In the beginning it was not about the words, though his words are now all that remains. We lived as if in paradise. It was each moment that mattered. He gathered us, connected us, filled us with shared wonder. That was enough. No, it was everything. Explanation was superfluous.

            Only later did he tell us what was to come. Even then his message was far from clear. He spoke in hints and riddles and then scolded us for not understanding—as though it were our fault he refused to speak plainly. Like a poet or politician, he hid behind ambiguity. He stared us into silence when we dared question him. It was impossible to know just what he planned. I managed to piece it together. When I tried to stop him, it was too late.

            He changed, evolved—as did we all. People joined us. The Community grew. Things became complicated. Purpose was sought. We looked to him to provide it. He stumbled into language. Words betrayed him. They could not convey what had to be felt. They were too malleable. They were filtered through the mind. They altered his intent.

            In the end, he got lost in the search for meaning. So he attempted to create it himself. 

            Where his story should begin remains uncertain. (We know, all too well, how his story ends.) His life was a river that flowed from obscure headwaters. Its course was continually reshaped by tributaries, forks and branches. Unfortunately, not all of them led to the sea. Do I start with his mother (that pure and tragic soul) who had the audacity to bare a child out of wedlock in those dark and unforgiving days? Maybe I need to go back further, to his ancestors and forebears, though, in truth, I know little of them, only legend and innuendo. Perhaps it was his mother’s leaving our small judgmental town to give birth to him in secret. Or it might have been that day when he was plunged into an ancient river by a wild-eyed mystic and emerged with a new vision of who he could be.

            The image that pops into my mind was the afternoon he unexpectedly called us to join him at the shore. There was nothing unusual about that day. It was at neither the beginning nor the end, but, as the Roman’s say, in medias res. There were twelve, maybe more of us. The morning’s work was done, the evening’s not begun. Light glimmered off the waves as they rolled onto nearby rocks. He had lured us to the spot with the promise of something to eat and drink. We arranged ourselves on the sand in a semi-circle below him. He sat on a three-legged stool he had supposedly just made and placed a jug of wine between us and him, just out of everyone’s reach.

            We continued muttering until he produced, out of nowhere, a large crust of bread. Pungent aromas swirled from it. He tore off a piece. Its scent filled our noses as he handed us the rest. We each pinched off a bit, passing it around until only a heel remained. Then he raised his piece to his mouth, uttered some unintelligible words, and took a bite. We did the same. The bread was crisp, tasty, but dry. It cried out for something with which to wash it down. We were all fixed on the jug of wine, so close, yet too far away to grab. We watched for someone—anyone—to stretch out, retrieve it and take a first sip. None of us had the courage.

            Our eyes darted between the wine and him, random side glances flickering between us. He remained motionless above us.

             “It is difficult,” he softly spoke, “to be offered something, but for it to remain distant. One never knows if one is supposed to seize an opportunity or await it. We are often given savory morsels that only seem to make us want more. At other times we are served delicacies that sate our hunger. There are those that dip their bowls into the communal pot and gorge themselves on first helpings. Others wait for the ladle. Some climb the trunks of gnarled trees to pluck off what turns out to be sour fruit. Most bide their time hoping that some windfall will tumble to the ground. It doesn’t make a difference. The meat of a nut may be sweet or it may be bitter. You cannot tell before the shell is opened. Whether you crack it apart yourself or it is delivered on a platter, it tastes the same. Until then, you cannot know if it is something you actually want. You may think you do. But, often times, you find you are wrong.”

            As he finished, he reached for the jug, lifted it, considered it and, with a wide grin, tipped it over. Someone gasped, most kept their tongues. We all wondered what he was doing? A clear liquid poured onto the ground. “Water” he said. He put the jug back upright and carried it around the circle. Each of us took a sip. It quenched our thirst better than any wine would have. Then, with a snicker, he picked up his stool and left us to figure out the lesson. That is, if there really was anything to figure out.

            Not long after that his forewarnings began. The first one was sprung on us one evening over a kettle of stew. As he was stirring, he gave a homily about ingredients blending. “It is the combination of flavors that makes it so tasty. Individually, each may fall short. Only together can they reach their full potential. Just as with us.” Then he looked up from the fire, his face strangely pale, and added, “This is why you must know the coming signs. The earth will quiver when the eschaton nears. It will feel like armies marching. Buildings and walls will crack and collapse. People will turn upon each other. They will turn upon us. By our unity, though, we will survive.” We waited for more, but he merely began to spoon out the stew. 

            Most of us dismissed this as another of his impossible tests. What else could we do? How can one react to such an outlandish pronouncement? Several weeks passed. The utterances faded, were forgotten—or at least ignored. They were an aberration, would not be repeated, we thought and we hoped. Then, at a teaching, after extolling the virtues of cooperative planting, they burst out again. His voice deepened ominously and he wailed, “The skies will open. Clouds will pour forth unending tears. Earth, herself,” he thundered, “will rise up and revolt. Against what man has done to her.” He stared beyond us. We listened and shuddered, frightened as much by the glow in his eyes as the venom in his words.

