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Two weeks before the interview my parents came to BYU. They had never visited me before, but they were passing through on their way to Arizona and stopped for dinner. I took them to the Indian restaurant across the street from my apartment.

The waitress stared a moment too long at my father’s face, then her eyes bulged when they dropped to his hands. Dad ordered half the menu. I told him three mains would be enough, but he winked and said money was not a problem. It seemed the news of my father’s miraculous healing was spreading, earning them more and more customers. Mother’s products were being sold by nearly every midwife and natural healer in the Mountain West.

We waited for the food, and Dad asked about my classes. I said I was studying French. “That’s a socialist language,” he said, then he lectured for twenty minutes on twentieth-century history. He said Jewish bankers in Europe had signed secret agreements to start World War II, and that they had colluded with Jews in America to pay for it. They had engineered the Holocaust, he said, because they would benefit financially from worldwide disorder. They had sent their own people to the gas chambers for money.

These ideas were familiar to me, but it took me a moment to remember where I’d heard them: in a lecture Dr. Kerry had given on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Protocols, published in 1903, purported to be a record of a secret meeting of powerful Jews planning world domination. The document was discredited as a fabrication but still it spread, fueling anti-Semitism in the decades before World War II. Adolf Hitler had written about the Protocols in Mein Kampf, claiming they were authentic, that they revealed the true nature of the Jewish people.

Dad was talking loudly, at a volume that would have suited a mountainside but was thunderous in the small restaurant. People at nearby tables had halted their own conversations and were sitting in silence, listening to ours. I regretted having chosen a restaurant so near my apartment.

Dad moved on from World War II to the United Nations, the European Union, and the imminent destruction of the world. He spoke as if the three were synonyms. The curry arrived and I focused my attention on it. Mother had grown tired of the lecture, and asked Dad to talk about something else.

“But the world is about to end!” he said. He was shouting now.

“Of course it is,” Mother said. “But let’s not discuss it over dinner.”

I put down my fork and stared at them. Of all the strange statements from the past half hour, for some reason this was the one that shocked me. The mere fact of them had never shocked me before. Everything they did had always made sense to me, adhering to a logic I understood. Perhaps it was the backdrop: Buck’s Peak was theirs and it camouflaged them, so that when I saw them there, surrounded by the loud, sharp relics of my childhood, the setting seemed to absorb them. At least it absorbed the noise. But here, so near the university, they seemed so unreal as to be almost mythic.

Dad looked at me, waiting for me to give an opinion, but I felt alienated from myself. I didn’t know who to be. On the mountain I slipped thoughtlessly into the voice of their daughter and acolyte. But here, I couldn’t seem to find the voice that, in the shadow of Buck’s Peak, came easily.

We walked to my apartment and I showed them my room. Mother shut the door, revealing a poster of Martin Luther King Jr. that I’d put up four years before, when I’d learned of the civil rights movement.

“Is that Martin Luther King?” Dad said. “Don’t you know he had ties to communism?” He chewed the waxy tissue where his lips had been.

They departed soon after to drive through the night. I watched them go, then took out my journal. It’s astonishing that I used to believe all this without the slightest suspicion, I wrote. The whole world was wrong; only Dad was right.

I thought of something Tyler’s wife, Stefanie, had told me over the phone a few days before. She said it had taken her years to convince Tyler to let her immunize their children, because some part of him still believed vaccines are a conspiracy by the Medical Establishment. Remembering that now, with Dad’s voice still ringing in my ears, I sneered at my brother. He’s a scientist! I wrote. How can he not see beyond their paranoia! I reread what I had written, and as I did so my scorn gave way to a sense of irony. Then again, I wrote. Perhaps I could mock Tyler with more credibility if I had not remembered, as I did just now, that to this day I have never been immunized.

My interview for the Gates scholarship took place at St. John’s College in Annapolis. The campus was intimidating, with its immaculate lawns and crisp colonial architecture. I sat nervously in the corridor, waiting to be called in for my interview; I felt stiff in the pantsuit and clung awkwardly to Robin’s handbag. But in the end, Professor Steinberg had written such a powerful letter of recommendation that there was little left for me to do.

I received confirmation the next day: I’d won the scholarship.

