My Colon Went Rogue

I was crouched behind a dumpster in the loading alley of the Inner Bloom Wellness Retreat when I remembered the fake mustache. I had made a whole list, and mustache was item three, and I had bought duct tape and a whistle and a fanny pack and skipped the one thing that mattered. So now I was a man in a black hoodie hiding behind a dumpster in rural Pennsylvania in July, which is maybe the least incognito outfit a human being has ever worn. Sweat was running into my eyes and I was thirty-two years old and I work in IT, mostly for a guy named Murray who is sixty-one and calls himself a wellness visionary despite a certification I am fairly sure he printed at a FedEx.

Let me back up, because you deserve to know how a man ends up behind a dumpster.

* * *

Murray runs a company called VitalCore Solutions, which sells corporate wellness software to mid-size firms, and three weeks ago somebody stole a hard drive from his office. Not the client data drive, which would have made sense. The other one, the one he kept in a locking drawer and would not let anyone touch, the one he called "the Asset." He called me into his office, closed the blinds, and said, "Alec, my boy, the Asset has been taken, and I know where."

I said no at first. Actually I said no several times, in several formats, including a formal email. But Murray had facts. He had tracked a former employee, a man named Doug, to a compound outside Hackett's Ferry, Pennsylvania, a place called the Inner Bloom Wellness Retreat, where Doug had apparently found religion of a sort. And Murray, who cannot legally force anyone to do anything and knows it, instead did the thing he always does, which is offer money, separate and up front, in writing. Five thousand dollars, paid before I left, cash in an envelope, no strings. He handed me the envelope at the kitchen table and said, "That's yours whether you find it or not. This is not a deal, Alec, it's just wages." So I took it, deposited it, bought gas and a whistle, and drove three hours to pretend I was a wellness seeker.

The bad idea had a shape to it, which was that I would sign up for a weekend retreat under a fake name, wander the grounds, find wherever Doug kept the drive, and take it back. Simple. Clean. The kind of plan that works in the shower and nowhere else.

The philosophy of Inner Bloom, according to the brochure I read at a gas station, involves something called Gourd Resonance. The idea is that decorative gourds, when held at the level of the sternum, amplify your breath into the universe, and the universe, which is apparently very into gourds, sends back alignment. There was a whole section on synchronizing your inhale with the gourd's inherent curve. I read it twice. It does not get less insane the second time, which I sort of respect.

I signed in under the name Gerald Plimpton and paid the two hundred dollar retreat fee with cash, which they took without blinking, and a woman at a folding table gave me a lanyard and a small dried gourd and told me the weekend would change my life. Her name tag said PETRA and I want to talk about Petra, because Petra is the reason this whole thing went sideways.

Petra was maybe thirty-four, tall, tan, with the calm of a person who has never once lost her keys. She ran the retreat. She was, and I say this with fear and respect, terrifyingly competent. Within four minutes of meeting me she had noticed I was carrying a laptop bag, taken it from me gently, said, "No screens past this gate, Gerald, the universe hates them," and put it in a locked cabinet, smiling the whole time. And here is the worst part. She was kind. Genuinely kind, warm, attentive, remembered everyone's names after one introduction. A mean person I could have handled. A suspicious person I could have out-waited. Kind and competent at the same time is a threat profile with no counter.

"So, Gerald," she said, walking me across a lawn toward a circle of folding chairs, "what brings you to the Bloom?"

"Well," I said, "I work in, uh, HVAC, and I guess I burned out a little."

"Ventilation is the body of the building," she said, nodding like this was wisdom. "You've been breathing badly for years. We'll fix that."

I had been breathing badly for years, apparently. I felt seen and threatened simultaneously.

The first event was the Opening Circle, which involved forty adults sitting in chairs on a lawn, holding gourds to their chests and breathing in unison while a man named Chet played a singing bowl. I am not going to lie to you, reader, forty people breathing at a gourd in the Pennsylvania heat is one of the strangest things I have ever joined, and the worst part is that after about ten minutes I felt something. Not alignment. Probably just lightheadedness. But I breathed in when they breathed in, because everyone else was doing it, and I am weak.

Then came the trust exercise, and this is where the retreat earned its reputation in my heart forever.

Petra stood in the center of the circle holding a stick of butter on a small plate. "Pair up," she said. "Face your partner. One of you holds the butter. The other simply looks at them. No words. The butter is the silence. Do not drop the butter."

There were questions. A woman asked if the butter was metaphorical. Petra said no, it was salted, from the co-op. A man asked what happened if you dropped it. Petra said you would both know what you had done. Nobody asked a follow-up to that, and I want you to sit with how quickly forty adults accepted that.

My partner was a retired dentist named Carol, twenty-nine years my senior, who held the butter at chest height with the gravity of a woman passing a torch. We looked at each other. The silence went on. A fly landed near the butter and Carol did not flinch. I have sat through outage calls with screaming vice presidents and I have never been in a silence with that much pressure in it. My eyes started to water from not blinking. Somewhere behind me a man began to cry quietly, and nobody acknowledged it, because the butter was the silence.

"Gerald," Petra said softly, from somewhere to my left, "your breathing is shallow. Let the gourd help."

I exhaled, shakily, and Carol nodded at me like I had passed some test, and then she handed me the butter, and I held it, and she looked at me, and time stopped being a thing I understood. Four minutes. The exercise lasted four minutes and it aged me.

Afterward, at the vegan dinner, I did some reconnaissance. I found Doug on the second evening, sitting alone by the herb garden, and I sat next to him and