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The Cult

  Jordan Jones (Caesar Naples)

  Copyright 2014 Jordan Jones

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  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  The whole world was in my hands. Without stopping I said the things they would fear most. The fantasy of the alien was hers and I shared it with my girlfriend Anne, my boss Daniel, and eventually, the entire world. None were ready for the truth except her, because she had discovered the truth and she was the real messenger, not I.

  There wasn't anything about me that grouped me into a pack or helped me stand out as having leadership ability. Before school was over and I met her, my interests were useless. I could fold nice cigarettes into slinky fingers and smoke them by the lake. Another task I endeavored upon was intoxicating myself (illegally) in purposeful increments one beer at a time. The period of joy and happiness I had slipped into was that way because I was lazy and I didn't go to college. Precisely this description of a boy was what she had needed. My birthday was right-on, and after I guess four years of planning she introduced her sexual life to me.

  But this was after I had broken my early curfew and driven to the lake and saw a man get arrested. I heard shouting, watched the man as the officer pulled him to the back of the police car and handcuffed him. By the time he was taken to the backseat, I felt the empty silence again. The lighted vehicle exited. My first thought was that the man had been vacuumed into space.

  The next time I would remember the incident and think of it as an intense and relevant memory was a few months later. She was jumping into the backseat of a different cruiser, passing under my arms and out of the scene. That was her totally paranoid exit from the situation she had created at the casino.

  I never felt safe. When I was eighteen and going to different lakes around the city for fun at night, I was located by her and taken into a scenario out of Star Trek, or maybe instead Blade Runner. To survive, anything I had discovered about myself that summer would need to be remembered. The test was if I had truly enjoyed myself at lakes and on bike rides to the library. I only had to know the meaning of pleasure and not really figure anything out intellectually. That wasn't known to me beforehand and it feels a little ironic that everything would have been over if it had been.

  I was still in high school but had reached the point of apathy where smoking drugs before class seemed acceptable enough. School was almost over. I took special classes for students with a higher aptitude. I didn't enroll completely in advanced classes because I thought the workload would be too much. Instead, I took a basic credit Biology class in the morning which seemed like the main motivation for getting high before school. The class itself was extremely boring. The teacher's daughter was mentally handicapped after a traumatic brain injury sustained in gymnastics. He was a Christian and tried spiritedly to raise awareness for both creationism and traumatic brain injury (TBI) accidents. He tied it into biology. Our trek through this comedy drama of life could jump the shark at any moment, he said. Later he won twenty thousand dollars on a gay morning talk show. I could see his wife's discomfort when I saw her online. It must have been a terror for them to be on television with an openly gay host. In his lecture about personal health he actually drew a shark on the board, and explained what jumping the shark means.

  It was ridiculous, yet I would remember the class with a strong attachment after I met her. Any sense of comedy or drama would be better than the nightmare of her acquaintanceship.

  In the case of my own television appearance, that was explained by the way I was hooked into a brainwashing scandal. It amounted to me becoming a famous celebrity. In the commercial, I was like any actor you see in a Disney movie or on a stupidly popular miniseries. I guess I looked most like Matt Damon but didn't have his stomach.

  The organization which targeted me was not owned or subsidiary to anything of her status. She was an agent of that group. She had specified who she wanted and when she wanted him. She wanted me. My Mom had gotten the idea to move to the city during her doctorate studies. She called her move “action research,” which is a form of social maneuvering to help change communities.

  Mom met Macy and other addicts at the shelter where she volunteered. She told me Macy and I were a good match. Mom had told Macy everything about me. The information was processed quickly by Macy and related to me in the way that superficial facts can be used to arrest one's attention. An illusionist tricks someone with the simplest of distractions. She distracted me with a new version of myself. She mentioned she knew me well. Her idea of who I was needed to feel compete although it was, I see now, only partial in its understanding of me.

  I felt like I had found a companion who could see into my soul. I thought she was the person I had prayed for the summer before. We seemed an identical match and of course she showed me her astrology companion which confirmed that our relationship would be “written in the stars.” Her tarot interpretation was fantastic in its matching of us as lovers. The cards for a queen and the four swords were drawn. They represented her, and me.

  Finally, the sex rendered me helpless. For months, I was a victim of her devices. I was her lapdog, or her sex monkey. She was forward with her disease, which I felt sorry for. I felt pity that she was an addict and a user. She said she was disappointed that she had hit the pipe again this weekend. She didn't want it to get in the way of us.

  Mom was working all the time and Dad had no time for me being divorced. Macy’s set-up was so effective that we slept together for four months before I lost interest for my own mental health. Being with her was dangerous. I imagine that someone had written down a law hidden by the court and the lawmakers. It could have been made by an officer or other agent, who could have writ our relationship in a few secret sentences. The purpose of this law was for her to reference should anyone of similar status to her be suspicious.

