by Sands Hall
“Mom?” Heather, the eldest, came in wielding a taped-up hockey stick. “I have to have a new one! I don’t know if it’ll last one more game. Oh, Mom, stop crying!” She leaned the hockey stick up against the mudroom’s doorjamb. “What’s for dinner?”
I slept, or rather didn’t, in Heather’s room and in the morning headed straight back to Iowa City. I couldn’t imagine a life as stuffed as Sue’s cupboards were—rubber boots, children, tippy cups, hockey sticks, cream cheese—but all of it struck me as so wonderful, every particle of it! Matter. Energy. Space. Time. The huge conundrum. Yes, it was messy. Ugly. Complicated. Things disintegrated or exploded. Items got lost or broken. Time had this nasty way of marching on. And yet weren’t M and E and S and T responsible for some of life’s greatest pleasures? Children, books, orgasm, peanut butter, chardonnay? What was this intense need, which I’d felt for as long as I could remember, to feel I was “above” the “pettiness” of an earthly life? How about enjoying it? Why, to me, did being in life, just doing it, just being, seem like a lesser mode of existence?
start. i returned to my meditation pillow. When a celebrated Buddhist roshi visited, I signed up for the retreat, and for an individual consultation. During the retreat, we sat in a circle, and my pillow wound up beside his. I’m sure I was distracting. I could not settle physically, much less mentally. When we took a break, before walking meditation, he looked at me with kind, assessing eyes. Then he lowered them again, crossing his hands into the opposite sleeves of his black robe.
Somehow I got through the eight hours, and the next day sat and walked for another eight. Those of us who’d signed up for individual meetings with the roshi would have them that evening, in the house of one of the members of the sangha.
This woman kindly instructed me in what I would need to do as I entered the space, before I put my question before the roshi. A gesture of Namaste, bowing over pressed-together palms (the Buddha nature in me honors the Buddha nature in you); turning in a circle and another Namaste (the divinity in me recognizes the divinity in you); prostrating myself three times, laying my whole body facedown, arms outstretched. Only then could I sit before him.
It’s this religion’s form of “standard,” I told my mortified self, as I lay with my face pressed into the carpet, then rose up to do it a second time. It’s necessary for form, for ritual, every religion has these things. I laid myself out fully a third time. We—I mean Scientologists—sit opposite someone else for two hours with our eyes closed! Scientologists write up Ethics Conditions. Scientologists rub lotion into their palms before picking up cans attached to something like a lie detector. What could be stranger than that?
Taking a deep breath, I bowed over my palms in a final Namaste—the light in me perceives the light in you—and sat cross-legged before him. I told him the way I felt torn in two.
He kept his face lowered, though his eyes were open. He was sitting on a black zafu, a meditation pillow, itself atop a square zabuton—words that were, I told myself, Buddhist nomenclature just as “ARC” and “overt” are Scientology’s. A fanlike pattern on the red and blue Persian carpet, like his silence, stretched between us.
I knew what I wanted him to say, but he did not say it. He did not say: You must probe more deeply into being a Buddhist. Buddhism is the only Answer, the only Way.
Instead, he raised his bottomless eyes to mine. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.
It doesn’t matter!
I put a hand to my heart, puzzled, agonized, horrified.
“There is a way,” he said, “but it can only be your way.”
My mind batted against the windows closed against the wintry day beyond.
“If Scientology is your way,” he said, “then you must return to it. And if it is not, then you must not.”
i knew he was right. He’d said exactly the right thing, the wisest possible advice. Scientology would never have left the choice up to me—it would have told me where the “only” answer resided. This strengthened my (sleepless) resolve.
I began to understand the ship settled on the bottom of the sea. There was no way to unknow what I knew. The reading, the questioning, the knowledge I now held, had caused my belief in the Church to sink. It would not float again. I was still terrified I’d return—look how often I’d vacillated!—but the vision told me I would not sail back into Scientology’s harbor. I’d done it so many times, and it had led me to this: shut into a cave and left to die, like Antigone. A kind of death in life.
