She hoisted a porcelain pitcher of Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee from the sideboard and poured for both men. Piper took a long moment to savor the trepidation in her beautiful brown eyes. She was about as nervous as a hummingbird cleaning hippo teeth.
“How did you go about it?” Lipset asked as Arianna left. “Becoming a cult leader?”
“Well, I soon realized that starting my own cult would be too time-consuming. Better to find a ready-made cult, preferably a large one, and connive my way to the top.”
“How did you identify the candidates?”
“The internet,” he said. “I went online, to the Cult Awareness Connection, which is a crusading, anti-cult group. One of its programs involves monitoring cult activities.”
“How ironic.”
“Indeed.” Piper sipped his coffee. “Through their web site, I located more than two dozen cults whose members lived in large communal settings along the west coast, and then I read extensively about each of them. I selected a half dozen of the best candidates for further study, then quit my job at the lab.
“Over the next seven months, I traveled up and down the Oregon and California coastlines, joining four different cults, staying only long enough to determine whether there was a weak leader who could be toppled.”
“And you finally found what you were looking for in this Earthbound bunch?”
“Yes,” Piper said. “I moved onto the farm and started my bid for cult leadership almost immediately. Took me less than four months to reign supreme.”
“How did you make it to the top so quickly?”
“Several reasons,” he said. “First, I helped Earthbound to escape from severe financial troubles. They were in danger of losing their farm. So I immediately claimed their good graces by selling most of my stocks and bonds and donating the proceeds. Not only was the money enough to secure the farm, but there was enough left over to obtain the mortgage on an adjacent dairy farm that had come up for sale.”
“Big gamble,” Lipset said.
Piper nodded. “True. I had few assets remaining, mostly the equity in my house in Los Angeles. But I had good reason to be confident. I’d done my homework. I’d read every major work on mind control in the modern era, everything from the nineteen fifties forward, starting with Robert J. Lifton’s book on the brainwashing of American prisoners during the Korean war.
“In addition, I’d studied the most successful cult leaders of the late twentieth century. I applied an amalgam of techniques taken from Jim Jones, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, L. Ron Hubbard, David Koresh, Lyndon LaRouche, Korea’s Sun Myung Moon, Japan’s Shoko Asahara.”
“What happened with the old leader?” Lipset asked. “The one you eventually replaced. Was it a very bloody coup?”
“Actually, it was bloodless. I toppled the old leader quickly, and then simply ran him and his small contingent of loyal followers off the farm.”
“You make it sound so easy.”
“It was,” Piper said, “it was. You see, I haven’t yet revealed the ace up my sleeve. A few months before I left the neurophysiology lab, I began staying late, well after normal business hours, secretly developing the technology for a device that would make me appear to possess supernatural powers.”
Lipset froze for a moment, then splashed a little coffee returning his china cup to its saucer. “Do tell.”
Piper prefaced his tale with a brief discussion of his graduate school days at Yale Medical School, mentioning that he’d trained, briefly, under the famed Spanish neurophysiologist, Jose Delgado. Then he summarized Delgado’s ground-breaking bull experiment and explained a bit about the electronics involved.
“By now,” Piper said, “the technology has reached amazing heights. The transmitters, for example, are perfectly concealed just below the scalp, and the portable neurostimulators are small enough to be mistaken for cell phones. Thus, all I had to do, for my purposes, was to develop a neurostimulator with a long-distance range of fifty or sixty feet. It wasn’t too hard. The main reason there had never been such an instrument before was because no one else had ever had a reason to stimulate brains surreptitiously.”
“What fiendish things did you do with this technology?”
“Well, I couldn’t do anything without the rather expensive medical equipment needed for brain surgery. That’s when I contacted Tom Mahorn, my old cellmate from San Quentin. He’s experienced with commercial burglaries. He broke into a medical supply warehouse and stole everything I needed. Surprisingly lax security in those places, considering the cost of the items.”
“Then what?” Lipset asked.
“Then, in the middle of the night, Tom and I stole a sheep from the farm, tied it up in the back of my SUV, and drove it three hours away to my house in Brentwood, where my medical equipment was kept, and conducted a bit of brain surgery. Soon I had the animal doing tricks in front of the other cult members. Or rather, Tom had it doing tricks. He had the neurostimulator, because all eyes were on me.”
“What kind of tricks do you mean?”
“For example, I put a pair of electrodes in the area controlling vocalization and then, through trial and error, turning the neurostimulator on and off, caused the animal to bleat out Mary Had a Little Lamb.”
Lipset, overcome with mirth and amazement, pounded the table with his fist several times. “No wonder they thought you were a god!”
“I operated on a few other farm animals, and did a few more tricks, before I made my move for cult leadership. I was having so much fun that, soon after I became cult leader, I had a secret lab built on the farm, moved my equipment there, and began toying with human brains.”
“You must be joking!”
“Certainly not,” Piper said. “Wait here, I’ll show you.”
He zipped into his bedroom and returned holding a plastic shell, flesh-pink in color, and the size and shape of a cell phone. Returning to his seat, he rang the silver bell for his household servant.
When Arianna appeared by the table, he pointed the portable neurostimulator at her head and pushed a button. Instantly, she froze, as if in a state of catalepsy, immobile as a department store mannequin.
“Wow!” Lipset said.
Piper continued to point his neurostimulator at Arianna’s head. “What I’m doing is stimulating a set of electrodes in the caudate nucleus of her brain, sparking a specific cluster of neurons that control movement, sending a message to freeze all of her muscles.”
Lipset slid his chair back, stood, and approached Arianna. “Amazing. Just amazing. How long can you keep her like this?”
“I’m delivering a short duration stimuli of balanced charge, which allows me to stimulate the subject for hours at a time, if desired, without any deterioration of response.”
