Apologies for the length, I wanted to be as detailed as possible. If you don’t want to read it all, I would recommend skipping to where I begin a paragraph with “***” and then read to the end, though some fascinating revelations are peppered in throughout, especially regarding Tina. I’m sure many people had similar experiences. Here is mine:
I was the first of the 12:30 group to arrive at the location for registration. It was a small warehouse with an attached parking lot. I walked to the side door facing the parking lot and was immediately greeted by Stephanie Hyden, one of the handlers from Ascension. Others I spoke to said they found her to be nervous, stressed, or worried about something (and during my time there she did spend a good amount of time pacing and talking with someone on the phone) but to me she came across as bored and disinterested to the point of being curt. She walked me inside a couple of steps to a small table with stacks of The Tension Experience t-shirts and a couple of the processing jump suits. She asked if I wanted to buy “any Tension Experience merchandise.” I said that I already had one of each of those and she asked if I wanted more, then gestured behind her. “What about the Addison red dress?” Sure enough it was there hanging up. I asked if that was the real one and she nodded and said “Worn by Sabrina Kern.” I found it interesting that she used both names so casually in the same breath.
The warehouse was very open and spacious, high vaulted ceilings with air conditioning and music playing that sounded somewhat Middle Eastern. There were five tiny tables with two chairs opposite one another spaced far apart in different quadrants. On the far end there was a large mass of theatrical platforms with small legs that were pushed together to create a kind of haphazard stage and runway, but while I was there it was never referenced or used. There was projector facing this back wall that was projecting THE LUST EXPERIENCE title and logo in the same color scheme as this website. On the other end of the space was a waiting/sitting area made up of a few padded benches/love seats with high backs. After Stephanie saw I wasn’t going to buy anything, she led me to this sitting area.
As I approached, it looked like I was intruding on some kind of last minute team meeting/pow wow. All five of the people who would end up doing the registering were sitting there and looking at none other than Gordon, the producer of The Tension Experience, who seemed to be leading the meeting. Everyone was getting audibly upset at Gordon for some reason, saying things like “Seriously?!” “Are you fucking kidding me?!” Just obvious displeasure and it was unmistakably directed at Gordon. As I sat down amidst complaining all of the processors stood up in a huff and walked to their respective tables. Gordon sat there for a few moments, head in hands, zoning out and obviously stressed. I watched him for a moment, then asked if he was OK. He looked up at me, scowled, then got up and walked away.
I was then approached by a friendly, stressed woman who introduced herself as Tina. She seemed very wired and a bit overwhelmed by what was happening, and it seems as though at least some of the drama may have been directed at her. Tina is a real estate agent (commercial only, not residential. I asked for a card but she didn’t have any) who has been in contact with the organization putting on the event for the last two years. Apparently they were unhappy with the building we were meeting in and were blaming her for not finding something more suitable. She was a little taken aback by this reaction, but ultimately came across as unfazed, as though she felt they were being irrational and too picky. She said that these people who hired her have “Next. Level. Money.” so they were worth the headaches. She briefly mentioned this being for a theatre piece, some kind of live performance, and asked me if I could confirm this. She said she had heard the last show this group had put on was also in a warehouse, and asked me if that was true, and I said yes it was. So we know that although she’s been in contact with them for two years, she had no hand in finding the space for Ascension.
