L. Rob Piper sat in front of an electronic console in the little control booth next to his sensory deprivation chamber, turning down the volume on a fresh recording. John’s screaming, captured on voice-activated microphones, hurt his ears.
“Somebody help me!” John cried through the stereo speakers. “They’re biting! They’re biting me! Somebody help! Please!”
“Excellent,” Piper said to himself. The hallucinations indicated that his subject had reached an advanced stage of sensory deprivation, technically known as
stimulus hunger
.
Any human being isolated and secured motionless in a lightproof, soundproof room for an extended period of time, usually no more than three days, would eventually resort to hallucinations to satisfy an overwhelming urge for sensory stimuli. The human mind, which evolution had designed for continuous sensory stimulation, would eventually reject perfect monotony in favor of lively insanity.
But Piper had never used the chamber to drive someone insane. He’d learned in medical school, more than thirty years earlier, that sensory deprivation could function as an extremely effective attitude influence technique.
The reason was primarily found in the brainstem reticular formation. Normally, the reticular formation served as a kind of way station for neural events or environmental stimuli. It reviewed the myriad messages that were constantly streaming in and out of the brain, inhibiting some messages, enhancing others. But sensory deprivation disrupted this activity.
When the brain was starved for neural events—messages of any kind—the reticular formation ceased to perform its critical, analytical role. Instead, it enhanced the significance of all environmental stimuli. For this reason, human beings in a state of sensory deprivation were highly open to suggestion, open to any and all messages, even the most ludicrous.
Piper used the chamber no more than once a month. Until now, he’d reserved it for the big fish—wealthy cult followers with stocks and bonds and trust funds and real estate. He used his sensory deprivation chamber to prime them, to ready them for a brief return to their former lives, during which time they would have to withstand the protestations of bank officers, stock brokers, and attorneys while delivering instructions that would hand over their entire financial assets to the cult.
The deprivation chamber had helped Piper to garner seven and a half million dollars so far this year. An off year, really.
The year before the take had been twenty and a quarter million, including more than ten million dollars from a single new member, Lloyd Neville Adams the Fourth, the young scion of a wealthy San Francisco family. Lloyd was now hidden away from his pesky father, Lloyd the Third, on a small farm in Central Europe, cleaning out pigpens and horse stalls hour upon hour. When Lloyd the Fourth turned thirty years of age, in less than a year, a forty million dollar trust fund, willed to him by his deceased grandfather, Lloyd the Second, would fall directly into Piper’s lap, and there was nothing any Lloyd could do about it.
Piper glanced at the EEG meter. It indicated that his subject had just fallen into REM—or Rapid Eye Movement—sleep, the very deepest sleep. It was now safe to enter the chamber. He phoned for Doctor Rebecca Fosse to assist him.
Piper opened the door to the chamber and turned on a dim overhead light. He and Rebecca worked quickly and wordlessly. The nutrition bag attached to John through an intravenous line in his arm was now empty, so Doctor Fosse attached a new bag.
Meanwhile, Piper ripped off two strands of duct tape and secured a mechanical button, encased in a small square metal frame, to the edge of the table next to John’s waist. A thin insulated wire connected to the button ran into a hole in the floor beneath the table. Gently, Piper placed John’s right hand on top of the mechanical button. Then he and Rebecca slipped away, turning off the light and closing the door on the way out.
John awoke. His heart sank upon finding himself still suspended in a bottomless, topless black hole. Its vast nothingness was powerfully claustrophobic. It was like being suffocated by a heavy, lead-lined blanket, only his lungs never gave out. He almost relished the thought of more hallucinations, of being terrorized again by his own mind.
It was his own mind, wasn’t it? They were hallucinations, weren’t they?
He felt something cold and hard beneath the palm of his right hand. It was a small thing, his fingers discovered, a thin hunk of metal shaped in a square. Another hallucination?
Something circular in the center of the thing gave way a little when he poked it. A moment later, a loud sound—despite his earplugs—startled him, the semi-muffled sound of another human being speaking.
“Welcome to the farm,” said the voice. “We are all so delighted to meet new friends. New friends who, like us, are willing to lay aside their own selfish needs for a time to support the environmental movement, a movement that simply must succeed if life on this planet, as we know it, is to continue. I heartily applaud you.”
The voice disappeared, but not before John had recognized it as The Wizard’s. Where was he? Hiding in the dark?
“Hello?” John said. “Hello?”
No answer. John listened for sounds in the darkness, a human being’s rustling or breathing. But he heard nothing. He soon concluded that he’d been listening to a tape recording. But why had the tape stopped playing so quickly? After a mere twenty seconds or so?
He remembered the square metal thing beneath his palm. He felt for the circular center again, which had given way before, and pushed it. Immediately, The Wizard’s voice returned.
“Although each of you chose to be here today, I wonder just how many of you, my new friends, actually recognize the extreme urgency of this moment in history.”
The tape recording ceased abruptly again. He pushed the button again, and he heard again another brief excerpt from The Wizard’s speech, a speech he was now certain he’d heard before.
Now John knew that each time he pushed the button, a new excerpt would play. He pushed the button again—without thought or delay—and listened intently to the taped excerpt.
When it was over, he pushed the button again.
And again.
And again.
And again.
He couldn’t help himself.
“How did you know he’d keep pushing the button like that?” Tom asked. He stood beside Piper’s chair in the control room.
“He hasn’t any choice,” Piper said. “He’ll push it a million times, if I let him. Hear my voice a million times, learn my lectures by heart.”
“Why?”
“His brain is starved for stimulation.”
