by Sands Hall
Dana was sympathetic but bracing. “Sands!” she said. “That’s what master of fine arts programs do! They yank your engine asunder, strew the parts all over your garage, and leave you to put it back together again.”
I didn’t believe I had an engine, much less one to be yanked asunder. But I was bolstered by the notion that maybe, eventually, I might put one together.
In the end, I learned a lot from that workshop with Frank. And it gave me a powerful purpose, although it took a few years to manifest: I’d be an effective teacher, but a student would not feel, as a result, that her only recourse was to get off the planet.
still i could not sever the cord to Skye, which meant I stayed connected, tenuously, to the Church. Fall of my second year in the Workshop, he and I took a last trip together, to England, winding up on the Isle of Wight. A storm lashed the island, and I’d left my raincoat on the plane. (PTS! Overt!) We walked in spitting rain, splashing into pools unlit by the intermittent streetlamps. Cold and miserable, we retired to our hotel room with its two narrow beds and climbed together into one of them. Wind rattled the tiny window, rain splattered. He warmed my freezing feet between his calves before we turned to each other for what we did not know would be the final time.
The next morning, back on the ferry, we squabbled about Scientology. The wind blew our hair around our sullen faces. I watched him walk to the stern of the ferry, where he gazed at the seething braid the boat left in its wake. Then he pulled a hand from his pocket, looked at what he held there, and threw whatever it was into the ocean. He returned, his face pinched. We sat in silence for the rest of the cold, blustery ride.
Dawn the next morning, we shivered in a parking lot outside Oxford, where we were catching our respective airport shuttles. His plane, to LA, was taking off from Gatwick; mine, to Chicago, from Heathrow. There in the darkness, confronted by the looming separation, we began to talk, heading back toward each other yet again.
Which, given our history, is no doubt what would have happened if we’d ridden in the same bus to the same airport. But, our breath coiling and dissipating, Skye and I hugged goodbye. With a last squeeze of our gloved hands, we mounted the steps and found window seats, holding our faces close to the glass, frosting the panes. My bus revved and exited the parking lot, his followed. Even as we headed in different directions, we waved and waved.
It would be the last time I saw him.
What he’d thrown into the ocean was an engagement ring.
and now my own trek across the coals began. I’d found The Way and was, of my own accord, leaving The Way. Those thoughts froze my brain, my blood; even worse was the terror that I’d again find reason to return. I’d told Skye we couldn’t be in touch. In spite of deep urges to call him, I never did. I thrashed through the days and nights. Especially nights. It was as if I were back in the Center’s course room, opposite Skip, jolting too fast over rutted roads, taking corners at dizzying speed, faces and options leering and receding. In spite of consuming deeply steeped cups of chamomile tea, which helped me slide into sleep, I’d wake within hours to continue the lurching, horrifying journey on a road that looped through a wilderness of lost life. My soul was damned if I stayed with Scientology and damned if I left. I surfaced from troubled dreams aware that my features were creased into an expression of aversion, as if I’d smelled something acrid and was trying not to breathe. This nightly mien created furrows around my mouth, as if I’d smoked for years.
As I breathed and breathed, tossed and turned, mashed a pillow into yet another shape, sometimes I thought of Antigone’s effort, countermanding her uncle Creon’s edict, to bury her dead brother—to scatter soil over him—so his soul could rest. Otherwise his spirit would roam the land, anguished, moaning, searching. What kind of earth could I place on my own soul, I wondered, so that after my death I wouldn’t haunt friends and family forever? Would I be a large, white, comma-shaped thing, the bottom of me trailing into invisibility, wending and howling my way through tilted gravestones by night? Would I be Antigone herself, locked in a cave to die?
I laughed, sardonically, and recalled a derivation, unexpected and incredibly apt, found on course one day when I’d been checking the differences between ironic, sarcastic, and sardonic. sardonic descends from the name of a plant that grew on the island of Sardinia which, when ingested, “produced facial convulsions that resemble horrible laughter.”
“I miss all that!” I whispered into the darkness. “I miss the words!”
