Simple Simon

by William Poe

  Jewell sat on the couch, listening to music through headphones. She lifted them off her head and said, “Thank you. Those are pretty.” Her words became a pastel dust that filled the air around her. She readjusted the earphones and took a drag off her cigarette.

  I went back to the yard and found the leafy face on the dogwood changing shape again, at first frightening, then benevolent. The great void of the universe opened before me as I gazed upward along the ever-brightening shaft of light.

  Suddenly, the moon disappeared. In its place, a countenance formed among the swirling clouds. A resounding echo shook the earth: Look to the moon and seek the clouds of Heaven.

  CHAPTER 15

  Iwas at serious risk of getting a miserable grade in more than one subject, so each day following the astounding acid trip at Jake’s, I settled into a quiet corner of the student union with my books. Not long after finishing a practice exam in physical anthropology one afternoon, I spotted two solicitors handing out flyers inviting people to a lecture about the evils of Communism.

  Students told wild stories about the group. Many of the tales were truly outlandish. Some students (who definitely had done too much acid) said that people who attended the lectures disappeared into an Aleutian Islands gulag. Others believed that touching the flyers brought bad karma. As a result, the university grounds were littered with them.

  What struck me about the proselytizers was how poorly they dressed. Only the Goodwill store sold clothes that shabby. Even so, I noticed a dark-haired fellow in his twenties who, despite the drab clothes, carried himself with a dignified air. When he approached my table in the student union, I allowed him to give me his pitch.

  “Hello, I’m Randall Jamison,” the man said, speaking with an Australian accent as charming as his smile.

  I listened to him for a few moments, but soon, the intensity in his eyes made me uncomfortable. Saying I was late for class, I began closing my books and placing them in my satchel.

  “Another time,” Randall said.

  I was his last hope. After failing to interest me, the man left the student union. Watching at a distance, I saw him join others of his group near the courtyard fountain. I waited long enough to observe them forming a circle and holding hands. Then they bowed their heads in prayer.

  Was this the group that had taken Tony from me? I wadded up the flyer Randall had given me and threw it in a trash bin.

  On the morning of Good Friday, I was again at the student union, cramming for an exam in algebra. I took a break from studying to browse the vending machines near windows with a view of the common area and spotted Stanley sitting on a bench, drawing in his sketchbook. I’d never seen Stanley smile, but his expression seemed downright giddy as he closed his sketchbook and came into the student union. I dropped some change in the vending machine and watched a Hostess cupcake slide down the chute. Stanley caught me by the arm and asked me to follow him to the same fountain where I’d seen Randall and the others pray. We sat for a few moments while I finished the pastry, washing it down with a pint of milk.

  “I’ve found it,” Stanley said obliquely.

  I was in no mood for mysteries. My grasp of quadratic equations was slipping away, and I had to get back to my books.

  “My brain can’t handle this right now,” I said.

  “Come to my apartment. You’ll see.”

  “Stanley, I’d love to get high, but I’ve got to stay focused. I don’t want to flunk algebra.”

  “It’s important,” Stanley insisted. “You’ll see.”

  How could I resist those sparkling green eyes? Not to mention the fact that my resolve to study wasn’t as strong as I pretended.

  That evening, I drove to Stanley’s apartment, where I found him sitting on the flagstone steps in front of the building. He took a joint from his shirt pocket and handed it to me.

  “Strong weed,” I said, squinting after the first puff.

  When the joint had burned to a potent nub, Stanley attached it to an alligator clip. He kept a bloodshot eye trained on the streetlight down the block as he sucked a final draw from the roach. Eventually, a Dodge van rounded the corner. Along the roof, a sign in red lettering on a white background read: one world crusade. I paid little attention until the van slowed to a stop at the curb and Stanley pocketed the empty roach clip.

  “Oh man, not those people,” I moaned.

  Stanley waved at someone hanging his hand out the window.

  “I’m not doing this, Stanley. No fucking way.”

