A Darker Place

by Laurie R. King

  There was breakfast left, though only of the cold cereal, canned-fruit-or-bananas, and sour yogurt variety. There was no coffee, though she could have had a cup of black tea if the big urns hadn’t been cleared away. She satisfied herself with a small glass of goat’s milk and orange juice made from an inexpensive concentrate.

  Ana gathered her bowl in one hand and the two glasses in the other, and surveyed the room for a minute before choosing her seat. There were only nine people sitting down, in three groups. She decided against the young couple, who appeared too wrapped up in each other to welcome an intruder, and the four men who had obviously already put in two or three sweaty hours of dirty physical labor. Instead, she gravitated around to the three women nursing their cups of tea. One of them was Laurel from the night before, who recognized Ana and moved over a fraction to welcome her to the bench.

  Introductions were made—Teresa Montoya, pretty and silent, and Dominique Picard, who had an accent and an appearance as French as her name. Ana greeted them, sat down, and made a comment about the beautiful morning; with that simple prime, the well of conversation began easily to flow, even when Laurel excused herself to begin her kitchen duties.

  Teresa and Dominique, it seemed, were teachers. All of the older students currently being off to basketball and Biosphere, the two women were free to bring their record books up to date and have a leisurely consultation over an extended breakfast. They were interested to hear that Ana was herself a teacher, and asked her about her experience.

  “Well,” she said, “I used to teach the little guys—I started with kindergarten, then third-grade for several years. Then I wanted a change so I upgraded my certificate and taught high school in a private alternative school—history, English lit, and even beginning Spanish for a year.” The two women did not go so far as to exchange significant glances, but Ana could feel that they were definitely paying attention. “Tell me about your school here. How many kids are there?”

  “We have about a hundred kids in the community, eighty-seven of them in the school,” Dominique told her.

  “Really? That’s quite a good-sized school. How many people in the community in all?”

  “Two hundred seventy, two hundred eighty, something like that. A high percentage of children, you are thinking, no? Do you know anything about us, Ana?”

  “Not a thing, really. Carla took pity on me last night in Sedona when she saw me working on my bus’s heater, but we didn’t have a chance to talk. I did gather that this is a religious community.”

  “Please, whatever you do, do not think of us as a cult. We are a community of people brought together by a common interest in spirituality and responsible living—personal transformation leading to a change in society as a whole. Steven is first among us here, but he is no cult leader.” Ana smiled to show her sympathy, and Dominique, mollified, went on.

  “We have a high percentage of children here because one of the ways we take responsibility for our existence on this earth is to nurture young people who have been abandoned by their families. We take in so-called problem children—children who have been rejected by a series of foster homes, who are being released from juvenile detention centers, children too old or too ill-behaved for the adoption agencies—and we give them structure in their lives, the firm hand and good example of mature adults, healthy food for their bodies, fresh air and open space for their spirits, education for their minds, and, when they are ready for it, the skills to personally transform their souls.”

  “And basketball games,” said Ana.

  Dominique looked puzzled for a moment, then grinned. “Basketball, yes—and we have a killer baseball team as well. Kids need focused relaxation, and a little friendly competition teaches them how to use aggression, not be used by it—a lot of the boys who come to us have real problems with aggression, learned from their fathers, continued by their peers. Besides which, an all-American team sport is a way we can demonstrate to the community and the state that we’re not a bunch of weirdos about to start shooting at the FBI and BATF.”

  The colloquial familiarity with governmental agencies was disconcerting, particularly as Dominique had hit on the very purpose of Ana’s presence here, but it was also amusing to hear the phrase “bunch of weirdos” rendered in a French accent. Ana laughed. “I met a child named Dulcie yesterday, who I assume is being fostered here.”

  “Dulcie is a sweetheart. But why do you not think she was born here?”

  Without pausing to consider, Ana said, “Because she acts like an abused child.” Oh God, she then thought, what if Dulcie is actually one of their own? But both Teresa and Dominique were already nodding.

