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Entry 8
The gods? I had been led to believe there was only one. Sometimes he was called Jesus. Sometimes the Holy Spirit. But most often just God.
Entry 8
August 12I’ve had what are called lucid dreams twice in my life: once when I was ten years old, and that first night of the retreat. These are dreams in which you awake within the dream and you know you are dreaming. It’s very unsettling at first, as you examine the dream you’re in and realize you are its stage director, its script writer, and its cinematographer. There is an unfamiliar experience of power unlike anything else you have known. Reality, such as it is, cannot be manipulated in the way a lucid dream can be. Once you have your wings, you can fly. You can sail on your imagination and decide what you want to see and experience in your dream, as well as who you want to share the stage with.
When I was ten, my grandmother died from some form of cancer the adults would not talk about. Some kind of woman’s cancer, breast or ovarian. It wasn’t until I was in my teens that my mother told me it had been metastatic breast cancer and it had consumed my grandmother within a matter of months. Aggressive, they’d called it. And uncurable in any case.
I attended the viewing and the funeral. My grandmother Antonia, whom everyone called Toni and the children called Nonny, had been a sturdy woman from a working-class background. Her death was a shock to me less from the death itself than from Nonny being felled by anything at all. Hers was a formidable presence, and she had a particular fondness for me.
But to the dream: three nights after her funeral, I relived it in exact detail. This was a dream and I knew I was the dreamer. I was able to magically appear next to one relative or another and hear what they were saying. When one of the mourners was not sufficiently sad, I made him sob at the loss of such a great woman. And then I made Nonny sit up in her casket. She called me over and we talked for several minutes while no one else seemed to see me there.
“You’re a special boy,” she told me. “Someday you will know why.”
“But I don’t want to wait,” I replied, having no idea what being special meant.
“The gods act in their own time, boy.”
The gods? I had been led to believe there was only one. Sometimes he was called Jesus. Sometimes the Holy Spirit. But most often just God.
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Entry 7
There had been no way of knowing the gender of our host, and women are just as capable of concealment as men.
August 11
We made our way to the cabins after listening to Phillip’s story—and surely it was that. Nothing about it could be remotely true. Yet it unsettled us all, at least that’s what I concluded from our silence. There was no late-night chatter before leaving, no nightcap, even if there had been one to have. (The lodge had no amenities we could see other than the dining room and two restrooms; there was nothing resembling a liquor cabinet in sight, and I found myself wishing one of us had brought a bottle or three of wine, not to make us convivial but to calm the nerves.) Phillip had remained behind, saying he needed time for his evening meditation. Given that it was a spiritual retreat I didn’t think there was anything odd about it. We all left him there and headed out from the lodge.
“Do you think any of that was true?” Larry asked.
The cabin was small enough that we could talk without raising our voices. There hadn’t been time for anyone to fall asleep, and the quiet itself added to my unease. We had all prepared for bed and gotten beneath our respective covers. I’d had the foresight to bring sweat pants and a T-shirt to sleep in—something I normally did unclothed. Sleeping alone in my apartment was also normal for me, and I’d fretted before coming that I might not get a good six hours, let alone eight, in a room of strangers. I assumed before arriving we would share sleeping quarters, and there were no photographs online to see what the lodge and property looked like before we got there. That is another part of story I’ll relate later—evidence that the place existed, but not what it looked like.
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Entry 6
Harlan had said nothing all this time, but I began to sense these people were not all strangers.
August 10
Three days have passed since I last wrote. There are things I noticed at the retreat that I’ve put off recording because they seemed so fantastical. This includes my retreat mates, if they can be called that. At least it’s how I saw them at first, until things began to change.
Remy had said little about himself. The look, and a slight South Asian accent, made him stand out from the others. I would guess India, or Pakistan, but he never verified it.
