Cult Weekend

Afew days after I returned home from cult weekend, Sara informed me that her brother would be moving in with us. It would only be for a month or so, she insisted, two months max. “We’re the stopgap, not the solution,” she told me. “Bly knows that.”

Bly had a reputation in our household as a difficult personality with a strong sense of entitlement and little in the way of marketable skills. My first impression of him, gleaned one Fourth of July spent with Sara’s family at their beach house in New Jersey, was of a tall, athletic young man in flipflops, possessed of a preternatural self-confidence and very little interest in speaking with me. I managed, in our brief encounter, to glean that he had recently returned from motorcycling across Southeast Asia on five dollars a day and would, after a brief stint of adult-son regression under the care of his highly tolerant parents, be disembarking for New Orleans to play washboard in a free-form Cajun music ensemble called the Swamp Trawlers. These bare minimum of biographical details delivered, he got up from the folding chair next to mine to freshen his drink, failed to come back, and said no more to me for the rest of the vacation.

“Bly gets away with being a so-called free spirit because he’s six-foot-four and conventionally handsome, but the truth is he’s a self-centered little boy who’s never suffered enough disappointment to become a real person capable of functioning in the adult world,” Sara vented on the ride home. Her resentment of her brother’s twenty-eight-odd years of unimpeded coasting was overshadowed only by her smug delight in being considered, by her parents and herself, the responsible and reliable child, the one with the job and the apartment and partner of seven years—even if the job was a temp copywriting position conducted from home and the apartment was a messy one-bedroom in a grungy building and the partner of seven years was me. The sudden announcement that Bly would presently be coming to live with us was surprising, but Sara’s motivations for allowing it were not hard to grasp. Long typecast as the straight-arrow older sister, she was wellprepped for the role of landlord, setting house rules and enforcing curfews for her errant younger brother.

I had my reservations, both about sharing living space with Bly and being caught in the middle of his and Sara’s choppy sibling dynamic. But I was already twenty minutes late for work and couldn’t risk getting caught up in an argument liable to drag on well past my colleagues’ point of tolerance. My supervisor Miranda had her eye on me. My frequent long weekends

away, my new tattoos and scars, the assorted paraphernalia, manuals, and iconography collected at my desk were all inviting questions I had so far managed to dodge without consequence. But coworker curiosity is like a clogged sink, filling up drip by drip until the basin overflows. I was lucky to have made it this long without needing to explain my strange behavior, but it couldn’t last. A missed deadline, a major screwup, even one day too many waltzing in at nine forty-five could be the final straw that forced me to divulge my extracurricular activities in a way guaranteed to imperil my employment.

“I have no objections,” I said to Sara. “As long as there’s some kind of formal agreement in place.”

Sara chuckled. “I have verbal commitment, but formal agreement will be hard.”

I pulled a small, sharp stick carved with glyphs and sigils out of my jacket pocket, another of the cult weekend mementos that seemed to pepper my normal life more and more. Not wanting to add to the esoteric clutter at my workstation, I left it on the table by the door where we kept our keys and bills.

“OK,” I said. “But if an awkward conversation needs to happen at some point, I’d prefer not to be the person doing it.”

“That’s fair,” said Sara. “I grant you permission to stay as out of it as you wish.”

Dinner had been getting cold for three hours by the time Bly arrived with all his worldly belongings in a giant rucksack that he promptly deposited on the floor in the middle of the entryway the moment Sara let him in. Instead of hugging her, he tossed her over his shoulder and spun her around while she hammered his back with her fists and screamed for him to put her down. In his own sweet time he did, turned to me and gave me a stiff and formal handshake. Sara, red-faced from the ride, ordered us all to the kitchen table. “I actually ate at the airport,” Bly confessed. “But I’m happy to sit with you.”

As we tucked into our room-temperature supper, Bly filled us in on the sequence of events that had landed him under our roof. He had been working as a chef on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, making good money, when a grease fire erupted on the griddle during a moment of distraction and quickly spread across the mess, forcing him and the rest of the crew to evacuate on lifeboats. They were soon rescued by the Coast Guard and brought to shore, but Bly, concerned that the owners of the oil rig would try and pin responsibility for the blaze on him, hit the road that very night, thinking it best to maintain a low profile until the incident blew over.

A disaster on an oil rig did not strike me as the kind of thing to soon be forgotten, and I said as much, taking seconds of the lukewarm lentils to show Sara her efforts on the meal had not been in vain. Bly disagreed. He’d been working under an assumed name, took all his pay in cash, and had, since leaving Texas, cut his hair, shaved his beard, and taken to wearing thick tortoiseshell glasses whenever he was in public. The rig’s owners were chasing a phantom, and he would happily remain a fugitive until their efforts to apprehend him were exhausted.

“We’re just glad you’re safe,” said Sara. “But I hope you’ll understand that in light of this information we’d prefer you leave the cooking to us while you’re here.” This got a laugh from Bly, but I detected a high-tension wire of seriousness running beneath Sara’s joke.

Bly insisted on doing the dishes, waving off Sara’s protestations with the explanation that we had cooked and waited up for him and not made too big of a deal about the fact that he was already full when he arrived. The logic for this unexpected act of kindness was airtight, and I could tell it bugged Sara to no end. She moved his rucksack out of the entryway and leaned it against the sofa in the living room, where Bly would be sleeping. “It’s been a long day and I’m very tired,” she announced. “So I will bid you boys adieu.”

I remained seated silently at the table listening to the roar of water everywhere in the apartment as Bly ran the sink and Sara performed her half-hour of evening ablutions in the bathroom. In an uncanny act of sibling psychic correspondence, they both finished at the same moment, the gasp of the tap in the bathroom overlapping almost perfectly with Bly turning off the faucet and racking the final dish. Sara padded to the bedroom and shut the door and Bly returned to the table, took Sara’s seat across from me and pulled a joint the rough size of an index finger from his shirt pocket. “Do you mind?” he asked. I said I didn’t. “Want some?” he asked.