  “She has only been with us about six weeks. She speaks only to her brother, who is also here, but she has begun to respond to outsiders by gestures, nodding, or pointing, and occasionally she uses a few words. That is progress.”

  “Dulcie?” said Ana. “Do you have more than one Dulcie here? The girl I met last night was talking just fine.”

  “Dulcie was?” It was the first time Teresa had contributed; both women were leaning across the table as if to seize Ana by the collar.

  “Yeah. When she and Carla saw me working on the engine, she asked me what I was doing. And what was the other thing? Oh yes, when I pulled a length of duct tape from the roll using my front teeth, she was a good little mother and told me I shouldn’t use my teeth like that, they’d come loose and fall out. And then she got the giggles when I actually pulled my teeth out. I have a dental plate,” she explained.

  Teresa and Dominique looked at each other thoughtfully.

  “Well,” said Dominique. “Interesting. Would you like to see the schoolrooms?”

  “Sure,” said Ana. “Let me just take the dishes back.” She piled up her things and took the empty cups of the two women, turned to carry them over to the kitchen, and then nearly dropped her burden in astonishment.

  “Good… heavens,” she said. It was the first time she had faced the high half-wall that dropped down to divide the high-ceilinged dining hall from the kitchen. Last night she had merely glanced in as she went past, and this morning she had come in at the far door, taken her food from the buffet, and walked over to the tables to sit with her back to the kitchen. Now, however, she stared at the high wall and at the ten-foot-high mural that stretched the full sixty-foot width of the room.

  The theme of the painting was proclaimed in foot-high gold letters smack in the middle: TRANSFORMATION. At the left side of the mural a highly realistic portrayal of the untouched desert that Ana had contemplated from her high perch that morning gradually gave way to the gentle civilization of fields and crops from which tumbled baskets of fruit, tomatoes, eggplants, and grain that spilled into the central image, the kitchen. Five figures stood with their backs to the painter and their arms raised, giving praise to a fiercely glowing horno, the womb-shaped bread oven found behind native dwellings throughout the Southwest, its top slightly elongated by the artist’s perception into something closer to a pear in shape. To the right stretched an abundance of cooked dishes, breads, casseroles, and pots of soup that nourished a long row of identical people, again shown from behind, and then a row of people marching renewed to the fields while in the background children played on a slide and a set of swings. The people were followed by a jagged, half-raised circular stone building, and finally, seated in a lotus position, a meditating man surrounded by a shimmering golden aura.

  Ana laughed in pleasure at the sight of it, and felt that really, she might as well climb into Rocinante and ride away: Any group with sufficient sense of humor and sheer exuberant joy to paint that mural above the entrance to their communal kitchen was not about to twist itself in self-loathing or paranoia.

  She walked with Teresa and Dominique to the schoolrooms in the central building. On the way she looked curiously at her surroundings. The buildings were impressive and original, massive circular objects slapped together of rock and cement that somehow managed to look crudely primitiv
e and wildly modernistic at the same time.

  The garden, however, was the real delight. Xeriscape landscaping at its most austere, the carefully scattered cactuses, boulders, and desert plants had the look of modern sculpture in the courtyard of an art museum, softened only by the rises and falls of the ground and the sprinkled clumps of delicate grasses. There was even, Ana was charmed to see, a boojum tree at least twelve feet high, its glorious blue-gray trunk straight and tall in its cloud of tangly, tiny-leafed branches.

  “‘For the Snark was a boojum, you see!’” she exclaimed. Teresa looked at her as if she were mad, and Dominique blinked. “A poem,” she explained. “By Lewis Carroll.”

  “Ah,” said Dominique.