After dinner, but before Phillip’s tall tale by the fireplace, several of us were sitting outside in the cool air. The lodge had a large wraparound porch with a half dozenwicker rocking chairs in a line along the front wall. I was sitting between Remy and Harlan, with Claire to Harlan’s left. The others had all gone to wash up or change their clothes while we sat listening to nature’s orchestra, fullest at night.
Remy turned to me and said, “Trust is a choice.”
I’d asked the others on the porch if they were comfortable with this experience, believing I couldn’t be alone in my trepidation.
“What is it we’re supposed to trust?” I said.
“Beneficence,” said Harlan. “Whoever invited us all here surely has our best interests at heart.”
I looked at Claire, with her yellow pallor under the porch lights. She shrugged.
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Entry 5
It had been a long day and I was already teetering on sleep. I hadn’t yet wondered what it would mean for me that I might be the odd man out, or why.
August 7
The dinner proceeded for some time, each guest talking casually while I made mental notes about them and watched. We reveal ourselves through our movements and expressions as much as we do our speech. Observation is a habit, perhaps a discipline, in which you stop cataloguing details and start noticing the spaces between them, the things that don’t quite line up. I want to be honest and tell you I don’t know exactly when that shift happened, only that it had happened by the time Eileen refilled my water glass without my asking.
Phillip suggested early on that we each say something about why we’d come. It wasn’t demanded, exactly. Nothing at the retreat those three days and nights was demanded, only suggested in a tone that made refusal feel like bad manners. Claire went first, unprompted, something about a divorce she hadn’t had yet but could feel coming, like bad weather forecasted with certainty. Harlan mumbled about ‘unfinished business,’ which struck me as deliberately opaque, information that was by design not informative. Benita laughed and said she was there because her therapist suggested a retreat and she’d Googled the wrong kind. Considering the nature of the online posting we’d all responded to it seemed unlikely.
Larry said almost nothing, which was its own kind of answer. Remy offered a single word—’curiosity’—delivered with such flatness that no one asked him to elaborate. We were all curious, were we not? About spiritual matters, about afterlives, about reincarnation and ghosts.
When my turn came, I gave some version of the truth: I was there because of the item on a website we’d all seen and responded to. (At least that was how I assumed they were all there, an assumption that proved incorrect and nearly fatal in the end.)
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Journal Entry 4
Some of those revelations would turn out to be confessions of crimes, though the evidence would never make it into a court of law.
August 6
Were you to notice the dates of my writing, you’ll see significant gaps. That’s due to my personal struggles, resulting in large part from the consequences of this misadventure. There are days and nights when I’m simply unable to do much, and writing, however easy that might seem, becomes a herculean task. At the same time, I realize I won’t always be able to record these events, barring a miracle, so I will continue attempting it as best I can.
To say I was hungry by the time we headed to the lodge for dinner is an understatement. I hadn’t eaten anything that day other than a bag of cashews I bought at a gas station outside Easton. Other than that, my only fuel had been four cups of coffee—I admit to having a caffeine addiction that, if not fed regularly, gives me crushing headaches. I even travel with my own small percolator and can of coffee. It has proven prescient on more than one occasion.
We had been told to arrive by three p.m., which was after lunch. It seemed like the standard check in time for a hotel, so I had assumed it would be much like staying in one. I was wrong. There was no one at a front desk—no front desk at all—and only signs posted on the driveway saying ‘Men’s Cabins’ and ‘Women’s Cabins’ with arrows pointing us in the directions of them.
I ignored the sign at first and went directly to the lodge, only to find it locked. How strange, I thought. Had the retreat been cancelled and I hadn’t been notified? Then, of course, I noticed the other cars. There may not be anyone in the lodge, but there were certainly people in the cabins. I made my way to the men’s quarters, met the other gentlemen, and found the note on my mattress. Five mattresses, five notes, four men—which meant, of course, I was not the last to arrive. It was only later I would find out I had been. The mysterious fifth man, whose bed remained empty and whose fate would be revealed before the end of this misadventure, would never be encountered.