I hesitated. My current arrangement with myself was that I’d limit my intake of psychoactive substances to cult weekend and cult weekend alone. The rule was in place for my own protection against my insatiable appetite for mental escapism. I had always found it especially hard to commit to the flattened, boring, grayscale autobahn of real life. I wanted more, I wanted extra features, I wanted reality-plus. But the problem with reality-plus is that it outcompetes regular reality on every axis, and in the end you have to live in regular reality, with its annoying limits and inflexibilities, schedules, money, society, significant others. Reality-plus is like a window you can look out but can’t quite fit through. Only in the right headspace, with the right kinds of chemical help, can you crack it open and squeeze under the sill.

“Just a little,” I said. Bly smiled, my reasoning totally transparent to him.

“Holy shit, this is strong,” I said after I finished coughing. “Miracle Mirror,” he said. “Great for openness and connectivity. It’s a very chatty strain.”

Within minutes we were gabbing like dear friends. We talked plants and politics, virtual reality and the golden age of Hollywood cinema. Bly seemed to be genuinely enjoying my company, and perhaps for this reason I found him more simpatico than ever before.

“I’m going to put on some music,” I said and plugged my phone into the kitchen speaker. We were nodding along to the sultry strains of Thai psych guitar when Sara appeared in the doorway wearing a bathrobe and a pickled expression.

“Can you two please keep it down,” she said, to me in particular. I apologized and lowered the volume to a whisper.

When Sara was gone, Bly opened the fridge and pulled out a tub of hummus and some baby carrots and brought them back to the table for us to munch on. As we snacked I wondered if our crunching would be enough to bring Sara back even madder this time, but then I rationalized that the noise was probably much louder inside my head than in the bedroom down the hall.

“So Sara tells me you’re in a cult,” said Bly.

“That’s correct,” I said.

“It’s not really a cult, though, is it?” he went on. “I just never pegged you as a cult kind of guy.”

“Well, cult is a bit of a shorthand for what it actually is. It does have certain cultish properties, but it also maybe isn’t exactly what you think of when you think of cults.”

“Is there sex stuff?”

“Not really.”

“Drugs?”

“They’re around, but optional.”

“Weird freaky religious shit?”

“It’s actually very informal.”

“Can you tell me what it’s called?”

“Erusopxe.”

“What?” he asked. I said it again, slower this time, and he repeated it back to me, skeptically.

“It’s ‘exposure’ spelled backwards,” I explained.

Bly dragged a carrot along the bottom of the hummus container, revealing the transparent plastic base that more or less meant we had no choice but to finish the tub.

“I have to be honest, you’re being very mysterious about all this,” he said. “It’s hard to describe. You kind of need to just experience it.”

He bit off the hummus-toupeed head of the carrot and chewed it thoughtfully. “Is it a joke?”

This was the fundamental question that I returned to again and again with Erusopxe, and my response to Bly touched on this ambivalence. “It’s not not a joke,” I said. “But it’s not just a joke, either. In fact, it’s actually quite interesting—from an intellectual standpoint, I mean. There’s some irony in calling it a cult, but there’s also a lot of serious thinking backing it up. The term we use is reality-adjacent. It’s a mindset and a place and a group of people, but none of those elements are fixed. They recombine, rearrange, and give rise to new forms in a sort of autopoietic system. And from this ongoing collaborative process a pattern emerges that in turn creates the baseline psychic consensus that constitutes the cult.”

Bly nodded slowly, making no outward show of either understanding or confusion.

“And what is the new member policy?” he asked.

Bly had been living with us for about three weeks when, one morning at work, my boss called me in for a one-on-one meeting. Nothing like this had ever happened before, and as I took the long way to his office a cannonball rolled around my stomach, communicating certainty that the well-guarded secrets of my personal life had leaked and I would shortly be exiting the building with my sketchy cult stuff in a box.

My boss’s office was tidy and sun-flooded from a gigantic window that afforded stunning widescreen views of the city. “You may have some idea what this is about,” he said, indicating for me to sit across from him at his desk. I swallowed hard and braced for bad news. “As you may know,” he continued, “Miranda is departing for brighter horizons at the end of next week, which leaves a vacuum at the top of your department. I was hoping you’d be willing to step in on a temp to perm basis.”

Miranda was a top performer, a bona fide expert in the field with a list of credentials as long as a drugstore receipt. I, meanwhile, occupied a cubicle and collected a biweekly paycheck, shuttled document X from point A to point B, answered emails in a semi-timely fashion and attended the occasional meeting, but contributed essentially nothing to the company beyond being a warm body in a seat fifty weeks of the year. This undistinguished interzone between more productive colleagues had been my niche for years, and leaving it for greener pastures had never even crossed my mind. But as I often did when presented with an unexpected twist in the story of my life, I accepted it readily, with a minimum of foresight.

“I’d be delighted,” I said.

“That’s the kind of initiative we look for here,” said my boss.

We shook hands and I returned to my cube vibrating at a sympathetic frequency with the fortuitous future that had just landed in my lap.

That night Sara and Bly and I went out to the fancy wood-fired pizza place around the corner from our apartment to celebrate. I was in wonderful spirits. Through no doing of my own, fate had bent my way, and I had an inkling my involvement with the cult was responsible.

“Will it mean a lot more work?” Sara asked, folding up a slice of wild boar and fennel sausage pizza into the sandwich shape that was her customary method for eating pizza.

“My guess is that it will actually mean less work,” I said. “In a sit-at-mydesk-and-actually-work sense.”