Yet I was bereft. By leaving the Church I was considered a Suppressive Person, and, not wanting to bring trouble to my Scientology friends—friends who were a huge reason I’d lingered so long and found it so hard to go—I did not communicate with them. I knew they’d have to have Ethics Handlings, would need to write Knowledge Reports; perhaps assigned the Condition of Enemy or even Treason (by being in touch with me, now an “enemy” of the Church), they’d have to write up overts and work their way back up the Conditions. These were aspects of Church policy that had always troubled me. But now, in my anguish, they outraged me and helped bolster my efforts to leave it behind.
I had to face, moreover, that in a matter of months, I’d earn a master of fine arts degree. And then what? And how could I possibly be considered a “master”? I’d published almost nothing. And anyway: Did anyone ever “master” an art?
I looked up the word.
Among master’s twenty-odd definitions are 1: one who has control over another; 7: one who defeats another; and 16: an original from which copies can be made. Also 12: a worker qualified to teach apprentices and carry on the craft.
The word descends from the Latin magister: “chief, head, director, teacher.”
This I understood. Writing was a craft. I liked teaching. Also it was clear that critiquing others’ manuscripts honed one’s own writing skills. I started to look for teaching jobs, taking anything, paid or unpaid, that would help build a résumé. I signed up for the university’s Arts Outreach program.
Now, in my datebook, “CC” and a bracket outlining several hours no longer meant being on course at Celebrity Center, but the time allotted to grade the correspondence course. “AO” did not indicate something I’d be up to at the Advanced Org, but a day spent on Arts Outreach. Two times a month I crawled into a car at 4:00 a.m. with other sleepy grad students from various disciplines to drive across the snowy hinterlands of Iowa. Late afternoon, having taught all day, we headed back through wintery darkness, sometimes arriving home after 9:00 p.m. I’d drop my bags full of teaching material to the floor and fall into bed.
For winter break Mom suggested I stay with them in their San Francisco flat. It meant sleeping on their floor, but both grateful and ashamed, I accepted. We appeared to have reached a détente. Strategies, put in place in their wills, limited what I’d receive in the event of their death. I never asked what they were. I did not talk about Scientology. Nor about Skye. If querulous questions about these began to emerge, as sometimes, after glasses of wine, they did, I left the room.
My appearance startled everyone. I was very thin. The lack of sleep had etched new lines. Circles under my eyes were purple-gray. I did my best to rally, but misery hovered, as dust rolls around Pigpen in Peanuts cartoons. I held Hunter, Brett and Louis’s baby, all he’d let me, trying not to think about all I’d made a choice away from having, year after year.
One Sunday the family met at a Marin County flea market. Mom and Dad wandered off to look at some artwork. Brett and I headed down an aisle of jewelry stalls. I carried Hunter, and we paused to look at a collection of silver earrings.
“Oh, isn’t this so precious!” The woman behind the counter beamed. “Mother and Baby and Grandmother!”
Brett and I looked at each other, horrified. I might be ten years older, but did I really look old enough to be her mother? She started to protest, but I shook my head. “It’s what I’ve done to my
life, Brett. No one else did it. I did it. I just need to walk it out. I’ll meet you back at the car.”
I didn’t walk it out that afternoon. It would take years to walk it out. Nevertheless, something was beginning to take shape in me: an understanding—it was a phrase of Skye’s—that this was a spoke of the wheel, and the wheel would turn. The wheel always turns.
by late spring, about to graduate the Workshop, I’d accrued some teaching experience but few publications. What to do, what to do. Well, I loved study. I trotted across the Iowa River to the low-lying buildings of the theater department. I could actually imagine being a “master” in that art. Maybe I could land a job teaching acting, and write in my spare time. Erik Forsythe, chair of the department, was willing to apply my past experience and training so I could earn that second MFA in one year instead of the usual three. I spent that summer in Iowa City, acting in a very satisfying repertory season.
