Addicted to the Light

by S. E. Amadis

  For a while we waited in silence. But something was weighing heavily on my heart.

  “Bogdan,” I muttered.

  “Mmmhh?”

  “Back there...”

  I hesitated, unsure of how to approach this.

  “Back there, in that van... Bogdan...”

  I heaved a troubled sigh.

  “What’s up, Annasuya?”

  “You know I was holding that machine gun, right? What I mean is...”

  He stared at me intently.

  “What I mean is... Do you think I might have killed someone?”

  Bogdan sighed and glanced down at his hands. When he answered, he refused to look at me.

  “If you hadn’t fired, they would’ve shot you,” he replied at last.

  I paused. “Yeah. But somehow that doesn’t make me feel any better.”

  “Well.” Bogdan twirled his hands about, fiddled with his fingers, still not looking at me. “Well, you know that we were all shooting. Who knows which of us did what? Who knows which of us fired the shot that hit home? But what I do know is that if we hadn’t shot back, we’d all be dead now.”

  That wasn’t what I’d really wanted to hear.

  “Look, kid. It’s a tough world, and sometimes when you’re a fighter — when you fight for something you really want, I mean, something you truly believe in, well... Shit happens.”

  This time he raised his head and looked straight at me, unblinking.

  “It’s something you’ll just have to live with for the rest of your life. Like me. Like Tar, and Spade, and Quarryman.”

  He leaned forward and patted his hand on my leg.

  “Welcome to the club, kid.”

  Lindsay stirred, cutting into my misgivings. I watched as she finally peeled one eye open and gazed at me, unsurprised.

  “This is a dream,” she whispered. “The loveliest dream. I thought I’d never see you again, Annie.” She tried to turn her head, but she was too weak. “Or did I die and go to heaven?”

  I pressed my hand against hers.

  “Well, we almost did die trying to wrangle you out of there,” I exclaimed. “Although I have no idea whether we woulda ever made it up to heaven.” I grinned. “You been a good enough girl to make it to heaven? Or at least to receive some sort of present? Because it’s Christmas day, you know.”

  *

  To my utter — albeit pleasant — surprise, Lindsay showed absolutely no desire to return to the sect or, as she used to refer to it, the religious eco-community.

  “I used to spend my nights imagining what would’ve happened if Elder Brooks had lit that fire,” she said, and grasped my hand tight tight. “And then I couldn’t sleep. I felt like I was cowering in the middle of a den of wolves.” She squinted and peered at me as if beholding a mirage. “I realize now what a miracle it is, that you’re here with me, and I’m still holding you. That I still can hold you.”

  I spent all my spare time with her. Within a couple of days, Bogdan allowed her to leave her cosy and accommodating — but nonetheless still imprisoning — underground quarters. With no apartment to return to, she decided to bunk out at her mother’s for a while.

  Debbie Johnson was beside herself with joy to get her daughter back, and busied herself cooking all her favourite dishes and concocting chocolate cakes and carrot cakes with butter frosting every day.

  “You’re all skin and bones, lass,” she said. “Got to bring the roses back to your cheeks, don’t we?” And she would pinch Linds on the thin apples of her now scrawny face. “Didn’t they feed you there?”

  Lindsay shook her head and hung it ruefully.

  “I was always hungry. They said it would pass, when I got used to the portions they served and, according to them, ‘threw off’ the toxins of the outside world. But I never did. Get used to it, I mean. I was hungry day and night.” She squeezed her eyes shut and pressed her palms hard against them. “It was such a gnawing thing. It became like a chronic pain. I almost didn’t notice it anymore after a while. But it was always there and especially at night, I’d feel like I could just about down a whole whale.”

  I was sleeping much better at night now. But there was a darkness in my heart I knew would never leave me as long as I lived. I brought up the subject with Christy Owen, my therapist.

  “Annasuya, this is something a lot of people that I’m aware of have to go through, and live with,” she explained, thoughtfully. “Military fighters and soldiers, law enforcement.