“You’re management now,” said Bly, who had ordered an entire okonomiyaki pizza for himself and was devouring it with relish. “You get to give orders and play putt-putt golf in your office.”

“How does your team feel about it?” Sara asked. “I always got the impression that Miranda was pretty well-liked.”

I was, by this point in the meal, on my fourth cocktail, and my discretion sufficiently loosened to speak my mind about my former supervisor. “Miranda’s problem,” I said, “was that she would always hoard all the work for herself because she didn’t trust the rest of us enough to do it to her totally unrealistic standards.”

“Classic group-project mentality,” said Bly. “My attitude was always: if someone cares that much about getting an A, who am I to get in their way?” “You think it’s OK to just piggyback on other people’s hard work?” asked Sara. “I was the only person who ever cared on those projects and let me tell you, I would really have appreciated that not being the case.” “This is my entire point,” I said. “From now on, I’m going to distribute the workload fairly. Everyone does their part. No one slacks, the stack stays balanced.”

“And your part will be the distributing, I assume,” said Sara. “Think of me as the subway hub,” I said. “I conduct the traffic, I grease the tracks.”

“Just my two cents,” said Bly. “Some people accustomed to the benefits of working under someone like a Miranda may not appreciate being suddenly shunted onto public transportation.”

“Some people,” said Sara, “may find that mooching off other people’s labor and goodwill is not in fact a sustainable solution for living on this earth.”

Bly smirked, dabbing orange spicy Japanese mayonnaise from the corners of his mouth with a napkin. “The law of least effort is a governing fact of nature.”

“I have full faith in my team’s ability to adapt,” I said.

I pounced on the check the moment it hit the table and walked back home between Sara and Bly, who were ignoring each other now. How different would managing my coworkers be than interposing myself between my high-strung yet capable partner and her grifting but affable brother? Only time would tell.

That night, Sara and I lay in bed reading while the smells of Bly’s marijuana and the high-pitched engine sounds of the drone-racing videos he liked to watch while stoned crept under our closed door.

“I can’t take this much longer,” said Sara. “Every time I look at him I’m filled with rage and bitterness.”

“He’s not that bad, is he?” I said.

“Shhh. You have to keep your voice down when we talk about him.” “There’s no way he can hear us over those videos.”

“You don’t have to be in the apartment with him all day. You get to escape to an office. But I’m stuck here and sooner or later I’m going to lose it.” A short while later a flurry of chopping and sizzling went up in the kitchen as Bly prepared his customary midnight snack of whatever groceries Sara and I were planning on using for our dinner the following night, combined in a buttered skillet and smothered in cheese.

“I swear to god,” moaned Sara, covering her eyes with the flat of her hand.

“Have you thought about maybe having the conversation with him?” I asked.

“Have I?” she replied, spreading her fingers Vulcan-style to reveal one glaring eye.

“I’m just alluding to the terms of our initial agreement.”

“That’s management material, ladies and gentlemen,” she said, rolling away from me and pulling her pillow over her head.

The next cult weekend was tentatively scheduled to take place in one month’s time at a log cabin in the country owned by one of our oldest members. Some of the first Erusopxe retreats had been held there, years before I joined—outlandish, freewheeling events, when attendance was lower and the schedule less formalized, that had generated a host of stories that had since passed into group legend. How one day Lou S. had appeared on the lawn, naked save for a traffic cone on his head, riding a horse he had stolen from a neighboring farm. How Mel Q. had climbed a tree high on mescaline one night, slept in the branches, and broken an arm when Dave R. chainsawed the tree down to make firewood the following morning.

There was a general consensus among the more senior cultists that the organization had grown too large and culturally diffuse and as such had strayed from its foundational values of unfettered freedom, creative exuberance, and contemptuous disregard for the norms of bourgeois society. On the official message board there had been frequent exhortations to “go back to the cabin” as a way of recapturing the unruly spirit of those early weekends. Finally, Darvin D., the owner of the iconic property, had offered to host again on two conditions: intoxicants of any kind, including alcohol, would be forbidden, and there would be mandatory lights-out at eleven thirty p.m.

The initial response to Darvin’s demands was surprisingly upbeat. A dry weekend, after so much unchecked debauchery, was considered a radical departure, a daring improvisation, and very Erusopxe. Even more than the obligatory sobriety, the early bedtime won widespread support. Most of our members worked grueling jobs in tech, education, and public policy and voiced gratitude for the opportunity to catch up on their sleep.

Still, there was some scattered grumbling that certain people in the cult were trying to impose law and order on a fundamentally unlawful and disorderly phenomenon. “Not everyone attends the same Erusopxe” was a core tenet of the group, and by coalescing the experience around a strict code of conduct, the argument went, Darvin was showing himself to be badly out of step with the weekend’s emancipatory goals.

Slowly but surely the balance tilted in the naysayers’ favor. Alternatives and workarounds were proposed. The people who wanted to do drugs and break curfew could stay in a nearby rental house, for example. Janet Z. suggested that all drug use could be confined to a single twenty-minute communal DMT trip and that any after-hours communication could be carried out on the message board, without a word spoken out loud.

Darvin was unmoved. It was his cabin, with his rules, or nothing. The morning after a particularly bitter exchange with Nelson B. and Katya M., he announced he was withdrawing his offer to host and quitting the cult. He called us “a bunch of experiential consumers” with no ability to “confront reality unassisted by chemical inducements.” He then deleted his forum account, forestalling any attempt to reason with him or bring him back into the fold.

