Helen Zuman - Mating in Captivity - A Memoir

They dropped me at a gas station, where I met two young men who said I could spend the night in their spare room, a short walk from the Tecumseh road. They were kind, high, solicitous. Incensed by Alvin’s trespass.

Alone in the dark, plagued by waking nightmares of scaly predators stealing in from the hall or out from under the bed, I studied the assault through the warped lens of psychic cause and effect.

Why had I wanted it?

Had I regressed to hunting forced touch after half a summer starved of sex, among friends?

Or was I hot to shock myself back to Zendik? In the weeks since Arol’s ultimatum, I had not wanted to call the Farm and beg another chance. But oh, how I’d wanted to want to. How I wanted that now.

I’d heard Arol say that people didn’t change when they went out; at best, they grew more desperate to flee the Deathculture. Perhaps my corruption ran so deep that I would never return out of zeal for Zendik’s crusade to save the world, or hope for Friendship unto Love. Perhaps I’d required a threat to my survival.

The assault, I decided, bore a warning: head back or risk death.

I arrived at East Wind primed for signs of decay.

In the morning, making guacamole for the commune’s lunch, I discovered that most of the avocados in the walk-in were rotten. Then, hiding out in the visitors’ kitchen, I found ants parading bits of amaranth flake over the lip of a box left open. Finally, on a tour of the nut-butter factory, my guide—a shirtless hippie with the taut paunch and scarlet flush of a hard drinker—highlighted the residue griming the production line. He said I could help deep-clean the factory’s machinery over the weekend, if I wanted to.

I didn’t want to. I couldn’t grasp wanting to. How could such a task be attractive to anyone ? (Was that where the hard drinking came in?) I saw the machinery—unless it attracted an ant army—going uncleaned.

I had other scrubbing to do. The assault lay like a smudge on my breast, a sooty clutch print. I needed a woman to talk to. I needed help to wash it off.

Back at the visitors’ house, I repaired to the living room and sank into the worn armchair by the phone. I did not call the Farm. I called my mother, collect, and poured out my story, sobbing afresh. As she listened with warm concern, the mark started to fade. Some of my vigor returned.

Maybe I was strong enough to make that other call.

Maybe I was ready to break my neck for Zendik.

Early the next morning, I climbed down from my sleeping loft and marched, heart pounding, to the phone. It was Saturday, August 31. Soon, more seekers would arrive. For now, the house was still.

I lifted the receiver and pressed the eleven digits that would link me to Zendik.

The phone rang. Once. Twice. Three times. Then, the thwip of a receiver lifting. A voice—throaty, unmistakable—I was not prepared to hear.

“Hello?”

“Hi, this is Helen. Is Lysis there?”

A dry snort. “Lysis? What? This is Arol. You wanna come back, you gotta go through me .”

“I do want to come back,” I said, voice cracking. “I want to be a Zendik.” I knew not to mention the assault or recap my absence. Arol didn’t care what had prompted my call.

She breathed, waited a beat. “I don’t think you’d fit in here. Since you left, we’ve been getting closer. Building kickass relationships. All of us. You wanna run your own show.”

“Please,” I pled, through tears. “Please. I just want one more chance.”

My sobs turned to ragged gasps. I slumped forward and stared at my feet. An ant approached my bare toes.

Arol took another breath.

“Okay. One more chance,” she said.

My mother agreed to wire money for a bus ticket. Sure, she might have preferred to pay my fare to New York—but she’d settle for sparing herself more stories like the one she’d heard the day before.

On the bus that afternoon, forehead pressed to a fogged pane, I imagined the end I might have met, had I succumbed to the Deathculture. In my vision, I crawled back to Alvin, for round after round of ever more brutal abuse. I died a battered hag, keening through chipped teeth as a broomstick cracked against my crown.

With this strand of fantasy, I sought to squeeze the last gasp from my desire to mate in the wild.

On another bus, a couple years earlier—returning to Zendik from my visit to Brooklyn—I’d dreamed that I’d dumped Kro for a lean, flint-jawed man, singed with rage and danger, and that Kro had chided me with a wistful plea: “Didn’t you know I offered you a friendship, Helen?” I wondered now: Could I have sidestepped Alvin, could I have bypassed this stretch as an outcast, if I’d stuck with the first Zendik who’d wooed me? Had I been wrong to seek spark and warmth in a single flame?

By morning I was just twenty miles east of the Farm, waiting for a Zendik to retrieve me from Spindale. As a half hour stretched to one hour, then two, I wondered if I would need to surrender what little cash I had to Discount Taxi—and recalled my four-hour wait for a ride from the Hendersonville bus stop, in October 1999. That time, I’d believed the delay had nothing to do with me.

This time, I knew better.

THE STORY THAT I WOULD DIE if I couldn’t be a Zendik had thrust me back to the Farm.

Could it power me through the immune response roused by my return?

I idled at the end of a long butcher block in the Farm’s new kitchen, craving recognition. This kitchen, nearly complete when I’d left, had shifted into service while I’d been gone. It stood uphill from the Farmhouse and across from the Addition. Morning sun poured through enormous windows, stretching toward a soaring ceiling. I had not crawled under a counter. Yet the dozen Zendiks at work nearby—dusting glassware, clearing breakfast, straining cheese—seemed not to see me.

Maybe they awaited word of what to see.

A door banged. I turned toward it. Arol advanced through the pantry, Prophet at her back. She stopped at the doorsill and pushed her palms against the jambs. Her silver hair spilled past the rim of her shimmering robe.

I folded my arms over my chest and ground my heel against a ridge in the flagstone floor. Her lips twisted into a grimace. “ That was quick.”

I nodded. I had traveled fast. This I took as psychic proof that I’d been right to come back. But Arol seemed to be casting me as an intruder who’d dashed through a gate left unlatched by mistake.

“You look good,” she continued, stepping toward me and passing a hand, aslant, across her face. “Kind of clear and open. Like you’ve been going through it.”

I nodded again, letting myself hope, for a moment, that we agreed: I’d gone out so I could love Zendik better. Clear myself for full surrender.

“Won’t last, though.” She chuckled. “Knowing you, you’ll be fucked up and shut down in no time.”

Prophet stepped forward and squeezed her shoulder. I forced a weak smile—as if mimicking her amusement might mark me as self. Assure her we belonged to one body.

She was not assured.

The next day, after lunch, the body attacked.

Prophet and Zar commanded armchairs flanking the door from the living room out to the porch. The rest of the group—save Arol and the kids—filled the couches, the other chairs, the floor. I huddled on the rug a few feet from Prophet. No one had told me the goal of the meeting. No one would meet my eyes.

I folded my legs and pressed my elbows against my knees. I studied the rug. I looked up.

Prophet tugged at his goatee. Outside, a peahen squawked. A peacock answered. He stilled the crowd with a nod.