  “I don’t usually work with such cases. As you know, I help victims, not... not professionals who have to deal with this sort of issue on a daily basis as part of their jobs.”

  She jotted something down in her notebook.

  “But really, Annasuya. You mustn’t consider it such a bad thing. This is... the price people have to pay, sometimes, when they vow to protect and help someone else.”

  She patted me on the shoulder.

  “And you should take comfort in the fact that everything that happened, everything that you did, you did it for someone else. Someone that you cared about. To protect her, to keep her safe and yes, ultimately, to save her life as well.”

  *

  I went back to my routine, amassing successful campaigns all over the city and papering my walls with glowing testimonials. For the first time in years I had money left over at the end of the month. I opened a savings account and began hoarding up for a car. It would be something cute and spiffy, I mused, not the giant, stretched-out mass of steel that used to pass for Lindsay’s car, streamlined though it might have been. A gleaming pink Mitsubishi Mirage, perhaps, or a second-hand Chevy Aveo.

  Romeo continued as usual at school, hating homework and exploring basketball and soccer and still finding it boring. He eventually discovered a new fascination with parkour, a ninja-acrobatics-like sport which was all the rage these days. He began to practise assiduously with friends outdoors on snow dunes and inside on gym rings and bleachers. From that point on I had to bandage booboos and rub scraped knees with hydrogen peroxide almost every day.

  Deep winter passed by, lazily, languidly. The snow-filled months dragged on and I almost forgot the ordeal we had gone through so recently. Lindsay met up with Grant, and long drawn out talks over coffee about all the things that mattered and late nights snuggling in front of Grant’s fireplace led them to a reconciliation.

  Grant returned Lindsay’s car to her, and she began to send out CV’s with the hope of finding a new job and beginning her life afresh.

  “How do I explain the huge time gap in my curriculum?” she asked me. “They’ll want to know why I left my last job and what I’ve been doing all this time. And I certainly can’t exactly blurt out, ‘Well I was living with a sect.’ Right?” She scowled.

  “Tell them you have relatives on the other side of the country, and you went out there to live with them for a while to help them through some, ah, difficult life changes.” I raised my head, brightly. “Cancer. Say your cousin had cancer or something, and you decided to devote yourself altruistically to his care.”

  Lindsay giggled. “My made-up cousin Devlin. I’ll say Cousin Devlin had, oh, I dunno, bowel cancer, maybe.”

  “Ugh.” I made a face. “That’ll sure go down well in an interview.”

  We both laughed out loud.

  Chapter 36

  At last spring arrived. After the long, frozen drought of winter my pulse quickened at the sound of water streaming down gutters and kaplunking into drain holes and sewers.

  One afternoon as I waltzed home with Romeo, enjoying the sight of sunshine finally lingering above the horizon again at the end of a workday and marvelling in fresh tulip buds and dandelions dotting all the lawns, we burst around the corner and there on the porch was Calvin, pacing nervously up and down before the front door with a bouquet of pink roses clutched in sweaty hands.

  I pelted towards him and a minute later he was wrapping me in his warm arms muscled from years of handling a potent motorcycle. I laid
my head against his shoulder, the way I used to, and he stroked my hair.

  “I’ve missed you, Annie,” he whispered, nuzzling at my curls.

  “I didn’t think I’d see you again,” I replied.

  He cradled my chin in his palm and studied my face.

  “You wouldn’t have gone out and picked up another mate to take my place, would you?”

  I shook my head. “Nope. Haven’t even been looking.”

  We laughed together, softly. Romeo strolled over and punched Calvin on the shoulder.

  “Look what I can do, Cal,” he said, as easy and natural as if we’d just been together this morning.

  He took a running leap towards the awning spanned over the front of the building, gripped the edge of the awning and swung from it with his arms for a few seconds, pulling his chin up over the metallic edge. Then he dropped to the ground and returned to us. Calvin ruffled his hair.

