To matter.
Then, as time passes between Awakenings and that feeling fades, life gets in the way and nothing much in their lives changes. In fact, things get harder as they struggle to afford things in everyday life, as well as the fees for remaining Devoted to The Path.
And so, they grow fidgety and need another dose of the Herald’s teachings. They sign up for another Awakening, fork over a load of cash for the privilege and the cycle starts over.
It easily slips into being an addiction. Something people seem to lose all rationality over. They cancel plans, miss out on work and weddings, even funerals, to attend one of the Herald’s Awakenings.
People will come into the room tonight, feeling a little uncertain, maybe skeptical. Others are going to feel nothing but the desperation that’s brought them this far.
All of them will have paid a hefty ticket price to be in this room, and just when the Awakening hits its climax, the screen behind theHerald will flick on and he’ll start the tracker for tonight’s donations. Those who donate more will get closer and closer to ascending to a higher power, of reaching absolution. Transcendence.
He’s selling a dream. A fix for all their ills and a fantastic new life.
Except, it’s all bullshit.
Of course, it is.
The Herald talks the talk, walks the walk. He says he helps people. Says he transforms their lives for the better. He’s part life-coach, part cult leader. All smarm and lies.
In reality, there are only two things he lives for. Adulation, and cold, hard cash.
Tonight, he’ll get both in spades.
He literally couldn’t care less if the room dropped dead, beyond the damage it would do to his reputation and his revenue streams.
I was fifteen when he started dating my mother. Back then, I figured things might get better with him around. I figured they couldn’t get much worse, since we lived in a trailer and our power had just been shut off because mom refused to pay the bill.
She also had a terrible reputation around town for stealing from the cleaning jobs she did back then. And when I turned out to be handy with a screwdriver and offered my services fixing stuff so that we could at least afford to eat, she’d steal from my jobs too.
It left both of us unpopular and unemployable, always on the move from town to town.
It never occurred to me at the time that no onegoodwould want to get mixed up with her petty bullshit.
Of course, my mom thought meeting the Herald was a gift from the heavens. He wasn’t ‘the Herald’ back then, though. He was just a guy with big dreams, called Cedar Orlog.
Then, as they spent more time together, he became a bigger part of our lives, and that ‘gift from heaven’ turned into a step on ThePath. For my mom, there was no room for faith in anything else when the Herald was in the room.
My mother didn’t just drink the Kool-Aid, she mixed it herself.
For a while, so did I.
And I know,I knowI should have left years ago, as soon as I turned eighteen. Should never have gotten as involved as I am. My flimsy fucking excuse is that he’s never paid me, so I can’t even afford a bus ticket. He pays the rent for our shared apartment. Pays the bills and for food, but I’ve never earned any money.
Add to that, I’m not as invisible as I’d like to be. People know about me. To them I’m Saint, his perfect daughter, working alongside her dear ol’ papa.
I’m entrenched in this shit. Complicit up to my eyeballs.
The Herald might be the one with the patter, the guy that sells the dream. But it’s my work that really makes them believe it.
The mic, the device hanging over the door frame as they enter; the projector displaying behind the Herald on the stage. They’re all my work. All dripping with my magic.
But tonight I’m cutting the cord. After tonight, there won’t be any more magic to his Awakenings.
I think I was twenty before I started to question the ethics of what the Herald is doing here. That was right around the time this following started to grow and he upped his prices for membership.
The requests for donations always start out small and subtle, then before his Devoted realizes what’s happening, they’re suddenly re-mortgaging their houses so they can make hefty enough donations to Transcend to the next level of The Path.
It never hit me how fucked up the whole thing was. Maybe I was a young, dumb kid, too blind to see what was happening. Or maybe he really did get more money hungry as his operation grew bigger.
