“You fell in with Glide and the Dugpa cult, not too long after you hit L.A.,” I said. She nodded.
“They don’t call themselves a cult. Everyone just knows everybody in it,” she said. “They don’t wear robes or dance around pentagrams or anything stupid like that. Brett seemed so nice. I should have known, you’d think I would have learned. Nice-acting guys fuck you over.”
“I honestly couldn’t say,” I said, “never having been one.”
“Yeah, I can see that in you,” she said. “You feel like a door torn open in a strong wind, Ballard, an empty house, full of winter wind and spinning dead leaves. Why do you think I’m talking to you? You’ve been nodding a lot. I’m not telling you anything new, am I, nothing you haven’t seen, been through?”
“Did Glide ever tell you who ran things, who was above him in the group?”
“I’ll take that as a yes,” she said. “He never said, just the occasional hushed phone call in the hallway or outside. I sure as hell didn’t ask. By the time Brett stopped being nice, I was so strung out, I would have blown my fucking father if I was told to. I wanted to die, I was planning it. I tried a few times.” She showed me her wrists. “They always stopped me. It wouldn’t get them off for me to just OD or bleed out, no. They had my disintegration mapped out, just like the others. We were like a fucking crop to be grown, harvested.” She glanced briefly at my wrists, my scars, then looked back up at me.
“Then I found out about Garland and I just … I couldn’t let them do that to me again.” Her hand fell to her swelling belly and she caressed it. “I knew that Brett would as soon as he found out I was pregnant.”
“Dr. Thobias?” I asked. Caern nodded.
“Yeah. They either forced you into an abortion, or to carry the baby to term, and then they would take it from you. You had no say in it, either way. A lot of girls in the industry went to Thobias. He’s one of them, y’know, right? Do you smoke? I thought I smelled it on you.”
“I suspected Thobias was,” I said. I handed her a cigarette from my pack. “They took the kids and had them adopted by other Dugpa.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m pretty sure that was what happened to Brett. He said once he was adopted, said his grandfather was some kind of big guy in the group back in the sixties. I think they raised him from a baby to be so fucked up.” She tapped the cigarette against her palm and gestured for me to give her a light as she put it to her lips with slightly trembling fingers. Before I could get to my Zippo, she ran her hand over her tummy again and tossed the American Spirit down on the table. “Shit,” she said. “Never mind. Thanks, anyway.” I put the cigarettes away. “Jesus Christ, how could anyone do that to an innocent little baby? It’s … evil. The closest I ever came to seeing God was looking into Garland’s smooshed-up little face that first time.”
“It’s going to be okay,” I said. “I’m shutting them down.”
“Good luck,” she said. “You wouldn’t be the first to try. If they can’t seduce you, they’ll fucking obliterate you and everything you hold dear. They’re everywhere, hardwired into the city, into its power. I was going to kill myself and my baby before they could kill him or steal him. If Joey hadn’t been there, Garland and I wouldn’t be here now.”
“Joey and you met in the business, in the Life?”
“Yeah, he worked for Roland Blue. He was a techie on some of the movies I worked in, early on, and he was sometimes muscle for Roland to make extra money. We were friends, we weren’t even fuck-friends, just friends. We didn’t fall in love until after we got away from all that shit. Well, he loved me before, and he wanted to get me away from Brett, from Roland, from all of it. He didn’t know about the stuff with the babies, the girls being sacrificed … the … whatever the hell you want to call them—club, group, society, cult, whatever—until I told him later.
“He’s the only guy I’ve ever known that didn’t fuck me over. He loves me, loves Garland, he’s seen me at my worst, so fucking damaged and broken, hateful, sick, mean, and he still loves me, wants me, wants our baby. We’d be dead without him. He found us a local doctor to help me get off the drugs and then later, she helped us with the baby.”
“Dr. Nahn,” I said. She nodded.
“I went cold turkey in his uncle’s old beach house out in Leucadia, Garland in my belly. He never left my side. Joey’s uncle is dead, so no one knew about that old falling-apart place but Joey, so we were safe there. Joey didn’t sleep for a month after we ran. He’d sit next to us, with a gun in his lap and jump at every sound. Garland’s named for Joey’s uncle.”
“An old beach house out in Leucadia, huh?” I said. “Well that explains the cheese.”
“The what?” Caern said.
I gave her a dismissive wave.
“Nothing,” I said. “It’s not important.”
“Here,” she said, climbing off her stool, “let me show you!” She made her way to the living room, checked on Garland, and then plucked one of a dozen or so pictures off the shelves of an entertainment center and handed it to me. The picture was recent. It showed a handsome young black