Robin and my brother had recently moved from Chicago to Ohio, and they journeyed across three states to see me in those plays. Tad was writing; years later I’d find out that he’d won a local playwriting contest. But even though they drove all that way, I made hardly any time for them. That terrible pronouncement made by Mary’s mother years before—that I was bad for him—still held sway. For years, I spent hardly any time alone with Tad, did not speak with him in any substantive way about his accident, nor about Scientology. I could not confront that mangled face and the tragedy it represented. Still mourning who he’d been, I was not yet able to love who he’d become. When it was time for them to leave, I waved them off with a distressing, hateful sense of relief.
That fall, settled into the satisfyingly encompassing theater program, I was headed through town on the way to class when I passed a storefront that had been empty for some months. I literally jumped backward.
Hanging above the front window was a large and familiar blue-and-white S.
Scientology! In Iowa City?
It had found me!
Black crows seemed to wheel and shriek as I ran down the block and around a corner. Heart pounding, I slowed to a walk. Surely I’d just conjured the icon that represented so many years, so many friends, so much pleasure, and so much anguish. On my way home, I walked to the corner and peered around the edge of a building.
There it was: that large super-serifed S, marine blue and gleaming white.
I crept down the opposite sidewalk. Visible through the window, angled this way and that, were shiny, lurid covers of books by L. Ron Hubbard. Beyond, in a brightly lit interior, stood a table. No one sat there. But there were dictionaries. A little basket that would contain batteries, a clothespin, some pennies, a pencil stub.
There was no doubt about it. A Scientology mission had plunked itself down in the middle of Iowa City.
A slim dark-haired woman—probably the mission holder, probably also wearing the hats of Auditor, Case Supervisor, Ethics Officer, maybe even Course Supervisor—came into sight, heading for the window. Re-angling a book, she peered into the street. Unexpectedly, I was moved. I knew how much intention, how much effort, how much compassion for humanity, how much faith that mission represented. Also how much money.
That enormous S felt like a mirage, manifested out of a convoluted need. But—and it took me weeks to let myself truly examine this—I was not tempted. I wouldn’t go see the Ethics Officer, nor take my place at that table.
Relief surged.
About six months later, the mission folded. Once again a sign in the window said for rent. But that big S, disappeared, did not turn out to be objective correlative in a carefully constructed novel. The claws were in deep; there was more extricating to be done.
spit happens
A thick envelope arrived one day from Sunny. She was happily married, living in Michigan, she wrote; in addition to a schedule full of gigs, she was teaching voice at a university. Every few months she flew to Flag or Los Angeles to continue her OT levels. The envelope held photos of her toddler. In one, his grinning lips were coated with pureed carrots, more goo spread all the way up an arm that waved a baby spoon. Splotches of orange almost covered the letters on his bib that spelled out spit happens.
I understood it was a play on the phrase “shit happens.” But to a Scientologist, that idea is outrageous—sacrilegious. It was as if Sunny had purposefully misquoted a piece of Tech. Nothing, absolutely nothing, just happens! You’re always responsible. How could Sunny—Sunny the sturdy Scientologist!—let her child wear such a bib? It sent an entirely wrong message!
It took an astonishingly long time for me to smile at the photograph, so involved was I in sorting out its ramifications.
The summer after I earned that second MFA, in theater arts, I stayed in Iowa City, teaching for the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, until the Squaw Conference, after which, at my parents’ invitation, I lived for a few months in their lower house, the Annex. I meditated morning and evening, walked and worked on my novel during the days, cooked them dinner at night. On Saturdays I drove four hours to Marin, spent the night with Brett and Louis and Hunter, sat Sunday sangha at the Green Gulch Buddhist Retreat, listened to the dharma talk, and drove back again. Buddhism, during that time, was as essential as breathing.
