Nine Perfect Strangers

by Liane Moriarty

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever experienced those feel-good chemicals doing exercise,’ admitted Frances. She picked up the candle he’d discarded and dug her thumbnail into the soft wax near the wick.

  ‘You probably have,’ said Tony. ‘Doing certain types of exercise.’ He paused.

  She blinked. Wait. Was that innuendo?

  He continued talking. Maybe she’d got it wrong.

  ‘You probably find this laughable but there were some games where we were all where we were meant to be and we all did what we were meant to do, and it all just came together, like a piece of music or poetry or . . . I don’t know . . .’ He met her eyes and winced, as if preparing himself for derision. ‘Sometimes it felt transcendent. Like drugs. It really did.’

  ‘That’s not laughable,’ said Frances. ‘That makes me want to take up AFL.’

  He gave a deep appreciative chuckle.

  ‘My ex-wife used to say that all I ever thought about was the game. It probably wasn’t much fun being married to me.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure it was,’ said Frances without thinking, and caught herself staring at his massive shoulders. She changed the subject hurriedly. ‘So what did you do after you stopped playing? How did you re-create yourself?’

  ‘I set up a sports marketing consultancy,’ said Tony. ‘It’s done well – you know, for a business run by an amateur human being. I thought I was doing better than a lot of my teammates. Some of them really fucked up – I mean . . . stuffed up their lives.’

  ‘I feel like fucked up is the correct phrase to use there,’ said Frances.

  He gave her his full ‘Smiley’ grin. It really was the funniest smile.

  ‘You’re kind of annihilating that candle,’ he said.

  She looked guiltily at the mess of wax in her lap. ‘You started it.’ She brushed the wax onto the floor. ‘Go on. So you set up this consultancy.’

  ‘I had one friend who said to me, “Don’t you hate the way that everyone only wants to talk about who you used to be?” but I honestly never minded that. I liked it when people recognised me; I never mind talking about the man I used to be. But anyway . . . late last year I started to get these symptoms, this incredible fatigue, I just felt something was wrong, even before I got on Dr Google.’

  Frances felt herself go cold. She was at an age where people in her circle didn’t imagine serious illnesses, they got them. ‘And . . .?’

  ‘So, I took myself off to my GP, and he ran a lot of tests, and I could tell he was taking it seriously, and I said, “Are you thinking pancreatic cancer?” Because that’s what I was thinking – that’s how I lost my dad, and I know it runs in families. And the GP just gave me this look – I’ve known him for years – and he said, “I’m covering all bases.”’

  Oh, damn it to hell.

  ‘It was just before Christmas, and he called me in to give me the results. He pulled out the file and, afterwards, I realised I had these words in my head, and I was saying them to myself, and it just . . . shocked the life out of me that I would think that.’

  ‘What words?’ asked Frances.

  ‘I was thinking, Let it be terminal.’

  Frances blanched. ‘And . . . but . . . is it?’

  ‘Oh, I’m fine,’ said Tony. ‘Nothing wrong with me, except that I obviously don’t have a healthy lifestyle.’

  Frances exhaled. She hoped not excessively. ‘Well, thank goodness.’

  ‘But it shook me up – that I would think that, that I would hope for a terminal diagnosis. I thought, Mate, how fucked up is your head?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s bad,’ said Frances. She felt energised in that bossy female way that she knew drove men crazy, but there was really nothing you could do about it once you felt that sense of righteousness surge through you, because they were such idiots. ‘So, right, you’ve got to get this fixed. You need –’

  He held up his hand. ‘I’ve got it under control.’

  ‘It’s really very bad that you thought that!’

  ‘I know it is. That’s why I’m here.’

  ‘So you probably need –’

  He put his finger to his lips. ‘Shhh.’

  ‘Therapy!’ she got in quickly.

  ‘Shhh.’

  ‘And –’

  ‘Zip it.’

  Frances zipped it. She held the wet towel to her face to hide her smile. At least he wasn’t thinking about his claustrophobia now.

