Join Me

by Danny Wallace

  He laughed.

  ‘That’s not a picture of me. I’m not a complete idiot!’

  I imagine I looked quite confused at this stage, but Joinee Benjamin continued.

  ‘I’ll cut to the chase. I’ve been keeping my eye on your Join Me thing. I keep an eye on a lot of things, and Join Me is one of them. I applied to join you, I answered your questionnaire, and I’m fascinated. I thought it was important we meet face to face, so you know that someone is . . . let’s say “interested” . . . in what it is that you’re doing.’

  I nodded, but was still confused.

  ‘What is it that I’m doing?’

  ‘You know exactly what you’re doing.’

  I bloody wished I did.

  ‘No, tell me.’

  ‘I was suspicious as soon as I heard about you.’

  ‘Well . . . how did you hear about me?’

  ‘Your website was mentioned in the Mirror. Why is he getting people to join him? I thought. What’s in it for this guy? Politics? Religion? Money? Then I found out some more from you and other joinees I emailed, and they said you used the term “New World Order” in one of your advertisements, is that not the case?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what does that mean to you?’

  ‘Well . . . I just wanted to start my own thing. You know. Like a collective.’

  ‘Because to me . . .’

  The waiter arrived with the coffee, and Benjamin fell silent while it was placed on the table, followed by a bowl of sugar, a spoon, and a napkin. The waiter left and Benjamin felt it was safe to continue.

  ‘Because to me, and to my friends, it means something very different. It means eugenics. The elimination of what some deem the useless.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘The useless are more than welcome. I’m useless myself.’

  ‘The New World Order is something They want to instigate with the ultimate aim of reducing those who are left on the planet to a near pre-industrial state. It’s about the creation of a one-world oligarchical government.’

  I think my eyes were about as wide as they could get at this juncture.

  ‘I can’t even say “oligarchical”,’ I said, disproving my point. ‘That’s not what I’m about at all.’

  Who the hell did this bloke think I was? What did he think I was up to? He was a joinee . . . and yet he didn’t seem to be into the idea of Join Me at all. Why had he given me a false photo? Why couldn’t he have been like all the other joinees I’d met today? Or at least had the decency not to turn up, like Joinee Thomas? I couldn’t take it all in . . . and then he started to get a little odder.

  ‘What would you say if I said the words: “The Process”?’

  ‘I’d say “What’s that?”’

  Benjamin was studying my eyes for any glimmer of recognition or fear.

  ‘What about The Children?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘The Finders?’

  ‘I’ve never heard of The Finders. What did they find?’

  Benjamin paused. He wanted to tell me, but instead continued trying to catch me out. His eyes narrowed.

  ‘The Sovereign Order of the Solar Temple?’

  Jesus . . .

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘International Chivalric Organisation?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I don’t mind the sound of them. Chivalry is dead in this country.’

  Benjamin looked like he was about to agree, but remembered who he was and instead barked: ‘The Moon Child?’

  ‘Never met him.’

  ‘The Golden Way Foundation?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The Luciferians?’

  I sighed.

  ‘No. No, I’ve never heard of any of this lot. They’re nothing to do with me. I’m doing something called Join Me, and it’s about good deeds. That’s all. No Moon Children, Luciferians, or Finders.’

  ‘You’ve heard of The Finders?’

  Benjamin’s eyes were filled with horror.

  ‘You just mentioned them a minute ago,’ I said. ‘Look, do I look like someone who’d be in one of those things?’

  ‘Cult leaders take all forms.’

  ‘It’s not a cult. It’s a collective. And cult leaders very rarely take a form similar to mine.’

  ‘Why aren’t you more open about what you do, if it’s all so innocent? Why the secrets, Danny? The evasive answers? Why don’t you have a picture of yourself on your website?’

  ‘Because I don’t feel I look like a particularly inspiring Leader,’ I said. ‘Look at me. I’m just a scruffy bloke with specs. I don’t want people going to the site and saying, “Oh. Look. We appear to have joined one of The Proclaimers”.’

