A short story
At the age of fifteen I was ready for my life to be over. I seemed only to exist, rather than live, in a carpeted semi-detached house on the edge of a new town. My family were strangers of different ages who just happened to occupy the same building and talk about the same weather.
My brothers were older. One was sporty and left home to play for a city football team. The other liked Latin and disappeared into academia. I was studious myself, spending free moments reading old Russian novels in the library, and dreaming of my own escape. Late at night, in an effort to feel alive as I sat in bed, I would use scissors to cut deep scars into my arms and legs. My parents liked to tell people I was ‘not a happy bunny.’
I watched the news, read the papers. As the millennium passed, Doomsday cults dominoed through the headlines. The antics of one cult prompted a reminisce of another, and I read everything I could about Heaven’s Gate, Waco, Jonestown. Reporters fretted over the fatalities but I preferred to read about all the things these groups offered: visions, transcendence, oblivion.
I began to feel excited about the future. I wasted no time in making plans: I was writing applications for temping agencies in the capital before I’d even got my final grades. Then a letter arrived one day, offering me work filing records in a solicitor’s office. Nobody raised objections when I left for the city.
I took a bunk bed in a hostel teeming with aimless backpackers and began my working life. The office manager held me to a high standard of efficiency that I met with ease. He was a business-like man and seemed to regard me as a kindred spirit, offering me a contract after a few weeks.
My real energies were spent seeking out the kind of family I could choose. In my empty hours I travelled deep into the city where the occult bookshops were, and collected addresses from the scraps of paper stuck inside their windows. It seemed the cults I hoped to find were shy to declare themselves.
I learned to make enquiries with organisations that called themselves foundations, or centres, or ashrams, and I didn’t let the little feints and euphemisms in the adverts put me off. I wanted the real deal: to give up my responsibilities, my life and my name. I paid close attention to the name element. If a sect lets you keep the word your parents attached to you, that’s a pretty cheap con. My parents had named me Abigail. I wanted nothing to do with the life that they had imagined Abigail would lead. I wanted to hurt Abigail and leave her dead.
I made Abigail’s life into a carousel of experiences. I would rise early for yoga classes led by a fervid acolyte of Shiva. In the evenings I tried devotional music, watching Sufi mystics twirling in a community centre, or quasi-Buddhist gong baths at a local chapel; at the weekend I spent hours at a gurdwara, letting the droning prayers of kirtans wash over me. I tried crystal healing step-programmes, the Church of Latter Day Saints, and Scientology. The most promising leads charged membership rates I couldn’t afford. The joyful, low-cost ecstasy of the Hari Krishnas appealed, but their curried-pasta-mulch food was inedible.
One early foray was with Alcoholics Anonymous. I loved the self-disclosure of that night, the agonising climbs toward redemption, the backsliding, the strangers weeping. My only addiction was to emotionally heightened atmospheres, but I knew I was on the right path.
The next hope was a group of anarchists devoted to preventing the construction of a new airport runway. They lived near the enemy airport in a rudimentary camp and I travelled to the end of a train line twice to attend their open meetings. All ten of the core organisers were under police surveillance for prior offences sabotaging aeroplanes. No-one there used plausible Anglo-Saxon names, instead favouring simple, violent nicknames like Crunch and Spanner. I noted their inventive piercings, their weighty metal tools for damaging aeroplanes, the pride they had in their work. The anarchists weren’t just fretful about imperialism and global warming, though. In the first meeting two rivals began denouncing each other as undercover cops. By the second meeting they turned on me; I was unknown, I was unseasoned, and I was watchful. One of the rivals turned to me and hissed: ‘and who are you spying for, little girl?’ and so I left.
In the end the cult I chose was both classic and unusual. A yogi in my class had mentioned the teacher in reverent tones. The teacher! He was an aged South African Indian man. His ancestors were Rajasthani, but he’d been born in colonial South Africa. During the apartheid years he had united Indian residents in a peaceful resistance to the regime. They fell into disarray after revolutionaries accused them of colluding with the Afrikaans, and after that he’d spent his later years in contemplation, holding silent retreats. He had been silent himself for twenty-five years. He was in the city to make final preparations for his return to South Africa, to the desert village where he had been raised. I learned that he was taking his students with him; I wanted to be one of them.
I attended one of his ten day retreats, sitting with the others in the stillness, letting a crackling and aging recording of the teacher’s soft voice guide my breath and my thoughts. ‘Permit yourself to become what is around you,’ he counselled. ‘Part ways with the old self. Be at peace with the space left behind.’ I imagined the air in South Africa, dried out with heat, and felt a thrill at how little I knew about the future. The day after the retreat ended I chose not to go back to work. I went straight to the centre where the teacher was residing and made my petition. I remember the quiet street, and the renewing rain that fell that day, blessing me as I reached the stone-fronted hall.