  The law would say that we must have been illegal; but to keep us out of danger, we would be overlooked by the police. We must be combatants on a war on drugs, a battle of the mind, and by calling attention to ourselves we could free people from use. And she must do drugs, and I must do drugs. Perhaps even, the law would say, that we were allowed to manipulate the media to help us in our endeavor. All of this must have been written somewhere, because according to her organization the rule was that she didn’t exist as a person. She was merely a legal cable or instrument of change.

  It was inescapable, our time together. Eight months I spent in her sights, until now, aboard this aircraft typing it all out. It is in the nature of my own devices that I write this with nervous hands. I am honest company, and perhaps that shows why I have no friends. The story must be gotten out of the way before I feel safe with anyone else.

  Chapter 2

  She had previous boyfriends and at least one of them dressed very nicely. I was fortunate to be marrying my future with hers. She was 31.

  Our first physical connection was through a bauble she gave me the first night. I wore it around my neck and showed a few people before I lost it. Next came the hand job, and then coitus on my childhood bed in a green bedroom. The walls were adorned with printouts of her favorite drawings and a hanging corset, which I found so remarkable with awe I asked her if she made them. Her clothier had made it. My attraction to her was overpowering until that moment of first coitus. I broke into her by lying sideways. I was surprised by the sensation of penetration and I tumbled to the foot of the bed immediately and almost
fell off. She thought it was hilarious. Unbelievably, I had found a woman of a culture so mysterious that it seemed I had manifested her out of the insanity of my own thoughts. These thoughts confused me because I knew it was wrong to date her as an eighteen year old the summer after I graduated high school. My own fears were both quelled and kindled by her overt kindness. The last blog post I made up until then mentioned my wariness in a short, cryptic update. I had forgotten about it until this moment, because I feel less overwhelmed now.

  Then she was my girlfriend. I lost my job immediately. I was so obsessive about her I couldn’t show up on time.

  It was naive when I expected to be able to move out of my Mom’s and get an apartment with her. Expertly she managed the landlord to do her bidding. However, I was two days too late when I delivered the remnants of my check to that landlord, and we didn't get the duplex. I planned to use it as a place for us to have sex. Missing the lease was a mistake which I told her in arguments was the last time on earth when I had any hope for a good future. I wasn’t exaggerating. I believed everything would have been different if we had gotten the place. She said it didn't matter then and it most certainly did not.

  Instead we moved in with her mother and Macy’s four children. And she introduced me to the men and the drugs; and I took showers with cameras; and I saw backyard death cellars surrounded by metal fences for perching photographers. The house was characterized by large windows, drug traffic, and school buses created of solid bulletproof titanium from the inside out to protect them from explosions.

  I was the fourth one she had introduced to the stimulant which is called by most people Chem 1. She was a Chem 1 dependent. I live now with a prescription to another drug, debian.

  The only time I felt jealousy was with her, when she was having sex with Mika in the other room. The conversation between her and him was an unconnected dialogue I could hear while lying in a bed adjacent the garage. They were using Chem 1 by smoking it, and I'm sure they were so extra-human themselves. That's what the Chem 1 does.

  "He's been taking a lot of weed,” she said. I couldn’t hear very well. “Don't carouse him. All the people make him afraid. It's been like this for a few days. If he does nothing, then try talking to him about music. I like him. I love him."

  I was on the stuff myself. Chem 1 wasn't a good drug for me.

  "He thinks he's already dead,” she told Mika.

  I also talked with Jed at the house. Who is to say how long I talked with Jed? On Chem 1, time would pass in intervals that feel the same, but are different lengths. Two hours could feel like thirty minutes. He said it was the same with a lot of drugs, but it was most noticeable on Chem 1.

  I asked him how they had all gotten together. He said "similar interests," then answered more existentially. "We were brought together by an idea that the truth is there, and you have to work terribly hard to find that out yourself." He picked up a coin from the desk where we smoked.

  "What truth?" I said.

  "We don't know that, do we? You and me haven't found it yet. We look inside, and outside for answers to these basic questions like, how will we survive?” He rolled the coin across the table. “And where do we get more Chem 1?" he added. "That's a biggie. The addiction is like being mentally sick. If we don't have our medicine, we start, well, obviously seeing stuff and our thinking changes. But I guess it’s more like a pain we feel."

  "So it does hurt?" I asked.

  "Hell yes, it hurts. Your body feels dead," he said. "Cold and lifeless, and your mind perceives it that way. You could do almost anything for a re-up."

  I thought about how the body and mind could feel dead. I had always thought that I would die when I lost willpower, and when didn't want to live anymore that's when the clock would start ticking. I occasionally worried about this and it made me very nervous sometimes. I would try to reinvigorate myself, or heal whatever life essence gave me the power to survive. By managing my perception of myself and trying to get a grip on what risks I was taking at any given moment, things felt safer. The thoughts of being in danger were what confused me. Right then the risk felt pretty high.

  "We're all going to die," he said. "The fact is you can preview death with Chem 1. It is a dead drug. We still all do it, but maybe something in the air or water makes us not feel as happy with it as we once did."

