Use Your Imagination Read online

  Turbo was a big guy, covered in tattoos with one of those horseshoe tough-guy moustaches. Having him among us was always a sign of our inclusivity, that, with our program, even people with a verifiable criminal record can be offered the path to enlightenment. This was why Grant liked him: he wasn’t like the rest of the button-down people, the old ladies with Kleenex permanently clutched in their palms, the bipolar yoga moms, the men with ponytails. He looked like the real deal, and seeing him react like the others made it feel like none of it was unreasonable.

  It was a trick. On the hike, I reminded myself that it was a trick that had worked on me, too. The first time we saw Turbo at a lecture—Finding Strength with Grant Basso—when he told the motorcycle crash story, and talked about how Grant had helped him, everyone had been moved. I was. Grant had come up to me after and said holy shit, and we both knew what he was talking about. Grant and I both knew we needed to take him in, that he was valuable, that he could be wielded against the others, used to encircle them and hold them in place. At that point in my life, that was how I thought about people. That they were things to be arranged, connected and combined to elicit the particular outcome we were after. This was exactly how we used Turbo on the hike. Once Grant got him under control, he stood up and said his latest mantra, the first and last line of our newest book, The Grand Self:

  “Today is the day you stop being weak.”

  Grant changed his demeanour and there was resolve in his voice, like the hero in the third act of a movie, right before the big fight. Everyone had been conditioned for it, primed for a real speech since the morning’s quiet and measured address where he had promised more thrills to come. Grant had made a science out of these kinds of interactions and knew precisely how to pace himself, when to pull back and when to push ahead, how to improvise and turn these spontaneous moments into compelling spectacles.

  Then Turbo’s breakdown was inverted before our eyes, and the men were in each other’s arms, laughing and stumbling like a pair of drunks, and everyone was cheering along with them. But that wasn’t enough for Grant.

  When he let go of Turbo, he brought back his Determined Leader voice, now coupled with the smile left over from his laughing session. Like always, I ignored what he was saying and instead watched what he did. Watched his eyes sharpen and his chest expand, his whole body stiffen. Watched him clap Turbo-Barry on the back and lead him off the walking path to the treeline, encouraging all the others to cheer.

  I remember the way a second wave of apprehension came over me like a fever and I struggled to control myself. He was taking us off course, and off schedule too, but I reminded myself that this was the meat of his performance, the magic. Bringing logistics and programming into it would spoil the entire thing, I told myself. But in the few moments it took me to regain my composure, something happened:

  Grant somehow got Turbo up a tree.

  They were climbing it together, using their arms and legs and not their hands, sort of humping their way up, awkwardly, like a pair of koalas. They looked ridiculous, but the Star Partners could never see anything to ridicule. They were too positive for that sort of thing. Everyone was gathered at the base of the tree, to scream and cheer and amp each other up, and I was off to the side with my assistant, Mary Alpoort. I was pissed off.

  Mary later testified that I told her to take off her pack and be ready to catch Turbo if he fell. I don’t recall saying that, but I certainly could have. What I do remember is that I lit up a cigarette out of irritation and made some glib comment when she asked if I should be smoking. I remember telling her:

  “They can’t even see us right now.”

  It was something I had observed, many times, and I took pride in being able to share it with someone. The sentence was in my mind, like something from a zoologist’s log:

  The group, as a whole, cannot see us when we’re in its shadow.

  I know now I was distancing myself by making a distinction between myself and them. This made it so that when something Grant did was dangerous or unethical, inconsistent, or just stupid, I could take shelter from it inside myself. I can see this now.

  I remember Grant kept shouting his slogan, “TODAY IS THE DAY!,” over and over as they climbed, and that Turbo’s forearms were bleeding from scraping against the boughs, but that I kept telling myself all of this was normal. Mary even testified that I leaned over and said that to her—All of this is normal—though I don’t remember that either. She also said that this was the point where I should have said something. Where I should have stopped it, or, at the very least, when they were back down, should have told Grant that he was taking things too far. That I should have made an appeal to his sense of responsibility, which she said she sometimes saw me do, but didn’t that day.

  Mary told the court I should have said, “Someone is going to get hurt, Grant.”

  And she was right.

  When they reached the top and bellowed in joy, and all the other members joined them in celebrating, two regular tourists—who were there for the Balancing Rock and the Balancing Rock Nature Trail and nothing else—walked by and saw us. Got a good look at Grant’s face as it reddened and a vein the size of an earthworm rose up on his forehead as he screamed:

  TODAY is the DAY you STOP being WEAK!

  I recall, quite clearly, looking at the tourists and finding a mix of curiosity and irritation on their faces. I knew what they thought of our group, but wondered, with my pen and BlackBerry and clipboard, my cigarette and sunglasses, what I had seemed like to them. What they thought of me when I smiled and nodded before turning back to the people bellowing at a tree. I wonder now if they saw the patch of blood from Turbo’s forearms midway up, a dark spot of blood on tree bark shaped like a kidney. A warning sign.

  We didn’t see the couple again after that, not even when there were ambulances and police and a helicopter.

  ***

  In some ways, Grant is better off now.

