Chris Jordan - Torn

Shane learns a little more about the process when, as promised, the doors to Profit Hall close at 8:00 a.m. precisely. He’s been expecting something like a grand cathedral, or at the very least a modern auditorium. But it turns out there’s more than one assembly hall in the complex, and the thirty or so new recruits have been confined to a relatively small theater equipped with a variation on stadium seating. The difference being that each seat is separated from the next by cubicle-height walls.

You enter in a group, but experience the seminar alone, as an individual. All of the group watching the same images on a big central screen, but listening to the audio part on individual headphones, so that the voices seem to be speaking to you alone.

Pretty clever, Shane admits to himself. The tension between individual and group being part of the whole Ruler spiel. Which begins in total darkness with a lush, swelling soundtrack-he’s put in mind of Holst’s The Planets as interpreted by John Williams of Star Wars fame. The first image is of the famous cover of The Rule of One, some thirty feet high on the screen. Size alone makes it appear totemic, important. Next there’s a clever, almost dizzy dissolve into the author photo, and then the viewer seems to break through into a neatly ordered study or library, and Shane finds himself in the presence of Arthur Conklin himself.

Conklin is somewhat older that the author photo on the original book, but he can’t be more than sixty, so the seminar had to have been recorded more than twenty years ago. And yet it has a convincing ‘live’ feel, as if Professor Conklin were in a nearby studio. The video quality is uncanny-no scratches or static or faded colors to give away its true age-and seems to have been somehow rendered in high definition, although surely HD didn’t exist when this particular lecture was recorded.

Shane gives the production values an A+ and wonders if Industrial Light & Magic had a hand in refreshing the imagery. If not ILM, then some entity with a similar skill set. But what really seals the deal is the audio part of the experience. Conklin’s book might be difficult to comprehend, but the man himself knows how to talk. He has an attractive voice in the middle register, neither so low as to drone, nor so high as to whine. It’s a perfect FM radio voice, well modulated and compelling, and it makes you want to listen and learn as Arthur recounts his early years. His struggles to improve himself both physically and mentally. His confusion as to the motivations of human behavior. The long years he spent away from the human sphere by recording the orderly patterned behaviors of the insect world-specifically ants and honeybees-on-screen are some remarkable film clips of ants and bees toiling away-and ultimately his discovery that the human brain can be rewired by a process he calls ‘deep thinking.’ Before his brilliant, charismatic new friend Arthur can explain about ‘deep thinking,’ the lecture pauses for a lunch break.

Shane, who thinks of himself as impervious to sales pitches and other forms of indoctrination, is stunned to discover that nearly four hours have gone by.

How did that happen? Was it something in the pancakes, or was Arthur Conklin simply that good? And how could Shane, who has never met a self-help book he cared to finish, find the lecture so fascinating? On an intellectual as well as a gut level, Randall Shane is pretty sure of himself. He knows who he is and what he believes. At this stage of the game he has no interest in ‘rewiring his brain’ or ‘evolving to the next level.’ He’s comfortable in his own shoes, as it were. And yet he had listened avidly to Arthur Conklin and found that after four hours of one-way conversation, some essential part of him really did want to know what ‘deep thinking’ was, and how it might affect his own powers of concentration.

Bloody hell. He’d been brainwashed, and all it had taken was one rinse cycle.

For the first couple of weeks after his father died, Noah clung to me. Physically clung to me, his arms around my legs if I happened to be standing up, snuggling up to my breast, thumb in his mouth, if I was lying down. It helped me to keep such close physical contact-I could feel how alive my son was, feel the fierceness of his small heart beating, somehow in sync with my own. We were adrift in the same powerful current of grief. In my mind Noah and I were being swept along by a great and terrible river, and people along the riverbank kept waving to us and urging us to come ashore, but we had each other and we didn’t want their comfort because it was right for us to be carried along by torrents so deep, so powerful, that they opened up canyons in the earth, eroding the world, making new landscapes of sorrow and loss.

Three days after the funeral-it had been a nightmare, getting Jed’s remains released, and seemed to have taken forever, although it was only about ten days-Noah stopped clinging and he was no longer sucking his thumb, and he said to me, “It’s really real, isn’t it? Daddy’s really gone and he’s never coming back?” I said yes, it was really real, his Daddy was really gone, and Noah thought about that for a few moments and he looked me straight in the eye-we were at the kitchen table, pushing our food around but not really eating-and he said, “Daddy wants me to grow up and be strong for you, so that’s what I’m going to do,” and there was something about his tone that made it seem he was speaking with his father’s voice, as if Jed was looking at me through our little boy’s eyes and saying goodbye, and the amazing thing is, I didn’t break down. I didn’t burst into tears. Just hearing him say that gave me so much strength and confidence that I was able to reach out and take Noah’s hand and say, “You’re already strong. You’re my superhero. But I’d rather you didn’t grow up too fast, okay? I need you to be my little boy for a while.”

After that we were okay. The emptiness was still there, of course-sleeping was especially difficult for me-but somehow we’d come ashore without me noticing, and we were both in the world again, doing what you do to get through each day.

Remembering how Noah had shown me the way, how an eight-year-old’s inner strength had far surpassed my own, makes me believe that he’ll be strong enough to keep his own mind, no matter what poison is being spread by those who want to use him. Missy keeps warning me about Evangeline, what a terrible, evil person she is. For all I know, that’s true. But what sticks in my craw is Noah’s teacher, Mrs. Delancey. That bitch! Her I know, or thought I did, and it seems to me unutterably cruel that she must have moved to Humble for no other purpose than to ingratiate herself with Noah and with me. All the while planning to steal him away.

That’s who these people are. Never forget.

Meanwhile, after the strange little man leaves us, Missy Barlow wants to show me around. I’m not kidding-the woman who helped abduct me wants to give me a tour of her house-in effect my prison-and show off all the cool stuff she and her weirdo husband have accumulated.

“The design had to be approved by the Ruler council, of course, but Eldon really did most of the design thinking himself.”

‘Design thinking,’ it turns out, is when you think of something-in this case a Really Rich Ski Lodge-and then hire someone who actually designs it. In Missy’s world, apparently, buying the Mona Lisa is the same as painting it. That sounds crazy, but I’m not about to defend her sanity. It’s as if her life is unraveling, and she thinks if she talks fast enough the trend will reverse itself. You don’t go from being a successful, law-abiding citizen to a felon-in-hiding without it having some pretty strong effects on your mental status. And who knows, maybe she was always a few bricks shy of a load, as Jed liked to say.