The Likely World

by Melanie Conroy-Goldman

  It was almost sunrise, almost time for the pools to go private again. Daytime, all we vagabonds were supposed to leave so the drivers of the Mercedes in the parking lot could reclaim their waters.

  Nancy crouched down beside us in the dwindling crowd of bathers. “You want to try enversion therapy?”

  Paul did his audition face again.

  “Don’t worry,” said Nancy. “I don’t have to touch you. It’s just heated rocks.”

  “What does it do?” I asked.

  “People call it memory work. It unblocks you. Anyway, nothing bad.”

  Paul and I looked at each other, then shrugged. Maybe we’d picked up a mild case of hippie from the backpackers in the springs.

  “One at a time,” Nancy said.

  I wasn’t worrying about him and Nancy for some reason. She didn’t give the impression of wanting anything, I guess. I mean, nothing in the world. From us or from her shitty parents or from a guy or even G-d. I marveled at it.

  Nancy set me up in one of the pavilions to wait while she did the thing with Paul. There wasn’t a roof, so I lay on one of the cedar benches, watching the stars disappear as the sky turned pink. At some point, a girl appeared and started sorting through a bag of rocks. It made a strange rhythmic sound which soothed. Some more time passed. Paul had surpassed my expectations for his attention span. I sat up to ask the girl whether it was five yet. I could tell even in the early light, she’d been through some rough things. She was bone thin, like an anorexia patient or a refugee.

  “Caty?” I said. For a moment, I thought it was the missing girl from Lew’s set. She startled, looked up at me, a weird panic lighting her face. Then Nancy was returning, shaking her head.

  “She’s on a vow of silence,” Nancy said sitting beside me. “She’s one of our—I guess you’d say, interns. We call them acolytes, but that language is a holdover from when this place was more of a scam. It’s like work-study, but for people who need to heal.”

  “Is she from LA? She’s the spitting image of this girl—”

  Nancy put her hand on my arm. “I don’t mean to sound judgmental. It’s the last thing I want. But you still use cloud?”

  “From time to time,” I told her.

  “Some people, you know, after a more intense episode, they have those recognition troubles.”

  I didn’t say anything for a moment. I didn’t like to talk about cloud, but tonight I felt easy. I felt easy with her.

  “I guess maybe,” I said, stealing a last look at the girl. It really did look like Caty, but so skinny and altered, I couldn’t be certain, and then she was gone before I could really reach a conclusion. Still, it made me recognize something about the place that situated Nancy in it in a way that felt less confusing. There were people who might not be rich, who might need to hide, and some of them had found shelter here. Following Nancy toward the cliffs, I passed this kind of campground area as we traveled through the trees, camp fire, tents, a parked RV. It was over a fence, but you could tell somehow that it was a satellite of this place, at a different price point.

  Then, we were back among the scrubby trees, the ocean air and the sulfur from the springs and the woody perfume somehow wonderful together. Nancy was carrying what appeared to be a backgammon case.

  “What a place,” I echoed myself. “It’s really spectacular.”

  “It’s a work in progress. The current management are kind of fuckers and there’s a kind of gross breed of white lady who show up here looking for Mexican boyfriends—no offense. The locals don’t see the kind of benefit they could. It’s no wonder the narcos find so much support in the area. Still, there is something to the stones. It’s not even really drug-like. It’s more, stuff the body produces already—like a supplement or a hormone.”

  I shrugged. I’d heard of incendario then, but I didn’t know all the lore—that its qualities were dependent on being processed through special volcanic rocks, that it was filtering it in this way which stimulated production in the male body of some hormone or substance—all I knew was that it supposedly led to better workouts.

  “I don’t want to bulk up,” I said.

  “Most people just hold the stones, or they wear them in this headset. Ingesting is what produces the physical results.”