  Ana decided not to attempt further explanation, and as they continued on she turned her attention to the buildings themselves. All of these in the central compound were made in the same fashion, comprising great, rough-hewn hunks of rock held together by reddish concrete. The rocks were not laid so much as tumbled, with the spaces filled by the concrete varying wildly and including a lot of gaps. It was a pleasing technique, looking both massive and delicate, but Ana had to wonder if it wouldn’t fall in on itself in an earthquake.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen buildings like this,” she commented.

  “Then you haven’t been to Taliesen West.”

  “Frank Lloyd Wright’s place? That’s in this area, isn’t it? No, I haven’t been there.”

  “It’s down near Scottsdale. Beautiful. Inspired. Needs a lot of muscle, though. We build the forms, lay in miles of reinforcing bar, heave in the rocks—we have a forklift for the bigger ones—and shovel in yards and yards of very stiff concrete. After a couple of days we take the forms down and do the next section.”

  “That explains the muscle on the men in the dining hall,” Ana commented.

  “Steven calls it ‘sweat meditation,’” Teresa volunteered seriously.

  Ana decided that this was one Change member who had not contributed to the humor in the TRANSFORMATION mural, but she said merely, “I’m looking forward to meeting Steven,” and followed the two teachers into the central building.

  • • •

  Ana spent the morning with Dominique, exploring the classrooms, shelving books in the nascent library, helping fill out a stack of evaluation forms, all the endless process of running a legally recognized school under the state’s watchful eye. They took lunch in the hall, where Ana met more strong, happy young men and women than she had seen gathered together in one place for a very long time. Then, in the afternoon, Ana met the children of the Change community.

  Many public schools, Ana knew, had gardens for the students, “life labs” where the elementary classrooms’ bean-seed-in-a-milk-carton could be carried through to its fullness, giving the children actual edible beans to harvest. Concepts of biology and ecology were given solid form, and the students learned cause-and-effect by seeing their own plants wither or thrive.

  The students here were put in the gardens for pedagogic reasons, but also as a basic lesson in responsibility. Change was as nearly self-supporting as a desert community could be, and the earlier the children learned to become active contributors to the whole, the better, for themselves and for the community.

  Today was dedicated to the beginning of the year’s cycle. Ana was assigned to a group of six five- and six-year-olds, and the subject was the planting of beans. Instead of small waxy milk cartons salvaged from the lunchroom and bags of sterilized potting soil from the local hardware store, they used rough pots formed out of recycled newspaper and scoops of rich, fragrant soil from a compost heap mixed with the sandy earth of the desert, but other than these surface differences, the effect was the same as any other classroom bean-planting. Clumsy fingers, chubby still with baby fat, spilled more soil than the pots received and either thrust the beans so far into the soil the seeds would be hard put to reach the light or else left them so close to the surface they would be unable to stand upright. Each child then drowned his seeds with water. Muddy, wet, and thrilled, they placed each already disintegrating pot onto flats, and then she herded them out of the potting shed toward the beds where the beans would be planted when the survivors had their first three leaves.

  These children knew what was going on, that was clear, even if few of them could handle the gardening implements with any dexterity. They squatted down along the side of the weedy bed and plunged their trowels enthusiastically into the soil as they tried to emulate Ana, who was loosening the soil with a garden fork before she pulled the weeds and tossed them into a nearby bucket. Most of the children overestimated the motion required, and clots of dirt and weed flew all over.

  Ana kept them at it for twenty minutes, abandoning the bed with the ravaged edges only when the next group stood waiting to take over the trowels. They then went to scrub hands, brush ineffectually at knees, and gather eggs at the henhouse.

  She began to relax in their company. She had only experienced one bad moment, a brief blink of an eye when she seemed to be standing not in Arizona, but long ago in Texas, and it was Abby digging at her side with similar enthusiasm, unearthing an enormous worm and holding it up in triumph. But the memory was gone in an instant and she was again Ana Wakefield in Arizona, and the worst part of meeting the children, the early moments of extreme vulnerability, were past, she was sure of it. Now she could get on with the business of saving them.

