“Oh, Sophie!” Margaret said, suddenly near tears. She pulled out a tissue and dabbed her eyes. “I’m sorry.” She found herself actually weeping for this actor she’d never met. Maybe it was the strangeness of this church or these weird people, or perhaps she’d missed her calling—she should’ve been an actress. She blew her nose. “We need to know what he went through here, what these…doctors…subjected him to.” Margaret glared at Hubbard and Julius. “Because it obviously didn’t help!”

“Beatrice, it wasn’t their fault,” Sheryl Ann said. “Chris struggled so!”

Hubbard put a hand on Sheryl Ann’s knee. “Now, now, this is all a very normal human reaction to grief,” he said. “Chris was indeed a member of our church, and we worked closely with him in hopes he’d become clear, but he was not committed. In fact, though I’m sorry to bring up something uncomfortable, he still owes us quite a bit of money. Some eight hundred forty-three dollars and change. Let’s call it eight hundred forty.”

“Sadly, that’s true,” said Julius with regret in his voice. “We really tried with him.” He rose from his chair. “Will you excuse me? I’ll just be a minute.”

As the door closed behind him, Margaret turned to Hubbard. “What does becoming clear mean?”

Hubbard looked at her for a few seconds as if he were deciding whether to let her in on a great secret. Then a smile—a wide, gleaming grin—erupted on his face. “I will show you, Beatrice.”

Hubbard stood, ambled to a file cabinet in the corner, and withdrew from its top drawer a device that looked like a small television wired to two soup cans.

“Being clear is what we call the state achieved through auditing, which is done with this meter.” Hubbard took his seat again and began fiddling with the knobs on the device. “It’s difficult to pick up these concepts in just one meeting—we have classes that I highly recommend—but just to help you understand how hard we tried with Chris…” He leaned forward and placed the tin cans in front of Margaret.

“What is this thing?” asked Margaret.

“A Hubbard E-Meter,” he said proudly. “Most people have reactive minds. That’s the source of all of the ill behavior we see—insecurities, irrationality, unreasonable fear. The E-Meter helps us detect those problem spots. Once we get rid of the reactive mind—that’s what we call going ‘clear’—only then can we become our true selves. This E-Meter allows us to audit you, to figure out where you need help. It’s what we used to try to help your brother.” He sighed deeply and arranged his face into an expression of sympathetic sorrow. “But Chris didn’t give himself over.”