  Incarceration is a purer kind of living for someone like him. It’s one that has finally allowed him to live up to his own ascetic expectations of himself. There are no more distractions; there is nothing to take him away from the internal world of his own mind. There are no more accountants, and there is no more bottom line. There is just his body, his brain, and the room.

  When we ran Brand New Day, there were women. There were the ones who thought he was some kind of special person, who thought his genitals could anoint them somehow. The ones who were merely in love with him and his program, who wanted to help him relieve stress and maybe have a more successful day by blowing him. There were also the ones who wanted his money, and the ones who wanted his guidance, and the ones who wanted both. These were the very worst.

  They’re gone now.

  There were critics and book reviewers and skeptics, too. There were all those little things that were nameless and could accumulate until he’d have one of his “bad days” and we would have to cancel some speaking engagement until he was himself again. Now there’s none of that, but most of all, there is no more me. I’m not there to contradict and challenge him, to correct and question his motives, to threaten him, to badger him. Now he meditates cross-legged on the floor of a cell, focusing on the sound of a dripping tap. He eats one of his three simple meals a day. He writes letters in longhand.

  When I visit—which I do every week—I call to make sure the prison isn’t “locked down,” then take the remaining company vehicle on the 401 for two hours until I reach a town that only exists because of the prison facility. I go through three types of screening before I get in a line with other visitors—mostly women—and get shuffled along by guards. Then I’m brought into a big, open room with tables and chairs connected to the floor like a fast-food restaurant, and made to wait. He comes in with another dozen or so men, some in uniform, some not. He’s always in his. A drab orange jumpsuit with short sleeves.

  All around us a
re wives, mothers, daughters, girlfriends, fiancées. It occurs to me every time that he has none of these things. No one else visits him. He tells me he doesn’t allow it, but I don’t know how many are asking, either. He has me, and me only.

  I don’t think this is a realization either of us had when our lives were busy and full and tiring, when we spoke with and surrounded ourselves with dozens of paid employees who seemed like friends. It’s a perspective that regular life just doesn’t really offer you sometimes. A question most of us don’t usually ask ourselves, and couldn’t honestly answer anyway: who would take the time to care for you when it was no longer easy to do so? If checking in on this person meant more than popping your head into the doorway of the break room, or rolling your chair over to their desk? I think if it were I who was incarcerated instead of him—if I’m honest—I might only get visits from my mother. And him.

  Our relationship has changed. There’s no fighting anymore, but that’s because there’s nothing to fight over. When he was the guy who gave speeches and led classes and I was the one who did everything else to make that happen, I was supposed to fight with him. I was, in some way, his enemy. But now, even though there were no vows or rings exchanged, even though we have never had sex or even kissed, we are married to each other.

  ***

  Here’s how a day like September 23, 2011, is supposed to go:

  Drive to the place in a panel van.

  Give a parking-lot speech about how challenging the day will be.

  Change into smocks and don drawstring bags containing a notepad, pen, and a water bottle, all bearing our logo.

  Hike.

  Meditate.

  Hike some more.

  Go to the great big rock and talk about how everyone and everything is connected, and how we (all of humanity and organic life) are a single being (The Grand Self) born of abiogenesis (The Cosmic Miracle) that sprang forth from the sun (The Solar Parent). Talk about the rock like we’re all the rock and the rock is us, or something like that.

  Hike to a pre-prepared campsite, get tantalizingly naked, and crawl into a tent that’s filled with superheated rocks, a bucket of water, and a ladle. Hallucinate, then write down hallucinations upon leaving the tent. Rehydrate. Cry/share. Watch the sunrise while Grant blabs about what they’ve learned and overcome. Get back into the panel van and drive away.

  But very quickly Grant, Mary, and I all understood it was one of those days where everything was going wrong. Even the little moments connecting to the big ones were a disaster. On the way there, the rental van shook and rattled like it had just been assembled from disparate parts, and when Grant lowered the passenger window, the glass itself fell into the door and disappeared. He managed to make everyone laugh by quipping with one of his slogans—NOBODY’S INCAPABLE OF HAVING A BAD DAY—but I knew he was already getting frustrated.

  After that, once we started walking, Rita kept needing to go the bathroom and we’d have to veer off the main path and find a porta-potty, or else help her find a secluded spot to go. This would be a suck it up situation with anyone else, but Billionaire Rita received special treatment. My assistant Mary Alpoort levelled with me at one point when she returned from the woods with a folding spade shovel that she’d dug a hole for Rita with:

  “Rita’s got diarrhea.”

  It rained off and on for most of the afternoon. The weather forecast I’d looked at said nothing about it, so we were unprepared when it happened, and everyone was all nipples and goosebumps in their cheaply made Brand New Day shirts. Whenever they sat to meditate, there were sniffles and coughs, and everyone soon had brown patches on their asses from the wet earth. Grant had acted like it was a challenge to be overcome, and while everyone agreed, it affected them. These people weren’t used to being uncomfortable whatsoever. It made it so they didn’t talk about their problems as much, and Grant had to coax emotional breakthroughs out of them, which never happened.