“But what if he doesn’t buy all your crap?”
“Trust me, Tom, he will. His brainstem reticular formation is impaired.”
“His what’s impaired?”
“Never mind.”
Marilyn sat on her bunkbed, digesting her supper and writing a letter. The cult leadership had determined that it was time for the new recruits to write separation letters to their closest relatives. She was writing to her mother, not her real mother, Heidi, who was dead, but her fictional mother, whom she’d named, Grace, an ex-stripper, now working as a secretary.
Dear Mom
:
Hi! It’s me! Marilyn
!
I’ll bet you’ve been wondering what happened to me. I’m writing to let you know I’m fine. More than fine, really. I met this great bunch of people who are really dedicated to the environment, like me. I work on a beautiful farm, and I’m involved in lots of other activities that are vitally important to preserving the environment. I’ve never been happier or more fulfilled in my entire life
!
I’m not sure how long I’ll stay here. I’m just taking it one day at a time. But right now, I can’t imagine leaving!
I hope you and the parakeets are doing well. I’ll try to write once in a while just to let you know I’m okay and you don’t have to worry about me. But I’m very busy around here, so please forgive me in advance if you don’t hear from me for awhile
.
Love
,
Marilyn
Separation letters were quite useful to a cult. For one thing, they helped to keep the police away. Worried parents or relatives of a new cult member would often not know what had happened to their loved one for several days, if not weeks, and would call the police. Without a separation letter, the police would attempt to track down the person reported as missing and, if successful, contact the cult—even visit—to ensure that the new cult member lived there voluntarily.
But with a separation letter in hand, the police wouldn’t do a thing. The new cult member couldn’t be considered as a missing person, not legally. The police would explain to whomever had filed the missing persons report that it wasn’t against the law to hide from friends or family members, that there was nothing, regrettably, that law enforcement could do, that in America an adult living within the confines of the law was free to conduct his or her life in any manner whatever.
Another purpose of the separation letter was to calm the relatives and friends of the new cult follower. Seeing familiar handwriting and familiar prose leap joyfully from the page was usually enough to delay serious attempts to find the missing and reestablish personal contact.
Marilyn folded her letter and enveloped it, without sealing it. Bob Marsh would review the letter in the morning.
On the envelope, she penned the mailing address for her fictional mother, using a fake street and a real zip code in Santa Cruz. She didn’t have to worry about her letter being returned as undeliverable. She’d been instructed not to provide a return address on the envelope. The cult wanted to make it as difficult as possible for relatives of the new cult members to find the farm. The letters wouldn’t even be mailed locally, she assumed, due to the postmark. They’d be mailed from Bakersfield, or Fresno. Maybe as far away as Phoenix.
She opened her footlocker, tucked her letter away, and removed a green vinyl three-ring binder stuffed with pages. The binder had been issued to her with much pomp and circumstance.
She opened the binder and turned to the first page of her assigned reading for the evening. Tomorrow, she’d been told, her comprehension of the material would be tested.
Her reading described the purpose and functions of the Leadership Council, which consisted of L. Rob Piper himself, the lawyer, Michael Brimley, Tom Mahorn, and Bob Marsh. Before diving in, she thumbed through the pages she had to read before bedtime and sighed heavily. Many hours of study lay ahead.
John had no idea where he was at the moment. And he wasn’t sure he could trust himself to figure it out. He thought he might still be in the black place, having more hallucinations. But if that were the case, they were growing more intense.
Recently, he’d been running for his life behind the red farmhouse, trying to escape Tom Mahorn, who was trying to run him down in a sport utility vehicle, weaving wildly across the lawn.
Then, somehow, he’d returned to the bullfight arena in Tijuana, Mexico, where he’d watched The Wizard levitate above the crowd. The Wizard had pointed to John in the stands, shouting: “That man’s a police detective! Get him! Get him!” And all the spectators had followed orders, coming after John, surrounding him, sticking him in the back with banderillas—the colored sticks meant for the bull.
Now John was in a hospital operating room, strapped securely to a gurney in four point restraints. He tried to free himself, one limb after another, but it was fruitless.
He screamed, but hardly any sound came out. His mouth had been taped shut, muffling his cries. He ceased to struggle.
Nurse Karen appeared by his side to attach an IV line securely to his wrist. She ignored his gaze. People just beyond John’s field of vision were barking out directions at each other, using lots of technical terms that he didn’t understand, like “CT scanner.” Through the IV line, clear fluid poured into a vein. A hot flash coursed through his entire body. The nurse wheeled him beneath some bright lights. He began to feel groggy. He sensed he was about to undergo a surgical operation, one he hadn’t asked for, didn’t think he needed, didn’t want, and certainly couldn’t stop . . .
John awoke with harsh circular lights staring him in the face. He tried turning from them, but his head wouldn’t budge an inch. It felt as if it were clamped in a vise. He couldn’t move his limbs either, but he was almost used to that by now.
He tried to call for help, yet his throat, and the muscles of his face, reacted sluggishly. The result was a weak, incoherent moan.
“Coming to, are we?” said a soft-voiced woman who sounded as if her mouth were just behind John’s left ear. John answered with another moan.
“Easy now, you’ll be able to speak soon.”
The overhead lights dimmed a little. John scanned his surroundings as best he could, his eyes slow to follow his mental commands. He’d been drugged, he thought.
On one side of him five freestanding monitors displayed glowing digital numbers or squiggly neon green lines. On the other side stood two tables, each with steel utensils spaced out on a white cloth surface. The soft-voiced woman inched closer and into view. It was Dr. Fosse.