  In a clearing, there was a circle of large stones big enough to lie on. I thought of Nancy’s Western Mass guru, Zarah, the one she’d sicced on me in an earlier intervention. OneLife was a different animal, less about panic and control, more about perception and acceptance. By coincidence, my mother had been following some of the OneLife teachings—by audio disc, via mail, which was a practice that felt outmoded by ten years. Although I didn’t make the connection at the time, these audio discs also referenced the local stones, which according to my mother, were meant to allow you to penetrate inaccessible possibilities. Unfulfilled hopes, for example, abandoned ambitions, might live in certain blind spots, if only we could get inside them. The example my mother gave was of herself as a teacher. She’d done a teaching degree, dated teachers, teacherliness recurred in her life, but for some reason, this theme had never actualized. There was an origin point, where you’d veered away, and the stones allowed you to enter it. It wasn’t necessarily simple from there. Only through practice might you actually begin to move toward what had been lost. From where I stood in the cedar glen, I was open to OneLife having some substance, to its not being total bull crap. Nancy sat and I took a place beside her.

  “You can lie on the rocks, but I think the headset is really the best way to experience it. The box keeps it warm.” She withdrew the headset from the flat, wooden box and placed it at my temples.

  “Is this what you did with Paul?” I asked.

  “He’s at a different phase,” she said. “It’s a personalized process.”

  I lay down.

  I was cold and the warmth of the headset felt like something I couldn’t pull away from. I heard a sound. It was a mantra or a song, and I couldn’t tell where it was coming from, or even precisely if it was a human voice or something like wind through the rock formations. The sound of the sea wasn’t far. The voice, if it was a voice, was yearning, full of feeling, and it called up a compassion in me, an understanding for this alien, unexpected pain. It didn’t feel like it had to do with me, but I felt like I could sit at its bedside and hold its hand and keep it company for a while. Ay yi yai ya.

  “The OneLife therapy suggests that we each operate in our own idiosyncratic realities. A daily commute, a walk along the cliffs, flipping the pages of a photo album. We will attend to certain things—faces, places, objects, and others will vanish. Let us say this is an external representation of our limitations. What we are going to do is walk backwards, revisit what has been missed. There are things of significance there, and if we focus on the right one, then new directions open.”

  “That woman you were working with, though. She said a new person.”

  “A trained practitioner makes sure that is not the case. That’s why we move slowly. Rush, and there can be mistaken recognitions, calling to yourself something that does not belong to you.”

  “Who’s we?” I asked. “Do you have like a leader?”

  “I know,” said Nancy. “I’d be skeptical too.”

  “I’m not laughing,” I said. I was thinking of my drive with Paul, how much I would like to already have lived that life. Spent my twenties in AmeriCorps instead of coasting from high to high. What if all your impossible fantasies were simply signs? I heard the yearning sound again. Was this unlived life so lonely? Or was it yearning for me, for me to simply return to it?

  “You remember when you lived in that shitty apartment in Brookline, with all the bugs and your grades taped to the fridge? How you were going to be a politician?”

  “I don’t want to be a politician,” I said.

  Nancy shook her head. “It doesn’t work like that. It’s not about actually being a ballerina or in Commedia, or whatever. You remember when your mom regressed
me? I know this sounds insane, but there was a place I went to, a desert at the edge of an ocean. And I saw you there—but it was a better you, and so you were going to some place better, some place you always could have gone, if you hadn’t kept circling back. In this place nearby, you’re a—”

  Brush cracked nearby. A flashlight wavered in the trees. What I thought Nancy had said was “you’re another—” which didn’t mean anything to me.

  “What?” I said. “I’m a what?”

  Then Paul drifted through the brush. I say drifted: there was a way about his body, hovering and partially deflated, like a helium balloon the morning after the party. So, Nancy’s message, whatever it had been, was put aside for the moment.

  “Paul?” she asked.

  “Apollo,” he said, and his voice was like something leaking out of him. “I’m Apollo Blue and I’m so empty, you could fit another me inside me. I’m not even inside me anymore.”