  Benjamin considered this. I continued.

  ‘And anyway, I am being more open. You know what Join Me’s all about now. Good deeds. Nice things. And I’m meeting people face-to-face precisely because I’ve nothing to hide.’

  ‘The fact that you took out the advert worried me. The Heaven’s Gate cult did something similar when recruiting for new members. They placed an ad in USA Today saying something along the lines of “This is your last chance to advance beyond the human”.’

  ‘Mine’s about just being human,’ I said. ‘Not about advancing beyond it. What have I asked you to do since you joined me? Just nice things. Have I ever tried to control your mind? Have I ever once asked you to kill the president? Even the president of a small country, like Antigua? No.’

  ‘So why do you ask people so many questions? Why send out a questionnaire?’

  ‘I want to find out a little about them. I want to know who’s joined me. It’s natural. And anyway, you’ve asked most of the questions today.’

  Benjamin looked at his fingers, drummed them on the table again, and then looked back at me.

  ‘Are you sure you’re nothing to do with The Finders?’

  This bloke had to be winding me up.

  ‘I promise you. I know nothing about them.’

  Benjamin looked around the room, decided it was safe, and whispered conspiratorially, ‘Since 1987, The Finders have been active, mainly in America.’

  The words ‘mainly in America’ translated to me as ‘this is bollocks’ and I sat back in my chair with a sigh.

  ‘There are roughly forty of them, all adults. They have no visible means of support for their activity, and they appear to be worth over two million US dollars.’

  ‘What’s the problem with them?’

  ‘Well . . . their activities are worrying in the extreme.’

  I sighed again. ‘Go on . . .’

  Benjamin looked around again. Apparently, ‘mainly in America’ didn’t mean that one of the forty Finders mightn’t be in this tiny café near Paddington, just by chance.

  ‘They constantly walk the streets. They follow people about all day, and they take extensive notes and pictures of everything.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘No one knows. But that’s what they do. Always writing notes. scribbling things down. Keeping a record. They’re part of the global vision. Heralds of the coming world superstate.’

  I didn’t really know what to say to any of this. It’s not often you’re sat with a complete stranger, in a café in London, discussing heralds of the coming world superstate. Not unless you’re Benjamin, anyway, who I imagine spends much of his time doing just that.

  ‘Are you sure we’re not wandering into the realms of fantasy here, Benjamin?’ I asked. This was all very peculiar, and I was slowly coming to the realisation that this increasingly fidgety man was a complete and utter cockney nutjob. You may have realised this for yourself a page or two back, but remember: I still had my tea to finish, and I find concentrating on two things hard enough at the best of times. Nevertheless, I was fascinated by what he was saying, though some way from convinced. And I was still trying to work out how he thought Join Me fitted into all of this.

  ‘Let’s look at how you’ve recruited people for your cult,’ said Benjamin.
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br />   ‘It’s not a cult – it’s a collective. And all I did was invite them to join.’

  ‘Yes, but let’s look at what we’re going to do now we’ve got them.’

  I didn’t like Benjamin’s use of the word ‘we’ there.

  ‘We’re not going to do anything. Apart from good stuff. And what’s with the “we”?’

  ‘I’m just saying. You obviously have plans. And it’s very interesting that you chose to mention killing the president a few moments ago. Why did that pop into your head?’

  ‘It just did.’

  ‘So the words “Kill The President” were just offered up by your subconscious? That’s interesting.’

  This annoyed me.

  ‘It’s not interesting. And I’m not going to kill the bloody president, okay? That was just an example of one of the many things I haven’t asked my joinees to do. Do you want more? There are lots more. I haven’t asked them to make plans to leave Planet Earth on a big bloody spaceship hidden behind a ruddy great comet. I haven’t asked them to all do crazy little dances and dress up in orange and play the bloody bongo drum. Oh, and most importantly of all, I have not asked them all to be in a cult.’