That was how, with less than four weeks until cult weekend, Erusopxe found itself a house divided, with no venue or vision for the coming gathering. I had, up until then, stayed mostly out of the debate. Though I was personally more amenable to a classic meat-and-potatoes forty-eight-hourbender-on-hallucinogens kind of cult weekend, I didn’t feel comfortable imposing my preferences on the others, especially not elder statesmen like Darvin. In the immediate aftermath of Darvin’s departure there was panic

on the boards. What would we do? Where would we go? Many members had already taken the time off work and hired babysitters and canceled plans in order to attend. A lot of cultists were out money on car rentals and airfare. Something had to fill the void of Darvin’s sudden drop out. Maybe it was the confidence that came from being bumped up the chain at work, maybe it was Bly’s self-possession rubbing off on me, but one night after another grim day on the forums I chimed in the with the offer to host cult weekend at my apartment. It wasn’t very big, I said, and it was in the middle of the city and my partner and her brother also lived there, but it could be an option if no more suitable venues were forthcoming.

The reaction was effusive. “Rebooking my flight now,” announced Finca T. “I can bring two air mattresses and a sleeping bag,” added Fan X. “Sardine-can slumber party!” cheered Les C.

Before I could temper expectations or ask Sara what she thought, we had a quorum. Any reservations I had about allowing between fifteen and twenty-four big-time weirdos to take over our home for two days died and withered on the vine.

I waited too long to tell Sara. The office was my excuse. My attempts to reorganize the department along more egalitarian lines were meeting stiff resistance. Miranda, it turned out, hadn’t just done everyone’s work for them, she had also done a ton of other work no one even knew about. Now I was put in the unenviable position of redistributing it all to a deeply ungrateful team, who rewarded my efforts by introducing so many errors into their assignments that I had to do virtually everything over from scratch. My days grew longer, my eyes stung from screen exposure, my fingers became crosshatched by paper cuts. I developed a deep admiration for Miranda, whose shoes I struggled to fill.

And unlike Miranda, my burnout was obvious. My colleagues snuck 5-Hour Energy shots onto my desk, asked if I was getting enough sleep. I kept my head up and trudged through the blizzard of deadlines and filings, but secretly I was starting to hate everyone I supervised and was getting desperate for a reprieve. Cult weekend couldn’t come soon enough.

“I feel like I never see you anymore,” said Sara one evening after I got home past ten for the fourth time that week. “And even when you’re here it’s like your mind is somewhere else.” I put down my book and rolled over to face her in the bed. Bly was doing something extremely splatterysounding with a wok in the kitchen.

“Would it be alright if I hosted cult weekend here next Friday, Saturday, and Sunday?” I asked.

Her face, for a moment, went entirely blank in almost the exact same way Bly’s had when I first told him the name of the cult. “You want to do Exopus here?”

“Erusopxe,” I corrected her. “This is very important for me, Sara.” A heavy pan fell to the floor and Bly started swearing. Sara winced, furrowed her brow, and held that pained expression for a long time.

“No,” she said. “No way.”

“But everyone’s counting on me. Some people have already bought plane tickets.”

“So you’ve already said yes? What about me? What about Bly?”

“Bly wants to participate. And you’re more than welcome to join in too.” “I don’t want to join your stupid cult. I just want quiet enjoyment of my own fucking home.”

She got what she wanted for a couple tense minutes. Then I asked her: “Wasn’t I understanding when you asked if your brother could live with us more or less indefinitely for free?”

“You’re seriously going to pull the my-brother card? And that is in no way close to the same thing.”

“Come on. Isn’t family just another kind of cult anyway?”

That night Sara kicked Bly off the sofa so she could sleep there, and I found him the next morning snoozing in the bathtub in a nest of blankets and pillows. As I brushed my teeth I heard him stir. “You screwed up, dude,” he said, squinting and grinning impishly at me. “What happened?” “I told Sara I wanted to do the next Erusopxe here.”

“Dude, yes!” he said, bolting upright. “This is what I’ve been waiting for. Count me in!”

Later in the day, over text, Sara and I agreed to a compromise. I could host the weekend at the apartment and pay for her to spend Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at a four-star hotel downtown. It was bribery, plain and simple, but such was the cost of striking a balance between the competing needs of cult and life partner and preserving some sliver of face with both.

Cult weekend snuck up on me like a tiger in high grass, and the Friday everyone was supposed to arrive it sprang for the jugular. I had taken a halfday at work so I could shop for food and tidy up the apartment, but that plan was dashed the moment I reached my desk. I had a message from my boss waiting for me telling me to come into his office right away.

I found him facing the window with his back to me, his reflection superimposed on the skyline. “Have a seat,” he said, not turning around. His tone was all business. I knew immediately that something had gone wrong and it was my fault. “When I put you in charge of the department I wasn’t

expecting Miranda,” he said, wheeling on me with an axe glint in his eye. “But I also wasn’t expecting revolt.”

I squirmed and bounced my foot rapidly on the carpet. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” I said. “Has something happened?”

“What’s happened is that your entire team has walked out the door.” I had not prepared for this. That some of my colleagues were unhappy with their updated assignments, that many longed for a return to the days when Miranda did everything—these issues I was aware of but viewed as necessary growing pains in the making of a new system that would in the end improve all our lives. Miranda was not coming back, I could not singlehandedly support her Atlas-like workload on my shoulders indefinitely. We all had to get on board with the changes, man the oars, and row as a team. But my teammates had thought differently and abandoned ship. “Typically in a case like this I would have no choice but to fire you,” said my boss. “But unfortunately your incompetence has created a situation in which you are, at least for the moment, indispensable.” It transpired that he was scheduled to deliver a presentation my team had been working on to a team of VPS from our Frankfurt office early Monday morning. I explained, a note of panic rising in my voice, that the components of the deck were currently spread thin across my departed colleagues’ stacks in various stages of completion.