  Stanley touched my forearm, as if to say, Be patient.

  Randall was the first person to approach us. He and Stanley practically lifted me off the curb as they ushered me through the side door of the van. The people inside started singing an old-fashioned hymn.

  Onward, Christian Soldiers. Marching as to war, with the voice of Jesus.

  Silently, I protested, It’s the cross of Jesus, you idiots.

  Randall sat close with his knee pressed against mine. He threw a friendly arm over my shoulder and put his lips close to my ear so I would hear him over the singing. “Good to see you again, Simon.”

  I didn’t want Randall to notice my bloodshot eyes, so I averted my gaze. The assembly in the van appeared to be an international mix. After the song had ended, the woman in the front passenger seat greeted me with an alluring French accent. “Bonsoir, Simon.” Two women in the backseat whispered to each other in German. I already knew that Randall was Australian.

  Everyone was so straight looking that I worried they might turn Stanley and me into the police for being high. When the van slowed at a stoplight, I considered attempting to escape. Randall read my thoughts, distracting me until the light changed.

  We came to a small house on the opposite side of campus from Stanley’s apartment, driving a long way to go a short distance, which seemed strange. Then I realized that only a few of the original passengers remained in the van. Stoned, I hadn’t noticed how many people had disembarked along the way. Each person left the van holding a box, which I learned later were stuffed with bags of peanuts that the members of the group sold to support themselves.

  Stanley got out of the van and motioned for me to join him. At that point, I wasn’t as paranoid as I had been, and I didn’t want to embarrass Stanley by running away.

  “The group is moving from this house,” Stanley explained.

  I had wondered why it seemed to be empty.

  Whatever I was getting into, I just wanted it to end so Stanley and I could go back to his place and get high, but not before going by a Burger Chef. I was ravenously hungry and wanted a hamburger.

  While we stood outside the house, Stanley took a rubber band off his wrist and pulled my hair into a ponytail. His action surprised me. I’d never known him to be concerned about appearances.

  “You know how we’ve talked about finding a spiritual group?” Stanley said to me out of earshot of Randall. “These people live together like a family.”

  I couldn’t remember any conversation when we had discussed finding a group to join. In fact, Stanley and I had agreed that spiritual awareness was a solitary path. Before I had a chance to challenge him, a woman introduced herself.

  “Hi, I’m Mary Womack,” she said. Mary had a medium build, was probably in her thirties, and sported short-cropped brown hair. Her floral-print dress looked like those sewn from a pattern book.

  Just then, the van’s driver leaned toward the open door and called out with a Scottish accent, “Have a good lecture, laddie.”

  Stanley started walking toward the van.

  “Aren’t you staying?” I asked.

  “I’ll be at the new place. Randall’s a good lecturer. You’ll be okay.”

  “Yeah, well,” I stammered, “I just thought we’d be together.”

  “Keep an open mind,” Stanley said as he shut the van door.

  A checkered cab rounded the corner, and I raised my hand to hail it. Mary politely, but firmly, pulled down my arm and led me into t
he house just as Randall went to greet three people who were getting out of a car that had pulled up to the curb. Randall shook hands with a man and woman and a teenage boy and started walking with them toward the house.

  We entered a spacious room, empty except for a blackboard and some folding chairs leaning against a bare wall. Our voices echoed off the parquet floors.

  “Feels like a small auditorium,” I said, struggling to conceal a nervous laugh. The man, dressed in a suit, and, presumably, his wife, coifed as if for church, eyed me suspiciously. The son looked as though he’d rather have been anywhere else.

  Mary positioned folding chairs in front of the blackboard. “Don’t be anxious,” she said to me while Randall spoke to the others. “Stanley’s told us about your search for Truth.” She paused to gauge my reaction. “I believe you’ll like what we have to say.”

  I had never used the word Truth with Stanley. What had he been telling these people?

  After aligning the chairs into a straight row, Randall asked the three guests to sit at one end. Mary sat beside me on the other end.