I waited for hours, watching people come and go, before I was granted a private audience with him. We spent the time in silent observation of the other. There was an exchange. His eyes black and bright. I knew I was capable, young, focused. And he knew he offered sanctuary, adventure, meaning. I agreed to follow him. He agreed to let me.
We travelled the hard way, by sea. The month of oceangoing made it a pilgrimage, a salted preparation for life in the remote village. The ship was where I got to know Rebecca, the only acolyte younger than even me. We looked out for each other as we got to know the older men and women. They didn’t show much interest in us, dazed as they were by the teacher. By the second week on the ship my mind narrowed down to a flat horizon, the clinking of metal below decks, the fug of diesel air.
The port was chaotic. We were the only white people there and I could feel the local stevedores staring. My sweating, pinkening skin embarrassed me. Abigail’s skin. I was glad to leave.
We took a bus inland to a sparsely populated town coated in red dust, not much more than an outpost for local herdsmen and the occasional passing geologist. There we found a mechanic who shruggingly sold us his flatbed truck. We crammed into it and arrived at the teacher’s village, amid blooms of the dust that quickly coated every part of our lives.
The village was empty. All that was left were remnants of an adobe church, adobe huts, and the oasis that had inspired this settlement in a desert. The Catholics who had employed the teacher’s family all those decades ago had moved away into the cities after a biblical flood. Their trees still stood: dates, palms, figs. Beyond them were vast flats of red earth. Further out, there were spiny monongo trees, beloved by locals for their rich fruit. Beyond those were shimmering red hills and the orange river; beyond that, the land of the San people, a tribe of hunter-gatherers that the teacher appeared indifferent to.
We were a small group to begin with, all keen to prove our industrious qualities. We were clumsy though, our skin burning and peeling beneath the sun. The teacher sat beneath a palm, aware and radiant. The men repaired adobe walls and hauled water from the oasis. The women wove thatch from palm leaves and prepared food. One of the younger men, an eager-to-please boy named Salvador, taught me how to drive the truck. We went to the town market for sacks of rice, chickens and a few sheep and goats to milk.
Once established, our group aimed for subsistence, gleaning tips from a battered colonial-era field study of the district. We harvested dates and figs, and foraged for the prized mongongo nuts. We milked the goats and hand-sheared the sheep, weaving woollen bed mats and blankets for the cold desert nights. We became leaner and more concentrated as our questions about life simplified into tasks.
New acolytes arrived. We were one hundred strong when the first rainy season came. We needed more rice, more looms, more petrol: more than we could afford. Though we were frugal, money was seen as unspiritual, menial even. I volunteered to take care of the accounts and the supply runs.
The heavy rains revealed the land’s secret wealth: beautiful semi-precious stones were washed clean in rivulets of water. We began to gather them, and then to dig for them. Soon the village was full of treasures – lumps of marbled jasper, deep-green malachite, and translucent rose quartz. I encouraged everyone to mine the gems wherever they could. We hoarded them, carved them into shapes, and buffed them up to a fine shine.
The hard part was finding buyers for our new cottage industry. We amassed a considerable store of gems before deciding what to do with them. No one wanted to have the new grooves of their lives roughed over by commerce. But I was ready to get my hands dirty: one day I asked the teacher for permission to go to the town and begin our enterprise. He made no visible objection.
On that first trip I located the library and its computer terminal. I wasted no time in using it to put our little crystal business on the world wide web. It was early days for such things, and we went into the wholesale market, supplying faraway museums and New Age shops of all kinds.
I was making things happen for us, but back in the village I took care to remain quiet about the business. To talk of it was to be reminded that we weren’t renouncing everything, not really. Even so, on cool dawn mornings, with the teacher sitting by, working with the stones had an unexpectedly holy feeling to it. A hundred heads bowed in concentration around him. We prayed over the gems as we polished them, then sent them away on unseen journeys.
Twelve moons after our arrival, on a chilly morning set aside for stoneworking, the teacher gave us our new names. We had settled at our places when he raised one hand and gestured for us to listen. Slowly, he bent forward to pick up something from among the heap at his feet: a single, glistening black stone. He held it up and gestured to me with his other hand. I sprang to my feet to receive it. A piece of inky black glass, cool in my hand; Onyx.
