by James Abel
I said, “I agree with Dave.”
Dave sat back, happy to have an ally. The Canadian looked from Dave to me, as if we’d turned into aliens. “Some people believe anything,” he said.
Dave offered me granola from his bag. He was more confident with an ally close by. He asked the Canadian, still trying to convert him, “Do you trust Jesus?”
“I sure do, mister. Especially now.”
“Then you believe prophets exist. You just don’t believe in this one. You believe in miracles. Just not this one.” Dave suddenly seemed to tire of being nice. He had another side. “You don’t know anything about Harlan Maas,” he snapped.
“Salvation at a truck stop?”
“Jesus preached in the slums. Why not a truck stop?”
The doubter threw up his arms. “Fine! He’s a prophet!”
“You say that as a joke now. You’ll change your mind.”
Dave turned his back on the guy and smiled at me and reached into his knapsack and came up with a folded-up paper. It was a roadmap of the New York–Massachusetts border area. My home lay only an hour away. It would be funny, I thought, to be plucked from home and sent to Africa and learn, in the end, that the problem had originated less than fifty miles from where I started out.
“The website says if we can get to this railroad bridge, volunteers will drive us the rest of the way,” he said, gloved index finger tracing rural roads, coming to rest on a dot in western Massachusetts, red veins on a map, along the rail spur to Pittsfield.
“Aren’t those drivers afraid of getting sick?” the Canadian’s teenage son asked from behind us.
“No, because they have a cure.”
“Aren’t you afraid to ride with strangers?”
“I’m doing that now, and so are you.”
“This cure,” I asked. “Is it a pill? A drink?”
“I don’t know.”
“Dave, were there any companies named on that website you mentioned, that helped make the cure? Any specifics at all?”
“Let’s call up the website and YouTube and see. Rats! No reception.”
YouTube. The ultimate arbiter. Our age’s essential truth. Maybe history will one day call our times the age of information, maybe the age of rumor. When the sheer weight of complexity drove millions away from fact. Dave remained calm and hopeful. I suppose if you have to take refuge in something, hope’s not bad.
I spoke to the stranger named Harlan Maas in my mind.
If your people released the disease, and then you cure it, I wouldn’t exactly call you a prophet, Harlan. I’d have another title for you. “Prophet” surely isn’t it.
—
The clatter of steel on tracks seemed farther away. I jerked awake and Dave was sitting right beside me, gazing into my eyes with fascination and, I sensed, sympathy. He was eerier by the minute. He leaned close. His whisper, fogged breath, smelled of his coconut-chocolate energy bars. “I know your secret,” he said, hand half covering his mouth.
“What?” Shit! Did I talk in my sleep?
His eyes flickered down to my hand. For an instant it didn’t register. When it did, a flood of horror seized me. A long wooden splinter had pierced my glove. I took off my glove and pulled out the splinter and a burst of blood came with it but there was no feeling where it had penetrated. I poked the finger. It was numb. I poked the next finger. Nothing.
I’m sick.
Dave said, “They’ll cure you. You’ll see. There’s a reason you came.” He slid back across the lurching floor to his corner. I realized that he’d moved close to me while I slept to protect me, to shield from the others that a four-inch-long projectile had lodged in my hand.
Twenty minutes later we crawled into the hamlet of New Lenox, and sure enough, the train halted atop a small bridge over a stream. I saw four automobiles idling on a country road, waiting for passengers, us, I guessed. Dave and I were the only ones climbing out, and walking through the foot-high snow to the lead car, an idling Dodge Ram.
“Hi, pilgrims!”
The driver was a plain-looking, moon-faced woman with a bright smile, a Midwest accent, and she waved us into the rear seat. She asked if we were hungry or thirsty. She said there were ham sandwiches in back, from animals slaughtered at the farm. There was a thermos filled with hot coffee. She said that we should relax, we’d reached a beautiful place. We would be cared for.
“Are either of you sick?”
“Me,” I said.
“You will be cured,” she said.
