by Sands Hall
But sitting opposite Skip, I felt as if I were being spun inside a whirligig. I jerked to stay on my chair, and opened my eyes.
He was staring at me with bald longing. “I want it to stop,” he said.
I nodded. I felt perspiration beading on my own forehead. “Flunk,” I said, smiling. “Start.”
I closed my eyes. Again the vertigo set in. Years before, I’d driven through a snowstorm so fierce that I’d no idea where the road was; at one point I was positive, even as I knew it was impossible, that I was driving the car straight up the whirling flakes. Sitting opposite Skip was like that, with the addition that it was violent and scary: purple-black clouds swirling by as we rattled too fast over a road full of potholes. It was visceral. Yet all we were doing was sitting in chairs. I tried to still my pounding heart and to bully my way through it. What was this? Could this be emanating from Skip? How was that possible?
I opened my eyes. His long eyelashes flickered and he opened his. “How can I keep the freak-out from happening?” His voice rose, his face flushed.
There was no way I was going to say “Flunk.” I just nodded.
Ed kept a desultory eye on the course room while I sat with Skip for minutes, checked in, started the drill again. After a while he was able to sit for a slightly longer stretch. The sense of rushing winds wasn’t quite as bad. I got Jen back in the chair opposite. After some fits and starts, they eventually did the drill for fifteen minutes. Scientology’s upper courses require one to do OT TR0 for two hours in order to pass. But Success Through Communication is an introductory course and simply asks that the student do it “comfortably.” Skip insisted he was “comfortable.”
Still, after saying good night to the students, and as I tidied up the course room, I was troubled. I appreciated the TRs and what they offered. But what had gone on with Skip was a whole new territory. What could possibly have caused those kinds of brain waves? Ones that emanated from Skip, physically—so powerful that they affected the person sitting opposite him?
And it wasn’t just me who’d experienced those sensations. It wasn’t my imagination.
dancing through life
Perhaps the sorrow in their childhoods, as well as the lack of ties to either of their families, helped my parents create their famously happy marriage. Mother often said as much: in the difficult early days of marriage, there’d been no one and nowhere to return to, so they turned to each other and held on. What family she did have accused her of “dancing through life.” Perhaps that’s what it looked like: the move to New York City after graduating (Dad majored in political science, Mom in English), where he enrolled at Columbia and she worked as secretary to the philosopher Lin Yutang; the trip to Europe and the year spent in Geneva; the return in time for Dad to enroll at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in Iowa City, where my brother was born; the jaunt across the country to La Jolla, California, where I was born; and from there to Chapala, where Lupe whited my shoes, Tad learned to use a lasso, and our sister Tracy was conceived. Perhaps the “dancing” accusation had to do with jealousy that Dad was able to support all that traveling and a growing family on his writing alone.
And then, in 1958, came that move to Squaw Valley and the building of a house high above a wide, lovely meadow. The 1960 Winter Olympics transformed our sleepy bit of rural heaven into a destination ski resort: half that meadow was turned into ice arenas and parking lot, although we still had a National Forest as our backyard. Brett was born in 1962.
At their parties—and there were many—candles flickered, wine flowed, and from speakers placed high on the walls, music poured. Late afternoons, friends often stopped by for a cocktail or glass of wine, and I delighted in putting cheese and crackers on a plate and delivering it to the animated, laughing group around the coffee table.
Around the time I turned eight, I started a twenty-six-page, three-hole-punched booklet, the topmost hole tied with yarn, to house my collection of homonyms. I listened to grown-ups talk, and when I grasped a word that sounds the same but means something different, I’d dash to my room to record it: there and their and they’re and to and two and too and four and fore and plane and plain and, as the collection grew, place and plaice, as well as Britishisms like key and quay and jail and gaol. These last were favorites (once I knew they were not pronounced, respectively, kway and gayol) because they could be recorded on two of my alphabetized pages. Sometimes I’d bring this out to show the grown-ups, delighting in their exclamations. As often as not, these gatherings morphed into a soufflé and a salad and bread, or a casserole made out of whatever was in the pantry plus a can of enchilada sauce.
