Space

It’s hard to disappear in this digitally-connected world.  Have you ever Googled yourself?  I have.  It’s amazing how much someone can find out about me in just the ‘top hits’ when I put my name in.  In all, close to 25 relevant entries appear, and I’m not remotely famous.  I think most of my friends can say the same, yet when I tried to find Ben Krieger on the internet, I came up empty.

Ben was my friend and sometime-lover for a year during college, four decades ago.  He was an elusive young man.  He lived in a house he owned, way off campus, even though he was barely 21.  He dabbled in drugs--lots of pot, occasional acid at a party, speed before exams, magic mushrooms when he was bored.  He majored in some form of humanities, maybe English Lit, and I remember him telling me that his favorite professor most appreciated the papers he wrote when he was hallucinating. 

Ben had floppy, dirty-blond hair, soulful brown eyes, and a loping gait that allowed me to identify him coming towards me from a distance.  He wore flannel and corduroy and drove a dark-green Subaru with skis and skates and sleeping bags in the trunk.  He liked to organize impromptu parties and outings--a group of us once traveled from our liberal arts college outside of Boston to the beach at Rockport on a Sunday in March for a clam bake and skinny dipping in the ice-cold ocean.  To the casual observer, Ben seemed carefree and breezy. 

One nearly-warm early spring afternoon, Ben and I lazed around on the grass near the theater building at school.  The sun played hide and seek with wispy cirrus clouds in a cobalt blue sky, and the air carried a scent of cool earth and new leaves. We were still mysteries to each other, then; every story we shared was new.  I don’t know how we got to the subject of Ben’s family, but when we did, his history spilled out like red wine from a shattered bottle, suddenly and irretrievably coloring everything around him.

Ben’s mother died when he was a child.  His father, a successful businessman, stuck around, loosely, until Ben was 17  and his sister, Kate, was 19 and in college.  One day, off on a supposed business trip to Arizona, he called Ben at home and told him to “sell the house and ship the furniture.”  He didn’t ask Ben to come live with him and his brand new wife, who was a polarity therapist, a type of alternative healer.  Instead, he transferred an obscene amount of money to each of his kids and told them to take care of themselves.  Ben hadn’t seen him since, though there was an occasional letter.

There were also packages, apparently.  In the summer, Ben invited me to go camping in New Hampshire with him, his sister, and his sister’s boyfriend for a weekend.  My job in the lab at the university, during which I pulverized the brains of rats in a blender and extracted proteins from the resulting pink, viscous liquid, was a Monday to Friday gig, so I agreed to the trip. 

Ben’s sister looked like a more delicate version of him.  She wore her long, straight blond hair in a braid, and her slim figure was covered in sporty attire.  Kate’s demeanor, though,  was taut and intense.  She spoke pointedly, went right to the point.  She had none of Ben’s laissez-faire persona, not a hint of his lazy drawl or his lope.   Of course, I thought.  She raised herself and her brother. Her boyfriend was gentle, dark-haired and dark-eyed, quiet, the kind of guy who plays a supporting role in a real-life drama.

In the car, the conversation started as a buzzy back-and-forth between Ben and Kate.  Her graduate work, his summer courses, the repairs on his house.  Ben didn’t have a job; he didn’t need the money.  But I soon found out that there was a price to be paid for what had initially seemed like a free ride.

“Both boxes are in the trunk,” he told his sister.  “We can leave them with the architect after our meeting.” 

Kate nodded from her perch in the front passenger seat.  Ben and I were in the back. She turned around to face us.

“So, I have to explain to you what we’re doing today,” Kate said, addressing me.

I looked at Ben, confused.  “I thought we were going camping,” I said, to both of them.

“Oh, we are,” said Kate, “but we have an errand to do on the way.  Ben, do you want to tell her or should I?”

“You’re making me nervous,” I said.  It seemed that Ben and Kate had secrets.  I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what they were.

“It’s not that big a deal, Kate.  You’re making a big thing out of it. All we’re doing is stopping in Manchester to talk about some building plans with an architect,” Ben said.  He was looking down at his own hands when he said it, not at Kate or at me, so I knew there was more.

“Hah, not a big thing!” snorted Kate.  “Our father sends us guns and nuclear suits and tells us that if we want him to give us money for tuition, we need to have a nuclear bomb shelter built on property in New Hampshire. You think that’s not a big deal?  He’s making us do crazy shit that only he believes in, and threatening to cut us off if we don’t!”

“Wow, Ben, your dad is some kind of survivalist?” I asked. Ben hadn’t told me anything about guns or bomb shelters. Likely he was embarrassed.  Not that my parents were so perfect, but compared to Ben’s family, my anxious father and mercurial mother were just run-of-the-mill neurotics.

