“What are you,” I asked, “in love?”

“No,” she laughed.

“All right. Tell me about the kooks in Mount Airy.”

“They’re not kooks,” she said quickly and quietly.

“Aaah,” I said slowly. “I begin to see.”

“Begin to see what?”

“Tell me about Mount Airy.”

Her head tilted as she stared at me and I could see something working its way in her eyes and I flinched from the expected tongue lashing but then that strange smile arose and all was once again serene.

“Well they’re not a cult, or anything like that,” she said, fiddling with her silverware. “They’re just a lot of nice people trying to find some answers. They believe that the voices of the spirit and of the soul are always there to tell us the secret truths of our existence, but we need to learn how to hear them. We need to somehow cut through the murk of our omnipresent reality and learn to listen and see in a spiritual way. The purpose of the Haven is to teach us how.”

“Okay,” said the waitress with a roll of her eyes. She had slinked upon us as silently as a predatory cat. “You said you were ready.”

“We’ve been ready,” I said. “I’ll have the Caesar salad and the veal in the apple cream sauce. Is the veal any good?”

“I haven’t gotten any complaints,” said the waitress.

“A ringing endorsement. And another Sea Breeze.”

“I’ll just have the bean chili,” said Beth.

“They have that Texas ribeye I thought you’d like,” I suggested.

Beth made a face, an I-don’t-eat-red-meat kind of face. I had seen that face on many women before but never before on Beth.

“Aaah,” I said slowly once again. “I do see.”

“You see what?”

“Go on about your new friends.”

“What they’re trying to gain is a way to see into the spirit world, what they call initiation into the temple of higher cognition, where they drink from the twin potions of oblivion and memory.”

“The twin potions of oblivion and memory,” I said, nodding. “And this is not a cult.”

“Not really. They teach a series of practical exercises that will help you climb up the twelve-step path to initiation. You can do it with them or on your own, with proper knowledge. There’s some chanting and incense, sure, but no magic. And no Kool-Aid. Just a natural way to a higher wisdom. Twelve steps with explicit instructions for each step. There’s actually nothing so unique about it. They’ve been doing it for centuries in the East. This is just a way for the Western mind to train itself.”

“And I assume you’re in training.”

“As part of my cover, of course.” She fiddled with a packet of Sweet’n Low. “But I will admit it seems to speak to a certain void I have been feeling. Maybe even what we talked about before, the something I had been missing.”

“Wouldn’t a few dates be more practical?”

“Shut up, Victor, you’re being an asshole.”

I was, actually. I didn’t know if it was the vodka talking or an outgrowth of my false brave front or the feeling I had that the last bastion had fallen, but I didn’t like to hear about Beth’s voids or her search for spiritual meaning. I could always count on Beth to stay rooted in the real world. Her idealism had nothing to do with any mystical esoterica, just the realization that we had a job to do and let’s get to it. And if her job was helping the disadvantaged it was no big thing. I never thought I’d see her groping for meaning in the spirit world. That was for mixed-up losers who couldn’t make it on their own and wanted an excuse. That was for hipsters too cool to accept the Western way in which their minds moved. That was for phony shamans in orange robes, not for Beth.

When my drink came, plopped in front of me without ceremony, I took a deep gulp and felt the bitter sweetness of the juice and the cut of the vodka. “All right,” I said. “I’m sorry,” and I was. Beth was the last person who took me seriously, I think, and for me not to take her seriously was a crime. “Tell me about the twelve steps.”

“I don’t know them all yet, but I’m trying to learn. The first step is just wanting to find meaning. It’s walking in the door. The second is understanding that the answers are all around us, both internal and external, but in the spiritual, not physical world. To access that world we are required to develop new ways of seeing, to develop our spiritual eyes.”

“The creep who came into our office and threatened me said I was a two.”

“Gaylord. He’s one of the teachers. A sweet man, really.”

“Sweet enough to remember cutting my head off with a broadsword.”

She raised her eyebrows. “You must have deserved it in your past life,” she said, “and as far as I can tell not much has changed.” It was good to see her laugh.

“Well, at least I’ve been consistent through the ages.”

“That’s nothing to be so proud of. Your level refers to the steps you have mastered on your way up the ladder. Practically anyone who enters the Haven has satisfied the first two steps or they wouldn’t be there, so it’s no great honor to be a two. It is on the third step that the exercises begin. You have to prepare your mind for the journey and you do that by learning devotion. You take the critical out of your thinking, you clear your mind of the negative, you fight to see the good in everyone and everything you come in contact with.”

“That rules me out. My one true talent is seeing the negative in everyone and everything.”

“You should try it, Victor. It’s rather refreshing. One result of being completely uncritical, I’ve found, is that I stop surrendering myself to the outside world, stop chasing one sense impression after another. Instead I try to take each sense impression as a unique gift and orient myself by my response to its singular beauty. I don’t rush to see a hundred flowers, hoping to find the prettiest, but examine one completely, uncritically, and feel my inner self responding to it. It is that response which is most enlightening. Respecting our own responses to sense impressions is the first step to developing an inner life.”

“I can’t manage my outer life, what am I going to do with an inner life?”

“Why so defensive, Victor?” she said with a condescending smile. “No one’s saying you shouldn’t keep eating animal flesh and watching Matlock reruns and chasing all the money you want to chase. You should do as you like and be happy. I, on the other hand, am practicing devotion.”

“And that’s why you’re so sweet to our rude waitress.”

“I can’t let my inner life be disoriented by minor annoyances in the physical realm. Only benevolence will lead to spiritual seeing.”

“I’d rather chase the money.”

“And do you think being rich will make you a complete and satisfied person?”

“Maybe not, but at least I’d be able to dress better.”

“You’re no different than the rest of us, Victor. We all see ourselves as this dissatisfied thing, this ego, looking outside ourselves for just that one other thing that will make us complete. That job, that lover, that pot of money. Even enlightenment, as if that too is a thing we can grab hold of to complete what needs completing. There is always something, we believe, that will make us whole. But if you take a finite thing, like body and mind, and look for something outside it to make it complete, something like money or love or faith, what you are seeking is also just a finite thing. So you have a finite thing reaching for the infinite by grabbing for some other finite thing and you end up with nothing more than a deeper sense of dissatisfaction.”

“So what’s the answer?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t trained myself to see it yet, but it’s out there, it has to be. I think it starts with changing our conception of ourselves.”

It all made more than a little sense and I had to admit that some of what Beth was saying resonated with what I had been feeling that very afternoon while hiding beneath my sheets. I thought for a moment about pursuing it further with her, to see if maybe there might be some answers there for me, thought about it and discarded it. Maybe I was succumbing to the same impulse that made it so hard for me to ask directions when I was temporarily misplaced on the road, or to ask for help from my father, but I figured I’d rather suffer in existential limbo than give myself over to a bunch of chant-heads, as Caroline had so finely described them.