by Tosca Lee
Reporters interview coworkers, neighbors, and family of the sick in treatment. They’re baffled, clearly afraid, hoping for a cure. Meanwhile, ginkgo biloba and herbal brain enhancers have sold out of stores nationwide as fresh cell phone footage of bizarre behavior is uploaded to video sites by the hour.
When I show a few of them to Julie, she snorts.
“There’s a difference between having dementia and just being an idiot,” she says.
But I notice she’s begun setting the house alarm, even when we’re home.
• • •
A FEW DAYS later at my weekly appointment, Dr. Reiker asks if it’s ever occurred to me to do an Internet search on New Earth International.
I think back to the day I tapped out Magnus’s name. The pictures of him filling the corner of the screen, staring back at me.
“Yes.” Even as I say it, I feel the shadow of that former panic brush against the back of my neck.
“And did you?”
“I stopped.”
“Probably a wise choice at the time,” she says, crossing her legs. “But I think you’re doing well enough now that you might find that it helps put some more things into perspective.”
“Have you?” I ask. “Looked them up, I mean.”
“As a matter of fact, I did after our first appointment,” she says.
“What’d you find?” I ask, not sure I really want to know.
“Why don’t you take a look when you’re ready—maybe even invite Julie to search with you.”
Alone in the carriage house that night, I type “New Earth” into the search bar of my phone. I haven’t mentioned it to Julie, and my heart is pounding against my ribs.
I hesitate and then hit the “search” button.
The screen goes momentarily blank. And then it fills . . . and fills.
“New Earth Settles Lawsuit with Former Member.” “Little Cult on the Prairie.” “I Left a Cult—An Interview with an Ex-NEI Member.” “New Earth International Investigated for False Imprisonment.” “Sexual Harassment Suit Filed Against Elder ‘Omni West’ of Secretive Religious Sect.” “Woman Files Lawsuit After Being Abused as Part of Iowa Cult.”
Magnus’s voice returns with a vengeance.
Persecution and lies! Our ways are not the ways of the world. The Deceiver is a roaring lion.
I click the first link about a lawsuit filed by a couple (listed as Jane and John Doe) against a college teacher, claiming the teacher brainwashed their son (name withheld) into joining New Earth and in turn recruited his sister and brother, alienating them from the family. Which, I suppose, is how it would appear to anyone on the outside.
I click on the Wikipedia page next.
New Earth International (NEI) is an apocalyptic religious group located north of Ames, Iowa. Founded in 1992 by Magnus Theisen, New Earth’s theology centers around the End Times and teaches that only its members will advance to the new Heaven on Earth once the current Earth has been destroyed.
Theisen (formerly businessman and entrepreneur Jeff Gregory) changed his name in 1990 after selling his company, TG+ Hybrids, and claiming God had commanded him, as the New Adam, to prepare others to enter New Earth by strict adherence to spiritual standards and the ancient diet by which men were intended to live and eat.
“Jeff?” I say aloud.
There’s a section below about Magnus’s upbringing, how he dropped out of high school as a junior. A paragraph outlining his nine Testaments. Another about complaints brought against Magnus, Elder Omni, and New Earth as a whole.
I scroll down to the articles in the reference section at the end, click through to an article about a suit against New Earth for loans to the organization Magnus Theisen claims were “donations.” I’ve been aware for years that new members sign over cars, property, houses—entire bank accounts—to the communal cause. Though I’ve never heard of anyone wanting anything back.
I return to the search page and hover over the sexual harassment link but can’t bring myself to read it. Click instead on “I Left a Cult—An Interview with an Ex-NEI Member” on a site called Truth Watch. Scroll down to the account of “Ann” (not her real name), who joined as a teenager.
Because I can only think of one person this could be.
Shae.
But when I get to her photo, I freeze.
Because the eyes staring out at me aren’t Shae’s.
They’re Kestral’s.
But Kestral’s dead!
I scroll back up. The article is dated last year.
We were married for fifteen years when Magnus told me he had had a vision that he was to take a second, younger wife. That God had told him he needed children—something I could never give him as a result of two abortions I’d had in my past. Except I had never had an abortion. I was seventeen when I met him soon after he received his first revelation and was a virgin when we married. Magnus knew this but claimed God revealed to him that I had aborted two children in my heart and would therefore not be given more.
I searched through my past, combing back for any possible negative thought I’d ever had toward children—mine or anyone else’s—until I thought I’d go crazy. Until I no longer trusted my own mind or memory. Because I knew for a fact I had always wanted children—something that never seemed important to Magnus before. Once, when I thought I might be pregnant, I actually worried how he would react. Magnus requires a lot of attention, absolute devotion. It’s the one thing he demands from every member of the Enclave. There were plenty of families at the Enclave, but the implicit understanding was that Magnus, as the Interpreter, always came first—before spouses, before children, before even the Bible itself . . .