I’d felt nothing at all against my fingers when I’d grasped the door handle, nothing when I’d climbed over the top of the boxcar. I didn’t feel the glove fabric, or the cold, or the pressure of metal.
“You will be cured,” she repeated, “by the prophet.”
We started driving.
The truck stop, our driver said, was a mere eighteen minutes away, off the Massachusetts Turnpike. I saw a pin sticking out of the backseat, and picked it up. I stuck it in my finger.
Diagnosis, confirmed.
Joe Rush, leper, pariah.
Wouldn’t it be nice if he’s really a prophet? I thought. Who is this guy anyway? This Harlan Maas?
EIGHTEEN
It is estimated that over thirty thousand children in the United States are growing up in cults. They are isolated and have no other experience with life outside of these twisted environments. Many never adjust, even after being rescued. Many commit suicide later in life.
—CHILD WATCH,
NEW YORK CITY
The little girls have been named for flowers: Daisy, Rose, Tulip, Violet. The boys—Enoch, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Micah—have Bible names and first names only, until age twelve, when Brother Agabus assigns them adult identities and gives them jobs: girls to sewing, kitchen, and laundry; boys to the sugar fields or gun shows or the group-owned auto garage in the Louisiana town of New Bethlehem, twelve miles away.
“We will purify ourselves. This will lead to Christ’s return, the end of Babylon, the new Kingdom of Solomon,” Brother Agabus says.
The twelve-acre compound abuts a swamp, amid moss-covered cypress. There are alligators and gar in the black waters, and the old abandoned, long-closed leper colony consists of two rows of cheaply made bungalows that were crumbling when the isolated property was auctioned off by the state.
“In two thousand days will come the end times prophesized in Revelation 11:3,” Brother Agabus assures them. “Outsiders call us a cult, but that is a hateful word that devalues truth. This is a gathering place for those to be spared. This has been revealed to me by the Seventh Angel and by four secret messages hidden in the Old Testament.”
Harlan was born here. He has no memories of anywhere else. He’s only left the compound twice, rushed away by adults when Agabus thought that agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms were coming. After the agents left, the children were brought back.
“You are a special boy, my favorite,” Agabus always tells him when they are alone at night.
Harlan’s mother—91 IQ—quit her 7-Eleven job in Baton Rouge and moved here after hearing Agabus preach in a park one day. Harlan was born ten months later. His twenty-eight brothers and sisters were also fathered by Agabus, by fourteen women, all of whom dress as Agabus ordered, in modest print dresses and white bonnets. The men wear coveralls. No one owns private possessions. Agabus keeps the bank accounts and has a new Cadillac and better clothes. Only he can consume liquor. “To speak with outsiders, I must adopt their customs,” Agabus explains.
“Take off your trousers, my son, for more photographs. Lift your legs, please. Touch yourself,” he says at night.
Agabus is vibrant and charismatic, age thirty-five, thickly haired all over, curly black on top, with a beard that drops to his chest. He has a V-shaped torso, massively tattooed with religious symbols, saints and halos
, and he has thin legs and an almost dainty pigeon-toed walk on small feet. On most nights different women go into his bungalow.
On others, Agabus soothes Harlan and whispers hoarse things in his ear. Agabus smells of peanut butter and lime. After he leaves the bed, there are curly hairs on the damp sheets, and the room smells like dirty feet.
“If you tell anyone what we do, I will kill you.”
Adults work the sugar field or gun shows nine hours a day. Sunday sermons start at six and last until two, with an hour lunch break. Phones and televisions are forbidden. Visitors are not allowed. Women sleep in one dorm, men in another, with conjugal rooms provided for the better workers. Children are homeschooled in approved subjects: math and English, Old and New Testaments, Siddhartha, and certain black-and-white 1950s science fiction films, which were, Agabus tells them, “guided by Angelic hands.”
“Touch me here, son. Ahhh.”
Agabus, in sermons, quotes scripture in the whispery lost language of Mesopotamia, which only he speaks, after being taught it, he says, by the winged angel Zadkiel.