“Yeah, I guess.  He built a shelter in Arizona and stocked it with weapons and food in case of nuclear war. He wants us to have the same thing.  He bought the piece of property years before he moved to Arizona.  We used to go up there for family camping trips all the time.  Last month, he sent us plans from the Arizona shelter, and a few supplies. He told us to find an architect or engineer who could adapt it for this climate.”

He was silent for a minute, then directed his next comment to his sister.        

“I don’t see the harm in it, Kate.   I don’t think we’ll use it, but so what?  He’s trying to protect us.”

“Protect us!”  scoffed Kate. “This is not a normal request from a parent.  But then nothing he’s done has been normal.  We’re stuck doing it because we need his money.  That really pisses me off.”

“Hey, Sis, if you hadn’t refused at first, the money thing would never have come up, right?  It was just a threat to make sure we’d follow through. ”

“I suppose, Benny.  Whatever--it’s too late now.  Let’s just get it done.”

We rode the rest of the way to the architect’s office in silence.  When we got there, Kate’s boyfriend and I sat in the light-wood-and-chrome waiting area, playing cards, while Ben and Kate were ushered to an office. 

When they returned, the mood was lighter.  Someone told a funny story about camping as we walked to the car.  The rest of the trip was utterly ordinary--campfire, s’mores and too much alcohol.  Breezy. There was no further mention of guns or nuclear suits.

Ben and I saw each other off and on the next school year, my junior year in college and his senior year.  We hung out at the pub in town, playing darts and drinking beer.  We went to concerts, made dinner at Ben’s house.  Sometimes I slept there, but our relationship had blurry boundaries.  I dated other men and spent time with other friends.  I wanted to love Ben, but I couldn’t see him clearly enough for that to happen.  Each time the focus improved, he moved, floated away like a wisp of air, not just breezy, but ethereal. I felt like he needed to be surrounded by empty space.

The last time I saw Ben was the weekend before his graduation.  We were done with finals, and my summer research position didn’t start for a week.  We went into Boston and wandered aimlessly through the Back Bay on a hot and humid day, stopping for ice cream and talking about Ben’s plans.  He was supposed to start a job at a brokerage firm in Boston.  He didn’t say so directly, but I had the feeling his father had engineered this position for him.  Now that his start date was coming up, he was chafing at the idea.  He talked about traveling instead, across the country or maybe abroad.

As we turned a corner onto Beacon Street, a clean-cut young man in black pants and a white button-down shirt approached us, asking “Would you be interested in taking a free personality test?”

I was about to wave him off, but Ben said, “Sure, where do we have to go?”

The man gestured to the Church of the Scientologists down the street.  I knew very little about Scientology then.  A Conservative Jew, I’d been to my share of churches over the years and wasn’t especially enthusiastic.  Still, I reasoned, we were bored. It would be an ‘experience.’

We mounted the massive steps to the stone church and entered through heavy wooden doors.  A young woman in a drab skirt and white blouse had us sign a roster, and then brought us into a small library.  She turned on a VCR tape.

“You’re just going to watch this orientation tape and then I’ll administer the personality test, “ she told us.  Then she left, closing the door behind her.  

The 10-minute film recounted a history of Scientology, beginning with L. Ron Hubbard descending from outer space in some kind of flying saucer, bringing the word of the Supreme Being and the spiritual universe to earth.  According to the movie, our spiritual natures could be developed through Dianetics, a self-help curriculum, should there be the need.

“Bring it on!” I said to Ben, laughing under my breath.

Ben smirked through the film right along with me, and I assumed he, too, had pegged Scientology as a hoax.  The dowdy woman came back and escorted us to another room with a long table, where she gave us pencils and test booklets.  For the next fifteen minutes or so, we answered multiple choice questions such as ‘do you ever walk by a baby without smiling?’ and ‘do you ever read train or bus schedules for pleasure?’  The options for each answer were ‘never, rarely, sometimes, or often’.

When I finished, I put my pencil down and, instantly, the woman was back by my side, showing me to a desk in the lobby, where another man in black pants and a white shirt ‘graded’ my test.  I saw her leading Ben to a different desk and tried to catch his eye, but he didn’t see me.

The man at my desk peered at my answers, made some marks on the paper.  Then he put his pencil down and said, “You’re basically okay.  Nothing alarming here.  There’s just one serious weakness.  You are irresponsible.”

He looked deeply into my eyes.  I tried to keep a straight face.

“Don’t worry, we can help you.  You can sign up for the Dianetics course on responsibility.  You should also read this book.”  He held out a dark blue paperback book.

