The thing about endorphins is that they don't care if what you're doing makes sense. They care if you're tired enough.

Lenny Kovac knew this the way a man knows that the floor is hard by bumping his knee against it. Not through contemplation. Through repetition. Through years of bumping his knee against the same hard floor in different rooms, on different sides of town, in different states that all smelled the same — of stale beer, of fried food, of people who had stopped trying to impress anybody.

He was twenty-seven, built like a man who had spent most of his life doing manual labour and none of it doing anything for himself. His hands were permanently stained with grease and paint thinner, and his eyes had the flat, unreflecting quality of someone who had learned, through experience, that looking too closely at things usually led to disappointment.

The place was called New Eden. It was not actually an eden. It was a cluster of prefabricated houses on the outskirts of Canton, Ohio, surrounded by a chain-link fence that had been painted white at some point in the recent past, probably by a man named Frank who called himself "Dad" but was not anybody's father in any sense that the word had traditionally carried meaning.

Lenny had arrived at New Eden six months earlier, after a sequence of events that he described, when asked, as "a series of bad decisions." He had lost his job at the Ford plant in 1977. He had lost his apartment in 1978, after an episode involving a bottle of bourbon and a woman named Doris who worked at the Kmart on 4th Street and who, according to Lenny, "had a mouth on her that could make a sailor blush." He had walked west from Akron with nothing but a duffel bag and the clothes on his back, and he had ended up at New Eden because a man he met at a bus station in Sandusky had told him about a place where food was free and work was optional and nobody asked questions.

This turned out to be, in Lenny's assessment, "a lie. The food wasn't free. The work wasn't optional. And they asked questions all the time. But it was better than the bus station." Dad Frank — real name Frank Morrisey, though nobody at New Eden called him that — was a former auto worker from Detroit who had spent twenty years moving from plant to plant as the auto industry moved from Detroit to places where workers were cheaper and unions were weaker, until there was no plant left for him to move to. He was fifty-three, overweight, and possessed of a charisma that was partly genuine and partly a technique he had developed over years of trying to convince other people to give him money.

"We're building something here," Frank had told Lenny on their first meeting, in a kitchen that smelled of boiled cabbage and floor wax. "Not a religion. Not a cult. A community. People who have been failed by this country can come here and build something for themselves." "What kind of community?" Lenny had asked.

"A community where nobody starves. Where you work when you can and rest when you can't. Where you're treated like a person instead of a number on a timesheet." Lenny had considered this. He had been a number on a timesheet for eighteen years. He knew that numbers on timesheets could be erased, replaced, ignored. He knew that the people who held the pens that wrote the numbers didn't care about the people whose names were underneath them. He knew, in other words, that Frank's description of a world without numbers on timesheets was a fantasy.

But he was hungry. And he was tired. And the bus station was cold. So he stayed.

New Eden had forty-three residents when Lenny arrived. They were, as Frank had implied, people who had been failed by the country: unemployed workers, people with criminal records, runaways, alcoholics, people who had simply stopped believing that the system worked for them and had decided to stop believing it for everyone else. They lived in the prefabricated houses, which had been purchased at foreclosure auction for a total of twelve thousand dollars. They grew vegetables in a plot of land behind the houses. They survived on a combination of foraging, scavenging, and what Lenny euphemistically described as "borrowing" from nearby farms and abandoned businesses.

Frank managed the community through a combination of charm, intimidation, and an elaborate system of spiritual authority that he had constructed entirely on his own. He held nightly meetings in the largest of the prefabricated houses — which he called "the chapel" but which was really just a room with cinderblock walls and a wood stove — where he would preach about the New Dawn, a mystical force that he claimed was guiding New Eden toward a future of abundance and peace.

"The New Dawn is coming," Frank would say, standing before the assembled residents with his arms spread wide and his voice rising to a pitch that Lenny had learned, over months of attendance, to recognise as the point at which Frank was most likely to ask for money. "The New Dawn is already here, if you have the eyes to see it. I see it. I see it in each of your faces. You are the chosen people of this new dawn. You are the ones who have been left behind by the old world so that you could build the new one." Some of the residents believed him. Lenny did not. But he understood, with a clarity that was almost painful, why they believed him. Because Frank's preaching offered something that the outside world did not: a narrative in which their suffering had meaning. In the outside world, their unemployment was a statistic. Their poverty was an inconvenience. Their existence was a burden on the social services that nobody wanted to pay for. At New Eden, their suffering was part of a grand design. They were chosen. They were special. They were building something.

It was, Lenny recognised, the same narrative that had driven the religious communities of previous centuries. The Mormons had been told they were the chosen people rebuilding Zion. The Oneida community had been told they were establishing a perfect society. The Peoples Temple had been told they were creating a socialist utopia in California. All of them had offered the same thing to people who had been failed by the world: a story in which their pain meant something.

The difference between those communities and New Eden was that the earlier ones had been led by people who genuinely believed their own stories. Frank Morrisey had never believed anything in his life. He was, in Lenny's assessment, "a con artist who had convinced himself that conning people was the same thing as leading them." But conning people and leading them looked exactly the same from the outside, and from the inside, Frank's con was effective enough that it didn't matter.

