seat next to her was vacant; Janie was in the back replenishing the punch. Chris squatted in front of Leah, hands cupping her knees.
"Go away," Leah said. "You'll disrupt the Teacher if you're out of your seat when he's onstage."
Chris shot a nervous glance over his shoulder. "He's not looking. Just listen. I wanted to say I'm sorry for pinching you in the Wellness Train."
"You were right to. I needed it."
"No, it wasn't right." Chris's voice was rising. "It's not right for us to treat each other this way. It's not right to be treated this way."
Leah nervously regarded the others talking distractedly around them. "I don't know what you're talking about. It's our own growth."
He stood, flustered. "After TD scolded me, I thought about what you went through, then about my daughter from my first marriage. She's just a few years younger than you."
"It's fine. Chris, you're in a loop. Just sit down."
TD's voice boomed through the mike. "Yes, Winona?"
In the chair in front of them, Winona lowered her hand. Leah and Chris stared at the sprayed shell of blond hair in horror. "I experience Chris as undermining my time here tonight," she said.
Chris's whisper came garbled from his throat. "Please don't do this."
"I experience him as being negative about The Program, Teacher. And about you."
TD's voice, projected through the floor speakers, filled the entire hall. "That's okay. I'm open to criticism. Input, Chris?"
The certainty steeling Chris's posture just minutes before decayed. "No."
"Is that true, Winona?"
Winona's southern accent lent her words a haughty zing. "No. He's deflecting."
Leah felt TD's energy going away from her toward Chris and Chris alone. For a moment she thought the relief might send her unconscious again.
TD's voice assaulted them from the four corners of the room. "So you're willing to be negative to other Pros but not stand up for what you say. That's not a very strong position to take, is it?"
Chris shifted his weight, his eyes darting.
"I think I angered you when I took away the tape measure from you because of your inability to do a job and gave it to your beautiful younger wife. Did that anger you?"
The Pros pivoted in their seats.
"Answer him," Leah murmured, barely moving her lips. "Just give a response."
But Chris stood dumbly, legs shaking, watching some point on the floor between his shoes and the stage.
TD spoke so calmly Leah wondered why she imagined he was angry. "Control is your comfort, isn't it? You want to control how you're treated. You want to control this dialogue by not answering. You want to control your wife. This provides you comfort, but comfort doesn't interest us in The Program. Strength interests us. And you only get strong by rejecting comfort. I think you need some instruction in the matter. Janie? Where's Janie?"
Chris's flesh was a sickly, green-tinted hue, his face awash with sweat.
"Back here, Teacher!"
TD smiled at the crowd. "I think it's time we teach Chris about control."
Cheers of approval.
"I think Chris's unhealthy 'need' for his wife keeps him from maximizing his growth."
Clapping. Shouts. Boos.
"I think we should free Janie from his control."
"No." Chris's voice was barely a croak; Leah was sure she alone heard him.
"What do you say, Janie?"
"You know best, TD." She headed forward, her long hair swaying, brushing the back of her tight jeans.
"Stanley John, why don't you join Janie up here?"
Abandoning the kettledrum in the back, Stanley John strode down the center aisle.
TD helped them onstage and then stood between them, his arms spread across their shoulders. "Every time you confront a fear, you refuse to let it control you. That's the difference between your Old Programming and The Program. This, Chris, is for you." He kept his eyes trained on Janie's husband as he addressed the other two. "Go ahead. Undress her. Undress each other."
Leah felt delirious, drunk, hysterical with joy or terror. She dropped her gaze as noises emerged from the crowd, sighs and grunts and shouts of encouragement. Everyone seemed to be breathing in unison. Chris staggered out into the aisle, barely making it before he dropped to one knee, his other leg bent behind him but not bearing weight.
When Leah glanced up, Winona's eager stance obstructed most of the spectacle, though she made out Janie's hands pressed palms down on the floor, the wispy sheet of her hair spread like a fan from her back to her extended arm. Stanley John labored behind her audibly, blocked from Leah's sight; she saw only the jeans and underwear bunched at his sneakers.
TD stood with his arms crossed, his eyes not on the scene before him but on Chris's crumpled figure in the aisle. Stanley John and Janie finished in a crescendo of gasps and then stood. Neither, Leah saw now, had fully disrobed. Janie rotated her jeans around the leg they'd tangled on, slid her other foot through, and pulled them up, her face red not with embarrassment but exertion. She stood unembarrassed, though a whole room had just partaken of her private, most guttural sounds. Through an evaporating haze of disbelief, Leah realized she was supposed to admire her for it.
Praise and affection rang out for Chris. Staggering up the center aisle, twisting one hand in the other like a limp kitchen rag, Chris bellowed something, his words lost in the ruckus and applause.
"You did it, man!" someone yelled. "You let go."
Winona was shrieking, her voice cracked and throaty. "You're both free now!"
TD twisted off his mike, smiled, and hopped from the stage.
Some of the viewers started to spill out of their rows. Others stayed, slumped and exhausted in the metal chairs.
Eyes narrowed, TD observed Chris's tedious progress toward the stage. Chris spotted him at the head of the aisle and yelled something else -- Leah made out, "...people...the truth about you..." -- then darted from the hall, banging through the doors into the night. Skate was already turning from his sentry's post at the base of the stage, his eyes somehow expressionless and inquisitive at once. TD nodded, a subtle dip of his chin. Then he turned, smiling. "The truth about me is what makes this work."
Skate moved to the exit. Before the door swung shut a second time, Leah saw the two Dobermans resolve from the darkness, black forms gathering around Skate's legs like the billow of a raincoat.
The celebration lasted until almost two. Leah chirped and giggled and ate candy, bouncing from foot to foot. Her memory went in and out. She remembered being pressed in a full-body hug by the muscular guy who helped unstack chairs -- Chad -- and she remembered it felt nice. She remembered holding hands with Winona, petting the sun-beaten skin of her forearm in sheer gratitude that she'd told only on Chris and not her. She recalled the remorse in Chris's eyes when he'd apologized to her, the way his features had seemed intent and broken all at once, and the image hit her so deep she felt the tears running even before she could remind herself she was crying with happiness.
After cleanup she walked back down to her cottage. Janie, flying high after TD's praise and her copulating with Stanley John, didn't even notice her solitary departure. The silhouette of a night bird drifted across the five spikes of the cedars. The smell of a distant skunk tinged the air. The night hummed with vitality, more than she'd ever felt in her nineteen years.