‘He is giving us our names!’ I reported back to the others, who sat motionless before me. The words came to me without difficulty. ‘These names come from the land! And our labour! They reflect the abundance of the desert he has brought us to.’
‘My name,’ and I paused to take it in, ‘is Onyx.’ I turned back to him, questioning, and he nodded a little, smiled a little beneath his beard. His eyes met mine and I was transported: our surface divisions fell away, and his kind presence was in everything around me. It was the first time I felt real. Abigail was dead, without me needing to kill her.
The ceremony went on all morning. Rebecca became Agate. I thought it a good match, as she had such blue eyes. Then there was a Selenite, a Topaz. A younger Jasper, an elder Jasper. There were whispers among the group, and I felt their regard for me shift. They were listening to me.
We repeated the ceremony for all newcomers after that day. A baby born after we arrived in the village was nameless for her first twelve moons, after which she was named Peridot.
Agate and I became closer after our names were given to us. She confided that her deepest fear was becoming like the woman who named her Rebecca. Agate’s mother raised her to believe she was stupid and ugly, and also to feel responsible for her father leaving. ‘You poisoned the well,’ was how her mother put it. She was sixteen when she ran away, preferring to fend for herself in hostels until she heard of the teacher.
When Agate told me about her mother, she cried and I held her. I was glad to help—my own fear was to be superfluous. I helped how I could, finding Agate a role in the village resolving disputes, holding healing rituals. She brought everyone deeper into being together. We were becoming a society of our own, and I began to feel truly at home for the first time.
The only time Agate troubled me was on a dragging, dusty day, when I was busy weaving. She approached me to talk, even though I was trying to retain the devotional manner that gave the work meaning. She had become confident, I could tell.
‘I’ve had a vision, Onyx,’ she began. ‘I was walking along a path, and you were there too, and you showed me the way. It was very beautiful.’
I nodded, impatient.
‘So you’ve probably realised by now, since dream-you already knew.’
She was laughing. I tried to stay focused on the warp and the weft.
‘I’m meant to share my gift, as a healer. People really need help, all the ones out there.’ She was vaguely gesturing at the plains to the north, her voice breathy with excitement. ‘I think, I think there is work for me to do back home.’
She waited for me to reply, squinting at me under the midday sun.
I knew the teacher would expect me to be firm. ‘Your place is here,’ I said. ‘You are needed here. Your rituals have no relevance outside of the teacher’s way. You know that.’
She seemed to take it badly, accusing me of being no different from her mother.
I reminded her that it wasn’t always easy to stay with the teacher. I’d learned that myself the hard way. Salvador was to blame. In those first weeks in the village we’d become close. Then I had permitted him to become foolish and before long I’d become pregnant. I couldn’t be a mother, my duties to the teacher couldn’t be handicapped by child-rearing; before the teacher could find out I poisoned my womb using a preparation of sap from the firestick shrub, so toxic that it burns skin on contact. I lost the baby, at a cost to my health. Salvador nursed me through the fever, but when I said why I had caused it, his eyes became staring and unresponsive. He started saying ‘no no no’ and dragged me from where I lay, out into the village clearing. People crowded around, concerned, and then he started screeching, claiming I was a goddess of death incarnate.
In the end everyone chose to subdue Salvador. He seemed to have gone mad. I was carried to the teacher, and I asked him for permission to exile Salvador from the village. He had meditated deeply and his grave face told me everything I needed to know: to keep the peace, Salvador must go. Everyone looked on in silence as I informed him of the teacher’s wishes. He cursed me as a witch and evil-doer, but he gave way as I knew he would. He set off along the track towards the town, yelling and stumbling. The teacher had been wise. Salvador had unsettled everyone. In time I was able to recover, and go about my duties; they did the same. Our simple and spiritual life went on, exactly as it had before.
I expect Agate chose to stay for the same reasons I did. One of the attractions of togetherness is that we all tend to feel the same way, eventually. Those who feel differently take the other path – they leave the village and our memories. I’ve become skilled at letting go of those defectors in my meditations. Inhale, exhale. They no longer concern me, and neither does death. I feel like a kept promise.
We had been happily settled for seven rainy seasons when the teacher took to walking out onto the barren red land, alone. On that first day, we watched with some alarm. It was a strange departure from his usual stillness, but he never paused, disappearing slowly into the haze of the day. Many long hours later he returned, smiling into his beard. He walked out again the next day, and the next. I ensured that everyone kept up the village routines, but my mind tried to follow him over the horizon.