            In time, these revelations and prophesies made their way to almost every talk he gave. His discourses and sermons had always been disjointed. He would ramble on, babble, inch forward, retreat, search his mind and vocabulary until he turned chaotic assemblages into a semblance of sense. He would try out different sayings, gnostic proverbs, accidental aphorisms, fables, myths, and parables to try and reach an epiphany. When it worked, it was an explosion of truth discovered by him and his listeners together. When it didn’t, he forced a conclusion with some banal profundity—something we pretended to accept as clever.

            It seemed almost natural then for him to slip in these apocalyptic predictions. In time, almost any topic he held forth on—family, farming, fishing or even planning—would turn into an exhortation about the coming tribulations. “Fields and pastures will turn brown and wither. Creatures that were once plentiful will disappear. The oceans will swell and wash away towns. Then will come the end times,” he announced, often apropos of nothing. “I tell you this now so you will know what to expect.” He did not tell us when, he did not tell us where. Most importantly, he did not tell us how to prepare.

            Even with outsiders he could not help himself. In one village he began to preach about how it was better to live communally than separately. He lectured on this so often that I barely listened. But then he climbed off the steps from which he’d been speaking, pushed through the crowd that had amassed to hear him, and grabbed the sleeve of an innocent bystander just trying to walk past. Terror filled the poor man’s face as he was madly shouted at. “The sun will turn dark, the moon red. Drought, famine and plague will creep over the land. The drums of wars will be deafening. Cities will fall.” The man’s knees gave way and he crumbled to the ground. As we walked away, he confided, “We will find refuge in each other, in the Community. The terrors will pass us by. When the whole world joins us, becomes one with us, we will all enter a new age of peace and tranquility.”

            He has been called a prophet; he has been called a kook. Some saw him as a shaman, others as just a charlatan. He was a teacher, preacher, pedant, and fool. He would engage you with sage-like wisdom or prattle on interminably. There was no one more compassionate and no one more severe. He could be the kindest man you’d ever meet, yet abruptly turn upon you, without provocation, with the flimsiest excuse. Many saw him as a visionary, a revolutionary, a philosopher, a saint. Even before his death he was mythologized. Soon after that his apotheosis begun. Sometimes I think he’d approve, but mostly, not.

            Contrary to what so many think, he did not intend to found a religion. Certainly, not originally. He thought orthodoxy stifling, the dogmatic death. He railed against zealots, fundamentalists and unthinking literalists. “Those who get mired in the rut of belief do not progress on the path of knowledge,” he said. “Those that get stuck in belief never know.” 

            He was at his best with the misfits and outcasts who assembled around him. (As was I.) They latched on to him and followed, like a pack of dogs shadowing their master. He said we were bound, conjoined, a single organism. He may have been the heart, but we were the body. The two could not be severed. We would be together always. Then he abandoned us, trying to bring about the future he himself had forecast.

            We had been orphaned wanderers seeking the orbit of a family. He managed to provide what we did not know we needed. Acceptance. Love. Purpose. Belonging. When he left, the disparate souls he had gathered were suddenly set adrift. Forlorn and forsaken, they slipped into darkness, fumbled through the shadows, scrambled blindly in the void. In the end there was only a remnant—as he foretold. They tried to preserve what he had fashioned, tried to keep lit the dying embers by which they were united. In them, he was resurrected; the fire was reignited. The flames grew, combined, merged again into one blaze. But soon the schisms came, the denials, desertions, recriminations. The Community divided and subdivided, becoming, amoeba-like, two, three, four—who knows how many by now. He had warned us: “My sheep will be scattered.”

            That was some twenty years ago. And they still blame me. I became the scapegoat that they needed. Despite all the time that has passed, we remain frozen in that infamous kiss, that kiss everyone gets wrong. We are forever entwined like those twins of old, Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Romulus and Remus, Ahriman and Ahura Mazda. You cannot have one without the other; you cannot have the light without the dark.

            Yet I am the only one that knows the truth. That is my curse. Now I must reveal it, even if it is too late. I must get it out, set it straight, write it down. Knowledge, like life, demands release. I must push it into the world, as a mother does a fledgling. With each word I scratch onto these pages, I hereby set us free. Make your own way in the world. Flee! Would that he had done the same for me.

            It is in vain, though. These scribblings will not be believed. The rope that once joined us is frayed. My words cannot reweave the strands. There are already so many versions of his too short time here: biographies, histories, Remembrances. Every year a new one appears, peddling fiction accepted as truth, while I will offer truth to be rejected as fiction. My account will be discounted as apologia, dismissed as apocrypha. The role I played is long since settled. Their deceits spread and congealed while I had to hide. Their flood of lies and distortions have so saturated the ground that now only the twisted weeds of delusion grow.

            I am condemned, doomed. My writings will be used as the coils that hang me.

            I swear, I was trying to stop him, save him, save him from himself, save all he had done, save all of us. I failed. I did not know I would pay such a high price. I made my deal and cannot renege. The choice was mine. For him I became an exile. I have no more home to return to.