  Randall approached the blackboard and erased the chalky palimpsests of previous lectures, proceeding to describe ideas that sounded a lot like Taoism, but with a heretical-Christian twist. After sketching three diamond shapes on the board, Randall drew the Tao symbol at the top of each one to represent their understanding of “God.” Then he marked the left node of one diamond with the word male and the right node with the word female. The bottom node he labeled child.

  “And so,” Randall proclaimed, “families represent the image of God, who is the union of male and female. The creation of children through the union of man and woman makes us truly godlike.”

  Randall had only just started, and already, I felt sleepy. Then my stomach began growling with a terrible case of the munchies. Right in the middle of a point Randal wanted to make about the diamond-shaped diagrams, which he called the “four-position foundation,” I stood up and left the room to search for the kitchen.

  My disinterest in the lecture so surprised Randall that he dropped his chalk. Broken pieces shot across the floor and hit the wall.

  Before the lecture began, I overheard the man in the suit mention that he and his family were there because their daughter had left home to join the group, and they wanted to understand why. The parents had remained polite at the beginning of Randall’s lecture but were starting to argue with him as I left the room—something about God not being feminine. I found the kitchen right when the man invoked the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to counter Randall’s statement about God’s dual nature. The woman stood up and took her son by the arm.

  The guests were gone by the time I returned with a glass of water. I wasn’t sure what had happened, but Randall appeared shaken. I had thought I heard a chair fall over when I was in the kitchen, but everything seemed to be in order now.

  “Since it’s just us, why don’t we make this informal?” Randall suggested, sitting beside me.

  Suddenly, I heard raised voices outside. I went to the window and saw the man pointing his finger at Mary. He shouted something about the devil. Mary listened patiently. The man urged his wife and son into their car. Mary came back inside.

  I wanted to leave, too, but still felt I owed it to Stanley to hear the complete lecture. Also, the strong reaction of the man arguing with Mary had piqued my interest. The lecture had seemed so innocuous up to that point, but then, I had never understood the aggressive stance taken by Christians when confronted by ideas different from their own. The man had yelled at Mary, “Get thee behind me, Satan,” which seemed like a gross overreaction to the lecture.

  Growing up, his type had been among those who called our Powell family “heathens,” especially in regard to Aunt Opal.

  Mary found a forgotten box of oatmeal cookies in a kitchen cabinet. I munched away as Randall spoke. Without providing examples, he claimed affinity between the group’s teachings and Madame Blavatsky and Gurdjieff, along with Swedenborg, Edgar Cayce, and Ruth Montgomery. I suspected that Stanley had prepped Randall about my interests.

  The key point Randall tried to impress was that the group believed this world to be a reflection of a much greater “spirit world” and that many people’s teachings had revealed glimpses of this invisible realm. I expected Randall would tell me that the group’s founder, like the mystics he had mentioned, had gained access to the akashic records—the database of the universe—and, afterward, formed a hybrid theology.

  Randall couldn’t resist getting back to the chalkboard. He finished off a cookie and took out a new piece of chalk. At the board, he used the diamond-shaped diagrams with the Tao symbol at the top to explain the purpose of humanity.

  “Humans have a physical body, but also a spiritual body,” Randall asserted. “The two bodies should exist in harmony.” He labeled the left node of one of the diagrams physical body and the right node spiritual body. “When the physical body and spiritual body become one with God”—he pointed to the Tao symbol—“an individual achieves perfection.” Randall wrote the word perfection to indicate the “result” of the “give-and-take action” between the trinity of body, spirit, and dual-natured God. On a universal level, Randall stated that the physical world and the spirit world were two realizations of God’s inner and outer nature.

  My first impression that their teachings would invoke Christian heresy was on the mark. The apostatized church father, Origen, spoke of our “inner” and “outer” bodies in his Dialogue with Heraclides.

