XXIII
The chanting had become almost unbearable.
“Bury me in a nameless grave…” they were all saying, again, cycling through their little bit for the 10th time, “I came from God the world to save. I brought them wisdom from above: Worship, and liberty, and love. They slew me for I did disparage. Therefore Religion, Law and Marriage. So be my grave without a name. That earth may swallow up my shame…”
The chanting, they claimed, was calibrated to engineer release, transcendence of the spirit. This precise incantation had, over the course of millennia, they said, been finely tuned to bring about the death of the ego, and the liberation of the essential spark, which could then join the bonfire of oneness.
The essential spark, like that thing that actors had.
As if to illustrate our purpose we all sat in a circle around a cast iron fire pit on Anouk’s property in La Crescenta, losing ourselves in the flickering, losing ourselves unto infinity and unity. Anouk was our leader and had been conducting these sessions for nearly a decade. She only had the one name, and whether it came to her at birth or was a more recent acquisition I never learned. At any rate her birth had not been a recent event. I placed her at about 1400 hundred years old. She looked pickled and embalmed behind her mini black veil that hung from a pillbox hat that seemed never to come out of her heavily hennaed hair. But despite her hoary old age, Anouk moved as spritely as an adolescent, her black robes undulating around her with winds I didn’t feel.
Anouk had taken me into the group some months before, when I first came here on my semi-discreet inquiries after Laura Demme. At the time I had been snooping around the places where Paula and others had suggested Laura spent her time, and like any household pest I’d gotten stuck to the flypaper.
That first afternoon Anouk opened the door of her ranch house and invited me in for tea — people were always doing that, and I hate tea more than I hate the Knicks. She fielded my lame questions, I think, but before I even registered the shift, she had begun my instruction, counseling me in the assassination of my ego.
We had wandered her grounds in the shadow of the mountains named for San Gabriel, the saint, she said, who communicated with the heavens. Gabriel was Mercury, was Hermes, the guardian of thieves and the lost. He was the one who would guide us unto the unity when we had liberated ourselves from the illusion of identity, from the iron casing of the ego. I looked up to the snowy peak and the arrangement of radar equipment, like a little village in spires. It looked like a miniature altar, and I began receiving my lessons right away.
The group met regularly on Tuesdays and Thursdays, near dusk, around the firepit like a modernist Weber grill. We chanted. We pined for liberation. And we talked about the illusory demands our egos made upon us.
The group was a regular unit, thirteen of us in all, all of us typical Angelenos, straight from central casting, as if hastily assembled, on a shoestring budget. Inevitably our conversations took on the somber tone of confession. We all continued to share our lowest moments in exquisite detail. Bragging about them, more like.
Call it a compulsion but, even after Laura had reappeared in her life, I had continued to try, and mostly failed, to redirect these talks to stories of past members of The Group generally, and of Laura Demme specifically.
I simply couldn’t turn off my interest in the girl who’d gone missing and had—maybe, possibly—mysteriously returned. For one thing, if she had come back, where was she? She wasn’t showing up at her old haunts, certainly—I had Eleanor and Alexi to confirm that for me. And, while I wasn’t exactly staking out her apartment on Franklin, I passed by frequently enough to notice that no one ever seemed to be at home.
So, I wondered. And wondering can lead you to terrible things. Terrible, haunting things, like ideas. Notions. Hunches. Like for example what if the “Laura” I had followed from the Chateau to Ojai had not in fact been Laura at all, but a lookalike dressing up as her, much the way she had dressed up as hers? What if, in a reversal of Laura’s recurring performance as “Sage” for the subscribing members of Jerry Bass’s sex ring, Sage had dressed up as “Laura?”
I shuddered just thinking of it. And still I wondered.
All I ever did learn from The Group, however, was that the suicide rate seemed alarmingly high among past members. Past members, who, of course, willed the entirety of their often not insubstantial estates, to the group. That is, to Anouk.