You can still look up words in the dictionary!
Sitting up, I pressed the heels of my hands into my eye sockets until shimmering patterns pulsed. I often had these warring conversations with myself.
Scientology hardly has a patent on dictionaries, Sands. Hubbard didn’t invent the idea of looking up words. He didn’t invent the idea of ethics. He’s certainly not the first to talk about our being comprised of body, mind, and spirit. People have been finding their way to God, many ways to God, for millennia.
I lay back again. Did I want to find my way to God? Anyway, what did that mean?
We’re trapped on this planet, Sands. We’ve got to get free, spiritually free!
That would be Jamie speaking. Skye. Yet the Buddha said suffering was caused by attachment. So freedom was attached to being unattached. But here I was, attached, glued, in spite of myself (in spite of myself!), to Scientology. Which, paradoxically, was supposed to free me from the shackles of this MEST-y planet. Free from the hell of Planet Earth, free to stride, zip, flash through the universe . . .
Rolling over, pulling my forearms under my chest, heart pounding, I pressed my face to the mattress.
I liked the idea of being at one with God, at one with the entire universe. I envisioned this as the particles of my being enfolded into a larger one, my soul’s light part of a vast radiance. Not the Rapture. Not one’s body rising like a rocket, arms and hands and stockinged toes pointing straight down, eyes lifted toward the Light. No. The corporeal part would be dropped; we were talking pure spirit here . . .
Thetans, do you mean?
I pulled the pillow over my head.
Every religion has its form of soul, Sands! Hubbard does not have a premium on spirit!
I curled into a ball. If you attained real OT abilities, you were flashing around the stars with a purpose. It wasn’t just play. You were to take the Tech with you, bringing it to all those other planets. If you marched all the way to the end of that Bridge to Total Freedom, you were expected to—it was expected that you’d want to—pick up the laser, the sword, the billy club, and don the uniform of what I’d dubbed the Freedom Police. As a member of this spiritually evolved cadre you’d stalk (body-less) the universe, carrying the (molecule-free) wand of Tech, bringing its benefits to all the beleaguered, fucked-up planets and life forms that didn’t know they needed it.
But I didn’t want to do that.
I couldn’t be a zealot.
Because I didn’t believe.
Even though I’d spent seven years trying to persuade myself I did. Seven years.
But if I was wrong (you aren’t wrong!) (but what if I am?), what would happen to my soul?
An image rose up, not quite a dream. I seemed to be—not be in, but be—some kind of old-fashioned, many-masted sailing ship, and I was sinking. Drifting down through green-blue water.
What was that about.
A lapsed Catholic friend, chuckling, had told me that on her deathbed she’d probably call for a priest, “just in case.” Would I? Blind, hobbling, would I find my way back to an Org?
I sat up in a whoosh of sheets and blankets, staring into darkness, willing a blazing certainty, a truth, to smite me. I was reading about Buddhism, trying to sit at least once a day, following my breath. But at times the practice seemed terribly lonely. What little I knew about Judaism was intriguing, but didn’t you have to be born one, or at least marry o
ne? The cathedrals and rituals of Catholicism had always been attractive. Rebecca Lee, a friend in the Workshop, had loaned me an engrossing paperback called Hidden Christianity; I could explore Gnosticism. Another friend had told me he thought Mormonism had all the answers, until he realized he’d have to marry his girlfriend for not only this life but for the rest of time.
With a moaning laugh I turned on the light. Utah was arid but beautiful. Maybe I’d do well as a sister-wife. Or move to the Navajo nation, braid feathers in my hair. Or become a Poor Clare, live in a cloister. Ask another Workshop friend, Karen Bender, how one converts to Judaism. Could one have a bat mitzvah at thirty-eight? I felt like an adolescent—maybe that ceremony would usher me across the threshold into true adulthood.
You’re squandering your life, Sands. Were I living your life, I’d be doing such a better job.
I wanted to take a serrated spoon to the inside of my mind, scrape out its innards as one does half of a grapefruit. Shut up! I scrubbed my head, hard.