  It was a name I knew, the one he used in his more questionable projects or when he was working non union, and I didn’t give any particular credence to his words. I should have, but at the time I just assumed he had gotten his hands on some bad cloud, and so I took him back to Nancy’s dorm and put him to bed.

  When I emerged in the morning, Paul was back to himself, seemingly, chatting up some local boys while the three of them peered at the passenger dash of the Lexus. Nancy was AWOL, already off on some motorcycle adventure with a hot guy.

  “Something wrong with the car?” I asked.

  One of the local kids leaned into the car to wedge a chisel into a crack near the side view mirror and jimmied the lever back and forth.

  “That’s a leased car,” I said. When the kid turned, I could see that he’d lost an eye, that whatever clinic had treated him had left a bad, dark scar where his eye socket had been. He and the normal dude looked at me, like who the fuck is she, then went back to removing the dashboard cover. It cracked off. That was when I noticed a taped bundle on the seat beside him. I could make out a collection of paper packets through the bubble wrap and tape, some brown volcanic rock. The two men nodded at Paul, slapped hands, and then took off.

  “That’s not cloud,” I said.

  Paul grinned, a teenaged boy who’d discovered a way to leap levels in the video game. “That is Nancy’s pure, rock-filtered incendario. It makes you into a fucking machine.”

  Look, I’d fallen for it. Nancy’s transformation in the cedar circle, the truer life you’d already lived, inversion, whatever. And it sounds dumb, but it also meant something to me that Nancy had wanted me to come, that she’d missed me, that she’d reserved a private moment for me, away from Paul. Now I saw that I was the sucker, lying in the pavilion while Paul and Nancy jumped the compound fence to visit the drug lords in the neighboring encampment. My whole idea, that this trip was a prelude to Paul’s and my escape, had been delusional. We’d been doing a drug run, with the magic stones and the friendship and the scheming for our future as a cover.

  A peasant-looking girl was seated in our back seat. She was a teenager, fifteen, sixteen, wore cast-off OneLife pajamas and it transpired we were meant to give her a ride on top of everything else.

  “Try not to be so uptight, Mellie,” said Paul.

  “You don’t need it,” I said. “Fifteen years, Paul. We’re not teenagers.”

  Paul returned to jimmying the dash. “It’s not for us, for personal use.”

  And I shut up, because I’m always getting confused about virility v. fertility v. potency and for all I knew, incendario was about aging man things like leaking urine and chin wattle. It wasn’t for sex, for us personally, and it wasn’t any coincidence that he was making this run now. It was because of the big audition, the one he had gotten so close on. When we’d arrived in LA, fifteen years before, it was a shock: the banality of perfection, how your barista looked like a Ken doll and your checker like Sean Cassidy. It was a currency more valued here, beauty—typical, anglo beauty—than talent. There was a kind of freedom for me, congenitally pale, large-mouthed and bespectacled, because no surgery in the universe would put me among their ranks. Paul came closer. In New York, in the light of a downtown dive bar or a non-Equity theater, he could unhinge you. Here, he could chase the standard, but age was running right along beside him.

  In the nine months since, his body has changed. On the weight floor, he joined a cohort of pro-lifters and B-movie hopefuls, veins popping, skin taut over their muscles. Make no mistake: these men suffer to look the way they do. They sustain injury and starve themselves and they pump their veins full of whatever they believe will make them grow. They do not make small talk between sets, or eye contact with one another. Instead, they watch themselves in the mirror looking for the most part angry—with their bodies and their lot and their suffering. But there are substances other than incendario that can make you big. And Paul has changed in ways other than his size. I think, as I have watched him transform, of Nancy’s words. There are things in our lives we have glossed over. They have been right here, but for our own reasons, we have failed to see them. Paul himself has become harder to notice. He speaks less, as if his native verbal gifts have been rescinded in this warm climate, as if he is fading himself out. It occurs to me that these very side effects, more even than the physical promises, might have been what called Paul to OneLife that night, what converted him to the mineral life of incendario.

