Bad to the Bones by Layla Wolfe
CHAPTER ONE
BELLAMY
It’s not difficult to slide into another dimension. There are tons of them. Some are inhabited by lunatics only, some by the misbegotten who have never had any parents to love them. Some realities, like the one I spent much of my time in, was peopled by fellow travelers, seekers who had lost their way. A great many people at Bihari were like that, actually. While the vast majority of them were well-off financially—over half of the seekers who lived with me had college degrees of some kind—I still felt they were stumbling, looking but never finding, just scrambling their way through life.
Like me. Especially now, because I seemed to be running barefoot across a mesa of some kind. I was confused, unable to figure out why I didn’t have my Harley Sportster but was running barefoot. Swami Shakti liked us to “check our footwear and attitude at the door.”
If I recall correctly, a few of the guards they called daimyo followed us at first, swiping their assault rifles as though we were cockroaches they needed to scatter. They sprayed their bullets just close enough to our flapping hems to scare us, but not cause any bloody damage. That was considerate of them. I looked at my fellow exiles, stumbling with outspread hands like talons. Why had I been thrown in with this bunch?
In the last dimension I remembered, I had been at my place of worship, the bike garage. I was re-jetting the carburetor on a rebuilt 64 HP engine. It was a favor for a new citizen—only upstanding, close and important disciples were allowed to have their own rides. The rest took the shuttle busses or walked to the cafeteria or their places of worship, to remind them they were no more important than the bugs or the snakes.
I thought I’d been in one of Shakti’s inner circles of disciples. He’d taken me in seven years ago, when he was just setting up shop here near Pure and Easy, Arizona. I lived with him in Wang Cho House, the spread he’d had built with the indoor swimming pool for his sensitive skin, climate controlled for his allergies. No doubt this was just a test for us. Or some kind of gruesome mistake.
I’d been shoved into a minivan with eight other homeless men, driven down the canyon to this plateau in the middle of nowhere. “Where are we going?” we all asked each other. I had been taken from my mechanic’s garage, another man whisked from cleaning a street. Another guy had been yanked from digging a well. Another had been helping to build the dairy barn. A couple of them had just been lying around drinking beer.
“They’re going back on their word,” one guy kept saying. “I knew it. I knew it was too good to be true.”
The driver and guards of course wouldn’t say a thing. They were close-lipped. I had been witness to some pretty unbelievable events in my time with the ashram, mostly manifestations of the greatness of The Outlaw Prophet. Nothing of the water-into-wine variety, of course not, that would be absurd. But I had seen healings, and women touched eternally who had taken the leap, as I had when I was seventeen. Shakti was a father, lover, guru. Women were his mediums. I figured I must be the most healed woman in the entire ashram, what with all my private sessions with Shakti, my nonstop surrenderings to his purple whirlpool, my proximity to his vibes.
“We’d never go back on our word,” I protested to the homeless man. He hadn’t changed his name, hadn’t registered to vote, and was still Brian.
“What’s this ‘our’ business?” growled Brian. “You’re one of the upper echelon just because you f*ck that disgusting pervert.”
Rage rose in my chest, and I didn’t know what to make of it. I knew it was imperative to protect the Master at all costs. “I’m just a disciple like the rest of you.”
Brian rolled his eyes. He hadn’t even donned the purple pants and shirt, a kind of universal dashiki that was the great equalizer. No one had a higher status than anyone else when dressed in solid purple clothing. Shakti, however, due to his sensitive skin, wore a velvet shirt and angora cap. “We’re no f*cking disciples. We were pulled off the street by you whackos. I’m from Oklahoma City. We picked up Ted here in—where was that, Ted?”
“Aspen. I was a ski instructor, can you believe that? Now he’s got me melting down gold jewelry to smuggle out—like I know anything about gold. I know about powder and ski wax! It just sounded like a good beginning, the way they described it here. Take all your worries away. No pondering about paying your power bill. Everything done for you. All you have to do is give back.”
Brian groused. “Peace and serenity, everyone in perfect harmony with nature.”
Another grizzled man who was not that far into his most recent alcoholic DTs growled too. “Two beers a night. I sold out! For two beers a night I sold my right to vote! We have to vote the way they tell us to! What if I wanted to vote for the white party and not the purple?”
It was true, disciples had driven all over the country recruiting homeless people to bolster up our voting rolls. These “new friends” would vote as a bloc for our own choice for state rep and mayor. Why not? We needed to stand up to the constant harassment the “whites” were giving us, the “purples.” Shakti had chosen an open-minded corner of Arizona where we thought no one would bother us but we were wrong. The bombardment by residents was daily. We needed our own man in the House of Representatives to stand up for us, to give us a voice.