The phone calls began—from BYU’s student paper and the local news. I did half a dozen interviews. I was on TV. I awoke one morning to find my picture plastered on BYU’s homepage. I was the third BYU student ever to win a Gates scholarship, and the university was taking full advantage of the press. I was asked about my high school experience, and which of my grade school teachers had prepared me for my success. I dodged, I parried, I lied when I had to. I didn’t tell a single reporter that I’d never gone to school.

I didn’t know why I couldn’t tell them. I just couldn’t stand the thought of people patting me on the back, telling me how impressive I was. I didn’t want to be Horatio Alger in someone’s tear-filled homage to the American dream. I wanted my life to make sense, and nothing in that narrative made sense to me.

A month before my graduation, I visited Buck’s Peak. Dad had read the articles about my scholarship, and what he said was, “You didn’t mention home school. I’d think you’d be more grateful that your mother and I took you out of them schools, seeing how it’s worked out. You should be telling people that’s what done it: home school.”

I said nothing. Dad took it as an apology.

He disapproved of my going to Cambridge. “Our ancestors risked their lives to cross the ocean, to escape those socialist countries. And what do you do? You turn around and go back?”

Again, I said nothing.

“I’m looking forward to your graduation,” he said. “The Lord has a few choice rebukes for me to give them professors.”

“You will not,” I said quietly.

“If the Lord moves me, I will stand and speak.”

“You will not,” I repeated.

“I won’t go anywhere that the Lord’s spirit isn’t welcome.”

That was the conversation. I hoped it would blow over, but Dad was so hurt that I hadn’t mentioned homeschooling in my interviews that this new wound festered.

There was a dinner the night before my graduation where I was to receive the “most outstanding undergraduate” award from the history department. I waited for my parents at the entrance, but they never appeared. I called Mother, thinking they were running late. She said they weren’t coming. I went to the dinner and was presented with a plaque. My table had the only empty seats in the hall. The next day there was a luncheon for honors graduates, and I was seated with the college dean and the director of the honors program. Again, there were two empty seats. I said my parents had had car trouble.

I phoned my mother after the luncheon.

“Your father won’t come unless you apologize,” she said. “And I won’t, either.”

I apologized. “He can say whatever he wants. But please come.”

They missed most of the ceremony; I don’t know if they saw me accept my diploma. What I remember is waiting with my friends before the music began, watching their fathers snap pictures and their mothers fix their hair. I remember that my friends were wearing colorful leis and recently gifted jewelry.

After the ceremony I stood alone on the lawn, watching the other students with their families. Eventually I saw my parents. Mother hugged me. My friend Laura snapped two photos. One is of me and Mother, smiling our forced smiles; the other is of me wedged between my parents, looking squeezed, under pressure.

I was leaving the Mountain West that night. I had packed before graduation. My apartment was empty, my bags by the door. Laura had volunteered to drive me to the airport, but my parents asked if they could take me.

I expected them to drop me at the curb, but Dad insisted that they walk with me through the airport. They waited while I checked my bags, then followed me to the security gate. It was as if Dad wanted to give me until the last second to change my mind. We walked in silence. When we arrived at security I hugged them both and said goodbye. I removed my shoes, laptop, camera, then I passed through the checkpoint, reassembled my pack, and headed for the terminal.

It was only then that I glanced back and saw Dad, still standing at the checkpoint, watching me walk away, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders slumping, his mouth slackened. I waved and he stepped forward, as if to follow, and I was reminded of the moment, years before, when power lines had covered the station wagon, with Mother inside it, and Dad had stood next to her, exposed.

He was still holding that posture when I turned the corner. That image of my father will always stay with me: that look on his face, of love and fear and loss. I knew why he was afraid. He’d let it slip my last night on Buck’s Peak, the same night he’d said he wouldn’t come to see me graduate.

“If you’re in America,” he’d whispered, “we can come for you. Wherever you are. I’ve got a thousand gallons of fuel buried in the field. I can fetch you when The End comes, bring you home, make you safe. But if you cross the ocean …”

PART THREE

30

Hand of the Almighty

A stone gate barred the entrance to Trinity College. Cut into the gate was a small wooden door. I stepped through it. A porter in a black overcoat and bowler hat showed me around the college, leading me through Great Court, the largest of the courtyards. We walked through a stone passageway and into a covered corridor whose stone was the color of ripe wheat.

