I: And what about dressing herself and just all-around living—

  MI: She’s fine. But, again, it’s hard for her. She doesn’t want to think about that quotidian stuff. Eating, dressing. She just wants to be living fully in touch with the p at all times.

  I: So she’s not self-sufficient.

  MI: But remember she chose this. She spent years saving up money for exactly this purpose. To be Mull. She worked toward this. And now she’s arrived at her masterwork.

  I: Really, you’d call Mull that?

  MI: Oh, yes. I believe Mull can benefit humanity as a whole if people pay the right kind of attention to her.

  I: What’s the right kind?

  MI: Respect.

  I: As opposed to?

  MI: Voyeurism. Judgment.

  I: Speaking of which, the poster campaign is everywhere…6 MI: “Free Marshal,” right?

  I: Yeah. I, actually—I saw a few of them on the way over here. And then there was a sticker of your face on a stop sign. What do you think of all that?

  MI: I’m not sure I understand it. I’m trying to fast a bit from media these days, so I haven’t been following. The idea is that I’m trapped?

  I: Yeah, that the public trial has imprisoned you.

  MI: And who is doing this to me?

  I: The law, the media, the people.

  MI: Are you doing this to me?

  I: [laughs] Yeah. That’s the idea. Me among others.

  MI: Well, I just don’t feel that way. Why do people say this?

  I: Well, this kind of media-frenzied state is where your personality thrives, but I guess it’s just a common sentiment you hear from people under scrutiny. They feel invaded. Claustrophobic. And people just assume you feel that way, too. Especially now, when there’s been so much negative attention. Even though, the truth is, people still envy your situation, even if they would likely have a nervous breakdown dealing with the pressure you’re dealing with. Even then, they’d still probably choose it, just to be famous.

  MI: I appreciate all the sympathy, but honestly, I don’t feel imprisoned. I’m not upset. I just wish people would use all this p for their own turns.

  I: But the good thing is, in general, you have so many people on your side. That’s what this campaign is about. I mean, I drove down Alameda Avenue [where the Mayah! studio is located] recently and I couldn’t believe it. People were camped out on the sidewalk, right next to the gutter, for days, just to get a seat on the next episode.

  MI: Well, those days are no more.

  I: Is the show truly over?

  MI: Yes. I’ll finish out this season on my own, and that’ll be the end of our run with NBC.

  I: Now, I’ve heard all kinds of conflicting stories about what’s been happening with the end of the show. Do you want to clear anything up here?

  MI: It was mutual. With all the controversy, I felt I could no longer operate in a meaningful way with culture. People aren’t looking to M! for help anymore. They’re looking for controversy. It’s like you’ve been saying, the fans have become more…fanatical.

  I: Have you thought about going back to television after? Because I get the sense, despite all of the complications, that people don’t want you to go away. Mayah was what? Fifty-eight? And she’d stopped appearing at the seminars and it seemed to most people—me included—that she was backing away from public life. Right? Long before Mull. And it seemed like you were getting the nod from her to take over. Right? So then, with all that in mind, your willingness to let go of the show at such a young age, that surprises people. You have everyone’s attention in the palm of your hand.

  MI: Mm. Well, the show needs to end eventually, and I’m just trying to find the right ending.

  I: Are you tired of being so public?

  MI: No, I’m not tired, but I have to respect my reputation, and it’s become clear that it isn’t doing too well. It needs rest.

  I: Would it be a problem to discuss the investigation for a minute?

  MI: Not at all.

  I: And you don’t have to answer anything you don’t want to. I’m not going to try and, and—

  MI: I know. I trust you.

  I: So I read over the transcripts a few times, but if you’re up for it, I’d like to just walk through the evening again.

  MI: Sure.

  I: Good, and so, to start maybe you could talk about where you were the night of Mull’s turn—what you were doing before everything happened.

  MI: Where do you want me to begin?

  I: How about the studio?

  MI: OK, so, around sunset is when we do our checkups with the new guests, and I was in building two, checking in on Mrs. [Rita] Dugard, who was in the spa with a three-hour green mask.