One morning after such a party, I watched Dad leaf through a dictionary; the night before guests had accused him of being uxorious. He and Mother laughed and laughed at the idea that he was, indeed, “excessively fond of one’s wife.”
“But not excessively submissive!” he said, reading the rest of the definition.
Bookshelves lined most of the rooms and comprised the back of a couch my father knocked together in an afternoon; his carpentry may have been slapdash, but it got the job done. When Mother began to pursue photography, and asked for a darkroom, he chose an area under the house and handily built her one. They were proud artists: bohemians. Their lifestyle shaped not only their own lives but the lives of those around them. At least three of my friends have told me, eyes shimmering with gratitude, that visiting our house—eating and sleeping in book-lined rooms, participating in talk of art and literature around a dinner table, witnessing the relationship shared by my parents—inspired them to create lives very different from the ones in which they’d been raised. At the time, of course, I’d no idea it was unusual. It was just . . . life. What other way could it, should it, be lived?
Yet as I began to grapple with boyfriends, living spaces, career choices, and, eventually, marriage, I often thought, jealously, how lucky my parents had been, not to have parents they wanted to emulate, or whom they felt they needed to please. Once they’d figured out who they didn’t want to be, what a vast menu of options greeted them! Even as I glimpsed that this way of thinking was problematic, I envied that they’d simply created a life they envisioned, as if they were characters in a novel, and they were writing their life.
this is so weird!
Because Skip’s first encounter with the Training Routines had been a little rocky, I was relieved when he showed up his second evening for roll call. Sometimes students didn’t. Sometimes, confronting the reason they’d come to Scientology at all brought up things they couldn’t actually face. Or a friend or family member discovered they were involved and convinced them to stop. Or they didn’t like that you couldn’t drink alcohol within twenty-four hours of being on course. If you studied five evenings a week, that meant a lot of nights you couldn’t have a beer.
When I asked Skip how he was doing, he shrugged. “It’s bad,” he said, and began to study the materials that describe the next drill, TR0.
Training Routine Zero is similar to OT TR0, in that two people sit opposite one another—but in this case, their eyes are open.22 Again I asked Kolya to twin. As I worked my way around the course room, attending to various raised hands, I heard Kolya “flunk” and “start” Skip a number of times. I stepped over to watch. Although Skip was blinking a lot, Kolya was actually squirming. He could not seem to keep his eyes on Skip’s. After half an hour of this, he said he wanted to keep going with his own course. I asked another student to twin, and then another. Neither was able to do the drill for more than a few moments before dropping their eyes.
“This is so weird!” one said.
I knocked on Ed’s office door. “It’s Skip again,” I said. “We’re kind of stuck on TR0. You’re a trained auditor, on your OT levels. Will you do it with him?”
He shook his head. “Just keep doing what you’re doing, Sands. Don’t be reasonable! Just apply the Tech. When the Tech is applied st
andardly, it always works. Always.”
“I’m not sure, Ed, in this case—”
“There is no in this case! Sands!” Ed widened his eyes so that he looked shocked. “You know that! Always. Also, it’s clear he trusts you.”
“You’re going to need to watch the course room,” I said. “And I think that’s a little un-standard, I have to say.” But I didn’t say it very loudly, and he didn’t appear to hear me.
“I’ll be there in a minute,” he said.
I knew he wouldn’t be, but I settled in opposite Skip anyway. His eyes were pleading, his face flushed. “Start,” I said.
His was a handsome face. But the most astonishing thing began almost immediately to happen. The jawline lengthened, the eyes narrowed and then flared open like parallelograms. His cheeks bloated way out, then collapsed again. His lips pulled back in a rictus, impossibly wide. His face rushed at me, like the worst kind of nightmare, and yanked back. Skip’s actual face, his eyes fixed on mine, hovered beneath these terrifying distortions. My hands slipped from my lap to grab the edge of my chair. I did not say “flunk.” I couldn’t speak. I held on to the chair as we rattled over spine-jarring potholed roads, going far too fast for either comfort or safety.
