by Kris Bertin
One of these bills was shown as evidence of our exploitation at the trial.
Consultation (In Person): 3,000.00
Consultation (Telephone): 1,000.00
Private Session (Adv.): 11,500.00
Private Session: 6,950.00
Consultation (In Person): 3,000.00
Consultation (Extended): 7,500.00
Private Session (Adv.): 11,500.00
Emergency Consult: 15,500.00
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TOTAL: 59,950.00
Strategically, this was brilliant. For us to agree that it’s a big bill is to admit some predation on our part. To say that the bill is a small one only makes him seem like one victim among many. Instead our lawyer said it was industry standard, which indicted the whole of the self-help community and did nothing to help our case.
They also had pictures. My pictures. And a high-quality slide projector.
Click and then they would linger, in silence, on each one. Like they were looking at the site of some great, unspeakable horror. They showed pictures of the steps leading down to the Balancing Rock, all 697 of them: a mix of natural slabs of rock and man-made wooden planks with extensive rope work to use as handrails, taken from low angles with a fish-eye lens by me so as to look especially breathtaking. Or, in their hands, especially precarious.
They also had their own photos, ones they went and collected after the fact. Pictures of all the caution signs that told you to keep your hands on the ropes at all times, and the ones that recommend against taking pets or small children with you.
They asked: Is this where you’d take a seventy-four-year-old recovering from hip surgery?
On the way down, JR had to walk with his legs locked and bowed, moving like a compass across a map. He was hissing, huffing, and puffing, but I barely paid attention to any of it. Soon enough it was drowned out by the sea thundering against the rocks. The prosecution had my photos of this too. The water, dark and foaming, breaking against the cliffs some two hundred feet below us.
I remember thinking that it was so much louder than I had expected. Almost deafening.
The only sign the prosecution didn’t take a picture of was the information plaque posted at the observation deck. It identified the Balancing Rock as columnar basalt nearly 200 million years old, thirty feet tall and nine feet wide. It offered an idea that was too big for the jury—something that might have even helped us, by providing some context. That this thing really had been standing here, on its own, for longer than anyone or anything you’ve ever known. Longer than human beings have been around. Really, it made the loss of one single person seem almost totally insignificant.
They did photograph the rock, of course, doing their best to blur its majesty and focus on the forty-foot gulf between its own narrow, jutting cliff and the one the observation deck was attached to. This had value, because it communicated nothing of eternity or the sublime beauty of the natural world. Instead it was a photographic representation of absolute danger, cropped from landscape into pure precipice.
The final sign that they showed in the courtroom was of a little man hopping over the railing with one hand. It was a sign that most people would read and marvel that it even needed to be there. It was for kids and twentysomethings, not the families and retired tourists who frequented the park. For the majority of the people standing on the ledge, looking out, there was no warning needed. The giant column really was balanced on the very edge of a cliff, and on the rocky shore, down where the sea meets rock, there were five more pillars just like it, strewn about like erupted molars. The ones that couldn’t take the pressure. It was impossible to see them without thinking about their distance from their lone brother, somehow still resting there.
After Grant expounded briefly on the Balancing Rock—making it into some oblique metaphor for self-control—Grant had recreated the image on the sign perfectly. He pitched himself up and over the railing, mid-sentence, and landed on the outer edge, the final few inches before the long drop. I can’t remember what he was saying, but I remember that someone gasped. It might have been me. I do know I said his name, and that he looked right at me.
“Take some pictures, Janine,” he said.
And I did. I didn’t know what else to do.
If he hadn’t said anything to me, and if I had merely taken photographs on my own, the others might not have remembered that I was even snapping any. My microSD card might not have been seized and entered into evidence. But Grant had said it, and whatever Grant said, they heard. The photographs were clear, well-composed, and told a story.
One that destroyed us.
***
My father had worked in Search and Rescue for years, but never talked much about it. All I’d heard him say, when he introduced himself to strangers, was that he tried to save stupid people.
People who don’t know any better, basically. People who think they’re invincible.
It was him, or someone like him, whom I had imagined once Grant climbed over. I’d imagined the forthcoming arrival of some quiet and stern-looking man with a wide moustache and hands fat with muscle. Someone who could wear a cowboy hat and head-to-toe denim or one of those reflective blaze-orange jumpsuits without looking ridiculous. Someone to ask what we thought we were even doing here in the first place. Someone who could look around, and say, like my father did about the highway or the ocean or the forest at night:
This place will kill a person.
The walk to the rock was effortless for Grant. I watched him climb across a narrow lip, over a pine tree growing straight out of the cliffside, and onto a clump of rocks resting on the final ledge. He did it with ease and precision, walking a path already laid out in his mind, arriving before the giant stone, empty-handed and humble-looking. He stayed this way long enough for me to realize he wanted a picture of it. My hands were shaking as I captured the images that he thought might end up on a book cover, or on the website. The images that got him convicted:
Grant, standing before the rock.
Grant, touching its surface, like it was talking to him.
Grant, kneeling before it.