“Today we discuss spanking. The abandonment of spanking children will lead to criminal activity among the young.”
If you get sick, Agabus comes to your bedside, and mutters in Mesopotamian and dispenses medicines—only he can do that—until you confess what you did wrong.
Then you get better, unless you get worse, which means you lied. Lying means a whipping.
God led us to this old leper colony, Agabus says. Leprosy was Bible punishment. Leprosy was God’s judgment on sinners. Leprosy cured was God’s reward, delivered through the great prophets and saints.
—
On the night it all ends, the night of the raid, the boy lies awake on top of a thin blanket, listening to the nutrias screaming, outside, smelling rotting vegetation, black water, and swamp, a mix like cut grass and old sweat and a damp bathing suit locked up in a ten-year-old musty duffel bag. Mosquitoes whine behind him, or batter against the screen from outside. He’s listening for Agabus.
I hope he comes, the boy, eight, thinks.
He looks at the wall. Agabus keeps old black-and-white leper shots in rooms to remind people of God’s punishments if you don’t listen to his word. The boy sees children’s faces eaten away, crutches instead of legs, holes instead of mouths, gaps instead of noses. Leper children line his walls. Sometimes the visages populate his nightmares.
I’ll be good. I’ll do what he tells me, the boy thinks.
The boy jerks when the first gunshots go off. He can barely reach the window. There seem to be more mosquitoes inside than out. He hears shouting out there. He hears a bullhorn and a stranger’s electrified voice warning, “Throw down your weapons.” Women create elongated running shadows in the floodlights of the compound. Someone screams. The boy’s mother is on her knees, hands pressed to her temples, insane with fear. A man charges out of another bungalow with a shotgun but stops and drops it and throws up his hands. The other men put their hands up also. The bullhorn voices order them to stand together in the light. Then strangers wearing helmets and armored vests appear, herding the adults away. The boy is terrified.
“God has chosen you for something special,” Brother Agabus told him more than once. “You are a genius. You are the smartest child here.”
Now Agabus appears out there on his porch, between two armed strangers. Brother Agabus is in handcuffs. His head is lowered. His hair falls over his forehead. He is shuffling toward their black car and looking at the ground.
The boy runs out of his bungalow, screaming, enraged.
“Leave my father alone!”
—
Two days later the boy sits in a parish police station, across the gouged-out wooden table from a fat, sweating detective named Edward Wohl, and a woman who says she’s a prosecutor, whatever that is. He’s refused the ham sandwich and the cold Dr Pepper they offered. He’s refused to answer questions.
“Don’t worry, son. That pervert is locked away. He can’t hurt you now.”
“He didn’t hurt me!”
“He was a fraudster. His real name is Leon Charles DeGraves. He tricked people. He stole money. The things he did to you kids are disgusting.”
“You’re the one who is disgusting.” The boy stares at the woman. Her bare arms are fleshy and visible for all to see. So are her legs and calves. The man is wearing jewelry; a watch and a gold ring. Agabus has preached about this ostentation, the exhibition of the body.
The boy shuts down as if he could make these two—and their godless glitter—disappear.
The woman says, “All that stuff he told you about angels and prophets, son, he made it up.”
“I’m not your son!”
The man and woman look at each other, then tell him to “think about things.” They leave a TV on when they walk out, but the door is locked. The boy has never seen a TV before. On-screen is a show about a father, a mother, and kids all living in the same house, saying stupid things to each other, even talking to a dog while other people, unseen in the background, bray and laugh. The music is awful. It’s like watching aliens from another planet. The dog cocks its head, as if it understands English, causing more stupid laughter to erupt from the tinny speaker.
There’s also a black telephone on the wall, which fascinates the boy. When the adults were here, it rang, startling him, and then the woman picked it up and a voice came out of it. The woman spoke into the telephone. This was amazing! That you could speak into a piece of plastic and someone could hear you on the other end.
“The doctor found bruise marks on you,” the woman says when she comes back, all alone.
“I fell.”