“Okay,” I managed to get out, and dropped my eyes. We sat there not saying anything, catching our breath. My heart pounded. This is beyond me, I thought. This is beyond anything I am trained to do, beyond anything I have experienced, beyond what I understood can happen in or to the human brain.
I asked Skip how he was doing.
“Oh, that was par for the course,” he said. “I just keep seeing all these weird things. It’s been going on for a month. It makes me want to kill myself. I hate saying that! But it’s awful. I feel like I’m crazy, but I don’t actually think I am. I want it to stop.”
I smiled. I gave him another of Hubbard’s bulletins to read. Ed wasn’t in the course room. I knocked on his door again. “I think this is auditing material,” I told him. I described what was going on.
“We can’t get him into session until he can sit opposite an auditor, right?”
“Well, then, an Ethics Officer,” I said. “Lots of people don’t have their TRs in when they talk to an EO—we can be freaked out, or sad, or mad, or whatever else!”
He shrugged. “Still. You know what Hubbard says: ‘Flatten the process.’”
“The rest of the students are starting to wonder what’s going on, Ed. And I’m not on post if I’m doing TRs with him.”
“I’m keeping an eye on the course room.”
But he wasn’t. At one point he’d actually closed the door of his office to take a phone call.
“I think you need to try it,” I said. “Something pretty intense is going on. I think getting him to talk about it, how it came to happen, would make more sense.”
Ed smiled, his blue eyes, crinkling at their corners, evincing his utter understanding. “Got it!” he acked, emphatically. “However. The drill is the drill! Flatten his reaction! Go.”
I backed out of his office. The whole idea of “flattening” a reaction had always bothered me. The idea was to just keep doing the thing that had caused a given reaction until the person stopped having that reaction. It occurred to me, often, that it made zombies out of people: you just wore them down until they simply didn’t care anymore. Although I’d also seen that it was useful, and could lead to what seemed to be very real epiphanies.
Maybe I just needed to backtrack a bit. Maybe I’d allowed Skip to check off the previous drill too quickly. I set him to do OT TR0 with another student. He seemed tense but sat there, eyes closed, for another twenty minutes. I had Jen spot-check him on the TR0 bulletin. He passed. I fetched Ed to watch the course room and settled in opposite Skip.
“Start,” I said.
Once again the strange swoops began, as if my body, even as it was upright in its chair, was tilting wildly from side to side. Again the body-jolting sense of driving too fast over rutted roads. Worst of all, those jeering, looming faces, driving at me so hard and fast that I wanted to jerk back, then pulling away, elongating, billowing, contracting like images in a funhouse mirror.
I stood it as long as I could, trying to get through it, to endure it, to push past it. Finally I held up a hand.
He looked down at his sculpted, brown, sandaled feet. “I want my mind back.”
Ed had been watching. I think he was curious, if nothing else. “Let me give it a try,” he said, and sat opposite Skip. “Start!” he said. He lasted about a minute, swallowing and blinking. “Okay, Skip.” He rubbed his hands along his thighs. “Let’s talk about some other options.”
Skip picked up his course pack and followed Ed out of the course room. I had no idea that he wouldn’t return. I thought he and Ed would talk, that he’d get some auditing or an Ethics Handling to figure out what was going on, and that he’d soon be back, finishing up that course and starting another: that Scientology would, as he hoped, help.
saint catherine’s wheel
In 1963, when Tad was thirteen, I eleven, Tracy eight, and Brett still in diapers, Mom and Dad took us to Europe. My father’s novel, Warlock, had been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and subsequently made into a film starring Anthony Quinn and Henry Fonda. With the proceeds from that sale we sailed from San Francisco on the graceful Oriana, moving through the locks of the Panama Canal, touching in Bermuda, and landing in Le Havre, France, where Dad had arranged to buy a Peugeot. In that car we traveled for eighteen months: two adults, four children, food, tents, and camping equipment.