“Can she hear us?”
“Yes,” Piper said. “She can hear and process everything.”
“But shouldn’t this technology be kept a secret from her?”
“Oh, she’s far too intimidated to act against me.”
“Arianna,” Lipset said. “You’re a beautiful woman. And your tits are magnificent.” He cupped Arianna’s left breast and turned to Piper. “I suppose she’s your favorite concubine.”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, she is. Of course, she hates me with a passion, because I like to beat her up. Isn’t that right, Arianna? Oh, I forgot, you can’t respond at all, can you?”
“I do believe you’re wrong,” Lipset said. “See that? A teardrop forming on the lower lid of her left eye!”
“Good catch.”
“Thank you.”
“I’ve operated on nearly two dozen of my followers,” Piper said. “For each one, I have a customized neurostimulator made. The number of features varies. For example, there’s another button on Arianna’s stimulator that sends out a different radio wave frequency to a different set of electrodes buried in the septal region of her brain, which causes unabated sexual arousal.”
“No!” Lipset said.
“Sometimes I lie on my back with her on top, riding me incessantly, hating every moment of it, on the one hand, yet unable to prevent herself, on the other, from sliding up and down on my cock—trying futilely to put out the fire in her loins.” He grinned. “What I like best of all, I must tell you, is the tortured look on her face. It’s absolutely exquisite.”
“Really?” Lipset said. “May I see?”
“Certainly.” Piper switched off the neurostimulator and stood. “Bring her into my bedroom.”
Arianna moved and spoke again. “No!” she cried. “Please, no!” Lipset wrestled her along behind Piper.
John sat in pajamas on his bed, his back against the headboard. Tears welled in his eyes as he waved a thin pile of CAT-scan print-outs in his right hand.
“This isn’t true!”
“It is true,” Doctor Jones said. She sat on the edge of the bed by John’s knees, her torso twisted toward him. “And the good news is, you’re not responsible for Captain Switzer’s murder.”
A vision of Captain Ron Switzer’s bloody, mutilated face stuck in John’s mind, causing him to turn his head away from his three visitors—the doctor, Eddie, and Ezra Dean. He stared through the iron bars of the window into the courtyard. But the serenity he found there wouldn’t wash away the gruesome vision.
He turned to the doctor. “You don’t understand.” He turned to Eddie and Ezra, standing nearby. “None of you understand!”
“John,” Doctor Jones said, “who was with you? There had to be someone with you at Captain Switzer’s house.”
“No one, there was no one but me.”
“We don’t believe you,” Ezra said.
“John,” Doctor Jones said, “do you have any memories of being in an operating room recently?”
“I fell. Fractured my skull. So it’s not surprising I do.”
“Tell us what you remember,” she said.
“Why? It’s just a waste of time.”
“Please, John,” Eddie said.
“Fine,” he said. He would do it for Eddie. His pupils drifted to the ceiling as he gazed into the recent past. “It was wild. Most of the time I was hallucinating. Strange things kept happening . . . I had these incredible, vivid memories . . . so vivid . . . they didn’t seem like memories at all. Seemed more like I was really there. Bouncing through my life like a time traveler. Every once in awhile, I’d end up back on the table.
“The operating table. The room kept changing color. Then my leg started moving without my say-so. Then I thought I was in heaven, or some place like that. Then I got scared. Then I got angry. Real angry. I don’t know why. And I started yelling and screaming. Somebody put something in my mouth to keep me quiet.” John searched the face of Doctor Jones. “See. Hallucinations.”
She shook her head. “You weren’t hallucinating, John.”
Eddie stepped forward, bending over the bed, sending hot breath into John’s face as he said: “It was real! It was The Wizard poking around in your brain!”
John shook his head. “None of you understand! I saw a white halo above The Wizard. I’m not kidding! An actual halo! And-and-and at that moment, I could feel God in the room with us! God! I am not joking. Not exaggerating. My heart almost burst in my chest.”
Doctor Jones reached out, taking John’s hand in her own. “John, listen to me. You have an electrode implanted in your visual cortex. While you were looking at Piper, someone else stimulated that electrode, making you see the halo.”
“No, no, no!” John said. “That’s not a good explanation. That doesn’t explain what I felt! God touched that man, and that man touched my soul!”
“This will be especially difficult for you to believe,” she said, “but as for that transcendant feeling you describe, that sense of being near God, or in the presence of divinity, there’s another area of the brain associated with intense religious or spiritual feeling. It’s called the temporal lobe. There’s an electrode implanted there too.”
“Bullshit!” he said.
But in truth that punch had rocked him—not that the other jabs of logic and evidence had missed their target entirely.
He thought over what the doctor had said. The room stayed perfectly silent, the others somehow sensing he needed silence.
Minutes passed while his mind chased after illusive reality . . . Finally, he turned to Eddie and waved the print-outs at him. “Marilyn gave you the idea?”
Solemnly, Eddie nodded. John dropped the print-outs on the bed, raised his right hand, and touched the sore spot on the side of his head. Then he put his hands to his face and wept.
“Oh, my God! Oh, dear Jesus! What . . . What have I done!”
Jonestown, Guyana, November 17, 1978
John held his Susan’s hand while the visitors came up the trail from the river and into camp. The visitors were here to ask questions because traitors to the movement had told them lies about Father and Jonestown. Their leader was from San Francisco, a congressman, whatever that was. Others were from newspapers.
“
Remember, John,” Susan said, “no negativity today. It’ll make you sick. Very sick.”
But John wasn’t feeling negative. Visitors meant there would be meat tonight at dinner.
Father watched the arrival from his deckchair beneath the pavilion. People were brought to him, not the other way around, because he was Father, and used to be Jesus, Lenin, and Buddha.