I had plenty of problems in those days.  I still do, though maybe not the same ones.  Still, irresponsibility was never one of my issues. 

“Thanks,” I told the man.  “I’ll think it over.  For now, I’ll pass.” I rose and walked to the door.  He was saying something, but I was through listening.

At the top of the outside steps, I waited for Ben.  It seemed like hours before he finally walked out.  He looked upset, or maybe scared.  His brow was furrowed, and his cheeks were pale.

“What took so long?” I asked.  “What did they say to you?”

“I don’t really want to talk about it,” he replied.

“What?  Why?  You don’t believe them, do you?  This is a bunch of horseshit!  He tried to tell me that I was irresponsible, but I know that’s not true. I wasn’t having it.”

We started down the stone step toward the street, but halfway down, Ben paused and turned to me. “Just let me ask you,” he said.  “how many books did they tell you to buy?”

“Just one.  Of course I didn’t.  Why?”

“He told me I needed to buy all the books.  There’s like twenty of them.  He said I need all the books and all the courses, and I better do it as soon as possible, because I’m on the verge of having a nervous breakdown.”

“Ben!  You can’t listen to this nonsense!  They don’t know anything about you!”

“But apparently,” he replied softly, “they do.  They’re probably right.  I didn’t buy the books.  I don’t think Dianetics is the answer.  But they seem to be onto something.”

“Do you think you’re having a breakdown?”  I asked, suddenly subdued.  At that moment, I wondered if, during all the times he floated away from me, he wanted me to grab him, anchor him back to the ground.  But it was too late for that.

“No.  Not now.  But things can change fast.  Let’s head home, it’s getting late.”

A chill had entered the air between us.  As we walked toward the car, the sky turned a foreboding dark gray, and I felt the first raindrops of a late-afternoon thunderstorm.  We were quiet on the way home.  Ben dropped me at my door without asking where I wanted to go, saying he had a lot to do before graduation.

Over the ensuing decades, I rarely thought of Ben.  I was busy with medical school and training, building a life, a career, a family.  Busy with being responsible. I only thought of him when Scientology came up, like when Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes couldn’t agree on whether to raise their child as a Scientologist. I’d wonder for a moment what became of Ben.  Where had he ended up?  What was he doing? 

A few years ago, spurred on by a friend at a party, I tried to find out.  Scientology was in the news again, and it arose in conversation.  I told a few of the folks at the party about the visit Ben and I made to the Church of the Scientologists, and about his reaction to the results of his personality test.  One said, “Don’t you want to know what happened to him?  Aren’t you curious?”

‘Google’ displayed no results for a Ben Krieger in his late 50’s.  I tried Facebook, Twitter, my college alumni directory. Nothing. Then I got my Millennial son, home from college for a visit, to help me.  He tried a few different search engines and a bunch of social media sites.  Finally, he came up with a Ben Krieger of the right age on LinkedIn.  There were no photos, no addresses or phone numbers, no spouse, no children.  Just the name of a business under his LinkedIn entry, ‘BK Enterprises,’  in Portland, Oregon. 

Interesting, I thought.  I always joked that if my life, which has always seemed just a little too full, a little too much, overwhelmed me, I would run away to Portland.  I’ve only been there once, but I immediately noticed how wide the streets were and how the city seemed to tolerate a variety of people who wouldn’t fit in at home in the Northeast.  In Portland, I felt free and cleansed, like a blank sheet of paper waiting for someone to write on it.  For a second, imagining Ben in Portland, I felt something like envy.

I’m not planning to reach out to Ben Krieger of BK Enterprises.  I’ll leave it at this. The truth is, I don’t want to know more.  Whatever we had that year in college was a failed attempt at true closeness, a bond that fell short of intimacy for both of us.  We never really belonged to each other.

Still, I like to think I’ve found the right man, and that he meant to disappear.   I like to think that Ben is out there in Portland, taking advantage of the wide streets and enjoying the space all around him, but keeping himself firmly rooted to the earth.

-Rosalind Kaplan

Rosalind Kaplan has been published in several literary and medical journals, including Amarillo Bay, Annals of Internal Medicine, Another Chicago Magazine, Brandeis Magazine, Eastern Iowa Review, HerSTRY, Minerva Rising, Prompted, a Philadelphia Stories Anthology, The Pulse Magazine and The Smart Set. She is a physician and also teaches narrative medicine and medical memoir writing at Thomas Jefferson University/Sidney Kimmel Medical College. Dr. Kaplan is a 2020 graduate of Lesley University’s MFA in creative nonfiction, and she has attended a number of writing workshops. She lives with her husband and a rescue dog, and has two grown children.