“Then I suggest that you stop tapping your foot and put your nose to grindstone,” said my boss. “Because otherwise your ass is out the door.” I returned to my desk with a storm cloud hanging over me. In one fell swoop my long-awaited cult weekend had been washed away in the ultimate work shitstorm. Maybe, just maybe, if I abstained from all cult activities, did no drugs, performed the bare minimum of hosting duties, and left my guests to their own devices while I prepped slides for Monday, there was a sliver of a chance I’d make my boss’s deadline and save my job. My half-day, in any case, was canceled. Sara was already out of the house getting a massage in preparation for her hotel stay, and even if she had been available to help with groceries and cleanup it would have been unthinkable to ask her. That left one option: Bly.

He answered the phone in a froggy voice that suggested I had just roused him from slumber. “Hey dude, to what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Hi Bly,” I said. “My boss just dumped a truckload of crap on me so I don’t think I’ll be home in time to shop and clean before everyone comes tonight.”

“Say no more,” he said, the signature song of our sofa springs audible in the background. “I’m on top of it.”

“Really? You have no idea how much this means to me. I have a grocery list I’ll email you...”

“Have no fear, brother. I’ve got it covered. You just chill and don’t worry about a thing.”

I came home to a transformed space. Apparently a cult weekend in the offing was the secret to turning Bly into an ideal houseguest. He was sitting with a self-satisfied expression on the sofa in a living room that seemed paradoxically both more spacious and filled with more interesting things than ever before. A variety of potted plants greened up the eaves, eye-melting mandalas hung from the walls, the floors were spotless and the tables tidied. There were an assortment of musical toys laid about. The fridge was chock-full of fresh produce and family-meal staples, thoughtfully organized by dietary restriction.

“Not bad, huh?” said Bly, coming up behind me and grabbing me by both shoulders.

“This is incredible,” I said.

“Hey, like I told you, this isn’t my first time at the rodeo. Here, let me show you what I’ve done to the other rooms.”

He’d done a remarkable job. The bathroom sparkled like a toothpaste ad. The bedroom he had converted to a soft room, the floor covered in pillows and blankets to accommodate a large number of passed-out people. I fretted about the apartment for twenty minutes in search of something to correct but found that Bly had attended to everything, to the grease spatter on the stove’s backsplash, to the positioning of the bookshelf speakers, to the needing toilet paper for twenty-plus. He had an HDMI cable running from the TV to his laptop, labeled bins for trash, recycling, and compost. More than I would have ever considered doing, he had done. He was the Miranda of my cult weekend, leaving me with nothing for which I could take credit.

There were still a few hours before people were scheduled to come, so I settled at the kitchen table and spread my work things out, figuring if I occupied this central location now, I would be able to balance my presence and participation in the cult in tandem with my pressing professional obligations. Everyone would just have to understand. Bly, meanwhile, adjusted the lighting, turned on some unobtrusive yet mood-enhancing background music, and rolled two dozen massive joints for communal consumption. Around nine p.m. the buzzer rang and I raced to answer it before Bly. The elevator rumbled in the hallway, footsteps clomped down the echoey corridor. A knock sounded at the door: three raps, a pause, one rap, a pause, then three raps again.

“What biddings, traveler?” I shouted through the peephole. “Truth, chaos, and fruitful unity,” came the reply, sotto voce but clear enough to confirm our cultish shibboleth. I unlocked the door and let in

Mel Q., Dave R., Les C., and someone else I’d never met before who had come with them from Buffalo.

“Alright, alright,” said Mel Q., surveying the apartment. “A little snug but definitely workable.”

“Where should I set up?” asked Dave R., removing a portable 3D printer and several spools of filament from his suitcase.

A power chord sounded in the living room: Les C. had already plugged in his amplifier and was tuning his guitar to the open droning configuration best suited to his prickling, hypnotic, endlessly repeating jams. As I circled back to the kitchen table to resume work on the deck I overheard the fourth person introduce herself to Bly as Kala V. “So this is your place?” she asked. “I share it with some roommates,” he said.

Over the next three hours another eighteen people showed up. Karen G., Lars P., the Philadelphia contingent, the Providence clique. There was bodywork happening in the bathroom, a Dungeons & Dragons campaign underway in the bedroom. The apartment was bursting at the seams with activity and voices and smoke and music. I tried to get in a quick hello with everyone, but soon succumbed to self-isolation at the kitchen table while Bly cavorted and insinuated himself with my associates.

Around midnight, Lou S., the de facto head of our nonhierarchical organization, tolled the small ceremonial gong he carried with him everywhere and we all drifted at varying paces to the living room for the inaugural invocation.

“As those of you who frequent the forums know, this weekend—and really the entire future of Erusopxe—wasn’t looking good until about one month ago,” he said. “So while there have been some personnel changes and a lot of new faces in the mix, I think we’re coming into this incarnation stronger and more united in our separate paths than ever.”

A murmur of approval rippled through the room. Darvin D.’s absence was remarked upon in scattered whispers. Lou raised his hand for silence. “Before we offer the incantation, I’d like to thank our generous hosts,” he said. “Especially one of our first-timers, Bly, who really set the bar for this experience.” Bly pressed his fingertips together and bowed as everyone but me applauded.

Lou continued: “This apartment may not be exactly what we’re used to at these happenings, but sometimes restriction can be freeing, constraint the fertile soil of creativity. For the enlightened, a mere cell can contain the entire universe. From the seed we’re planting here, untold developments in the fields of art, science, education and technology may blossom, watered by our individual brains and bodies, bathed in the light from our collective energies. At Erusopxe, the one becomes many, the many one, merged and divaricated by the hallowed space we consecrate and bring into

being, today, yesterday and onward into the future. Will you join me now in silence as we vision the coming days together, the sparks of our individual meditations merging into a single radiant sun.”