  I: Dugard was the guest you were working on at the time.

  MI: Yes, but she wasn’t mine. She was Mayah’s guest and I came to look in on her just for a second opinion. Mayah liked to get my take on certain guests. And Mrs. Dugard seemed like she was rounding the bend on her turn. She was still down and she wasn’t getting any jerks, which was good, so I went to Michael’s7 office to get his thoughts about her progress. And he felt she was doing well. It was day eight for her and she seemed to be learning all the moves easily. The plan was for her to be on the show in two days, which seemed feasible.

  I: And where was Mayah during all this?

  MI: When I left her, in her dressing room.

  I: When was that?

  MI: Maybe forty-five minutes beforehand. I was giving her some time alone.

  I: Where did you go after the spa?

  MI: Backstage. My dressing room. To record what I’d just talked about with Michael.

  I: Which you do a lot, because of your memory?

  MI: Yes. It’s a smidge unreliable. [laughs] So that recorder has become an extension of me. My second brain.

  I: What did you say into the recorder?

  MI: I mentioned Mrs. Dugard’s face, which seemed to be responding well to the bentonite-chlorella mask we were using. I said we should expect her to wake up at the right time and that I was pleased about the results. I also recorded what I had eaten that day, which, despite my memory, I can remember pretty well: coconut, avocado, steamed dandelion greens, astragalus broth, duck eggs, beet kvass, a few shakes of cinnamon on wild honey. I’ve had to listen to the tape so many times, I know it by heart. And I usually mention any moves I’d learned, but that day, I hadn’t learned any, so I said that. And then, while I was near the end of my recording, I heard the sounds next door.

  I: Thumps, you called them.

  MI: Three, yes. Like this. [pounds fist against table] And they were followed by a hissing. [blows air through teeth]

  I: This is coming from the bathroom on the other side of your wall?

  MI: Yes. At the time I thought it was the plumbing.

  I: So you kept recording.

  MI: Yes. I was lying in my hammock, eyes closed, trying to focus.

  I: And on the tape you can supposedly hear the thumps and the hissing.

  MI: A little. The hissing went on for a long time, even after I stopped recording.

  I: What did you do then?

  MI: I packed up for the night. I drank my mucilaginous tea. I shut off the lights and went to meet Mayah to leave, which we always did together. And I remember walking down the hall between our rooms and noticing a thick, minty smell. Like camphor. And when I entered her dressing room it became about twice as strong, potent enough to make me get a little dizzy.

  I: When Mr. Billings was questioned about the smell, he said he didn’t notice it.

  MI: Well, I guess he wasn’t paying attention.

  I: People suggest you invented it.

  MI: I’m hypersensitive. It’s my job.

  I: OK. So you enter the dressing room…It’s empty, right? Mayah wasn’t—

  MI: She wasn’t at her vanity, where I’d left her earlier, and so I looked for Carla [Moore, Mayah’s chief of staff from 2000–2006] but she’d already left.

  I: So as far as you knew it was just you in there?

  MI: In that studio, yes. Like I said, the manager was in his office behind the soundstage. Everyone else had left for the day.

  I: Did you look for Mayah?

  MI: I waited for her in her dressing room, expecting her to return in a few minutes, but of course that didn’t happen.

  I: When did you start to get worried?

  MI: I didn’t. Mayah’s digestive system had been overactive in the last few weeks, so I assumed she was working on a bowel movement. She could spend an hour or so trying to fully eliminate. There was a massage table in there and she’d often lie down, massage her stomach to get the organs moving. It was a whole process.

  I: And how long did you wait for Mayah in her dressing room?

  MI: I’m told it was twenty minutes or so, but I’m pretty terrible with time.

  I: What did you do?

  MI: This is when I noticed the henbane. The jar had been sitting on Mayah’s dresser for the last few weeks. It was sent to her by one of her herbalists at the Tully Center. We had talked about trying it a few times in the spa, but we hadn’t had the chance to do it.