Three moons after his first walk he stopped coming back. I went to his sleeping mat to look for clues. He had left a note in wavering, unpractised handwriting that said: ‘bring provisions. full moon. the caves.’ Those words made me cry with joy. For the first time in years he had issued a message. A message just for me.
Since I found that note six moons ago, I have had new duties. When the time is right, I gather everyone at dawn to pray over an urn of water and a basket filled with dates and mongongo nuts. Then I alone carry these across the beating hot plain. The red hills are on the other side. At first it took me a whole day to discover his cave beneath a craggy outcrop, but now I can reach him at moonrise, as the dew gathers. He sits there, skeletal now, wearing a blanket we wove him. He picks at dates. Bats come and go, and insects move across his papery skin. I return to the village with dawn behind me.
I’m not a sentimental person. I don’t miss people. My family, for instance, are shapeless memories. But sometimes when I am on the grimy computer in the baking library I search for names online. Former acolytes. Old names, new names. Salvador, who never received a name from the teacher, has no presence: his old name brings up unfamiliar faces, other men who led different lives to his. I do find others, the defectors. They look different: fatter, whiter, shinier, less astringent than I am used to. They all seem to grin in their pictures. Some hold babies, or smiling children. At times I wonder what the defectors could be doing with their lives, far beyond the teacher’s reach. I think of the businesslike man who had employed me. He is grinning in his online pictures, too.
I search for my names, old and new, and nothing in the results mirrors me. I think of Onyx, turning the word over in my mind, feeling the weight and texture of it. A heavy gleam of black, smooth and contained. I am so light now. My name is the ballast that keeps me in place.
The grain stores caught fire last summer and Peridot had been too close. We saved her from the flames but her right side was left blackened and skinless. After two days, she caught an infection and died, aged six.
Everything relating to Peridot’s end was improvised and inadequate. We hadn’t healed her injuries. We had not established funerary rites. We had no way of bringing the teacher back to the village before her body began to rot. In the end I wrapped her in a white cloth and burnt her out on the salt flats. Nobody spoke afterwards. It took a long time, and smelt powerfully of meat, and I stoked the fire when it threatened to go out. The others watched from a distance. Peridot’s mother made strangled noises. After the thing was done nobody spoke. In the days that followed our habitual silence became more rigid. They have grieved enough now to chatter and laugh again, except when I am near.
A few days ago Agate left without saying a word to me. She just wrapped some supplies into a cloth and set off along the road without looking back. I tried to seem as unmoved as I usually am by defectors, but I haven’t been able to keep pace with the daily tasks since. Without her the looks from the others get more spiteful by the day.
I try to meditate and can only see the desert, shimmering and empty. I think about death goddesses, and the teacher, growing more skeletal with each passing moon. I think about Peridot and her mother’s screams, and all the work I have done. I wait for a vision of where this life will lead me.
Yesterday I went back to the town library. I searched for my old name again, and looked carefully at the women living parallel lives: artists, CEOs, an estate agent in America. Women who have ambitions of their own. It is time to tell the teacher I am ready to leave.
I wait until the moon is full and walk out to him in the darkness. He is almost deaf now and hardly able to see. I feel a wave of disgust for him, his dependency on me, his unwavering belief in his life of renunciation. He led me here and I am sick of following. This time I sit before him and tell him I won’t be coming back.
His lined face is moonlit. His toothless mouth moves soundlessly. His once-dark eyes have turned deathly pale, almost white. He raises his hand a little, near to my face. I take it and guide it to my cheek. I tell him I am the last person he will ever see. He nods his acquiescence. I am sure it was a blessing, that nod.
I’ve left him now. I walk back freed from service. Someone else can burn his remains if they find them. A breeze is running over me, and my feet feel light despite the long hours of walking. There’s the dawn, rising off the far hills. When I reach the village, I’m going to gather what I need and leave without a word. I’m going to make my own way, taking the truck, the hoard of raw crystals, and everything I’ve taught myself. I feel no debt to this strange land, or the strangers whose lives I’ve selflessly sustained.
The vision comes to me quickly now. I’ll travel overland, up through this sunlit continent, extracting knowledge of its nations’ rarer customs, and collecting its rarer gems. I’ll return to my homeland and stake a claim in the city I left. I’ll be a new prospect to the lost souls there, older than my years, steeped in experience. A wanderer, weathered and of strange provenance. I will be enterprising. This time I will deal expertly in rituals as well as gems. Everything I take with me can be used. Crystals attract seekers, and seekers need sanctuary. I’ll take them somewhere new, somewhere untapped and overwhelming. I’m ready to be found.
‘Extraction’ was published in Ossian Magazine, November 2019.
Suki Linnell 