  Once the kids were delivered, tired and dirty, back to the schoolrooms, Dominique took Ana back in hand. They wandered through the farm sheds and admired the goats, looked at the ongoing projects in the crafts barn, the pots, mugs, and weavings due for sale in the Sedona gallery, saw the bare orchard and the plowed fields and the wide, mulched-over vegetable beds, mature brothers of the beds the students played at, which in the summer would surely resemble the left-hand side of the TRANSFORMATION mural.

  At about three o’clock, Dominique excused herself, saying that she had her meditation period now. Ana went back down the road to the dull guest quarters, but stopped there only long enough to fetch her camera and her journal, and took them up to the red-rock perch above the compound.

  It was only to be expected that a woman like Ana Wakefield would keep a journal, the daily thoughts and meditation of a lifelong inhabitant of the New Age, her inner thoughts, reflections, and a record of her dreams. In it she recorded descriptions, personal details, speculations, and interesting asides. She could even make detailed if amateurish sketches of her surroundings, and anyone going through her things would see only an innocent diary of events. In truth, it was Ana’s means of reporting to Glen.

  It was small enough to take with her at all times, and she tended to stick it in a pocket and leave it there even when she had no intention of writing or sketching. That way she would have it with her on trips to town, where she could divert into a library or copy shop and in minutes have the pages photocopied and either into a stamped envelope or faxed to Glen and discarded, before anyone noticed she was gone. She felt like a teenager sometimes, but she kept a diary.

  The climb up the hill was not much easier the second time, but she had at least discovered some of the hazards among the boulders, and this time she located a natural seat, shaped for comfort. She took a few photos with her trusty old 35mm, then opened the journal.

  Over the years she and Glen had developed a series of code phrases, words that could be used naturally in the journal or a postcard to “Uncle Abner,” or even in a conversation, but which had specific meanings to indicate, for example, that things were going either so slowly or so smoothly that she thought Glen might as well go do something else for a while, or that she needed someone to hang around the prearranged meeting place until she could get free, or that she was feeling nervous and wanted to get out soon.

  The word used to show this first state of affairs was, appropriately, “placid,” and she used it now, twice, in describing the compound with a third of its population missing and then on the following
page in speaking about the goats in the field. She did not know if Glen would appreciate the nuances of the mural (though he sometimes seemed to have a sense of humor), so she spent some time on that, reflecting on its hidden meanings without giving too much away herself. She closed the entry immediately after the second “placid,” for emphasis, read what she had written (checking to be sure that she had not by accident made use of other, contradicting code words), and climbed back down the hill to see if she could lend a hand in the kitchen.

  After dinner, when the dishes were clean and the small children in bed, Ana was invited to join the community in its group meditation. She accepted with the appropriate eagerness, hung up her damp dish towel to dry, and waited while her new friends Laurel and Amelia checked on the breakfast provisions and shut down the lights. They took coats from an entire room dedicated to rolling metal clothes racks hung with hundreds of bent metal hangers, and bundled up fully before stepping out into the frigid night air. The three women walked quickly from the dining hall to the hub building, their breath steaming clouds around their heads, and joined several others just entering the foyer.

  This time, however, instead of going left into the school offices or right into the circular corridor that connected all the classrooms, Ana followed the others straight ahead, through a set of double doors that looked so like the walls around them as to be invisible, given away only by the slight discoloration of the wood where a hundred hands every day pushed them open. Inside the doors was another, smaller foyer, this one with a solid wall on the inward side and swinging doors to the right and left, forming a baffle to keep those outside from seeing in. Amelia went through the right-hand door, Laurel through the left. After a moment’s hesitation, and aware that Laurel was standing and waiting for her, Ana followed Amelia.

  Her first thought on setting foot into the circular meditation hall was how amazing it was that such a room could be concealed in plain sight, surrounded as it was by one of the busiest, most public places in the entire compound, the school.