It was at this point that the other members of the 12:30 group started trickling in and Tina excused herself to a corner of the room behind her where her laptop was waiting. We could see the screen from where we were, and she was flipping through pictures of different warehouse interiors. One by one the people at the desks walked over to the waiting area to take one of us back to their tables for registration. While I was the first one there, I was actually the last one chosen, so I continued to sit in the waiting area for some time as it emptied out again. I called over to Tina and asked if I could talk to her a bit more. As she walked over she smiled and shook her head, regarding everything that was happening. “Why not just go see a movie? A lot of effort for adults to play make believe,” she observed. I pressed her a bit more about her employers, to see if I could get a name, but she wouldn’t budge. Who her contact was, what was the name of the corporation, who appeared on her billings, nothing. Though she didn’t claim any kind of confidentiality on her end. I got the impression that whoever was hiring her had intentionally withheld any information from her not 100% vital to them conducting business. She interrupted by questions abruptly by taking her phone out of her pocket (though I heard no ring or buzz) and said “Amanda” as if that’s who the call was from, though she clearly said it too quickly for her to possibly have been able to read the screen. She walked to the other side of the room as she took the call, but I kept watching her and she frequently looked over at me as she (pretended?) to talk. Anyone know any Amandas?
Finally I was approached by a young woman in a tight black cocktail dress named Nicole. @thebuz had just been registered by her, I was her second person. She was friendly and engaging, very casual, if a little distracted. We had a good back and forth going, she was clearly not interested in giving anyone a lecture. She began with a few expected boilerplate questions. Had I attended the last Experience? I had. “Oh, so you must know Noah.” “I do, though I’ve only met him in person once.” “Do you think he’s hot?” “Well.. I wouldn’t say he’s exactly my type.. I’m afraid my wife might think he is.” “Oh, you have a wife! Where is she now?” “She’s at work, but she should be here around 5.” It was around this point that we were interrupted by someone at the other end of the space yelling “Lunch is here!” Nicole got up immediately without saying anything or even looking at me and walked towards the person passing out lunch. She stomped back a moment later, furious. She was Vegan and they had brought her a salad covered with chicken. And they were expecting her to just pick it out, but there was no way she would do that. I bonded with her over our shared belief that in these cases the food was contaminated, picking it out doesn’t help anything, the essence is still there. She had forgotten my name, so I had to remind her.
She complimented my clothes, say that she liked my style and that she could tell I wasn’t boring. I complimented her on her ensemble, which led into a whole tangent about how unhappy she is with her clothes at the moment. She hasn’t bought anything new in six months and is tired of everything she owns, she wants it all gone. Though she says she would never in a million years donate the clothes to Good Will or any place like that. She finds the idea of other people wearing clothes she used to wear bizarre. She would rather burn them then see “some fat pregnant teenager walking down the street” wearing her designer clothes. She worked for those clothes, she wasn’t about to let someone pick them up for ten bucks at a Salvation Army.
I honestly don’t remember how exactly it happened, whether it was because Noah came up again and I was making the all too common joke of comparing the two, or she mentioned him first, but the subject of Buz came up. He was sitting on the far side of the room waiting by the door that lead to the final phase of the experience, which I will get to later. She looked behind her to see who I was pointing at, and immediately went off about him. The first thing she said was “He tried to grab my vagina!” She went on to explain that he had been staring at her “tits” and was propositioning her. She was so taken aback and repulsed that she didn’t know what to do, but she wanted to see where he was going with it so she wheeled her chair around the table to be closer to him. He told her to open her legs and she did, out of curiosity of how far he would go she claimed, and actually reached towards her crotch before she batted his hand away. She was furious, but ultimately accepted it as something a woman has to deal with in the workplace. I didn’t know what else to say, so I apologized to her for what had happened. Then she asked me a number of sexually themed questions. Was I a pervert? (“We get a lot of perverts here”) Have you ever touched a woman inappropriately? Have you ever touched one without her permission? Why not? Would you do it if you couldn’t get caught? I didn’t have time to answer this last question because one of the other processors had walked over to our table. He didn’t acknowledge me, but talked directly to Nicole. He seemed bored and annoyed, and asked her how much longer they had to do this. He also asked if she had gotten the salad, which gave her another chance to scream about how it was “fucking covered with chicken!” After he walked away, she apologized and called me Bill. I said that wasn’t my name, and she corrected herself.
***She asked if I had any questions. I asked her about the fight I had walked in on with the processors and Gordon when I arrived. She smiled a little, as if to say Oh, you noticed that..