Any lodging reservations, certainly the purchase of a car, had been done via letter or, I suppose, telegraph. One way or another our parents managed to rent a house in Athens, a flat in London, and a casita on the Costa del Sur. In between those three-month resting spots, we camped: through France, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece, Spain, and, toward the end of the adventure, we took a boat up Ireland’s River Shannon, rigging our tents on its banks each night. We came to understand the thrill of a still-warm baguette with a slab of brie and another of pâté. Mayonnaise and mustard came in handy tubes. The chocolate was unlike any we’d ever tasted, and Mom let us have it. We’d pull into a campground, and as Dad and Tad put up the tents, Mom worked on dinner. I was supposed to help, but as soon as possible I’d dive into a Georgette Heyer Regency romance. Tracy raced off to organize a game with other children in the campground. Brett toddled about looking adorable.
At the beginning of our stay in Athens, we lived in a flat from which we could watch the lumière of the son et lumière on the Parthenon. One morning, Dad, who every day clacked away at his portable Olivetti typewriter, received a large envelope from the Bodley Head, his British publishing company. Out of the envelope he shook a half dozen paper rectangles, which, opened out to full size, were about the size and shape of AAA maps. Covered with small print, the huge pages listed titles and descriptions of books published by the Bodley Head, including the marvelous Puffin, Penguin, Peacock series.
“Take a look,” Dad said. “Mark the titles that look appealing.”
For days we pored over those lists, putting ticks by hundreds of books, before handing the sheets back and forgetting about them.
While in Athens, Tad, who’d been accepted by Phillips Academy, Andover, a college prep school in Massachusetts where he’d matriculate the following fall, worked with a private tutor. Tracy and I, enrolled at Saint Catherine’s British School, wore gray skirts, white socks, and brown shoes. Stitched onto the left-hand pocket of our red blazers was the school’s emblem: the wise owl of Athena encircled by the wheel of Saint Catherine.
A Saint Catherine’s wheel looks like a circle of jagged spikes. It reminded me of a waterwheel, and I envisioned Saint Catherine earning her martyrdom by having to endlessly walk that wheel, except the little buckets that might carry water were instead steps as sharp as knives. I imagined
that not only were they designed to cut Catherine’s bare feet, but, should she stumble and fall—which of course she must, exhausted, eventually do—they’d shred her to pieces. In a curious combination of the myth of Sisyphus and what even then I saw as the existential horror of a hamster’s wheel, I mentally watched her go round and round on that wheel. All the pain in the world could not shake her faith in Christ. I thought this very fine, and wondered if I could ever be so brave and so dedicated.
Lurid and violent as Saint Catherine’s martyrdom was in my imagination, it wasn’t as horrid as the actual form of her torture. Much later, I learned that with the use of a blunt object—usually a heavy wheel, driven over the victim—the victim’s bones were broken. Then the mangled limbs were threaded through the spokes of the wheel and the whole still-alive thing pulled aloft so an audience could cheer the writhing, endless, and very painful death. (For the record: Saint Catherine’s faith was profound enough to cause the wheel to fly apart before she could be tortured; she was instead beheaded.)
Inside the Catherine’s wheel stitched on our blazer pockets blinked Athena’s owl. I understood that Athena was depicted as an owl because an owl is wise, as she was, and because an owl can not only twist its head almost all the way around, it can see through darkness—all of which I understood meant that Athena could see what others could not. I revered Athena. I wanted to be her. She had gray eyes. She wore sandals. She helped Odysseus! She flew around and did cool goddess-y things. Included in my admiration was that she’d leapt fully formed and armed from her father’s forehead. This, too, seemed immeasurably fine. It would take decades to understand the patriarchy this represented, and how influential the “manning up” of this wonderful goddess—a virgin goddess, no less—would be.
This ironic conjunction of myth and image, stitched with gold thread onto the pockets of our blazers, caused a lot of parental amusement that I only vaguely understood.