            O, she never should have brought me these damn empty pages, these dirty temptations. The blank surfaces that demand to be filled. Before they are found they will deteriorate into dust—as so, soon, will I. “Write about him,” she said. “You knew him better than anyone.” I could not argue. What else would I write about?

            She was my only visitor, bringing me books and news and the occasional sweet. There was always a catch in her voice when she described for me recent developments. As though she were divulging something she shouldn’t, as though she were being disloyal. To whom or to what was always uncertain. She never stayed long. No one else, not even my family, ever came.

            I don’t know why, but I cannot bring myself to use their names. I have to be careful. What I say can and will be used against me. Proper names have power. Like the ancient Hebrews’ unpronounceable name for their god. It would make it all too real.

            Still, I have accepted the burden she has imposed on me. I must somehow make his words flesh. I do not know how I can do it—capture his electricity, the sparks that flew from him, that connected us all, that brought us together, that made us more than ourselves. I can only convey shadows of what it was like to be a part of his world, his creation, those few extraordinary years. I must make him live again, open my veins onto these virgin pages so my blood may flow out to revive him. I doubt I have the strength, the youth, the innocence to succeed. Yet, this may be my only salvation—and perhaps his.  

            Given enough time I will recount it all here. Though I do not know how much time is left me. All I know is that it is dwindling. It doesn’t really matter. No one will read this, what do you call it, diary, journal, memoir, confession? But, for his sake, I will not hold back. I must reveal all I know.

            No more delay.

            I knew him longer than anyone. You might say we were raised as brothers. I was older. He became my responsibility. I admit there were periods when we were happily estranged. They were, shamefully, a relief to me. In the end, though, I came back. At the end, we were together. Everything comes to an end. Try as they might, they cannot erase me from my own life. Or his!

            When I came to the Community, after so many had already thrown in their lots with him, followed him place to place, spread his message and name, they became jealous. It was understandable. We had the secrets of our childhood between us. We laughed at stories only we knew. We exchanged jokes and ganders they could not comprehend. Even, at times, our language must have seemed foreign. They did not have our common past. They had only expectations for the future. To them, I was a stranger, a usurper! Where was I when he had called them? Each felt he or she had earned their own special place by his side, as if seniority equaled preference, as if fervor equaled favor.

            And they believed. They believed fully and blindly. They believed without hesitation, without question, without regret. They believed in whatever he said and whatever he did. They had surrendered themselves to him. They did not think about it. For, above all, it was in him they believed, in whom they believed, in which they believed. For them, he was the fount from which all wisdom flowed. For me, well, I knew him too well, knew him too long. I could not subordinate myself to him or the group. I could not shed the individual I had become. My failure served his purposes.

            But where does the story begin? For me, it was the day I dropped off a misled and determined naïf at a grimy pier in San Francisco. Fifteen years would pass before I’d see him again, ripened, reborn, a transformed human being, the unexpected consequence of my first betrayal.

            It had been our secret. I had agreed not to tell his mother. I didn’t think he would actually go through with it. He had always been so coddled. He hadn’t even finished high school. It was my fault. I egged him on—enticed him—with tales I did not believe. But he did. He was convinced. He didn’t care about the difficulties, didn’t consider the risks, didn’t imagine the costs. He just went. I don’t know how he managed to arrange it. But when the day came, I drove him to the city and sat in my car as he boarded a freighter for Japan. 

            We seemed to be playing chicken. Another move in our eternal game of chess, leading me to take a knight so he could take my queen. He didn’t flinch when I stopped at the pier. My fingers tightened around the steering wheel as he swung open the door. He got out, inhaled the salt air, walked around to the driver’s side and stuck his hand in for an awkward handshake. He (and I) needed a hug. But it was still the Eisenhower Fifties. Men didn’t do that then. We were just boys, affecting the detachment that seemed the mark of maturity. He whispered, “goodbye. Thanks,” and set off on his impossible quest, a search for a father who could never be found. I watched him lumber down the wharf with a duffle bag slung over his shoulder, a parody of a sailor, the Kerouac character he had always wanted to be. He walked up the gangplank and into the hold of the ship. Then he disappeared. 

            There were no phone calls, letters or post cards. I happily lost track of him. His protection no longer fell to me. I could get on with it all: college, marriage, career, kids. Over time I felt something missing. I did not realize it might be him. Then, out of the blue, he returned, returned to California, returned to my life. And he remains despite all I have done. Apostasy is forever. So is the bond of brothers. Perhaps by these words I will finally be untethered.

            Night falls and I switch on the light. A single bulb dangles overhead. I fill these once pristine pages with this old ballpoint pen. Was it discarded or forgotten? Or is this a trap? They want to know what I know, what I remember, what I may reveal. Could they have convinced her to help them? I cannot take the chance. I am imprisoned, as much by my memories as by these thick walls. But truth will out. I can no longer contain it. It spurts onto these bare sheets of paper from my still open wound. I do not know for whom; I do not know for when. Until I do, I must hide away these writings and keep my secrets safe.