“I don’t want to gossip,” she said, “They can punish me.”
“Punish you?”
“Well they can’t kill me, or anything severe like that. But they can punish me.”
“How do they punish you?”
“But hey, that’s women in the workplace again.”
“Maybe you should find a different line of work.”
This is where things get really interesting. Her immediate response to my suggestion was that there was no way she could leave because these people were HER FAMILY. I asked if she meant figuratively and she said no. She had grown up with this group since she was a small girl. **”THEY DID SOME FUCKED UP THINGS TO ANOCH” but they were still her family.** She then asked me where I was from and presented the hypothetical that if Christmas rolled around and she said “I have this great new family in Encino. Come spend the holidays with them instead of your family.” What would I say to that? I of course said I would refuse, and she said it was the same way with her. Then our time came to an end. She reached for a paper on her desk that had a strange, incomplete symbol or pattern on it and turned it over to reveal a line that awaited my signature. “Are you in?” she asked as she handed me a pen. “Absolutely,” I confirmed as I signed my name. And with that we stood up and she walked me to the bench on the far side of the room. I’ll note that during this entire interaction Gordon had been pacing around the space texting on his phone, looking very pissed.
After a short time, a door next to the bench opened a crack, revealing a hand that was open, waiting to receive my signed paper. I placed it in the hand and then walked in. The door slammed behind me and I wheeled around to see an older, distinguished looking man with a beard and a walking stick standing behind me. He looked vaguely Middle Eastern and did not speak. The room was a stark difference to the cool, white, spacious warehouse. It was a tiny, hot, cramped and cluttered office. A desk littered with papers, garbage on the floor. Actual flies were buzzing around. The whole room had an orange, smokey feel to it. He led me to the center and placed my paper on the desk. He turned to face me. He stared deeply into my eyes, our noses less than an inch apart. I maintained intense eye contact with him as he started banging his stick rhythmically on the floor. This went on for a long time. Louder and louder, ’til finally he threw the stick away. The eye contact still hadn’t broken, and when he saw that I neither flinched nor looked away after he threw the stick, he smiled slightly and nodded. He had a magnetic serenity about him, the kind of calming power that I imagine it would be very hard not to follow. To obey. He reached up with one hand to my jacket’s left front pocket, where my sunglasses were. He very slowly, tentatively, pulled my sunglasses out halfway, looked at them, then put them back. I honestly think he was just making sure he wasn’t going to break them with what he did next. He lightly placed his hand on my chest and paused as if sensing something. “You have a fire in you. I feel the flames moving through your veins.” He asked me how old I was. “29.” He repeated the number back to me. He said that I was very special, and that they needed people like me for what they were doing. He then led me towards a mirror leaning against the wall and instructed me to look only at myself. He told me that he sensed the “fear” and “anxiety” that was inside of me and that he wanted to remove it. To unleash the power that was inside. “I care about your well being. Not just now, but always. You probably met some of my associates outside. But what they forgot is that you’re a part of our ecosystem. The same universe.” He thanked me for agreeing to join them. He began to show me to the door, but then stopped and turned to me again.
“I want you to keep this,” he said as he again patted my heart.
With that he opened the door to a small but bright white storage room with a door at the other end. I turned and stared at him, waiting for him to close the door after me, but he continued to stare at me intently until I finally broke and opened the other door where Stephanie was waiting for me. I turned back one more time and the man was still watching me as Stephanie closed her door. She then unceremoniously showed me out. I found all the members of the 12:30 and 1pm groups waiting for me on the sidewalk.
Obviously a lot to unpack here. What is the true nature of Nicole and her family? What are the implications of her bringing up Anoch in such a way that she seems to believe in him? Perhaps she was upset by the way they used him as part of the fraudulent Tension narrative? Who was this man in the room who seemed to be espousing the interconnectedness of all things, and what does he need us for? Probably something we should have asked before we signed our names. Something has truly begun.