“This is the north cloister,” the porter said. “It is here that Newton stomped his foot to measure the echo, calculating the speed of sound for the first time.”

We returned to the Great Gate. My room was directly opposite it, up three flights of stairs. After the porter left I stood, bookended by my suitcases, and stared out my little window at the mythic stone gate and its otherworldly battlements. Cambridge was just as I remembered: ancient, beautiful. I was different. I was not a visitor, not a guest. I was a member of the university. My name was painted on the door. According to the paperwork, I belonged here.

I dressed in dark colors for my first lecture, hoping I wouldn’t stand out, but even so I didn’t think I looked like the other students. I certainly didn’t sound like them, and not just because they were British. Their speech had a lilting cadence that made me think of singing more than speaking. To my ears they sounded refined, educated; I had a tendency to mumble, and when nervous, to stutter.

I chose a seat around the large square table and listened as the two students nearest me discussed the lecture topic, which was Isaiah Berlin’s two concepts of liberty. The student next to me said he’d studied Isaiah Berlin at Oxford; the other said he’d already heard this lecturer’s remarks on Berlin when he was an undergraduate at Cambridge. I had never heard of Isaiah Berlin.

The lecturer began his presentation. He spoke calmly but moved through the material quickly, as if he assumed we were already familiar with it. This was confirmed by the other students, most of whom were not taking notes. I scribbled down every word.

“So what are Isaiah Berlin’s two concepts?” the lecturer asked. Nearly everyone raised a hand. The lecturer called on the student who had studied at Oxford. “Negative liberty,” he said, “is the freedom from external obstacles or constraints. An individual is free in this sense if they are not physically prevented from taking action.” I was reminded for a moment of Richard, who had always seemed able to recite with exactness anything he’d ever read.

“Very good,” the lecturer said. “And the second?”

“Positive liberty,” another student said, “is freedom from internal constraints.”

I wrote this definition in my notes, but I didn’t understand it.

The lecturer tried to clarify. He said positive liberty is self-mastery—the rule of the self, by the self. To have positive liberty, he explained, is to take control of one’s own mind; to be liberated from irrational fears and beliefs, from addictions, superstitions and all other forms of self-coercion.

I had no idea what it meant to self-coerce. I looked around the room. No one else seemed confused. I was one of the few students taking notes. I wanted to ask for further explanation, but something stopped me—the certainty that to do so would be to shout to the room that I didn’t belong there.

After the lecture, I returned to my room, where I stared out my window at the stone gate with its medieval battlements. I thought of positive liberty, and of what it might mean to self-coerce, until my head thrummed with a dull ache.

I called home. Mother answered. Her voice rose with excitement when she recognized my weepy “Hello, Mom.” I told her I shouldn’t have come to Cambridge, that I didn’t understand anything. She said she’d been muscle-testing and had discovered that one of my chakras was out of balance. She could adjust it, she said. I reminded her that I was five thousand miles away.

“That doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’ll adjust the chakra on Audrey and wing it to you.”

“You’ll what it to me?”

“Wing it,” she said. “Distance is nothing to living energy. I can send the corrected energy to you from here.”

“How fast does energy travel?” I asked. “At the speed of sound, or is it more like a jetliner? Does it fly direct, or will it have to lay over in Minneapolis?”

Mother laughed and hung up.

I studied most mornings in the college library, near a small window. I was there on a particular morning when Drew, a friend from BYU, sent me a song via email. He said it was a classic but I had never heard of it, nor of the singer. I played the song through my headphones. It gripped me immediately. I listened to it over and over while staring out at the north cloister.

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery

None but ourselves can free our mind

I scratched those lines into notebooks, into the margins of the essays I was writing. I wondered about them when I should have been reading. From the Internet I learned about the cancer that had been discovered on Bob Marley’s foot. I also learned that Marley had been a Rastafarian, and that Rastafari believe in a “whole body,” which is why he had refused surgery to amputate the toe. Four years later, at age thirty-six, he died.