Smoke

man with slicked-back hair, wearing creased jeans, a faux leather jacket and matching loafers, laughed nervously as he tried to make conversation with a pretty black woman.

Lydia stood off to the side, leaning against a maple tree and listening to the quiet conversations that cropped up between strangers waiting for a common event. People seemed nervous, excited, tentative. She had to wonder why they’d come here. What were they seeking? Her eyes fell on the thin girl with the bad skin. The girl hunched her shoulders in, stood away from the crowd. She seemed sad and tired. It was contagious; Lydia started to feel that way, too.

After a while, a willowy woman in the white tunic and blue jeans Lydia had seen on the website opened the large wooden doors and people filed inside. Lydia lingered outside awhile, moving behind the tree. She wanted to be among the last to enter and sit toward the back. She hoped that her baseball hat and wire-rimmed glasses would keep anyone from recognizing her, though Jeffrey had been skeptical. He’d given up the argument and they’d parted angry with each other.

She hung back with the smokers and entered with the last of the people to walk through the door. They walked through the foyer and Lydia chose a seat as close to the door as possible, gratified that no one seemed to notice her. She had a row to herself and watched as people took tea from an urn on a table off to the side, dumping packs of sugar and creamer into their paper cups. People chattered a little at first, then grew silent. A definite tension built as people waited, started to get impatient.

“You’re here because you want to change your life,” said Trevor Rhames loudly as he entered the room from an unseen door to the side. “But you don’t know how.

“People always think it’s the things they don’t have that are making them unhappy. ‘If I can just get this, or buy that, or have that, then finally I’ll achieve real peace and joy.’ What they don’t realize is that it’s leaving things behind, wanting less that is the secret to true happiness.”

Trevor Rhames spoke quietly but his voice resonated with authority. He was short and stocky, his hair just a shadow on his shaved head, but there was a powerful bearing to him. His eyes were ice blue, pale and dramatic. They demanded. He wore black jeans and a black cotton shirt open at the chest, heavy leather boots. An unlikely getup for a preacher. He paced the front of the room slowly, picking a pair of eyes from the crowd and then focusing on that person for a while, as if he were speaking directly to him.

“It is when we abandon materialism and vanity, worry less about what kind of car we drive and how much we weigh, that we open our minds to the Universe, to the thing religion calls God. God is everywhere, all around us; he is the ground beneath our feet, the sky above us, and the trees around us. He is us. All we have to do is recognize him.”

He was a supernova. His energy filled the room and sucked everything else out. Even Lydia, who’d come for very different reasons than the other people gathered, felt his power. How powerful would he seem if you were lost, in pain, not sure of anything about yourself and your life? she wondered. How powerful had he seemed to Mickey? To Lily?

He was not a handsome man. His jaw was too big, his nose crooked. The stubble on his face made him look unkempt instead of rugged. A scar ran from behind his ear down the side of his neck and disappeared into the collar of his shirt. His boots added about an inch of height and he was still short. And yet Lydia could see how women might find him attractive. There was a pull to him, like the riptide in a violent sea. She was not immune to it; she felt the tug in spite of her intellectual perspective on it.

He went on and she settled into her seat in the back of the room. The people around her seemed rapt, hanging on his every word. She noticed something then, that many of them were holding and were sipping from or had placed beside them a paper cup. She scanned the large room, an auditorium with a brightly lit stage and rows of soft, large, comfortable seats. The construction was new, she could smell the leather of the seats around her, the paint on the walls. On a table to the side of the room was a stack of paper cups, an urn with a sign: TEA. She remembered what Dax had said about the woman he met earlier handing him a cup and his instinct not to drink from it.

“What they don’t want you to know,” he said loudly, startling her from her thoughts, “is that the media purposely, perpetually keeps you in a state of self-hatred so that you will continue to consume.”

He raised his hands and came to stop in front of a woman in the front row. Lydia was too far back to see her; she could only see a head of dyed blonde hair.

“ ‘I’m too fat,’ you think to yourself,” he said, looking down at her. “ ‘Yes, you are,’ says the media. ‘Buy this and you’ll look better, feel better, be better. But then have this cheeseburger; you deserve it!’ ” He shook his head in disdain, and then gave the audience a warm, sympathetic smile. He walked up and down the aisle in front of the seats.

“You have wrinkles or your breasts are too small or you’re losing your hair or whatever it is someone else has told you is wrong with you. But don’t worry. They have a remedy for everything-for the right price.” He paused here, looking around at the crowd. Lydia found herself shrinking down in her seat. She didn’t want Rhames to see her face.

“What they don’t want you to know is that you are exactly the way God intended you and any value or devaluing associated with your appearance or your station in life is man-made. It’s not organic, not real. It’s an illusion created to keep you buying into a system that wants to enslave you, keep you working at a job you hate, hating yourself, buying what they say will make it all better over and over again until you die.”

He paused again, again looking from face to face.

“There’s another way,” he said. He’d lowered his voice to a whisper and Lydia watched as people unconsciously leaned forward. “I am offering you a New Day.”

He put his hand out to a woman in the audience and when she took it, he gently pulled her in front of the crowd. She was an average-looking woman, her dry, curly hair clearly color damaged. She wore the formless clothing of someone insecure about her body, a cardigan sweater, a long, full skirt. She wore a heavy mask of makeup. In the bright spotlight that shone on the front of the room it looked pink and cakey. She looked around the room, obviously wishing she could sink into the ground.

“When I look at you,” he said, “I see what they’ve sold you. This color in your hair, these clothes to hide a body you think is substandard, this paint to hide a face you don’t want to see when you look in the mirror. But I also see you.”

The woman started to tear, put a hand to her mouth. “You’re beautiful,” he told her. “You don’t need to hide from me.”

He embraced her then and she started to sob. She could hear other women in the audience start to sniffle. One man got up and left. No one tried to stop him; he was shaking his head skeptically as he stalked past Lydia. She noticed that he didn’t have a cup.

All the people in here had come because they were in pain; there was no other reason to join a group like this, no reason to come here. Lydia would bet that on the meta-tags of the New Day website, they’d listed words like “depression,” “despair,” “loneliness,”… maybe even things like “weight loss” or “hair loss.” So that anyone searching for those words on the Internet might find a link to The New Day. She glanced at her watch and wondered whether Dax and Jeffrey were in place.

“In this New Day,” Rhames went on, “you work for the betterment of yourself and for the world around you, not for the profit of some corporate giant. You spend your free time getting to know God by getting to know yourself, cleansing yourself of the poisons you’ve been fed since before you were old enough to even know what was happening to you. Imagine a life free from addiction, anxiety, depression, bad relationships, dead-end jobs, and financial worry.

“Imagine,” he said, a wide smile splitting his face. “Imagine a New Day.”

As Rhames continued his spiel, Lydia waited for him to turn his back for a second, then slipped from the darkened room into the hallway. She stood there for a moment, looked around her as if lost and trying to orient herself. She looked for cameras, waited for some tunic-clad hippie to arrive and escort her from the building. But if there were cameras in the long hallway, she couldn’t see them. And when no one came, she made her way deeper into the building, toward the kitchen. Dax had managed to obtain an old building layout from his contact, so she had an idea which way to go, though she’d never really been good with maps.

Doors were closed; lights were dim. There was a palpable hush. The building had an air of desertion to it, like a school empty for the summer, its hallways echoing with the memory of footfalls and voices. Lydia walked quickly,