  Benjamin looked slightly offended. There was a tense five seconds of silence, as he looked to our left and right to see who’d overheard me banging on about cults. I’d raised my voice slightly at the end of all that, without really realising, and I calmed down, and felt slightly ashamed. It’s just a bit annoying when a man you’ve only just met thinks you’re planning to assassinate a world leader. It puts a downer on your whole day. You start wondering who else people think you’re secretly planning to kill.

  Benjamin cleared his throat and continued. ‘What do you do when your “joinees” come together?’

  The question was carefully put, and quietly spoken. Benjamin was now the one coming across as the sane party, and I the cult-obsessed nutter. He clearly thought he would have to treat me with kid gloves; I had just proved myself prone to unstable outbursts, after all.

  ‘I haven’t really met them as a group yet,’ I said. ‘Some of them like to make old men happy, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Chanting?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do they do any chanting?’ Benjamin was stirring his coffee but looking me straight in the eye.

  ‘Not that I know of. Maybe in their own time. But not on my watch.’

  ‘Because continual chanting is a common technique used to alter a person’s state of awareness. The same is true of swaying, or clapping, or just about any repetitive movement. Some leaders make their followers hyperventilate, to reduce the level of carbon dioxide in the bloodstream, which produces lightheadedness. You then tell them they’ve reached an altered state or had a spiritual experience.’

  ‘But don’t they just reply, “No, I’m just a bit dizzy because you’re not letting me breathe properly”?’

  ‘I’m just giving you the facts.’

  ‘Well, I won’t be telling people to hyperventilate. Because I’m not a cult leader, am I?’

  ‘Have you ever pressed anyone’s eyes in?’

  I was getting annoyed again. ‘No I have not. Who do you think I am? I don’t go about pressing people’s eyes in.’

  ‘Because if you did, you’d be doing what They do,’ said Benjamin, flatly. ‘You pass along your line of followers and you press on their eyes until the optic nerve sends signals to the brain as flashes of white light. And then you tell them that you were “bestowing Divine Light” upon them. You can also push really hard on their ears—’

  ‘I don’t want to push really hard on their ears!’

  ‘I’m just saying. You can push really hard on their ears until they hear a buzzing sound and then tell them they’ve heard “The Divine Harmony”, which is like Jesus humming—’

  ‘Jesus never hummed,’ I said, moodily, despite the fact that He probably had, at least once or twice. I made a mental note to check with Joinee Saunders.

  But Benjamin sensed my continued annoyance. He held his hands up and sat back, obviously trying to avoid confrontation.

  ‘I’m just trying to educate you, Danny. To let you know what it’s all about. I’ve been involved in certain things myself and I am aware of the techniques.’

  I think Benjamin was trying to tell me – without actually telling me – that he’d once found himself in a cult. He gave the impression of being someone who was violently against them, but he talked about them with a strange sense of glee. Like he enjoyed their existence. The only thing I can compare it to is when someone is telling you about a particularly grisly scene in a horror film; their eyes are a mixture of enthusiasm and disgust, and they desperately want you to share in both.

  My phone rang. It was Ian, who was actually ringing to ask me if I’d tape Die Hard 2 for him that night, but I made it sound like he was in town and demanding to meet me.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ I said to Benjamin. ‘But thanks for . . . you know . . . some interesting ideas for Join Me.’

  ‘I’ll be in touch,’ said Benjamin, before, slightly sarcastically, ‘Oh, Leader!’

  I nodded enthusiastically, gave him a little thumbs up (which he returned), said goodbye, and headed for the tube.

  What a very odd man. And I’m sure he wouldn’t mind my saying that. Because that’s the kind of attitude odd people have.

  Benjamin had exhausted me. Knackered me out. And made me question what I was doing. Today had been so much effort. Sure, I knew that the first few joinees I’d met would go on, and spread the word, and probably do a few good deeds . . . but had it been worth getting so tired over? Especially when one of them hadn’t bothered turning up, and another had come close to driving me insane.