Silence, for a moment. But the murmuring started up again. You’re not going to go back, Sands. You know that, so stop wasting time thinking about it.
But if I’m wrong, am I dooming my soul to everlasting wandering?
That was an average kind of night. (Ancient edicts of family, coupled with those of Scientology, meant that it never occurred to me to try a sleeping pill.) An image from the movie 2001 sums it up: An astronaut heads outside the spaceship to repair HAL, the computer that’s the brain of the ship, which has gone berserk. HAL, aware of the astronaut’s intentions, severs his oxygen line. Grabbing at his throat, the astronaut falls away from the ship. His limbs flail but soon enough grow still; the camera lingers on the lifeless body swirling endlessly into black and empty space. That was me.
it doesn’t matter
I continued to probe Buddhism. There was no question that the simple but arduous act of breathing with awareness was helpful. But even as I steeped three bags of Sleepytime tea for twenty minutes, drinking the bitter brew right before bed and crashing into sleep, a few hours later, my mind would begin to rev: jeering, badgering, mocking, blaming.
After one of these bouts, a particularly severe one, I forced myself to do some research. A few years before, I’d closed eyes and ears against a book that had been published with the descriptive title: L. Ron Hubbard: Messiah or Madman? Now, resolute, I headed to the Iowa City Library. I located the call number, climbed the stairs, entered the stacks—
—and stopped dead.
I raised both hands. Behind me, someone was aiming a rifle at the back of my skull.
Heart thudding, I waited a few moments before turning to confront the sharpshooter that I knew was (even as I was certain he was not) lurking behind the shelves.
Of course there was no one there.
This had nothing to do with the religion I’d personally known. Being in Scientology hadn’t felt particularly traumatic, but leaving it certainly did.
I was tempted to head back down the stairs empty-handed. But I located the book, checked it out, and pretty much swallowed it whole. It was hopelessly one-sided. But it also iterated awful things about Hubbard and the Church, and provided plenty of backup for those claims, which helped support my decision to stay away—even as, day after day, I found myself reviewing that decision. Like some awful worm, Scientology had wiggled into my psyche and sunk its hooks deep.
Eventually I found my way to a small Iowa City Buddhist sangha. I joined the group for 6:30 a.m. meditation. I sat with them in the evenings and for weekend retreats. My mind jibbered. It jabbered. Buddhism calls this, perfectly, Monkey Mind. It crooned, it comforted briefly, then it berated. It scratched its underarms, smacked huge lips, picked lice from its hair, before leaping nimbly along a branch to jabber at me some more. Why was I sitting cross-legged on a cushion when I could be studying the Way, the Truth, the Light at an Org? There was one just three hours away, in Chicago (I’d checked). I could be on course every weekend. I could demo concepts. I could look up words. I could be certain.
Except I couldn’t be. Or wouldn’t be. I’d done all that. I’d done it again and again.
That image of the many-masted sailing ship kept rising up. I—my soul?—was drifting down through green-blue water, sinking toward the ocean floor. The feeling wasn’t frightening, just terribly final. Also curiously peaceful as the ship settled: fish flitting about among the still-upright masts. I wasn’t quite clear what the vision meant, but it appeared again and again, the boat nestling into sand at the bottom of the sea.
That second year, I was hired to teach the university’s creative writing correspondence course. My stint as a Course Supervisor had bolstered a natural avocation, and writing critiques on all those manuscripts allowed me to develop and hone skills I knew were serving me well. I made lovely friends in the Workshop, to two of whom I actually “confessed”—as if I’d been a murderer rather than a pilgrim—my churning anguish. (They were surprised; they said it wasn’t visible.) It’s hard to imagine, now, when so many books have been published by those leaving Scientology, when there are blogs and YouTube videos and interviews and articles, how inured we are to the word “Scientologist,” how normalized it has become. At the time, hearing it caused people to draw back, as if by simply being in my vicinity, they might “catch” what had infected me. Often (and even now) there was a shocked intake of breath. It was a deep solace to talk with friends who appreciated the search my time in the Church represented, and who did not appear to judge that choice.