On one of these drives, all four lanes of Interstate 80 were closed by a terrible accident. Along the median, ambulances, sirens muttering and occasionally howling, worked past the veritable parking lot of cars. It brought to mind my own supposed death in a car crash, last lifetime: how I’d flitted above the wreckage and jammed myself back into a body. Even as I wondered if I’d concocted that whole episode, I could feel spirits zipping desperately overhead, seeking ways to return.
Cars rolled forward a few yards, paused. Up ahead, a siren began to yowl. As the sound of it faded, I found myself pounding the steering wheel.
“I am not responsible!” I cried. “I did not cause this!”
Over the years, I’d become convinced of the molecular power of thought, but until that moment hadn’t realized how much I believed that if I, personally, pondered or prayed or thought and certainly acted the right way, the butterfly-wing flap of my actions, my intentions, could prevent everything from car accidents to famines. Growing up with my mother’s Christian Science had buttered the pan for what I found in Scientology, which had prepared me for aspects of Buddhism, all of which had been given a generous sprinkle of Chaos Theory. Not only could what I did or did not do be linked to my breaking a bowl or getting a flat tire; it could be linked to the broken bowls and flat tires of strangers. It was not only my thoughts, of course; people the world over had to be clear in their thinking and motivations, which was why Catholic nuns prayed, Buddhist monks meditated, think tanks of scholars and artists and scientists met in Saigon, Oxford, Delhi to ponder, purposefully, peace and the environment. But my actions, my thoughts were part of this web. I was as certain of this as I was of the steering wheel in my hands. It seemed, suddenly, an awful burden. Not to mention, it began to occur to me, an egoistical one.
The line of vehicles inched by the four-car pileup. Men in bulky yellow uniforms prowled the accordioned wreckage. Police cars pulsed red-blue lights, tow trucks flashed amber ones. The ambulances were gone. There was no question that death had visited here. But how, how could I possibly be responsible for this accident? What did the word accident mean, if not “a lack of intention; chance”?
But I didn’t believe that. What I did believe is that everything is connected. If you feel too ill to go to school, it’s because of the bully on the playground. If you have a headache, it’s your psyche warning you to take a look. If your car overheats on the way to visit your parents, it means they make you steam, and you should not be visiting them. If you fall off a bridge . . .
As traffic began to speed again, I thought about the goo-covered bib announcing spit happens. As soon as I got back to Squaw Valley, I found Sunny’s phone number. She was out. I
left a message, wondering if she’d call back. I was, after all, an SP.
But she phoned the next morning. Without much preamble, I told her about the incident on the freeway.
“How can that be my fault?” I said. “It’s crazy to think it is!”
“No, it’s not,” she said in her warm voice. “Our thoughts do have power. We both know that.”
“It feels horridly egoistical.”
“Being—having—that kind of cause is what OT is all about. Not about causing car accidents, of course. Unless one’s an evil operating thetan. But being at cause like that.”
Beyond the windows of the Annex, a rushing wind made the pines sway. The sky lowered, gray and grim; a storm was coming in.
“Not that one has to be a Scientologist to have those abilities,” she said. “There were operating thetans before Hubbard came along—they just weren’t called that, and there are those who get there without the Tech. He just made achieving those abilities more certain.”
She wanted to let me know she wasn’t proselytizing, she wasn’t trying to haul me back into the boat. I loved her for it.
“It feels self-aggrandizing,” I said.
“That’s one way to look at it, sure. But most people wouldn’t dream of taking that kind of responsibility.”
“Sunny, I feel responsible, or rather, to blame, all the fucking time! I’m vacuuming and the rubber belt breaks, and it’s what overt did I commit to pull this in? Or my sister’s moody and I wonder what I did to make her be that way, or I stub my toe and immediately the thought is, now, what did I do to create that . . . ?”
“I know exactly what you mean.” She sounded weary.
“My dad would say solipsistic.” I remembered a day he’d talked about a self-involved student, his voice dripping with disdain: Beware solipsism.
“What’s that mean, solipsistic?”
“Hold on a minute.” I fetched the dictionary, which still traveled with me everywhere. As I flipped through its pages, we both laughed.