Before the Fall(91)

“I saw it,” he told her, “and I’m excited to hear your thoughts, but let’s talk about something else first.”

This seemed to placate her, which told him that she hadn’t connected to the story completely yet, the way a plug connects to a socket, drawing power.

“I’ve taken up the harmonica,” he said. “Trying to get in touch with my musical roots. Although I’m not sure roots is the right—”

She handed her empty glass to the waiter, who arrived with another just in time.

“Your stepfather played the harmonica,” she told him.

“Which one?”

She either didn’t hear his quip or ignored it.

“He was very musical. Maybe you got it from him.”

“I don’t think it works that way.”

“Well,” she said, and sipped her drink. “I always thought it was a little silly.”

“The harmonica?”

“No. Music. And God knows I had my share of musicians. I mean, the things I did to Mick Jagger would make a hooker blush.”

“Mother,” he said, looking around, but they were far enough from the other diners that no heads had turned.

“Oh please. Don’t be such a prude.”

“Well, I like it. The harmonica.”

He took it out of his jacket pocket, showed it to her.

“It’s portable, right? So I can take it anywhere. Sometimes I play quietly in the cockpit with the autopilot on.”

“Is that safe?”

“Of course it’s safe. Why wouldn’t it be—”

“All I know is I can’t keep my phone on for takeoff and landing.”

“That’s—they changed that. And also, are you suggesting the sound waves from the harmonica could impact the guidance system, or—”

“Well, now—that’s your area—technical understanding—I’m just calling it like I see it.”

He nodded. In three hours he was scheduled to take an OSPRY to Teterboro and pick up a new crew. Then a short jaunt to Martha’s Vineyard and back. He’d gotten a room reserved at the Soho House downtown, with a one-night layover, then tomorrow he flew to Taiwan.

His mother finished her second drink—they pour them so small, dear—and ordered a third. James noticed a red string on her right wrist—so she’s back on Kabbalah. He didn’t need to check his watch to know that it had only been fifteen minutes since she arrived.

When he told people he’d grown up in a doomsday cult he was only partially kidding. They were there—he and Darla—for five years, from ’70 to ’75, there being a six-acre compound in Northern California. The cult being The Restoration of God’s Commandments (later shortened to simply The Restoration), run by the right reverend Jay L. Baker. Jay L. used to say that he was the baker and they were his bread. God, of course, was the baker who’d made them all.

Jay L. was convinced the world would end on August 9, 1974. He had had a vision on a river rafting trip—family pets floating up to heaven. When he came home, he consulted the scriptures—the Old Testament, the Book of Revelation, the Gnostic Gospels. He became convinced there was a code in the Bible, a hidden message. And the more he dug, the more notes he took in the margins of religious texts, the more he banged out sums on his old desktop calculator, the more convinced he became that it was a date. The date.

The end of the world.

Darla met Jay L. on Haight Street. He had an old guitar and a school bus. His followers numbered exactly eleven (soon to grow to just under a hundred), mostly women. Jay L. was a handsome man (under all that hair), and he’d been blessed with an orator’s voice, deep and melodious. He liked to gather his followers in intertwining circles, like the symbol for the Olympics, so that some sat face-to-face, and he’d wander among them espousing his belief that when the rapture came only the purest souls would ascend. Purity in his eyes meant many things. It meant that one prayed at least eight hours a day, that one committed oneself to hard work and to caring for others. It meant that one ate no chicken or chicken-related products (such as eggs), that one bathed only with soaps made by hand (sometimes cleaning one’s face with the ash of a birch tree). Followers had to surround themselves with only pure sounds—sounds straight from the source, no recorded materials, television, radio, film.

Darla liked it, these rules, for a while. She was a searcher at heart. What she claimed to be looking for was enlightenment, but really what she wanted was order. She was a lost girl from a working-class home with a drunken father who wanted to be told what to do and when to do it. She wanted to go to bed at night knowing that things made sense, that the world was the way it was for a reason. Though he was young, James remembers the fervor his mother brought to this new communal way of life, the headlong way she threw herself in. And when Jay L. decided that children should be raised collectively and had them build a nursery, her mother didn’t hesitate to add James to the group.

“So are you here now or what?” his mother said.

“Am I here?”

“I can’t keep track of it. All your comings and goings. Do you even have an address?”

“Of course I do. It’s in Delaware. You know that.”

“Delaware?”

“For tax purposes.”