  I: When you say “trying it”…

  MI: It’s used topically, mostly, but also ingested in small amounts, the idea being that it simultaneously works from the inside out and outside in. So you use just enough to faintly smell it. That’s what the herbalist had recommended. A droplet the size of a grain of rice on a toothpick. But that day, when I saw the jar on her counter, the lid was unscrewed and about half of it had been spooned out.

  I: It was what, a thirty-two-ounce jar? That would be enough for a hundred people.

  MI: At least.

  I: And what were you and Mayah planning to do with it?

  MI: It was intended for the “Rebirth” episode. Alan8 and some of the other producers were concerned that the show had become a little too repetitive, with the same segments and same format, so we’d been considering new exciting directions. The henbane was one of them.

  I: You would use it on the guests.

  MI: Yes, but we fully intended to experiment on ourselves first. As we always do.

  I: But initially the herbalist brewed it for Mayah alone. That’s what he said.

  MI: Yes, to help with some of the heat from her personality. She’d been feeling warm all the time, especially her extremities. Soaking her feet in buckets of ice water. Air conditioning blasting. She couldn’t sleep.

  I: Menopause.

  MI: I wouldn’t use that word.

  I: And the henbane oil was a sort of a cooling agent?

  MI: In a way. I’ll show you. Can I borrow your hand for a moment?

  I: Sure. [extends hand]

  MI: [rubs hand vigorously around I’s forearm for a few seconds] You feel that heat?

  I: Yes, from the friction.

  MI: But I’m not talking about the actual friction. Just the feeling of it. Try to ignore my movement. Focus on the heat coming from the inside…The oil was for cooling that kind of heat. And we thought it could be right for making turns because guests often described a similar inner warmth.

  I: And so when you saw the jar, what did you think had happened?

  MI: I thought Mayah had used it.

  I: So then you used a little, too.

  MI: Yes.

  I: Why?

  MI: I wanted to experience it with her.

  I: And how did you apply it?

  MI: I took off my sandals and rubbed it on the soles of my feet, between the toes and the sensitive parts where the skin isn’t as thick. I expected it to be smooth, but the paste was mixed with ground-up bones so it makes tiny cuts to let oil into the bloodstream.

  I: Did you know it was blended with amniotic fluid?

  MI: Yes, I knew.

  I: Did you know it had been illegally obtained?

  MI: No, I didn’t, and I’m not sure Mayah knew that either.

  I: But you were aware it wasn’t something you could buy in a standard apothecary.

  MI: Sure.

  I: Did you feel the effects immediately?

  MI: No. I put my sandals back on and wiped my hands with a towel. As I was doing this I noticed some oil stains on my vest and hat, so I went into the bathroom to clean up, and that’s when I found her.

  I: Weren’t you concerned you’d walk in on her using the toilet—

  MI: No. We were always comfortable with each other.

  I: And when you discovered her, she was naked, yes?

  MI: Yes. She was lying across the countertop with her back toward me, her face toward the mirror, and her eyes open.

  I: Did you see the henbane on her?

  MI: Oh yeah. Glistening. She’d applied it pretty liberally to her face, eyes, lips, palms, anus, vagina, armpits. All that.

  I: Could she speak at this point?

  MI: Just that whistling sound I mentioned.

  I: The hissing.

  MI: Yes. She—I think she had swallowed several tablespoons of oil, which loosened her vocal cords.

  I: So no words.

  MI: No.

  I: And she’d already vomited at this point?

  MI: I noticed some of the oil pooling in her mouth and I tipped her head forward to drain it so she wouldn’t choke. I don’t think she’d put any food into her stomach that day, so there wasn’t much.

  I: Right. She’d been fasting.

  MI: She hadn’t been eating lunch with the crew for the last few days and I asked her why and she claimed she was trying to starve the fatigue out of her.

  I: But really, she was planning to use the henbane.

  MI: Yes.

  I: Now, here’s the point where a lot of people—they don’t understand why you didn’t go for help, call the police.