  Already, as we drove back toward the border, I could feel a new distance between us in the powdery odor gathering in the car. It was to that same Tecate stand we delivered the girl from the back seat, where that same fruit-seller family awaited, the mama and the papa and the two younger kids. At the sound of our car, the mama stood and the girl in our back seat began to hammer on the window and we were still moving when the daughter tumbled out and fell into the mom’s arms. The whole family were crying and striking each other’s faces and kneeling and wailing things at each other. And I knew there was a whole part of the story I wouldn’t understand, but I saw that Nancy had put that child in our car deliberately. Somewhere else, I realized, in the place that was keening for me, I was a mother. In this future that Nancy had seen when we were sixteen, I was a mother. I thought we could slip into that life like a cliffside pool, but LA had scripted something else for us, for Paul and for me, and that was what we returned to.

  Lew and his driver were waiting for me when I arrived. I’d left without word four days before, been halfway to Belize, to Mexico and back, and I’d been missed.

  From his seat beside the driver, Lew leaned over the seat back to give me a fleshy, damp hug. “We have been, to understate, worried, Mellie. I take it no one died during your vacation? There was no national emergency or volcano? Little sun do you good? A little sand in your shoes?”

  “I’m sorry,” I told him. Neither Lew nor the driver replied as we climbed into the hills above Lew’s house.

  “Here is what I understand. You are a smart girl, according to you, and I do not disagree. According to you, what we do together, what you and I collaborate on, it’s smalltime. Here, too, I have to confess I concur on one level. We are not nurses or social workers. No one is going to think you’re a brave, good soul because you make movies with fucking. And yet, this is our livelihood, which is a thing about which I care very deeply. Maybe you want something else. You want to go to cosmetology school? Go back to wearing parkas and riding the T? You want six babies and a house in the suburbs? Wanting is fine, but you do not walk out on me without a word.”

  “I don’t know what I should say,” I told him. “Tell me what I should say.”

  “You vanished. And an opportunity came, and I made a shitty picture, and I lost a fuckton of money.”

  “I understand.”

  “A fuckton,” he said, his voice rising. “I keep this little ledger. It tells me how much I’ve paid you over the years. Cash. Hard to operate in cash, right? But you want something, you ask Lew. Lew fixes it. All you ever had to do was ask, Mellie. There
are always ways of smoothing. Always, things can be arranged.”

  From below, from his bungalow, smoke curled. He was not a man who liked to spell out a threat, but he wasn’t a person who let you misunderstand it, either.

  “This business—even for us—doors are closing, sure. But how you did, in the middle. It will not happen again.”

  It was a threat, but it was an offer, too. I knew I couldn’t get there with a headset, but this, I thought, made sense to me, so I agreed to take the classes Trudi had found for me, and I made the arrangement Lew had suggested. And in another way, since Ensenada Sur, I have been throwing the dice for a better future. The first morning after we returned, I woke up early and cleaned the apartment. I washed the cereal bowl, and I scrubbed the bathroom until the smell of Paul’s health crisis had been banished by ammonia. Then, before he rose, and every morning after, I popped my daily Ortho Tri-Cyclen out of its foil and flushed it down the toilet. To the future! To motherhood! To happiness!

  The pills are gone, just as if I’ve swallowed them, but at some point, I will discover that I have been pregnant all along, that I must not have been taking them after all. Paul, too, is remaking himself for some unlikely and inadvisable future. His muscles have grown, but the muscles are not the point; the muscles are for something, or perhaps someone. At some point, for example, I realized he’d thrown away the last of the things he moved here with. None of it fit anymore, he said, but it wasn’t only clothing he threw away. He is divesting himself, and of course I think about it. If he’s divesting himself of me.

  Nine months, when you use, can slip away like water. So much of a user’s time goes unregistered. It feels like last week, we were making our plans, driving down the coast. But things have happened in the interim, both of us moving along our own tracks.