Bad Vibrations

PART 1

Blind acceptance is a sign of stupid fools who stand in line.

—Sex Pistols

CHAPTER 1

THE WOMAN WITH more chins than teeth asks if I’m here to see the cult. Yeah, she’s the type to use the C-word. The type who are OK with living in this world that’s killing them, eating all the poison, breathing in all the toxins, bleeding energy by the minute. Might as well be walking corpses. Just like Doctor says: they don’t get it.  In a society that does its best to make us sick, they’ll demonize the only true way to achieve optimal well-being.

The invitation said this was unfriendly territory, but unfriendly can’t stop truth. Detractors and deniers can’t stop the awakening.

I’m here for a wellness retreat.

With the cult? Her voice is gruff, but there’s no stale cigarette smell on her diner uniform. Maybe she’s among the ones that fear-quit during the early days of the virus. Takes a pandemic to knock sense into some people. Or maybe the voice is due to vices unknown to people who take responsibility for their health, who don’t deny the dangers of modern life. Aren’t smokers supposed to be svelte anyway? Maybe it’s not smoke. It could be processed food, booze, factory-farmed meat, parabens, aluminum deodorant, lead paint, radon, tanning salon radiation, reheated cooking oils, car exhaust, leaf blowers, microwaved burritos, prescription meds, poor sleep, adrenal fatigue, leaky gut, fluoride in the water, or just not enough energy to keep all her cells alive. Takes a pandemic for even super healthy twenty-eight-year-old women with aggressive powerlifting and weight class goals and an organic lifestyle to see there’s more that can be done with the help of the right doctor.

It’s not a cult, it’s a movement.

Heh, she snorts. What’s the difference?

In the Instagram DM, @lululunges said to expect derision. They can’t understand our discipline, our culture, our resilience. They’re sleepwalking, she said. Wellness scares them, so they try to shoot us down. We’re threatening to dismantle the hegemony that’s keeping everyone sick so they can’t achieve their full potential. They laugh, chins jiggling, until they deteriorate into a hacking cough and phlegm and blood spatters from their mouths, soaking the surgical masks they still wear since they’re never going to be resilient. But not in this town. Between the pickup trucks and ATVs in the yards and this woman’s visceral fat you can see even under the diner apron suffocating her already deteriorating organs, it’s more like the type of place where they stocked up on guns to shoot the virus. It’s like they thought, well, we already have so much disease, what’s another one going to do?

And to them, wellness is a cult. The routines we employ to keep healthy might as well be arcane witchcraft. Yoga, meditation, sharing each other’s blood; the habits that keep us healthy people looking and feeling younger, to them, belong in a horror movie.

The blood is the life.

You’re vampires. The long, gray hair protruding from the mole on her primary chin flutters in the air released with the grunt.

It should be us giving them the sign of the cross! Reaching for garlic. Keep your diseases away from us!

We’re not vampires. How many times online and off does this need to be repeated?

You drink blood.

That doesn’t make us vampires. Vampires suck the life out of their victims. We share each other’s blood to share energy, to infuse new life into our veins. It’s the secret to eternal health.

We don’t serve blood here. If you’re gonna sit at my counter you’re gonna have to order something. She shoves the menu across the tacky, stained plastic.

Ugh. The BPAs must already be seeping into my skin. @lululunges or whoever is giving me a ride to the ranch can’t get here soon enough. At least the menu is paper. Thank Doctor!

Is your produce organic?

Be more specific.

Tomatoes.

No.

Cucumbers?

No.

Carrots.

No.

Iceberg lettuce?

No.

Do you know how long they have been disconnected from their roots?

What?

How long since they’ve been picked?

How the hell should I know that?

They weren’t locally sourced?

I ain’t gonna buy from your vampire farm, if that’s what you’re asking. If you are, you can get right the hell on out now. I’m sick of you parasites coming into my town and demanding I change my ways for you. I been here my whole life, been running my business how’s I see fit longer than you been alive. Y’all got a lotta nerve trying to intimidate me into buying your vampire vegetables.

Whoa! I’m not doing any of that! I’m just on a super strict diet. I’m gonna hit a 200-pound back squat by the end of the year while getting in a 57 kg weight class. I’m not gonna meet my goals if I don’t eat super clean.

So what do you want?

Fries sound good. Yeah, they’re trucked in from some commercial farm and cooked in oxidized oil. Oh the free radicals! But at least it’s not animal flesh. It’s not that level of energy draining like eating literal death. And this weekend will be filled with detox and fresh blood. If I don’t meet my macros, it’s OK. Calorie counting is not part of Doctor’s prescription, just something I incorporate to meet my specific goals aside from highest possible vibrational energy. So, if I’m not in a deficit today, it only affects my competition goals. And no one has to know.

Unless whoever is meeting me at this free radical factory comes in . . . How much time before the others arrive?

I’ll take the garden salad.

$3.50 ain’t enough to keep me waiting on you in here.

I’ll take two garden salads.

You’ll take four or nothing.

I’ll take four.

Doesn’t make up for the business I lost when y’all put that ‘poisoner’ sign outside.

I don’t know anything about a sign.

You’ll take five salads.

Okay I’ll take five. We’re not all bad!

She rolls her eyes and turns around.

We just want the world to experience true health!

She pretends not to hear me as she passes through the plastic sheets that separate the dining area from the kitchen. The thin, saggy skin, the wrinkles, and the frown lines make her look a lot older than her capable gait. They must not have collagen powder in Caroline, PA. It’s not like they have much else. That’s how Doctor got the land so cheap. A full farm and all those summer camp cabins for the dedicated patients who made the move from LA. The sacrifice. They must have seen such tremendous results from the Practice. Like Andromeda, Doctor’s wife, sick with the virus in the early days and rescued by her husband’s blood after they’d tried everything else. Her life saved, her reason to live transformed. It worked for her when she needed it. It saved her. It works.

