He had been either ignoring or abusing
many of us, so the invitation came as a welcome surprise. Unlike other
recent events, there was an upbeat feel to the party. He had asked Anne,
for instance, to spend time decorating the room with colorful balloons.
"Maybe," a few of us thought, "things are going to get better."
During the party, though, Rama demanded that a handful of us confess,
one by one, before the other disciples, that the demons had succeeded
in talking over our souls.
"Anne is the worst," Rama proclaimed, lashing out at her.
"She either looks like a witch or a whore." Then, in a seeming
attempt to exorcise the demons, he told us to meet him the following
day at the Los Angeles coroner's office. He wanted us to witness
an autopsy.
The next day I watched two men saw the skull of a "John Doe"
hit-and-run victim. The saw whined. They peeled off the face.
The air smelled acrid. My stomach felt bloated. "That could be me
on the table," I thought. I wanted to retch. The pathologist
measured the brain. I found myself thinking about life.
Not in terms of Rama's increasingly fearful descriptions of the world,
but in terms of my gut feelings. "Something happened," I wrote
in a journal that I had recently started.
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