One of these was Karen Bender, whose writing I quite admired. I knew she was Jewish, and, intrigued, asked about it, especially her ideas about marrying someone who wasn’t part of her religion.
“I might date a man who wasn’t Jewish,” she said, “but I can’t imagine marrying one. There’s so much we share! So much . . .” She was almost speechless with the magnitude of it. “History. Intention. Purpose. Without having to talk about it!”
I nodded, glumly. Her religion was so old! Although at one point, it, too, had been new, and had been considered bizarre. Imagine, in ancient polytheistic Mesopotamia, the idea of worshipping just one god!
Another member of the Workshop, Rebecca Lee, young enough to be my daughter, wrote stories I found amazingly mature and sophisticated. Wise beyond her years, through her flowed a wide stream of tranquil spirituality. Her father was a Lutheran minister, and she shared with me advice he’d given a parishioner struggling with a life-changing decision: “Maybe you just don’t have enough information,” he’d said. “That’s why you can’t make a definitive choice. But the information will come. And then you will know what to do.”
But how could I possibly not have all the information I needed?
And so it was that early one Saturday morning, I watched myself with astonished horror as I rose and dressed and drove through pelting rain to Chicago’s Church of Scientology. I said I needed to talk to the Ethics Officer.
“Of course,” the Registrar said, struggling to keep her TRs in the face of what I imagine was a gaunt and startling apparition. Within minutes, minutes when I held on to my chair with both hands to keep from walking back out, I was in the office of the EO, stumbling my way through the litany regarding my chronic doubt. He told me I needed to review the PTS/SP materials. I know all that! I didn’t say. Instead, I settled in at a table in the course room, momentarily comforted by the “standard” nature of it all. Nearby lay Hubbard’s Technical Dictionary and the American Heritage, full of definitions—derivations!—I might want to clarify. Words like suppress and suppressive, meanings I already knew. potential and trouble, and source, even religion. Also on the table was a basket of batteries, marbles, rubber bands, paper clips, waiting for me to demo what I already understood. I put my face in my hands. Flunk. Flunk.
That night, I stayed with friends of friends. Sue was a Scientologist; just two days before she’d returned from t
wo weeks at Flag, the “flagship” Org in Florida, where she’d attested to OT VIII. Her husband Joe was not a Scientologist, but he’d looked after the three kids while she was gone, and seemed to have done so happily. I thought of Sunny, who’d moved to Michigan to marry Ron, a non-Scientologist; they’d conceived within days of their wedding. She, too, was continuing her OT levels. Sunny and Ron, like Sue and Joe, were figuring out life without both of them having to be mired in the religion. Why couldn’t Skye and I do that?
Sue’s kitchen was huge, with paned windows and glass-fronted cupboards that ran all the way to high ceilings. Crocks stuffed with implements lined scarred wooden counters. A bag of bagels and containers of cream cheese spilled across one surface. Cheers emanated from the living room, where Joe was watching a ball game, sipping a beer. I’d been offered one but declined; I was due back on course in the morning. Carrie, nine years old, ran in, sawed a bagel in half, smeared it with peanut butter from a jar she left open on the counter, and ran out again.
“Homework!” Sue called.
Beyond the kitchen was the mudroom, full of dripping raincoats and umbrellas and rubber boots in five different sizes. Joey hopped in, riding a nonexistent pogo stick, asked for juice, and, carrying his tippy cup, hopped out again.
Sue began to cry. “I can’t bear it,” she said. “I just want to go back!”
“Flag?” I asked, and she nodded, holding a dishtowel to her face.
“I just want to live there! It’s so pure. Everything is so full of light, everyone’s OT, it’s like floating in an ether of kindness and ethics, and it’s all so clean and upstat. And here I am with so much MEST. I mean look at it all!”
She waved at the crowded counters, the cupboards stuffed with dishes and cans and boxes, the refrigerator where magnets held Joey’s drawings and recipes and a photo of Hubbard.
“We’re all so stuck. How do we ever escape this planet where we’re so stuck!”