I closed my eyes and tried to get into the om, but my view of the coming days was blocked by a wall of paperwork. I pressed my face against it, and through a small crack I spied Sara in her hotel room, in a bathrobe on a king-size bed reading a book while a bath ran. She turned and stared straight at me. I flinched and pulled back, and the sounds of the silenced apartment—the wheeze of floorboards beneath the shifting weight of the cultists, exhalations and stifled coughs—began to infiltrate the edges of my inner vision.

Lou rang the gong, officially inaugurating what was either the thirteenth or the fourteenth Erusopxe, depending on whether you counted the first or second cult weekend as the official beginning, and the attendees scattered to their myriad vocations. Karen G. joined Les C. on Buchla Music Easel and soon the air was reverberating with crystalline synthesizer timbres and hypnotic coils of guitar. Jen F. started rubbing Saul O. down with oils under the fronds of one of the larger plants Bly had purchased. A small crowd had gathered around the coffee table, where Nora T., the cult’s apothecary, was laying out an extensive selection of psychedelics.

I made coffee and planted myself at my laptop. The noise and general pandemonium made it difficult to concentrate, but I had already decided that it would be impossible under the circumstances to do my job well, that it would be a minor victory to do it at all.

Bly had assumed the role of chef de cuisine and was presiding over the kitchen with a Martha Stewart–like bearing, dicing onions and grating cheese for quiches while engaging in slippery exchanges with everyone who entered. Occasionally, someone would swing by to check in on me, to which I would smile sheepishly and explain that my job depended on me finishing a massive presentation by Monday. “But I’m here with you in spirit,” I would say, eliciting responses that made it clear my spirit’s participation would be more than sufficient.

By three a.m., the LSD had kicked in, followed by the mescaline, the peyote, and the mushrooms. The tracks of numerous trips overlapped and crisscrossed haphazardly across the apartment. The music had gotten darker and stranger, clothes were coming off, discussions were swiftly diving toward the nadir of sensibility. Somehow in the midst of this Bly had produced a whole roasted chicken and a vegan nut loaf from the oven, and was setting up a sort of buffet station around my work area.

I had made slower progress on the deck than I had wanted and was a bit incensed as a dozen hallucinating cultists converged on the food and attempted to negotiate it into their mouths with all the difficulty their pres

ent state entailed. Tired and fed up, my self-control crumbled and I went off on everyone in the vicinity. “I am so sick of all your selfish, self-indulgent, woo-woo bullshit. Some people can’t take a whole weekend to trip balls and bang the bongos and eat chicken with their hands. Some people actually have to work for a living!”

The group around the table stared at me with black-hole pupils, loaf crumbs dribbling from their mouths, seeing god knows what mouthing off at them. I began to cry.

“Hey, buddy,” said Bly, wiping his hands on his apron and coming over from his station at the stove. “You seem really frustrated and upset, and that’s OK. But you don’t need to go dumping it on everyone else. They’re just trying to have a good time.”

“Don’t tell me what to do or not do in my own home, Bly. You’re the worst of all, acting like this is your personal restaurant and being everyone’s best friend.”

“Whoa, I didn’t realize you had all this resentment bottled up. We should really sit down and talk this through.”

“No,” I blubbered. “No, no, no, I don’t want to!”

I gathered up my laptop and work materials and headed to the bedroom. “I don’t know if you want to go in there right now,” Bly called down the hallway after me. I ignored him and promptly walked in on the wild orgy underway in the pillow room. In a state of shock, I withdrew and entered the bathroom, where Candy V. had set up a massage table and was stretching out the hamstrings of Frances Q.

“Excuse me,” I grunted, pushing past them, climbing into the bathtub and drawing the curtain.

The tub was full of hair and glitter and covered in paint handprints, but at least I could achieve a semblance of aloneness there. I sat and propped my laptop on my knees and reopened Powerpoint, and then the next thing I knew there was light streaming through the window above me and birdsong in the air and my laptop was down by my feet and my neck and back felt like someone had performed surgery on them while I slept, which with this cast of people wasn’t an impossibility.

I stumbled out to the living room, where peace and quiet had replaced the mania of the night before. Mel Q. and Dave R. napped on the sofa, Karen G. continued to tickle the keys of her Buchla, Skye A. and Ron P. drank tea and talked intimately by the rubber plant.

“A bunch of people went out for a walk,” said Bly, emerging from the kitchen with a cup of coffee and a piece of buttered toast and handing them to me.

“I’m sorry for flipping out at you last night,” I said after a few sips and bites.

“Don’t sweat it. You were under the gun. It was a pretty wild environment. Not an ideal combo by any means.”

“Well, thanks for understanding. I hope you know I don’t actually think you’re the worst.”

He gave me a good-natured drub on the back. “Of course. You were mad, that’s all.”

Relieved, I returned to the kitchen table and resumed work on the presentation. It was much easier to concentrate now that things were more subdued. In what felt like no time I had made significant headway. “Maybe, just maybe, I’ll actually manage to pull this off,” I thought, right as the worms began to writhe in the corners of my eyes.

Bly turned on me with a dripping clown-makeup face. “Looks like someone’s starting to feel something,” he said.

The floor listed like a ship as I cornered him against the stove. “You put something in my coffee,” I said.

“Your toast, actually. But you gave permission.”

“I never gave any kind of permission.”

“But Lou S. told me you joined the dosing alliance three cult weekends ago. He showed me the form on his computer that you signed giving anyone in the alliance free rein to dose you at any point between Friday and Sunday of any given cult weekend.”

He was right, I had signed such a form, although in my defense I had done so while already under the influence of powerful psychedelics I had taken wholly of my own volition.

“But you’re not a member of the alliance,” I said.

“I joined last night after you shut yourself in the bathtub,” he said. “But you knew I had work to do. Jesus Christ, Bly. This is the worst time I could possibly be stuck on an acid trip for the next eighteen hours.” “Buddy, don’t you see? That’s exactly why I did it. You’ve been wound so tight. Last night when you exploded it was like the chickens coming home to roost.”