Grant, getting into the lotus position.
The faces of his followers, bearing witness.
Turbo’s unlikely smile, his hand-less arm slung around Rita.
Then, the one image they lingered on. The first one to participate. The photo was of Lucy’s narrow back, blurred wide as she launched herself over the rail to join her guru.
This was the part I thought about most of all. The moment where there was no question that I should have done something.
The events that followed this string of pictures went undocumented, because I was frozen. I didn’t capture Lucy’s surprisingly graceful climb over, and the fat on the underside of Rita’s cheering arms swung without record. Turbo’s unfathomable journey over the railing and across the chasm inspired a paralysis so profound it was like columnar basalt had formed inside of me, from my stomach down through my legs and up through my head.
I was a statue of panic.
***
Grant asked me only once if I believed in what he believed. I remember it so clearly.
It came after my mother wanted to see what I did, and I brought her to a lecture where I searched her face from behind a curtain, trying to see how disgusted she was by me. I was disappointed when the performance started and I saw her smiling when Grant smiled, clapping when the others clapped, until she finally joined the human serpent that formed before the literature table when it was over. We were in midtown Manhattan, in the thick of it. I had flown her in personally.
I had wanted her to be proud of the scale of it, of how many and how much we commanded. We had come from a town in Nova Scotia that was so small and insignificant it had been swallowed by another small town and was no longer on any maps. I thought maybe seeing how far I had come would mean something to her, but it didn’t. Instead she liked the program itself, liked Grant’s talk
ing about Cosmic Power and The Soul, which was the last thing I expected. The truth was I expected her to hate it. My father would have, if he were alive—would have undoubtedly deemed it mere snake-oil bullshit—but she didn’t. When she didn’t, I realized I had wanted her to. But she was one of my people. She had THE LOOK. It was devastating.
Grant and I were flying home together afterwards, both of us in a little vinyl booth in the terminal, waiting to board. I was exhausted, stinking with travel sweat, my stomach aching from airport food and pay-per-cup coffee from a machine, and I wasn’t thinking. I made the mistake of mentioning that I was disappointed my mother actually enjoyed any of it. That’s when he asked me.
“Don’t you believe in any of this?”
I recovered quickly and told him that I believed in him, but that wasn’t good enough for Grant. I had to say that I agreed with everything he said—that humanity was all one thing, sprung from one place, and that our notion of self and separation was all just an illusion—but that it meant nothing to me.
I told him something like It’s true, but so what?
“What do you mean?” he asked, his face contorted. He looked genuinely hurt.
I remember offering to stop talking about it then, but he insisted I continue.
“Come on,” I said. “Do we have to?”
“No,” he said, “I really want to hear this.”
“Well. Even if all of humanity and existence is connected through common ancestors and we’re all a different branch of the same tree, we’re still, you know, separate,” I told him. “You can’t know what’s in my mind, and I can’t know what’s in yours. You are you. I am me. It’s—”
“Stop,” he said.
He put his hand up.
“You have to stop,” he told me. Even though he was the one who asked.
The week after the death, after Grant had been arrested, posted bail, and been released, everything stopped. We closed our doors, cancelled seminars and speaking engagements. We could avoid the media, could try to do damage control, but we couldn’t do a thing without Grant, and he was completely manic. Wouldn’t leave his house, and was doing a lot of crying. I drafted a letter to all of our subscribers, explaining that a tragedy had befallen us, that we were doing our best to recover from it, and that we would be back soon. I had a glass of wine and went to bed, thinking my deceitful thoughts about him, about turning on him, but remaining hopeful that we could move forward in some way.
Twenty-two minutes later, while I started to drift off, Grant sent out his own email. I didn’t know he even had the passwords to the account. I had never seen him successfully navigate a computer interface of any kind, but here was a message, from him to them, with no me whatsoever.
ATTENTION:
BND MEMBERS:
THOSE OF YOU WITHOUT THE CAPASITY TO PERSEEVE THE UNDERLYING ISSUES AT PLAY ON THIS PLANET SHOULD LEAVE AND QUIT BND; CUT UP MEMBER CARDS, TURN IN SHIRTS, ETC.
THOSE WHO ARE READY FOR TRUE CHALLENGES WHO ARE CLEAR-HEADED AND HAVE INNER STRENGTH BE WARNED—THERE IS A SECOND SOLAR BODY WHICH HARMS THE SOUL AND CLOUDS THE MIND AND EXISTS BEHIND THE SUN PROPER. IT ACTS AS OURS BUT IS MASKERADING.
DO NOT EXCEPT MESSAGES FROM THIS SECOND SUN AS ITS MERELY A DEEP SPACE DECOY WITH FALSE MESSAGES AND AN UNREPENTENT LEADER INSIDE IT. ALL DARK SUNSPOTS MUST BE PURGED BEFORE ANY MEMBER IS ALOUD IN THE INNER CIRCLE AGAIN.