If it can save a life, it should at least help me get to 12 percent body fat, bench press 120 pounds, and make six figures at the agency.

This weekend will make it happen. Full immersion into the Practice. This flirting with the diet and following along with the YouTube yoga videos just isn’t getting me there quickly enough. I need the blood. It’s the life.

The door of the tiny diner swings open. In this greasy spoon, in this opiate part of the state, the girl who walks in just makes you want to say, You’re not from around here, are ya? Rhinestone cowboy boots give way to perfect calves, lean but shapely, the kind some people are genetically gifted and others will never achieve no matter how many calf lift reps they perform. A flowered dress flows around the creamy tan skin of her long legs and her brown hair forms beach waves that my balayage would never achieve regardless of time spent with the curling iron. She’s beautiful in an effortless sort of way.

She must drink a lot of blood.

You must be Valerie! She extends a hand. No thought that I may be infected. Just offers me her hand, the first such gesture in what, two years? I’m Miami.

We shake. The energy flows. Her vibrations are high. Hand contact isn’t enough. We’re both craving energy. That’s why we’re in this town that just sucks the life out of you. It’s been too long since a proper embrace. Energy can’t be shared without some intimacy; sorry, Dr. Fauci.

We hug. Her vibrations pulse into me, mine into her. Miami, the beautiful Miami, filled with energy she’s so quick to impart. My sister from this day on. Someone who understands.

We loosen our hold on each other, but the vibrations remain. We’re each infused with the new energy created by an interpersonal connection. Not everyone exudes vibrations, as Doctor says. Some only have enough to sustain their own innate electrical systems and none to share. Others have achieved such high energy levels that they literally vibrate. They’re the opposite of vampires; they offer their energy to you. Those who accuse them of being vampires are trying to steal their energy. It’s ironic. It took me twenty-five years to understand the kids on the playground shouting, I know you are but what am I? were speaking the truth.

Everyone in the Facebook group says Doctor has the most intense vibrations, that he exudes them and can energize anyone in a six-foot radius. You can social distance and still be healed!

Miami takes the stool next to mine.

So, I just have to ask everyone in the movement. Have you met Doctor?

No, Miami says. But I’m so excited to. My friends—Medea and Mentor—they’re meeting us here, they’re longtime patients. They’ve met him a few times. They own a yoga studio in Cleveland. You’ll love them. Medea had been diagnosed with all these health conditions. Then one day she sees Doctor on YouTube and starts following his protocol and BAM, she’s cured. She’s a beautiful soul. So is Mentor. He’s so supportive of her. He started following the protocol too and it expanded his mind. They’ve been spreading the word in Cleveland.

How did they get to meet him? Was it at an event?

I dunno. I never asked.

You weren’t curious to know what he’s like?

Well, we know what he’s like from all his videos. He’s so authentic, not like the rest of the internet. And I heard he radiates vibrations. Ooh! Do you think he’ll give us names? Like Medea and Mentor?

What would a name do?

Well, it means you’re really a part of the Vibe. That you’ve officially become a new version of you. And you can leave that old, lesser you behind.

"What about not a new you, but a better version of you?" A you who can finally get a director title at an agency that seems to give them away quicker than Doctor gives his energy.

I guess, she says. But I know I’m ready for a new me. That’s what it’s all about, right? Leave the people stealing our energy behind. Get rid of all those things that take your energy. All the vampire foods, the stress, the low-vibrational people—all the things that keep you from achieving maximum energy. My name is stuck to all that old stuff that was killing me.

Did you, like, memorize his speech?

I must have watched his ‘What’s in a name?’ video like a hundred times!

And it’s almost like she didn’t just smile back at me because that positive energy just evaporates as the waitress/cashier/cook shoves through the plastic partition that looks more like it should be in a carwash than a restaurant. The five salads are on the tray, anemic bowls of iceberg lettuce, matchstick carrots, chunks of slicing tomatoes, and cucumber wheels—none of which are fresh picked, their nutrients evaporated into the ether. Plucked out of plastic bags, these are neutral foods, according to the Protocol. They neither giveth energy, nor taketh away. They are acceptable substitutes when energy-bestowing, fresh foods are not available.

Oh, great. You have a friend. Another Manson Family member?

Manson Family? Miami asks with genuine confusion.

She thinks Doctor’s Prescription for Higher Vibrational Energy is a cult.

Because we consider ourselves a family? Miami asks.

Because you drink blood.

That’s a small part of the Protocol. It’s a holistic lifestyle focused on sustainable health practices for high vibrations and maximal energy, Miami says.

OK, OK, what are you eating?

Is your coffee organic fair-trade Columbian?

No.

That’s OK then. I’ll stick with the salad.

The garden salad?

That’s what this is, right? One for each of us and Medea and Mentor? And whoever is picking us up here? Thanks, Valerie!

Those are hers, the diner minder says. You want to sit under my roof, you order something.

Um, hmm. Miami’s big, brown eyes scan the menu. Like everything else, her contoured brows are effortless and perfect like it all happened by accident and she didn’t spend time in a salon with some angry Korean lady berating her for mangling her eyebrows when she should have been threading for years. A cup of decaf.

Ten dollar minimum for vampires.

Five cups of decaf?

The diner minder’s arm flab jiggles as she grabs the full pot with the orange rim. It’s 4 p.m. With the empty roads around here making it look like spring 2020, it’s a safe bet that pot’s been on since the morning. Can coffee oxidize? That Instagram ad I saw last week claimed a cup of coffee has more toxins than a cup of anything else we drink, that it’s filled with pesticides and herbicides and mold and several other poisons. Doctor must not have covered that on any of his videos. The woman sets five white mugs on the counter and