When I balked at the idea of Magnus taking another wife, I was told I was in rebellion against God Himself. When two weeks in Penitence failed to change my conviction that I was not meant to share my husband [author’s note: Penitence is a white, windowless room with only a cot and an altar, designed for the Penitent’s undisturbed contemplation and prayer, where members are forced into solitary confinement and often not fed or given water for days], I was “sequestered” in a nearby garage and forced to sleep on concrete. When I still refused, I was given an ultimatum: go along with it or be cast out.
I was terrified. To be cast out [author’s note: sent to live out the remainder of one’s earthly life in the outside world before spending eternity in Hell] meant the loss of not only my salvation, but the only home or family I had. How could God demand this kind of choice from me—through the man who was His mouthpiece? Who had preached all my life about purity?
I began to wonder if Magnus was right and I was crazy. If Magnus was revealing something to me I myself hadn’t realized. Because what you need to understand is that in the Enclave, you learn not to trust your instincts. They’re base and fallible. You go by what the Elders and Magnus tell you instead.
Finally, I confessed that I had aborted two children in my heart. But I was too late. Magnus, I’m guessing, had probably realized the friction taking a second wife might cause inside the Enclave (if not the outside world, as we were never legally married—I couldn’t even prove common-law marriage, as we never presented publicly outside the Enclave as a couple). All I know for sure is that he didn’t want me to be his wife anymore, and for that to happen, according to our tenets, I had to “die.”
Three days later, I was taken out in the middle of the night and driven a hundred miles west where I was let out at a truck stop with only the clothes I was wearing.
I sit back, reeling. But my first thought isn’t of Kestral. It’s Jackie.
If this could happen to Kestral, what could happen to her?
Jackie has no idea Kestral’s alive.
All these years we thought she was dead . . .
I start.
Mom.
With shaking fingers I open a new tab and type in “Sylvia Roth Iowa.”
The page fills with addresses, white pages, social media pages, a couple professional sites
for an orthopedic practice . . .
And then I see it. The obituary. I click through, heart pounding in my ears. The picture is her. The date is the same.
Sylvia Roth, 39, of Ames, Iowa, formerly of Chicago, Illinois, died at home after a short and sudden battle with cancer. She is survived by her daughters, Jaclyn and Wynter.
Memorials may be made to the New Earth Clothing and Counseling Center.
I know what that last line means. I heard Julie talk about it just last week in relation to a friend who passed away in another state. I wonder if anyone sent money.
If New Earth profited off her death.
Now my hands are shaking for an altogether different reason. A new one: anger. At Magnus. For my mother. Jackie. Kestral. And at myself. For every minute I spent in Penitence. That I was cast out in a spectacle meant to keep the others in line, though I guess I should be glad I wasn’t driven far away and released like some wild animal.
Most of all, I’m afraid. For Truly—always. But especially for Jaclyn.
There’s an email address for Suzanne Ruckman, the writer of the article. I click on it and tap out a short message with my new email account I created to set up the social media one:
Dear Suzanne,
I am writing to you in confidence. Would you please forward this note to “Ann,” whom I knew at the Enclave? Please do not share this note with anyone but her. Thank you.
K,
It’s Sylvia’s daughter. I’m so sorry this happened to you. I didn’t know. We didn’t know. I’m out. Please write me back.
W.
I leave out my name; I have no desire for it to be associated online with New Earth if the author doesn’t honor my request for anonymity or makes me an addendum to her interview.
I read until the early hours of the morning: personal accounts of life at the compound by visitors who opted not to stay, unwilling to sign over their assets; profiles about the secretive community behind the charismatic leader of New Earth Pure Life Seed Co.; the sexual assault story about Elder Omni as told by “Tamara,” who is too afraid to use her real name as she still has family living in the Enclave.
I wonder if “Tamara” is Lyssa or even Shae. But there is no picture for that one.
Finally, as the path lights in the yard below come on signaling the hour before dawn, I type “Magnus Theisen” in the search bar. There’s far more on him, dating back to the 1990s, from more visible outlets: ag industry reports, financial news sites, business profiles, Entrepreneur Magazine, People. All about how he started TG+ Hybrids and later sold it for $53 million. The years he spent traveling, partying, and getting asked for donations to causes that, in his opinion, would never change the world. The cancer scare and conversion experience during which he claimed to hear the voice of God telling him to prepare for the new Earth by returning to the “ways of Eden.” His about-face on GMOs and obsession with acquiring rare, ancient seeds from around the world, including the “Methuselah” date palm in Israel—a tree germinated from a two-thousand-year-old seed—and, most recently, a four-thousand-year-old lentil purchased for $25,000. His rumored illegal purchases of seeds discovered at ancient archaeological sites in North America and the Middle East. The financial ruin of his former business partner, Blaine Owen.
I stare at that name a moment and then type in “Blaine Owen TG+ Hybrids.”
His picture comes up with the dates of his birth . . . and his death.
Just four weeks ago.
I search through several articles until I find an obituary in the Kansas City Star stating that he lost his long struggle with addiction.
I go back, scroll down the results until I land on an old article about TG+ Hybrids’ accounting violations. Hundreds of thousands in fines. Charges against Chief Financial Officer Blaine Owen, who spent five months in jail.
There’s more, on Owen’s allegations that Magnus forced him to take the fall, for which Magnus sued him.