FROM: GRANT BASSO,
A MAN, AN ORDINARY PERSON ONLY
I woke up to three hundred and sixty notifications that customers had unsubscribed from our services, and dozens more had sent confused emails inquiring what exactly any of this meant. Some were intrigued, wanted to know more about this evil decoy sun. Could it cause rashes? Was it the source of confusing thoughts? Were the false messages it produced being filtered through Grant? Is that why he had killed that man? Was he in league with the Deep Space Decoy?
I rushed to the door, phone in hand, barely dressed and furious, ready to fix things. When I got to my door and tore it open, Grant was there. Lying in the hallway against my apartment door, quietly weeping, his face streaked with dust and dirt from my doormat. That’s when I understood that it was all up to me. He was my problem, my fault, and either I took care of him, or he was dead. He spent the weeks leading up to the pretrial in my apartment, largely unresponsive. Mostly he smoked my cigarettes and stayed out on my balcony wrapped in a blanket. I didn’t say much to him, but every day I was meeting with lawyers, PR people, strategists, pleading with members to write letters in support of him, doing everything I could to get him through this thing.
When I was home I gave him Ensure Meal Replacements and codeine tablets, and let him curl up on me. Sometimes I kissed him. Sometimes I told him I loved him. Sometimes he said it back.
***
Grant started writing his books because of a vision he had, where he saw the Earth spinning backwards and experienced all of its geographic history in reverse. The continents sucking together, freezing, then sinking into the sea. The sea disappearing, and the earth beneath it turning red, growing hotter and hotter until it was an unstable, burning hot marble. An orb that unravelled, and unspooled itself into the sun, where everything and everyone that would ever exist was forged in its burning hot core.
Everything he says and does stems from this one belief. I never did think much about it when I was around it, when it was something I heard him recount over and over again. But now, after the accident, after Grant went away, it feels true. All of it. It’s another thing I’ve accepted. Now that I really am struggling with how I feel—with what feelings are inside of me—I can no longer be cynical about any of it.
There’s a line in one of our earlier books. The third one, I Am Inside Myself. That’s when Grant hadn’t figured out the right way to talk about his theories yet, and was trying something new. There was a horrible line he and I fought about over and over again, but eventually he got his way by going around me with the printer. I hated it because it sounded robotic and disjointed, and he loved it because he thought it was so accurate.
The line was:
We are who we are going to be, long before we actually are, because the path has already been set.
I think about that line a lot now.
I think about it when I visit him and we hold hands and he tells me he loves me, and I say it back to him. I still think it’s a terrible line, but it explains something now. A feeling about the course of my life. The very real sense that all of this was unavoidable. If he asked me now, about the program and his vision and its application, I’d have to say yes, I do believe. All of existence is fixed and inflexible, from past to present. There are no other choices, no alternate dimensions, no What Ifs. There is only the dangling flypaper of existence to which we are stuck.
That’s it.
***
When those exiled on this side of the gulf finally acknowledged my presence, and I felt myself materialize before them. When Marguerite’s five-hundred-dollar manicure clicked against the railing and she turned to me:
“Are we supposed to join in? Do you know?”
She attempted to lean over my clipboard and see if there was anything there addressing the climb over to the rock. But Rita the Chocolate Tycoon shook her head. She squinted into the day just like Grant often would when he was trying to look serious, like it was something he’d taught her how to do.
Rita shook her head again.
“This is a test,” she said.
She ran her hands over the rail.
Then, a voice from inside me spoke without consulting me. She sounded strong:
“This is a voluntary activity. If you feel as though you’ll have difficulty making it across, you should stay on this side, for safety’s sake.”
“I couldn’t make it,” Rita’s friend Marguerite said.
We were all silent. Grant was in a circle with the others, arms around shoulders. Turbo-Barry next to Grant next to Lucy, Roy with his head on her shoulder. I took another picture th
en. In the little viewscreen, in miniature, they looked like a tribal handicraft, carved by hand from a single piece of stone.
“This is a test for us,” Rita said. “This is all about us.”
I looked at her, and then to the others.
That was when I realized JR wasn’t on our side.
My head shot around, and I could see that he wasn’t over with them either. I looked to the stairs and could see each one, all the way to the top. He wasn’t on them.
I took the camera and flipped through my last few thumbnails, and found JR—just a few pictures back—a faded shape in the foreground. I felt then, for the first time, like I was in the presence of something greater, something unstoppable. A force which might flatten me with its mass, with its presence alone. I was in its grips.
I zoomed in on the picture—the one that would be the focus of the slideshow in the courtroom, the one they would linger on the longest—and looked on breathlessly:
JR, with both hands out in front of him, lifting a hairy white leg onto the railing.
There was a moment before the others realized he was gone, when it was my secret and no one else’s, when we were listening to the thundering crash of water against the rock, and we were at peace.
Every Sunday, Maggie sits on her stairs to talk with her little brother on the phone. Usually, she’s drinking her weekly Baileys-and-coffee after their post-church breakfast. Usually her children are doing the dishes and her husband does whatever he feels is important. The calls were quick, maybe only ten minutes long.