  “You’re sure getting pretty agile, champ,” he said.

  Before long Calvin had settled his things back into the empty space in my closet which I’d never bothered filling. He showed me models of his latest architectural creations, and I took him to my office and boasted over my new testimonials.

  We settled back into our routine of leisurely dinners of macaroni with homemade roquefort sauce and long walks in the parks on weekends. Saturdays became extended family days which we spent in the company of Lindsay, whom I called my extended family.

  *

  Life was groovy again. The last of the scars that Bruno had inflicted on me faded and disappeared until it was only visible with a powerful magnifying glass. Christy Owen and I went out to dinner to celebrate my almost complete recovery from the ordeal Bruno had put me through.

  One night, Bogdan invited Lindsay and me to dinner with him, where we chatted about how Lindsay’s life was coming back together again.

  “How’s Spade?” I asked as we toasted over wine and caviar.

  Bogdan picked at his chin. “He’s fine. Just fine. Making a full recovery now. He should be out and about shortly. He’ll be back in the business before you know it.”

  “Are you still dedicated to saving people from cults?” I said.

  Bogdan nodded. “It’s my life’s work. I doubt I’ll ever do anything else.”

  Lindsay frowned. “Surely there can’t be that many sects round here for you to kidnap people from, are there?”

  “No. Fortunately.”

  Bogdan dropped his hands to the table.

  “However, deceptive cults are a universal scourge. And I don’t only work here, of course. People can call me from anyplace around the globe. I recently jumped over the pond to save a group of schoolkids who had been led by, of all people, a schoolteacher of theirs into the community the teacher euphemistically referred to as a ‘revival circle’.”

  He cocked his head.

  “The teacher was arrested, of course. Charged with abduction. Unlawfully retaining minors against their will. That sort of thing.”

  He fingered his beard which he had been starting to grow, then popped some food into his mouth.

  “How did you get into this line of work?” Lindsay asked.

  Bogdan stared morosely into his plate. We waited, but he didn’t reply. The silence stretched out between us, awkward and gloomy.

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” Lindsay gasped and clapped her hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry if I’ve said something wrong. If you don’t want to talk about it you don’t have to, of course.”

  Bogdan shook his head, then downed all the contents of his wine glass in one gesture.

  “No. It’s time I got over it. I have to go on with my life.”

  He poured himself another glass and downed that one too before beginning.

  “You know I’m from Serbia. You know that, yes?”

  We nodded.

  “Well, then you know there was a war in Serbia. Many years ago. You would only have been young things then.”

  “Perhaps,” Lindsay pronounced clearly. “But we know about the war. Of course we do. We went to school. And you learn about these sorts of things there.”

  “Besides which, I was at that age at that time where we were just discovering the news,” I added. “And of course the Balkan wars were big news in those days. Really made an impression on me.”

  Bogdan inclined his head curtly at us.

  “Yes. I like that. Educated young ladies.” He downed another drink and cleared his throat. “Well, at that time I was a young man. Impassioned, brave. Foolhardy. I wanted to fight for my country. I thought, when I was that age, that it was the right thing to do. So I signed up for the army.”

  He rubbed his hands together.

  “You must know, I am not proud of the things I did when I was in the army,” he said pensively. “But that is not the reason why I now dedicate myself to getting people out of sects. If I had stayed at home, perhaps I might have prevented — what happened.”

  He poured himself another glass and stared unseeing at the liquid.

  “I had a younger sister,” he said at last, after heaving a deep sigh. “She was only a teenager, around seventeen. In those years, there was a village’d become famous in the region, for being impervious to all our attacks, no matter how vicious. Medjugorje, it was called, in the land of our enemy, Bosnia. Supposedly it was being watched over by the Virgin Mary, who never allowed harm of any sort to befall its inhabitants.”

  He swirled the wine around in his glass.