“So the solution was to mix LSD into butter and slather it all over my—?” My voice sounded like cartoon chipmunk’s, high-pitched and hiccupy, and then I realized I was laughing so hard I couldn’t finish my sentence. “Don’t mistake this for me having a good time,” I said. “I’m furious with you, Bly. Furious!”

“Well, there’s no going back now so my recommendation is sit down, buckle up, and enjoy the ride.” A timer dinged on the oven and he returned his attention to the cheese bread he was baking.

There seemed little point in reapplying myself to the Frankfurt deck now that my laptop’s keyboard resembled flickering hieroglyphs and the screen a liquid mirror. So instead I wandered around the apartment while the drugs

kicked in, examining up close the cool little toys and knickknacks Bly had laid out.

A bit later, the group that had gone out for a walk came back and the atmosphere in the apartment immediately became chaotic and overstimulating again. Joan V. began to lead a small chorus in a shape note singing performance and I decided I would be better off somewhere, anywhere, else. The elevator ride to street level seemed to take forever, as if my building had grown taller overnight and now I was descending miles and miles through the atmosphere to the earth’s surface. I then realized that I had failed to hit the button for the lobby and had been standing in an unmoving car for fifteen minutes.

The sun and fresh air felt incredible after being cooped up in my muggy, overpopulated apartment all night and morning with the cult. I headed toward a nearby park; this wasn’t my first ride on the psychedelic dragon, and I knew how nature could prettify a warping, shredding reality in the way a modest one-bedroom could not.

There were a lot of people out, and among them I imagined myself a traveler on another planet trying to blend in. I climbed a hill in the middle of the park and from my perch watched families picnicking, guys playing soccer, people fishing in the lake. It was a great, vibrant, bustling tapestry of humanity, and I was a loose stitch raveling at the seam.

I must have spent a long time in my solitary watchtower, taking in the pattern of the park, because at some point the light changed, the shadows of the trees lengthened, and an apocalyptic pallor spread across the meadows. I felt in my pockets and, with a stab of panic the synesthetic color of the sunset, realized that I had forgotten my keys and wallet and phone at home.

I headed for the park entrance I had come in, but the paths had rearranged themselves and I found myself unintentionally all the way over by the baseball diamonds and bandshell. From here I could make out on the skyline the hotel where Sara was staying, maybe three or four miles away. I pictured a thread connecting me to her, a telephone wire slung along rooftops all the way downtown, and in my altered state it seemed like a good idea to follow it.

Crossing the city on Nora T.’s lysergic wares led to some difficult logistics. I spent forty minutes on the side of the freeway waiting for a break in the traffic so I could sprint across. I navigated for ages along the banks of a rushing, turbid canal before finding the very prominent bridge leading over it. I hailed a taxi, rode two blocks, freaked out, and demanded the driver pull over. I crawled down a manhole into the sewer system, suspecting it was a shortcut, and was quickly turned back by a gruff man in a hardhat.

The sun was setting as I arrived at the hotel, sweaty, disheveled, mercifully cresting the comedown of my trip. The concierge eyed me with distaste as I approached. Somehow I managed to retrieve Sara’s suite number from my memory of booking the room and asked the concierge if he could call up and explain to the occupant that her partner was downstairs. He obliged with some hesitation, exchanged a few terse words over the phone, then waved me through to the elevator banks.

It must have been pure serendipity that I found the right door in that tilting, tortuous hallway of phasing geometric carpet patterns and squiggling amoeba numbers. I knocked, the lock turned, and there was Sara in a bathrobe looking at once nonplussed and seriously put upon. I was so overwhelmed with emotion that I collapsed at her slippers and clung to her knees, which she tolerated like a good sport for about thirty seconds before lifting me to my feet and herding me inside.

The hotel bed was heavenly, easily twice the bed we had at home. We sat side by side propped against an assortment of overstuffed pillows, and I told her how Bly had dosed me, how I’d left the apartment without any of my stuff, how I’d felt the inexorable need to trek across town on foot to see her. “Did you miss me?” I asked.

“Not really, to be honest,” she said. “I’ve really been enjoying my metime in this extremely well-appointed room.” I apologized for intruding; she said it was alright as long as I was out by eight. There was no way she was sharing her last night in this incredible bed with me.

We ordered room service hamburgers and watched a show we often watched together to unwind in the evenings.

“I know this isn’t news to you, but your brother is a singular piece of work,” I said during a dramatic dialogue-free montage set to serious music. “When I was fourteen he stole my birthday party,” said Sara. “Our parents said I could invite twelve people and he could invite two people, but then only three of the people I had invited actually came so he called everyone he knew and turned it into this massive blowout for his entire grade.” “That’s basically exactly what he did to my weekend.”

“Now it’s like you and I have our own little cult. The dark side of Bly cult.” “I’m sorry I used him as leverage to host Erusopxe at our apartment.” “That was pretty shitty of you. But this hotel room is making up for it a little.”

The episode ended and we sealed our napkins and uneaten fries beneath the cloches. “I’m afraid you need to clear out now,” said Sara, her tone friendly but incontestable. By this time I was more or less sober—i tested the carpet to make sure—and got up to go.

“Good luck finishing that presentation,” she said as I tied my shoes.

“I’m afraid my luck in that department has run out,” I said. “Will you still love me if I don’t have a job the next time I see you?”

“Have you considered sending Bly to work in your place? Given his history I wouldn’t be surprised if they offered him a promotion on the spot.” The journey home was shorter on account of me not being fried out of my mind on drugs. I buzzed my apartment from the lobby, someone let me in, and I went up in the elevator, expecting the worst. The door was open, the inside was ransacked. Every cup in our cupboard had been turned into an ashtray, dirty dishes ranged across the furniture, variegated stains and smudges covered the walls. A blade from the ceiling fan had snapped off and fallen upright into the soil of one of the potted plants like a pauper’s grave.