  Randall returned to the diagram he had made earlier showing “man” and “woman” as the image of God, the focus of the discussion that had so upset the conservative Christian. “Perfect man and woman have children born of God,” Randall stated, “and become the foundation for the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, a world of perfect families.”

  Pointing at the last of the three diagrams, Randal scribbled humankind on the left node and universe on the right node. “With perfect families populating the earth,” Randall continued, “it then becomes our responsibility to take dominion over the universe.” He wrote Kingdom of Heaven on the bottom node and swept his arm toward the chalkboard, presenting the three diagrams, and proclaimed, “This is the meaning of the three blessings in Genesis that charged humankind to be fruitful, multiply, and take dominion over the universe.”

  Clearly, Randall expected me to experience a moment of enlightenment, but the lecture left me wanting. All I could think to say was, “Genesis didn’t turn out very well, as I recall.”

  Esoteric teachings, whether ancient or recently conceived, always described an ideal and then proceeded to explain how it fell into corruption. In essence, how evil came into the world. The clincher was predictable—the group had “secret knowledge” that provided the only path to redemption.

  Randall smiled and said, “We understand why the ideal described in Genesis failed to materialize. Better still, we know what to do about it.”

  Exclusiveness was one of the reasons I shied away from the many groups proselytizing on campus. As far as I was concerned, “knowledge” should be freely available, not owned by a special group. I justified the use of hallucinogens by telling myself that I was following the writings of Castaneda, going the way of the Indian sorcerer, Don Juan, and that the books made the path available to anyone brave enough to reject society’s expectations and embark on the perilous journey of self-discovery.

  By the time Randall had gotten to the end of the lecture, I was in desperate need of food.

  When I told him that I wanted to leave, Randall asked rather hesitantly, “Will you come back tomorrow? Say, eight o’clock?”

  I didn’t see the point, really, but out of politeness, and still considering Stanley’s feelings, I said, “Maybe.”

  Randall telephoned the other house. Within minutes, the van arrived. Stanley greeted me, eager to know what I thought.

  “It made me hungry,” I said jokingly, but when I saw the disappointment
on his face, added, “Okay, I found the lectures intriguing.”

  “Are you going to hear more?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I have to solve the puzzle and figure out what’s gotten you so excited.”

  Despite my familiarity with the Tao-like, mystical Christian ideas Randall had presented, a few things nagged my thoughts. The afternoon following the lecture, I telephoned Stanley to compare notes. No one answered. Disappointed, I walked to Rebsamen Park and spent the rest of the afternoon trying to meditate. Proselytizers from the Process Church kept interrupting me. Process Church acolytes wore blue robes adorned with crucifix necklaces inscribed with a red serpent. I wasn’t interested in hearing what they had to say, not least because they were a surly-faced bunch. I also found their use of a serpent symbol disturbing.

  When the sun dipped low on the horizon, the proselytizers left the park, replaced within minutes by slithery drug dealers. John Carson spotted me but went the other way. I gave up trying to meditate and returned to Jake’s, finding him sprawled on the sofa. Mojo was curled up on the floor in a corner. Jewell was listening to music in the bedroom. At first, I couldn’t make out the album, but then recognized the lyrics of a Wishbone Ash song, “The King Will Come.” I strained to catch the words, but Jewell lifted the arm off the turntable and turned up the volume on her television.

  “News flash…soldier killed in Vietnam was a former athlete with the Sibley Hawks…named Heath Morrow…married to Lois Ann Morrow…also of Sibley.”

  My childhood friend, the sports hero who had supplanted Ernie in popularity, was dead.

  “Goddamn war,” I said aloud, reminding myself that if the draft didn’t end soon, I might be next.

  I went into the bedroom to continue working on my painting, but then I heard Jake and Mojo start coughing. I went to take a hit off the joint they had fired up. After a few puffs, the phone rang. It was Stanley. He told me to drive to the same house where I had heard the first lecture. Randall and Mary would meet me there.