At the end of my most recent session, Deborah, a former reality show regular with hair like curly wheat, and eyes ringed in smears of mascara, approached me. She was edgy and stilted in her movements as I suppose we all are when reinhabiting our ego prisons after biweekly trips to the godhead.
“You shouldn’t really listen to what they say about Laura,” she said. “They only knew a side of her. There was a lot more.”
“Oh,” I said, leaping out of my skin but trying to hide my eagerness. I had apparently kept some vigil lighted for Laura and it scared me how quickly this fanned to full flame. “Were you close?”
“As close as two spirits can be when lost in the crucible of time.”
Uh huh. “Did you spend time together outside of the crucible, or, at least, outside of here?”
Deborah and I went to the old taco place by the freeway in Eagle Rock. I tried to remember what role she played on what reality show but that disgusted me and I could feel the disgust rising to the surface like toxins in a sauna so I tamped it down and tried to focus on Laura, about the cult. Close up, Deborah was warmer, redder than she had seemed with the group. And she was so earnest that I felt somehow disarmed. I could let down my guard, my sarcasm. I hardly even felt myself to be the miserable failure I am around her. After all, it was she who’d been on a reality show.
“How long have you gone to the group?”
She looked off, dreamily munching a chip and holding another at the ready. She had the full lips, cheeks and breasts of someone who’d once been much heavier and I could feel my inner cynic wondering if she weren’t headed back to some ideal weight. “Three years? I guess. It’s changed a bit since then, as these things do.”
“How so?”
“Well, softening, maybe. There was a… break, I guess, about the time I started visiting. A sort of an exodus. A buncha people left the group and reformed another sort of sect. I guess you could call them the orthodox, hardcore group, whereas Anouk has guided us into more temperate, tolerant meadows…”
Jesus. “The orthodox group. Are they still practicing.”
An old fear, a heavy fear pushed down on her then. She put her elbows on the table and used one hand to cover her body, clasping her other arm, and using one hand to cover her face with a guac’d chip held aloft. “Yeah. I don’t really know much about them. They’re into some pretty hardcore stuff.”
“Like.”
“Like summoning demons and…”
“And?”
“And well there are rumors, you know? I guess they have pretty weird parties. Some of Anouk’s group go sometimes and they say it’s kinda crazy.” When she met my stare she felt compelled to continue. “Like full tilt debauchery. Because they believe all that Crowley stuff about states of intoxication being portals into the divine… but… I don’t know. I’ve heard it gets pretty rowdy. Like, group sex. Maybe not only with consenting adults. Or even only adult humans.”
“Ew.”
“Yeah.”
“What else?”
“Well, like I said, this is purely rumor I’m telling you. I don’t know about any of this first hand, but, like, people joke that they, the Golden Dawn, are doing the old rituals. Crazy stuff. Satanic, even. Bloody. Sacrifice.”
I could feel my eyelids catching on fire as I pictured Laura being opened up on some pyre… My eyeballs were throbbing. I tried to swallow but had a hard time getting past the wild animal in my chest. “And, Laura, she was… familiar with this group, the Golden Dawn?”
Deborah nodded, looking down at the cooling swamp of beans, frosting over with fat as they congealed in a thick porcelain cup before me.
“She went out there?”
Her nodding continued with an added sarcasm.
The night was neon and dusty dry. The wash of cars on the freeway rolled in and out like the tide.
“And you,” I said, finally. “Do you know how to get in touch with them?”
Her head kept moving, but now side to side. “Bo, the guy, the leader, the guru, he’s super secretive. Paranoid, like.”
“Can you find out? For Laura?” For me, I meant.
Deborah stopped suddenly as if she’d been struck. She was so still she might have actually been vibrating. Terrified. Chained to a radiator of fear. Trapped in it. But, as I watched her go under all these heavy fears I could see her as she came upon something else there, something even darker, perhaps, than pure fear. I don’t know what. Maybe it was duty. Maybe it was a trick. Maybe she’s as insane as I’d initially thought. Because after a moment she picked up her fork and broke apart the hunks of food mess in front of her and said, “I guess so.”