  “My sister, Jovanka, became obsessed. She lived in terror of our little village being attacked in retaliation, and when she heard about Medjugorje and how the Virgin was protecting those inhabitants, she couldn’t stop searching for something similar to protect her and our family. According to my parents, she went up every day to a mountain to pray for the Virgin Mary to appear to her, too.

  “One day, someone did appear. But it wasn’t the Virgin. It was a man. A squealing, double-dealing, scumbag weasel of a man, who deceived Jovanka and made her believe that he was the head of a religious group that really did receive visions and messages from the Virgin Mary. He enticed her over to their place. I don’t know very much about this, only what my parents told me after I returned home. And they weren’t very inclined to talking all that much about it.”

  He cleared his throat again.

  “Apparently, he held reign over a group of young people like Jovanka. People who were desperate for hope, for the war to end. For something to cling onto. Something that would guarantee the safety and survival of their loved ones. He would lead them into a dank room in a cellar, he would preach and they would pray for salvation all night long until the dawn. Then they would leave, go home and carry on with their lives as usual.

  “But one night this self-styled evangelistic leader apparently led them out of the cellar to the top of the mountain. The same mountain where Jovanka was accustomed to going to pray, alone. They went there and begged the Virgin all night to make an appearance. But of course, she never did. When dawn came, the leader proclaimed their mission to be a failure. He passed around some sort of drink to all the participants. They drank and fell down dead.

  “Only one ingenious lad survived to tell us what had happened. Apparently, he mistrusted the drink because his grandfather had taught him that in nature, things that taste bitter are generally poisonous. He only pretended to swallow his drink and as soon as the leader wasn’t looking, he poured his drink to the ground, then fell over and pretended to be dead.

  “It created quite a sensation in the region. But with the hugeness of the war booming all around them, people soon lost interest and forgot about this insignificant incident. Only,” he buried his head in his hands, “only my parents and I couldn’t forget.”

  He passed his hands over his face and stared at us bleakly.

  “My parents never got over it. One day, not long afterwards, when the war was already over, they went to their bedroom together and never got up. No one knows for sure how they died bu
t some neighbourhood elderly women said they found kukuta leaves — hemlock — in their kitchen. You know that hemlock is extremely poisonous, no sane person would ever have it in their kitchen.”

  He shook his head ruefully.

  “It wasn’t hard for me to figure out what had happened.”

  He clenched his fists.

  “So at that moment, I vowed I would fight against the evil of these types of cults and pseudo-religious groups in all their forms and guises, for the rest of my life.”

  He sighed.

  “I owe it to Jovanka, and to my beloved parents. It’s the least I can do. If I had been there, by their side, when they needed me... Well, they might still be here.”

  At the end of the evening, we shook hands with Bogdan, and he wished us the best of luck. He even leaned over and kissed my cheek, delicately, before we parted.

  I hooked my arm through Lindsay’s and we strode down the street as happy as two peas in a pod.

  “You know,” Lindsay gushed suddenly, grasping my arm, “we have to go back. To where this all started. And this time, celebrate that I am finally over all of it. Why don’t the four of us — you, me, Calvin and Shakes — drive out to Niagara Falls this weekend?”

  I skipped ahead, enthusiastic.

  My nights were finally blessed and calm. I hadn’t slept this peacefully since before I went to my temp job with Bruno Jarvas a year ago.

  Yep, life was all groovy again. I could finally stop worrying and we could finally leave this all behind us.

  *

  We perched in a row in front of the marina, huddled like parrots on a wall. Calvin, Romeo, Lindsay and me. I wrapped my arms around Romeo and Lindsay and cuddled them close.

  “This is the way we should be,” Calvin commented. “The way I’d love to see us, year after year after year. The four of us. We belong together.” He glanced at Lindsay. “Life is precious, you know. If only you were aware of all that Annasuya went through to get you out, and save your precious hide, bubs. You wouldn’t just run off so easily and throw your life away ever again, just like that.”