Apparently no one believed Blaine.
I spend the rest of the night reading everything I can find on New Earth, Magnus, Blaine, cults, and their leaders.
By morning, I am numb.
I had a purpose once. Believed the lie that I was special if only because I had managed to claim a slot in Heaven. A reservation that was by no means guaranteed but had to be reclaimed daily by faith and toil if only to keep it from the hands of another. Faith had never been about being perfect—good thing for me—but about being more perfect than a world on the cusp of being devoured. The spiritual equivalent of outrunning the person behind you when getting chased by a bear.
But I am no longer one of the Select. I am one in 7.5 billion trying to figure out what’s real. And right now all I know for sure is that I’m a jobless twenty-two-year-old vegetarian with exactly three friends and no job skills I can put on paper.
That afternoon, after finally getting a few hours’ sleep, I open my journal to begin the list Dr. Reiker suggested of what I mean to accomplish in my new life.
But there’s only one thing on it:
Get Jackie and Truly out.
That night, an alert flashes across my phone’s screen.
An email.
SCHOOL OF VETERINARY MEDICINE,
DEPARTMENT OF ANATOMIC PATHOLOGY
UC DAVIS, BUILDING 3A
Grad Student Shon Goken stared at the obituary on the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner online, feeling vaguely ill. Just last summer the farmer had posted on a Mangalitsa breeders’ board about the violent death of his sow by his boar. It had been a stroke of bad luck for the farmer but a boon to Shon’s summer fellowship project on the normally disease-resistant heritage breed. Especially once the farmer had agreed to exhume the carcasses and send him several tissue samples of muscle, bone, and brain.
Shon had put them into storage and promptly forgot about them since his proposal wasn’t due until February. Today, as he’d begun work on it, he’d realized he needed some more information. But now the farmer was dead, having been found in the woods last August after apparently wandering for days according to the farmers’ sister, who had answered his house phone. She’d talked readily, like someone hungry for conversation no matter who was on the other end, and he’d offered her his condolences, trying to figure out how to tactfully ask if she had access to the purchase information on his boar.
She had sighed. “I can look if you want to leave me your number. But he burned a bunch of files before he . . . you know.”
“Burned?”
“Yeah. You should see this place. It’s . . . I never thought John was one to do drugs, but that’s the only explanation anyone can come up with. Especially after two of his buddies he used to hang out with died a few weeks after he did. They weren’t right in their minds, either.”
“What do you mean ‘not right’?” Shon asked.
“One of them, Cash Devries, who worked at the slaughterhouse, took the top half of his head off with a band saw.”
Shon grimaced against his cell phone. “Oh . . . wow.”
“The other one drove his truck into a building. Died a few days later in the hospital.”
“Any idea what happened to the surviving pigs?”
“There was only two left,” the sister said. “He slaughtered them. Had to. Said he was done, was talking about going into cannabis. Which is why I mention the drugs.”
Now Shon toggled back to Cash Devries’s obituary and that of the other man he believed to be the friend, if only because he had worked at the same slaughterhouse.
Something wasn’t right. Pigs gone crazy. The farmer and two of his friends—who had possibly come into contact with the remaining pig—also gone crazy . . .
He called the sister a second time.
“Any chance your brother ingested any brain or spinal material of one of his own hogs?” Shon asked.
“He liked to fry the brains with eggs for him and his friends when he slaughtered. Only part he ever kept back for himself.”
It sounded like a prion, b
ut even a porcine variant of the spongiform encephalopathy responsible for mad cow disease in cattle or the human variant, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, would never present so quickly in humans. Assuming the farmer or his friends ingested the brain of a prion-infected animal, it would take years, maybe even decades, for symptoms to appear. And without studying a sample of the dead men’s brains, there was no way to know.
Shon prepared several slides from the pigs’ brain samples. And then, as an afterthought, took a sample of the dirt from the specimen bag as well.
Forty minutes later, he knew he had something far bigger than a summer fellowship project.
He grabbed his phone and placed a call.
“I found something,” he said.
• • •
TWO DAYS LATER, Shon’s summer fellowship project—and its $6,000 stipend—went up in smoke when his samples and their data went missing.
CHAPTER TEN
* * *
My hands shook as I crossed the yard. What could the office want with me? I’d striven to be silent, invisible, since Truly’s birth, lest anything interfere with my ability to spend time with her. Because each time that sweet four-year-old girl ran into my arms, I knew God was good and everything in life made sense.
I knocked on the office door, hesitated, and at the sound of a voice, let myself inside. I remembered nothing of this place from my single visit here the day I barged in demanding answers about my mother. This time, I took in the cream-colored curtains and stuffed chairs just inside the door. The filing cabinets and bookshelves. The entire far wall lined with what looked like magazine covers featuring Magnus—Entrepreneur Magazine, Organic Farmer, Forbes, Archaeology Today. Magnolia, rising from her desk. Her shoulders had begun to hunch some time in the last decade, her chestnut hair grayer in the fluorescent light than I remembered, her jowls more pronounced. How that could happen on Rosella’s cooking I had no idea.