  Later, when she was preparing the sweat lodge, Mary buzzed me on the two-way radio and told me she’d burned a hole in the tent, and though she’d patched some of it, there was going to be a lot of steam escaping no matter what she did. Soon after that, everything turned on us. Before she could resolve this problem, I radioed her back fifteen minutes later and told her to get on her cellphone and call 911. That we’d lost someone. Twenty seconds later she was running towards the parking lot—all two hundred and fifty pounds of her—with her phone to her ear, trying to get cell service.

  Before that, Grant was annoyed—both with me for failing to predict the weather and with the sky itself. But I was annoyed with him, too. He could get sort of entangled in himself at these events and lose focus, and that’s what I was seeing. After he and Turbo went up the tree—but before the rain came—everyone was getting high off of one and other. It just sort of happened. Some small excitement coupled with cathartic release becomes happiness, which becomes joy, and as one gets more excited, the others begin to trade their energy, back and forth, until it becomes rapture. Then it’s like they’re on drugs. At the end of this energy cycle is Grant, the terminal for any and all joy, ambient and directed. Before the sky opened up, before Rita started tugging on Mary’s sleeve, everyone was ready to explode. Their faces were bright and their pupils were dilated, but Grant—who was feeding on this—his eyes were two burning black holes of bliss.

  In this state, I could never communicate with him. If I would have said something to him like I wanted to—about calming down—he would have asked me something like Why are you trying to ruin this for us? This was another problem I had with this side of the operation. His involvement in the emotional side of things kept him from being the leader I needed him to be.

  Mary, who turned out to be many times more astute than I ever believed her capable, testified something to this effect. That Grant’s early excitement was the reason things got so extreme later on. She said, in her enormous black pantsuit and canary-yellow blouse:

  “He was losing them. Their focus or whatever. So he had to go further and further to try and get them back.”

  I was at the defendant’s table with Grant, trying my best to look innocent and bewildered by her statements. But if I weren’t, if I were on her side, I would have said she was almost right. He was just trying to get that feeling—his buzz—back. The one he had for fifteen minutes straight before a grey cloud rolled in overtop of us and it started raining again.

  In interviews, at conventions, and even privately, he used to say that he did all of this to help others, to spread the message of his pure and meaningful vision. I was never sure how true this was, but from the very first time I saw him like that, getting drunk from their love, I understood. It was about the money, sure, and was about leading people and having them listen to him, it was about his ideas, but mostly it was about a feeling. All of that work, all of that effort and people and buildings and literature, all for that. Something firing through his body that he liked, that he found pleasant.

  ***

  The Grand Self has two meanings. There is the newest one—the updated version—the name for all of living existence, the combined super-consciousness of the universe. But there is an older version from one of his earlier books that first used the term to describe our idealized self. It had been a criticism of the way we live our lives, of our indulgent fantasies, of the urge to mythologize ourselves and our pain, delusions, and addictions. This was perhaps the only one of Grant’s terms that mattered to me, and I really did believe it.

  If I had been like Mary Alpoort, if I had turned against him, I would have used this term in the courtroom. I would have explained both concepts and used them as an example of how Grant had changed over the years. I had fantasized about saying it, memorized how I would have condemned him.

  I would have said that the Grant described by the witnesses isn’t the Grant I first started working for, years ago. It’s a different Grant, a person divorced from re
ality. It’s the Grant who has lied to himself about who he is, what he does, and how important his work is. The inflated Grant. I would have said something about feeding off of people, and something about how that’s how he grows his ego. I could have said something chilling, something that would have been in the papers. Something that would be a gripping headline:

  “He eats people. Their happiness. Then their savings.”

  I would have been an excellent witness.

  I imagined the dramatic hush that would have come over the courtroom. How coolly I would have stared at him, wearing some sharp outfit, drinking water from a tall glass. It’s not lost on me that my fantasy is precisely the same kind of thing I’m talking about. My self at its grandest. A Macy’s parade–balloon version of myself, puffy and beautiful, risen against the dusty fluorescent lights of the courtroom.

  ***

  Of all the sojourners who were with us that day, JR had the least money.

  This is the main reason why no one was watching him. He was still extraordinarily wealthy, but if we had ranked him among the others, he would be at the bottom. But there was also the fact that he was also both unpleasant to look at, and to be around. He was squat with bad hips, and always walked like he was holding something between his ass cheeks.

  And he was a grouch. This could’ve been because he was a sufferer of chronic pain, though I’ve met enough of those people to know that you don’t have to be like him. He frowned at everyone, and reserved a look of neutral indifference for Grant, which was as close to adoration as he was capable.

  Despite this, I had him categorized as a Grant-man, which is to say he wanted nothing to do with anyone else and would only seek guidance from the source, talking with Grant privately. That he came on the hike at all was surprising to me. He often opted out of these things and made up for them later, on his own. Despite being largely silent and dour, however, he seemed to possess a strength that many of the others didn’t. In fact, he didn’t fit our demo at all, and I never would have taken him for the kind of person who needed us. His whole demeanour—the way he scowled at everything, the way he shook his head slightly when others spoke, even the drab clothes he wore—it all screamed skeptic to me, but he nonetheless racked up the bill of a True Believer nearly every month.