Helen Zuman - Mating in Captivity - A Memoir

Most Zendiks, including me, had a copy of “The Affirmative Life,” a paperback booklet of Wulf quotes small enough to slip in a back pocket. Each page offered either a reminder of cosmic connection (“I am the Mortal Manifestation of Infinite Mind and I carry the Great Spirit within me…”) or a whippet of metaphysical life coaching (“Dare to demand the Impossible and it becomes Possible,” “Feel the Glory of Simply Being Alive”). We treated it like an oracle, choosing a random page and trusting it to yield just the right insight.

The source material for “The Affirmative Life”—Wulf’s raps (talks) and writings on the subject—took a harsher tone than the sayings in the booklet. In a piece titled “Affirmative Living,” Wulf said, “When and if you should catch yourSelf in negative moods of any form, cease it instantly, for it is a virulent toxin and will surely sicken and kill you… . No one gets away with anything in this Life. No act of criminal negativity will go unpunished.” But I still imagined that affirmative living would lead me toward ever greater well-being and understanding. I’d yet to be charged with “criminal negativity,” shocked by Zendik’s emotional electric fence.

“To all Zendik Warriors, I place mySelf by your side as a weapon in our righteous fight to victory.”

That was it. I’d recited each word just right. The haze resolved once again into a ring of Zendiks. How thrilled I was to join my fate with theirs.

I turned to face Swan. From the heap, she plucked a necklace: an amulet strung on a slender rope of twined floss. Each amulet, hammered and soldered by two of the Zendik men, was identical: a copper Z in a brass circle. The circle-Zs, unlike the wristbands, would mark us to outsiders—set us apart in our war for a beautiful world.

Flushed with the heat of sixty beating hearts, I bent my head and stretched it forward. She looped the rope around my neck.

Kro lay on his side, head propped in his hand. I sat cross-legged, facing him, my date sheet swaddling the thin mattress he’d dragged down from the barn loft to the parking lot and installed in the back of the green van—on a busy night in mid-January, our best bet for a date space.

We’d been hanging out—in roughly these positions—for more than an hour, warmed by a heater plugged into the van’s cigarette lighter. Candlelight glinted off Kro’s circle-Z pendant and mine, reminding us that our date served a purpose higher than our own pleasure: We were Zendik Warriors. Our relationships were battlefields in the fight between Truth and Lie. Every move we made either slowed or sped humanity’s march toward ecocide.

So I was jarred, but not surprised, when Kro delivered a variation on the first lines of one of my favorite songs, the Meat Loaf ballad “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad.” Lifting his head from his hand, he said, “Look, we could talk all night. But that’s not what we’re here for. How about we get on with it?”

I nodded. I uncrossed my legs, breaking the membrane of my comfort zone.

I liked Kro and respected his intellect. He was better read, and a better writer, than most of the Zendiks. With them, I simplified my diction to fend off taunts about “big words” and “Harvard”; with him, I didn’t have to. And I appreciated the work he’d done, in the handful of Zendik philosophy classes he’d led for me and the new guys, to clarify Wulf’s murky prose.

Kro’s rapport with Wulf, as a thinker, anchored his Zendik creation myth: A decade earlier, at a taping of Wulf’s public-access TV show in Austin, Wulf had called Kro onstage and talked with him the entire half hour. That meeting had inspired Kro to quit his job as an aide at the Texas School for the Deaf and move to the Farm. He would eventually win a commission from Arol to write essays for the website on Wulf’s life and historical context—to render his legend for the layman.

Later, I would learn that Zylem, the veteran Zendik who’d taken my phone call about visiting, had woven Kro into my creation myth. I’d arrived at the Farm just three days after Kro’s thirty-fourth birthday. This synchronicity, plus our intellectual affinity, had led Zylem to suggest to Kro that he’d psychically summoned me. That he and I were meant to be.

Yet I didn’t find Kro attractive. He hunched when he walked, as if to make himself smaller; he seemed to shrink inside his tall, broad, potentially powerful body, like a shut-in confined to a few rooms of his home. His hairline, too, was receding, enlarging his already high forehead. Unlike Estero—whom I’d yet to give up on—Kro had not modeled as a child. And he was eleven years older than I was.

So why did I go on a date with him? Because he asked—he was the first Zendik to hit me up. Because he wore the royal blue wristband of the Kore and I, still with green around my wrist, was flattered by his interest. (Since his initial arrival in 1990, Kro had left the Farm twice, and twice returned; his current stint was in its third year.) Because Estero’s indifference was leaving me hungry and I was eager to try the varieties of sexual experience. Because Wulf had said, in “The Affirmative Life,” “All Power awaits your Yes.”

Wulf had also said that sex was vital to evolutionary ascent: “We fuck our way to Paradise or there is no Paradise. No one ascends to that Divine plane of Enlightenment who remains sensually censored.” Uncrossing my legs in the green van, I chose to interpret the lurch in my gut as sensual censorship and override it. I straightened my knees and stretched out beside Kro. I liked how his heft made me feel delicate.

His lips on mine tasted like a creosote bush smells—a blend of beans and incense. If Estero’s touch sizzled with electricity, Kro’s gave off the steady warmth of a woodstove. Maybe that was why I didn’t tense when he slipped my pants off and went to give me head. Ease bred pleasure. I twisted my hips in rhythm with his tongue, as it lolled and rolled and licked and tumbled. (I’d understand later, with greater experience, that Kro was that rare jewel among men: one who delighted in giving head and was exceptionally good at it.) I broke the silence I’d learned as a college student masturbating behind thin dorm walls to emit the occasional moan. And when I reached orgasm—the first good one I hadn’t given myself—I saw clouds parting in a pale sky. I’d never felt so clear, so bodily appreciated, with a man before.

In the wake of my date with Kro, I hoped the clarity I’d found with him would carry over to dates with Estero. It didn’t. I concluded I would feel it only when a man gave me his full attention—when his gaze and touch told me I was the one he desired most. Each time I saw clouds part with Kro, a fresh rain doused the torch I bore for Estero.

By late February, I’d charted enough cycles to know I couldn’t get pregnant in the first few days after my period. I’d also absorbed the Zendik imperative to “communicate”— not seeking advance feedback on your plans meant you were a “loner,” locked in the Deathculture pattern of “running your own show.” Surely, having sex for the first time was too big a leap to take on my own.

I’d need permission. Which was what I was seeking when I squeezed onto the last spot of bare floor near the front and center of the quickly filling living room, one night when I knew I wasn’t fertile and was set to get together with Kro. Just a few yards away, claiming an entire couch, sat Zar, the Family member with the power to say yes or no.

I’d tried to get cleared for sex by a woman, in a more private setting. But when I’d put my request to Rayel, in the kitchen before dinner, she’d advised me to ask Zar at the sex meeting instead. I didn’t see why she’d defer to him—she, too, wore a purple wristband—but I wasn’t about to challenge her judgment. So I recast my nerve-racking task as a chance to enact the promise of Karma’s Woodstock story: that here I could pursue sex openly, with the blessing of my community.