“Welcome back from your adventure,” Bly croaked from the sofa. “Everyone was like, ‘Where did that guy go?’ You left your phone here, you know.”

“Did everyone leave?” I asked.

“A couple hours ago. I wanted to keep going, but all you normies have work on Monday.”

I did a slow panorama of the trashed apartment. In the past, the whole cult had pitched in to help tidy the event site at weekend’s end. Not this time. I would need to restore some semblance of order before Sara came home, but the prospect of dealing with the disaster zone on no sleep with LSD shrapnel still ricocheting around my skull seemed impossible, and plus I needed to wrap up the Frankfurt deck by sunup or I was toast.

I kneaded my forehead, trying to smooth out the scales that had scabbed over my brain in the past forty-eight hours. “I’m going to try and finish this work,” I said.

“Oh, me and the other guys took care of that,” said Bly.

My heart skipped a beat. “What do you mean you took care of it?” “That Powerpoint thing, right? We finished it. Between the twenty-three of us we got a handle on the overall topic pretty quickly. You’ll probably want to read through it once just to be safe, but overall I’d say we did a pretty decent job.”

I retrieved my laptop from the cupboard where someone had conscientiously stowed it to avoid getting spilled or sat on and opened the document. As I scrolled through the slides a sense of relief so profound it stung cascaded over me. My sketched concepts had been filled in and shaded with nuance, my placeholders swapped with fully fleshed-out ideas that put my middling efforts to shame.

“Bly, this is unbelievable,” I said. “I’m truly in a state of shock.” “Hey, consider it a thank you from everyone for your hospitality this weekend,” he said. “We were glad to pitch in.”

Apart from a few small issues—for some reason every mention of Frankfurt had been changed to Mr. Frankfurt and the word “assessed” was misspelled “half-assed” throughout—all appeared to be in order. I tweaked what minor errors I could find and emailed the file to my boss.

“So what say you and I get this placed tidied up,” I said to Bly, wiping my hands with gusto.

He chuckled sportively. “Nice try, buddy. I’m afraid cleanup is all you.”

Bly had been out of our apartment four months when I got a text from him asking if I was coming to the next cult weekend. Ever since my promotion I’d been off the forums, devoting all my time to new initiatives, getting my life and financial security in order in anticipation of the baby Sara and I had decided to try for. I hadn’t quit, not officially. But my need for extreme release was waning. Rather than counting down the weeks and days to the next event as I had before, I now did the opposite, cherishing every day and week in which I heard nothing, half hoping Erusopxe had quietly petered out following its last hurrah at my home.

Bly’s message suggested otherwise. In my absence from the forums he’d become an active contributor and given the strong leadership he’d exhibited during the previous weekend he had taken responsibility for organizing the next one, on a forty-foot boat he’d purchased off an old oil-rig buddy. “Ambitious,” I told him.

“What can I say?” he replied. “All cults take to the seas eventually.” I couldn’t deny that the setup had appeal. Two days on open water with the cultists was precisely the kind of half-baked fantasy my unreformed self would have jumped at. But as I contemplated hours getting sunburned and seasick with the gang while Bly whipped up swordfish steaks on the grill and beer cans and bongs shifted underfoot with the swell of the waves, my eyes wandered from my phone’s screen to Sara, who was reading a book on the sofa in our quiet, cozy, decidedly uncrazy abode. It was just the two of us, possibly at some point in the not-so-distant future to be three of us. I felt something heavy and shaggy settle inside me like a giant dog about to go to sleep, and I knew that my days with the cult were over.

“I think I’m going to pass on this one,” I wrote to Bly.

“We’ll miss you, but suit yourself,” he responded, clearly far from heartbroken. “Give my love to S.”

It would be our last conversation. As far as what happened that weekend I know only as much I heard from the assorted media reports and acidaddled recollections of the other cultists.

The boat was sixteen miles out to sea when Katya M. spotted two FBI vessels approaching at high speed from the southwest. Chaos ensued as everyone tried to hide as much contraband as possible. Karen G. and Les

C. aimed their amplifiers at the oncoming craft to try and repel them with the worst musical vibes they could summon. Dave R., Lou S. and Mel Q. armed themselves with fishing rods and tried to thwack back the feds as they pulled alongside and attempted to board.

In the fracas that followed a number of cultists were injured. Nelson B. was pepper sprayed; Finca T. and Marvin J. suffered severe bruising from batons. The agents scoured the ship looking for Bly, demanding the others tell them where he was hiding. Did they know he was responsible for blowing up an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico less than a year ago and had been on the run from the law ever since? Surely he had told some of them this cockamamie backstory, but the cultists were a loyal bunch, and stayed mum to the man.

Later, there would be fierce debates on the forums about whether the FBI agents who commandeered the ship should be considered honorary members of the cult and therefore invited to future weekends. Given the numerous Erusopxe members now facing jail time or large fines for possession, interfering with an arrest and numerous violations of maritime law, this proposal proved quite controversial.

And then there was the question of what had happened to Bly. The FBI never found him, no life rafts had been taken from the boat, all his belongings were sitting undisturbed in the hold. The only clues were a sizefourteen flip-flop much like the ones Bly was fond of wearing found washed ashore thirty miles up the coast from where the boat was raided and Jen F.’s hazy recollection of sitting on the deck of the FBI interceptor in handcuffs, peaking on a triple dose of LSD, and spotting, out of the corner of her eye, a very tall and handsome man in the water, fully naked, swimming all out, away from the action, in the general direction of land.