The crisis began on a Tuesday in October, when the Stark County sheriff's department received an anonymous tip about an illegal community operating on the outskirts of Canton. The tip was specific and detailed: it named Frank Morrisey, described New Eden's activities in language that suggested personal knowledge, and included a schedule of Frank's nightly sermons that was precise enough to suggest that the tipster had attended at least one.

The sheriff, a man named Richard Varga who had spent thirty years in law enforcement and had developed a low tolerance for anything that smacked of cult activity, dispatched two deputies to investigate.

They arrived at New Eden on a Wednesday morning, rode bikes through the gate, and found exactly what the tip had described: a group of people living in prefabricated houses, growing vegetables, and gathering nightly for what appeared to be religious worship. They found no weapons. No evidence of physical abuse. No indication that anyone was being held against their will.

What they found, in Lenny's professional assessment of their findings, was "a bunch of people who had made bad choices and were living with them, which is not a crime in Ohio." But Frank saw the deputies as a threat. He had spent his life navigating the boundary between lawful behaviour and criminal behaviour, and he understood that a law enforcement investigation was usually the prelude to something worse. He began to prepare his people for the possibility that New Eden would be shut down.

"They will come again," he told the residents at the nightly meeting. "And when they come again, we will show them that we are not afraid. We will demonstrate the power of the New Dawn. And they will see, and they will know, and they will leave us in peace." "What kind of demonstration?" Lenny asked.

Frank smiled. It was the smile of a man who had just been handed an opportunity to do something that he had been planning for a long time. "A miracle," he said. "Or something that looks enough like one to satisfy people who don't know the difference." The demonstration took place three nights later, in front of the entire community and a contingent of approximately twenty deputies who had returned with Sheriff Varga after receiving an anonymous report of "disturbances at the New Eden community." Frank had organised the demonstration with the precision of a man who had spent his life understanding how people could be manipulated through spectacle. He had arranged for a group of residents to stand in a line in front of the chapel, facing the approaching deputies. He had instructed them to begin chanting at a specific moment — precisely when the lead deputy crossed the gate — and to continue chanting at an intensity that would be audible from the road.

He had also arranged for two men to stand behind the line of chanters and operate a pair of smoke generators that had been purchased from a theatrical supply company in Cleveland. The smoke generators were designed for stage productions and produced a dense white fog that, in the cold October air, looked exactly like the kind of supernatural phenomenon that people in rural Ohio were predisposed to interpret as divine.

Lenny watched the entire sequence from the edge of the group, his hands in his pockets, his expression carefully blank. He watched the chanters begin their ritual. He watched the smoke billow out behind them. He watched the deputies stop at the gate and stare, their flashlights cutting through the fog in wide, uncertain arcs.

He watched Sheriff Varga dismount his horse and walk toward the chapel, his face set in an expression that was equal parts suspicion and awe.

And then, with the detached fascination of a man watching a car accident from the safety of the sidewalk, Lenny watched Frank step out from behind the line of chanters, spread his arms wide, and raise his voice in a proclamation that carried, even over the wind, to every ear within range.

"Behold! The power of the New Dawn! This is the sign that you have been sent to witness. This community is protected. This community is chosen. This community will not be disturbed." The deputies stared. The residents stared. The smoke drifted across the pale October moon like the breath of some vast and invisible creature.

Sheriff Varga did not order his men to advance. He did not order an arrest. He stood at the gate, looking at the fog and the chanters and Frank with his outstretched arms, and he said something that Lenny would hear about years later, from a deputy who had been there, and that deputy would tell Lenny over a beer at a bar in downtown Canton, and Lenny would never forget it because it was the most honest thing anyone in a position of authority had ever said about people like him.

"God help us," Varga had said. "These people have us scared." The deputies left. The demonstration had succeeded. New Eden would be left alone — for a time.

But Lenny knew, with the same clarity that had accompanied him through years of bad decisions, that this was not a solution. It was a postponement. Frank would perform another miracle when the deputies returned. Another when they returned after that. And eventually, someone would bring a flamethrower, or a court order, or a journalist, and the miracles would stop working.

He said nothing. He never said anything to Frank about any of it. He continued to live at New Eden for four more months, doing the work that was required of him — gardening, scavenging, attending the nightly meetings — and continuing to observe, with the same flat, unreflecting eyes, the elaborate and ultimately futile performance of a man who had spent his life building bridges out of smoke and hoping nobody would notice that there was nothing on the other side.

When New Eden was finally shut down — not by deputies or flamethrowers but by a zoning violation that the city of Canton issued in March 1979 — Lenny was among the first to leave. He walked to the bus station in Sandusky, bought a ticket to Cleveland with money that he had saved from scavenging, and returned to the life from which he had fled six months earlier: a life of odd jobs and cheap rooms and bourbon and the steady, unremarkable misery of a man who had accepted, with no bitterness and no hope, that this was what his life was going to be.

He lived in Cleveland for the rest of his life. He worked at a warehouse until his back gave out. He died at fifty-eight, in a VA hospital, from complications of alcoholism. His obituary ran on page four of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, beneath an advertisement for used cars and above a listing of upcoming court dates. It contained three sentences: "Lenny Kovac, 58, of Cleveland, died Tuesday. He was a warehouse worker for twenty years. Survived by no one." Nobody came to the funeral. Lenny understood this perfectly. It was, he would have said, if he had had the energy to care about such things, exactly what he had earned.