“We know what those marks mean. The other kids told us about it. That freak can’t hurt you. It’s important to talk about things.”
He pushes the ham sandwich onto the floor.
“There’s no secret angel language. There’s no souls flying around. Leon DeGraves targeted the weak minded. He’s a sick pervert. He sold tapes he made of you for money.”
“I want to talk to my father!”
Fat chance. The terrified boy next sits in a doctor’s exam room, eyeing the straps and gowns, and syringes. He’s never seen a doctor’s office. The white-jacketed, mustached older man introduces himself as Dr. Robert Maas, GP. He pokes the same places that Brother Agabus does, but his touch is clinical and different.
When the doctor goes into the other room, the boy presses his ear against the wall to listen to Robert Maas talking to the woman. The boy is trembling with fear.
The doctor says, “Give me a break, Charlene. The mother is delusional. That kid is not going back with her. She doesn’t want him anyway. He doesn’t even have a real name! Yedaiah? He’s not going through life called Yedaiah!”
“Foster home, then.” The woman’s voice sighs.
“He needs to be with people who understand what he’s been through. He needs therapy and time. Reaching smart kids is tougher. Their defenses are sharper. The last thing he needs is the Louisiana system determining his fate.”
“Do you have a better suggestion?”
A sigh. “The mother’s schizophrenia kicked in at twenty-five. In males the average age for onset is twenty. Between his childhood and genes, he’s a walking time bomb.”
The boy’s new bedroom is on the second floor of the doctor’s home. The wallpaper has a fire engine pattern, and an Oakland A’s baseball pennant on the wall, instead of leprosy photos. Another boy once lived here. The doctor tells Harlan—his new name—that the boy who had lived here is dead and that he’d loved the Oakland A’s, but if Harlan wants, the wallpaper can be changed. Is there some decoration that the boy would prefer?
Leprosy pictures, he thinks. At least they would be familiar. He misses the pictures.
There are also telephones in the house, which the boy learns to us
e, learns which numbers will bring his adoptive father’s voice to him from Dr. Maas’s office. One day the phone rings and he answers and hears his real father’s voice, just as if Brother Agabus stood beside him.
“They think I’m calling my lawyer, but I called you. I miss you. I can always find you. I love you,” Agabus says.
The boy is frozen with love, terror, confusion.
“Don’t tell them what we did or HE will punish you,” Agabus says. “You will sicken and rot and die.”
Another voice in the background tells Agabus that his phone time is up. Men are arguing. Give me that phone! Suddenly all the voices cut off, leaving the boy shaking, the receiver buzzing in his hand. After that, he starts whenever the phone rings. In his dreams Agabus calls him, and whispers and threatens, and one time, in a nightmare, a hand even comes out of a telephone.
The boy wakes, wet from sweat.
But Brother Agabus never calls again.
By age twelve, four years later, the bedroom feels like his own room, and he’s happy with the pennant, and with playing in the town softball league. He’s a pretty good left fielder. By fourteen, he’s a straight-A student, with a special interest in science, atoms, and disease. By sixteen, he’s got a girlfriend. He’s a happy kid. He has friends. He loves biology class. He is president of the debating club.
“You can convince anyone of anything,” a teacher admiringly tells the boy after a big win.
He never speaks of what happened when he was younger, even to the doctor. The boy blocks it out. Sometimes he wakes up sweating, and cannot remember a nightmare. He reads in a newspaper that his biological father died in prison, knifed by another inmate.
“DeGraves was a child molester and pornographer,” the newspaper says, “sentenced to life without parole.”
He feels nothing at this news. He’s never spoken of the cult, or of that phone call from Agabus. Never has. Never will. He gets a letter from his birth mother. She’s in a hospital in Baton Rouge. He rips it up without reading it. His real father now is Dr. Robert Maas. His new family—cousins, aunts, and uncles—visit at Christmas. They give presents. They phone him on his birthday. They’re not perfect, they squabble sometimes, but to Harlan, they’re as close as you can get to what he wants life to be.