  I wanted to say his tolerance was responsible for that, but he seemed to have the conviction that the drug itself was dying. We were both intoxicated with Chem 1 and I sat there and entertained the idea. Maybe Chem 1 had no more resources to survive. Maybe it had been alive once, and was dying. I thought, wouldn't that be a good thing? It was a horrible drug.

  In the days leading up to then, I had been hallucinating sounds, the noises of men on the roof. I also felt like I was in danger although there was no apparent reason to be afraid. The stimulant effect made me feel like the superhero Batman, especially in the car where my power over myself seemed total and inhuman. When we would nearly crash the car into the carport upon returning to the house, the carport seemed like it was taking the full brunt of my power. The structure was strong, but could it withstand the missiles which followed us?

  The kids went to school in the morning, apparently unaffected by our use. I wondered if they felt like superheroes. I used to when I was a kid. Our relationship, by the time fall had ended, was entirely life-long in my mind, as if I could die at any moment and the thing that would have defined me was my girlfriend Macy and Chem 1.

  Chapter 3

  When I awoke she gave me oatmeal, the perfect gesture. I was scared and stressed out because of the drugs. I thought her offering to cook for me was very kind.

  The marriage was tonight. She said Smith and Angie would be anointed by the archetype Iris after she fitted Angie’s dress. I was completely interested and gave her my enthralled look but could not say much.

  I discovered that night by listening to their conversations that a marriage was a special thing which linked two souls together when they were wed properly. Her children already seemed to know this. The scary part was that two people could be married or linked without them knowing. While this marriage would be unofficial it was special because Macy and her posse knew the correct ritual. And it was extra special because someone called Iris was coming.

  I waited all day for her to finish the dress so that I could get attention from her. She was extremely distracted. Maybe I was her toy, I thought. She was much older than I was and I certainly couldn't be a father. I waited that day for a confirmation that we should continue dating, even though I did love her. The occasion of the marriage eventually bored me even with the mysterious promise of Iris. I asked her who was Iris.

  She said I might find out if I paid attention. That was a little disappointing considering we hadn't had sex for days and I felt intimidated by Smith and Angie. The children were making fun of me. I felt like one of her kids.

  I've never been a religious person but these two certainly practiced a form of worship. They seemed extremely devoted to the ritual and completely serious about their marriage even though it wasn't legal. Macy explained that it was an act, for all of them and I understood because of the Chem 1. In fact this entire household seemed like a bizarre carnival because of that drug. It made us child-like and weird, especially the veterans who needed it apparently to survive. Several hours before the scheduled wedding, a visitor came who appeared to be extremely strong and I was afraid again.

  He said he had heard that Mika was here. Macy said that he didn't live here. I thought; ‘why not tell him where he lives?’ But that was the nature of Chem 1. It made us paranoid. Everyone was a potential threat. She saw the man out and I learned later that he was a good guy, but didn't do the same drugs as us. In fact he was a captain. His name was Jerry and he was on a different team.

  Smith and Angie were bonded in marital ceremony at around 7:00. I sat and watched with the kids. I respected the newlyweds’ fervor but was somewhat alarmed when Macy asked me to com
e forward before they said their vows. I lurched upward, being high, and tried to pretend to hurt myself. I was having a tough time with all my doubt. However, she asked me to anoint their marriage myself by wishing them well with all my heart for I was blessed by Iris and could do his bidding.

  I stepped forward and said nothing. Their laser eyes waited for me and I twisted my body away from them. My head turned towards the ceiling for a few seconds until I finally uttered, "I bless your marriage with all of my heart. I hope you find happiness in your partnership." Macy was extremely pleased.

  During the after party which made me feel small and rodent-like I started watching her for clues about what had happened and also for cameras. It must have been a symptom of the intoxication. I really wanted out of this situation but couldn't tell Macy because I still was attracted to her. Did she like this drawing? Yes, very much. But I was one of her kids, not her lover. I became curious about the huge man asking for our captain and planned to go see him sometime. It had seemed like he was riding on a missile, the energy he carried was so strong. When I fell asleep, I dreamed of robots because that's what the children were watching on television. I really was just one of them.

  When I awoke she gave me oatmeal, the perfect gesture. I was scared and stressed out because of the drugs. I thought her offering to cook for me was very kind.

  The marriage was tonight. She said Smith and Angie would be anointed by the archetype Iris after she fitted Angie’s dress. I was completely interested and gave her my enthralled look but could not say much.

  I discovered that night by listening to their conversations that a marriage was a special thing which linked two souls together when they were wed properly. Her children already seemed to know this. The scary part was that two people could be married or linked without them knowing. While this marriage would be unofficial it was special because Macy and her posse knew the correct ritual. And it was extra special because someone called Iris was coming.

  I waited all day for her to finish the dress so that I could get attention from her. She was extremely distracted. Maybe I was her toy, I thought. She was much older than I was and I certainly couldn't be a father. I waited that day for a confirmation that we should continue dating, even though I did love her. The occasion of the marriage eventually bored me even with the mysterious promise of Iris. I asked her who was Iris.