Read More: A Brief Q&A with Joshua Ambre
My mother wants to go to Sedona to meet the leader of the cult she’s in, so I drive her. I offer to drive for two reasons. Reason one: because if I don’t go with her now, I’ll have to hear all about it later. Reason two: if I’m not behind the wheel, she’ll get to pick what we listen to. One of the cult leader’s podcasts, or worse, Tom Jones.
They don’t call themselves a cult, of course. Officially the event is a “spiritual summit.” Otherwise how else would they have scored the grand ballroom of the Four Seasons? I’m talking floor-to-ceiling windows on three walls, the famous red cliffs unfolding like a pop-up book. At check-in they give us each a pamphlet with an agenda, but I see no mention of a meet-and-greet.
“You don’t actually expect to meet him, do you?” My mother looks up from her pamphlet to gape at me. Her eyes have that watery look that old people get, people much older than her, and I’m annoyed when my tone instinctively softens. “I just don’t want you to be disappointed.”
For a moment that word sort of hangs there between us. It’s heavier on one side than the other. I’m still not sure whose, but I think it should be mine. It’s pretty disappointing to watch your own mother get seduced by some New Age crackpot. The other day I stalked his Instagram, the only account besides mine my mother follows. He’s got eyes like a shark and a grin with more gum than a park bench, but somehow I’m the one with the deviant sexuality.
“Aw, you really think so? That would be such a bummer. I really wanted you guys to meet.”
She says it like they’re good friends, like she didn’t start listening to his podcasts a few months ago. Before Christmas, right around the time I came out. That year she asked for a new pair of headphones—Bluetooth, because her wire ones stopped working. I ended up buying them for her. Not because she deserved them, but because, despite everything, it would have felt wrong to just get her nothing.
There’s a movement of air to my left. My mother is standing, like everyone else, to applaud the cult leader as he crosses the stage. He looks just like his Instagram except for his clothes. Where I’d expected flowy shirts and burlap pants he’s wearing a Nike quarter-zip and Lu-Lu Lemon joggers. He looks like he’s about to run a marathon, but instead he sits, right there on the floor, legs crossed like a gentrified Buddha.
“I want to thank you, each and every one of you—” here his sharky eyes start to rove, “for welcoming me here today.”
When he looks our direction I turn the other way, toward the cliffs. They look even more rugged through the pristine glass, even redder hunkered down under February snow. In life, it’s stark contrasts like these that really get to you: best friends with your mom for seventeen years to near strangers in a matter of months. When I was younger, we used to go shopping every weekend. Nordstrom and Dillard’s for us, JC Penney for my dad, to buy him more of those slippery Izod golf shirts. “I don’t know why he insists on wearing these,” my mom used to say. “He hasn’t touched a golf club in years . . . not since the Putt n’ Stuff closed.” We’d laugh then, breezing through the men’s department. The cargo shorts, the Wrangler jeans, the boxer briefs where I tried not to let my eyes wander. I was always afraid she would notice and ask questions. By the time we reached the golf shirts my heart would be pounding, and even though they were ugly I was grateful for them, their cold and puddly fabric, their feel on my hands the only thing then that could calm me. But my mother never said a word. At the golf shirts she became strangely efficient, picking a few from the top of the pile. But never the ones I’d touched.
My mother taps me on the shoulder.
“Ooh, listen up! He’s about to lead the meditation.”
“Now let’s use that,” the cult leader is saying, “really tap into that, and connect ourselves—our in here,” he stabs his chest with three fingers, “with the out there. With our interstellar family.”
When he says this, my whole body clenches like a fist. Interstellar? I try to tell myself it’s just a movie reference—Matthew McConaughey drifting through space—but when the cult leader moves on, with no explanation, I feel equally untethered, out of air. Now he’s teaching us how to breathe like the universe: with deeper, fuller breaths each time, constantly expanding. Everything and everybody growing infinitely farther and farther apart. Even if it’s true, I don’t get why all these people want to hear it. Unless they already feel it happening—the distance growing—and they don’t know how to stop it. I look over at my mother. Her face is smooth and enrapt, gone to some place where I can’t follow. I wonder if this is how she felt when I came out to her. Like for the first time in her life she couldn’t go where I was going. But maybe bringing me here is her way of trying.
I spend the rest of the conference in a warm daze; I’m not listening, but for my mother’s sake I pretend to. When the lecture ends, the cult leader rises from the floor. There’s more applause as he exits stage left, toward the emergency exit, a single security guard holding the door. The rest of us leave through the lobby, reemerging in the parking lot.
“I’m sorry you didn’t get to meet him.”
“Oh, that’s okay.” My mother stows the pamphlet in her purse. “I’m just glad you decided to come.”
“Me too,” I say, surprised by how much I mean it.
“Really?”
She gives me a side hug on the curb. A lump starts to form in the back of my throat, as craggy and red as the rocks that surround us. In that moment I wonder, as I sometimes do, whether all this time I’ve been impatient, for not giving her more time to process. After all, it’s a big adjustment for her too. But then she pulls away, the exposed corner of the pamphlet scraping my arm.
“I’m so happy you gave him a chance. I know it’s a lot to wrap your head around, especially the stuff about the aliens. . . . But isn’t it amazing?”
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Joshua Ambre (he/him/his) is a queer poet and writer committed to poking holes in the so-called wholesome values of American suburbia. His work has appeared in Fiction International, Glimpse Poetry Magazine, The Ekphrastic Review, and Cornell University’s Rainy Day. Joshua was also named a Very Short Fiction runner-up at the 2023 Tennessee Williams and New Orleans Literary Festival. He is currently living and working in Washington, D.C.
Read More: A Brief Q&A with Joshua Ambre