  MI: Who could help? I knew what she wanted me to do, and it wasn’t rolling her into an ambulance. She and I spoke about this often. She wanted me to keep the p moving, so it didn’t get clogged. And so that’s what I did. I took her pulse, looked at her tongue, and started rubbing.

  I: Now, with Mull this was a radically different sort of turn than she’d done before, right?

  MI: Yes.

  I: Can you say a little more about that, exactly how Mull was different than what had been done on the show in the past.

  MI: When I give lectures, I find it’s helpful to use the image of a circle. Have you heard me do this?

  I: Yes, but please…

  MI: So I ask everyone to imagine a circle, on the ground. Close your eyes.

  [I closes eyes]

  See it cutting a brilliant white line in black space…Can you see it?

  I: Yes.

  MI: But really see it. Don’t just think you see it. And then once you have it there, fixed, move toward it, walking in a straight line until you arrive at its edge. Are you there?

  I: Yes.

  MI: Now step onto the line.

  I: But you’re just imagining this—not actually walking?

  MI: Yes.

  I: OK.

  MI: You are now facing its center. So you must turn your body and walk along its edge.

  I: Mm hm.

  MI: But don’t do it yet. Wait. Get ready, in your mind and right before turning…stop! Now, notice your muscles. Are some of them already tightened and ready to turn? Are they anticipating it? Even an imaginary turn, even before you’ve begun to take it, your body often begins to respond.

  I: Right, right. I think I feel that.

  MI: From now on, as you walk along the circle, you will be in a constant state of turning. You’ll begin the turn at zero degrees, and you will walk a quarter of the way around the circle until you reach ninety degrees. Here p is not lost or gained. You can see the point where you began walking and you can also see the corresponding point on the other end of the circle.

  I: A soft turn.

  MI: The first decade of the show was all about those turns and they were quite successful. A lot of those were made well and were helpful to the guests. But eventually, Mayah found that these would slip. Nothing had been truly forgotten. So regressing was easy. It still felt comfortable. Like a person was returning to their quote true self. We didn’t want that, and so Mayah and I began making full turns about seven years ago. These required stepping halfway around the circle. One hundred and eighty degrees.

  I: This is when you first came on the show. You were the first full.

  MI: Right. We still used the soft turns—but the more we made full turns, the more we knew that we had a responsibility to continue making them.

  I: Responsibility?

  MI: Yeah, to the world. When a full turn is made well, it’s like an orgasm for anyone who ever comes in contact with that person.

  I: Whoa.

  MI: You’ve felt it. I know you have.

  I: [laughs] I have, I have. [both laugh] And, at that time, when you came on the scene, there wasn’t anyone else doing them, right? Mayah was sort of a pioneer.

  MI: Oh yes.

  I: But then did Mayah start to feel like the full turns, the one-eighties—they weren’t enough? Is that what Mull is about?

  MI: Well, well, let me finish here. The full turns were lovely. We weren’t stepping away from the full, but even then, we had been talking about going past full. We hadn’t made any of these yet, but we’d discussed what it meant to go past full. That’s all. Just talks. We had no plans or methods on how to accomplish this, but we both knew the step needed to be taken.

  I: And that’s what Mull is.

  MI: Yes, she’s the first.

  I: How would you describe that kind of turn?

  MI: The place beyond personality. Where any silly ideas we have about personality break down. As much as we try not to, we still think about personality as a series of parts and traits and behaviors. If someone asks you to describe them, you would begin by choosing their most glaring characteristics and working your way down to the gentler, less conspicuous parts of them, right? And even when we were making the full turns, even when we were trying to think holistically about the personality, we were still essentially addressing them as long lists of information. I realize this now. But we wanted to start seeing it more like a balance.

  I: You can’t remove someone’s sense of humor without also removing their depressive tendencies.

  MI: You can’t change people specifically. It’s a whole ecosystem—take out one part and the whole system falls apart. We wanted to lose control of p and go beyond our conception of personality. And that’s what Mull is. She’s a patch of wilderness. That personality is just growing and she’s being pulled along with it. All day long.

 

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