  I got back to the flat, head low and shoulders heavy, to find Hanne in my kitchen.

  ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Bath,’ I said. ‘I told you. I went to say hello to my parents.’

  This was true. I had.

  ‘Yes,’ said Hanne. ‘And I thought it would be nice to phone them while you were there, but your mum said you’d turned up for about five minutes and then gone again.’

  This was true. I had.

  ‘Well, you know what my mum’s like at exaggeration. I must have been there longer than five minutes.’

  ‘Five minutes, she said. From 9.30 to 9.35. She was horrified! So where did you go?’

  ‘I went to see some friends.’

  ‘More new friends, I suppose. Where are you meeting all these people? Why have I never met any of them? It’s getting really to me, Danny. We could have spent today doing something. I’m not sure how much more of this I can take. You’ve changed.’

  I said I was sorry, but I needed to see my friends, and she said she just wished I could be honest with her. I’d never been so secretive, she said, and for a moment I was utterly desperate to come clean; to just tell her what I’d been up to. Would that really be so bad? To say that I’d been spending my days not earning lots of money writing film reviews or playing videogames, but instead creating a network of joinees across the world, who do my bidding every Friday for no real purpose or profit other than to be nice? How could a girl not like a boy who did nice things? I wanted to tell her, I really did, but there was something inside me telling me I shouldn’t. I knew that either I had to stop doing this completely, or carry on in secret. There was no middle ground. It was stop or be stopped, and neither option was particularly pleasant to imagine.

  The truth of it was, I was enjoying myself I had found a purpose. And, in a horrible way, I’d gained a power. A power few people have. A power I was determined not to misuse, but a power that was as addictive as it was unexpected. And so, yet again, I didn’t tell Hanne.

  She knew something was wrong, and I could tell that her attitude towards me was changing subtly, and it made my stomach chum every time I thought about it. I didn’t want to risk my relationship, but I couldn’t stop doing what I was doing. I had hundreds of people relying
on me. Hundreds of good things happening as a result. If I told Hanne, I’d have to stop, and by stopping, I’d be risking preventing hundreds of good things happening in the future. Hell, hundreds of good things happening this week. Thousands happening in the months that followed. Maybe millions by the time I follow in Gallus’s clogs and they pop from underneath me. Could I really risk those things not happening, just to suit my own selfish needs?

  I didn’t know.

  Maybe?

  I’d have to think about it.

  Probably, yes.

  No. No way.

  I don’t know.

  Hanne didn’t stay at mine that night. She said she wanted to go home and clear her head. I didn’t stop her. But it made me very sad.

  Later, when I was utterly physically and emotionally exhausted and getting ready for bed and had just realised I’d forgotten to tape Die Hard 2, I checked my email. The first name up was Benjamin’s . . .

  Danny,

  Forgot to mention earlier: everything is in place for the creation of a nega-utopian society. Worldwide slavery is not so very far off, and narcohypnotics, water fluoridisation, mass observation, human robot production, microminiaturisation of mind control implants (etc) all have a little something to do with it! I’m sure you know what I’m saying......

  More soon

  Benjamin

  PS. We are partners now. Let’s Make It Happen!!

  Oh God. I’d hit a low.

  What the hell was I doing with my life? My girlfriend was constantly and unfailingly angry with me, I was living the shady double life of a well-meaning cult leader, it was all costing too much money, I’d attracted the attentions of a lunatic who thought I was out to kill the president and now wanted to team up with me for God knows what dark purposes, and I was absolutely, dreadfully shattered by it all.

  Don’t get me wrong, I knew that I was entirely to blame. But certain events had taken place over the past few weeks that couldn’t fail to spur me on; to draw me deeper into this world. Raymond Price sprang to mind. The Karma Army would never have happened without that chance meeting.

  But it was that chance meeting that was about to change things.

  Because the next email I clicked on shocked me a great deal.

  It concerned Raymond Price.