  ‘Tell me about this bastard who scammed you,’ said Tony. ‘And then tell me where he lives.’

  chapter fifty-four

  Yao

  ‘What’s wrong with this one now? Is she sick? Why is she dabbing at her face like that?’

  Masha’s accent, usually just a flavour, sounded more pronounced than usual to Yao. Yao’s parents were the same. They sounded extra Chinese when they were stressed about their internet service or health.

  He should call his parents. ‘You are wasting your life with this woman!’ his mother had said the last time they talked.

  ‘Yao?’ said Masha. She had sat down in the chair vacated by Delilah and was looking up at him, her big green eyes so worried and vulnerable. She was rarely vulnerable. It was exquisite torture to see her so.

  ‘Frances is menopausal,’ said Yao.

  Masha shuddered. ‘Is she?’

  Yao knew Masha was a similar age to Frances, also in her fifties, but she was presumably not experiencing any symptoms of menopause. Masha was a puzzle Yao could never quite solve. She enjoyed discussing the most intimate intricacies of the digestive system, she had no shame when it came to nudity (why would she?) and often walked about naked when there were no guests on the property, but the word ‘menopause’ caused her to shudder, as if something so distasteful could never happen to her.

  Yao looked at the back of Masha’s neck and saw a small inflamed lump: a mosquito bite. It was strange to see any form of blemish on her beautiful body.

  She reached back with her hand and scratched it.

  ‘You’re making it bleed,’ he said. He put his hand over hers.

  She waved him away irritably.

  ‘Delilah is taking a long time,’ he said.

  ‘Delilah is gone,’ said Masha, her eyes on the screen.

  ‘Yes, she went to get you tea,’ said Yao.

  ‘No, she is gone,’ said Masha. ‘She’s not coming back.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  Masha sighed. She looked up at him. ‘Have you not worked it out yet? Delilah looks after Delilah.’ She turned back to the screen. ‘You can go too, if you like. I will take responsibility for it all. The new protocol was my idea, my decision.’

  She could never have applied the new protocol without his medical expertise. If anyone should pay, it was Yao.

  ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ he said. ‘No matter what happens.’

  Over a year ago now, Masha had come across an article about micro-dosing in Silicon Valley. White-collar professionals were using micro-doses of LSD to increase their productivity, alertness and creativity. Micro-dosing was also being used with some success to treat mental illnesses like anxiety and depression.

  Masha was fascinated in her typical Masha way. Yao loved her sudden wild enthusiasms and the fearless way she strode into unfamiliar territory. She tracked down the person who wrote that first article and phoned him. That’s what led to her learning about psychedelic therapy, where people were given ‘full doses’ of psychedelic drugs. Within a very short time, she became obsessed. She ordered books online. She made more phone calls to experts all around the world.

  This was the answer, she said. This was what would take them to the next level. Psychedelic therapy, she said, was the magic shortcut to enlightenment. Scans showed that the brain activity of someone who had taken psilocybin bore striking similarities to the brain of
an experienced meditator during deep meditation.

  At first, Yao had just laughed in disbelief. He had no interest. When he was a paramedic he had seen the terrible impact of illegal drugs. The man who had held a knife to his throat had been suffering the psychotic effects of crystal meth. Yao had treated junkies. They were not a good advertisement for the wonderful effects of drugs.

  But Masha chipped away at him, day by day.

  ‘You’re not listening. This is nothing like that,’ she said. ‘Would you not use penicillin because of heroin?’

  ‘Penicillin does not affect brain chemistry.’

  ‘Okay then, what about antidepressants? Antipsychotics?’

  That low, persuasive, accented voice in his ear, those green eyes fixed on his, that body, that beautiful hold she had over him.

  ‘At least study the research,’ she said.

  So he did. He learned about the government-approved clinical trials of psychedelic drugs being used to help ease the anxiety of patients with terminal cancer. The results were overwhelmingly positive. So, too, were similar trials with war veterans suffering PTSD.

  Yao became curious and intrigued. Eventually he agreed to try the therapy himself.

  Delilah got the supplies on the dark web, including the drug-testing kits. Yao did all the testing.

  He and Delilah both agreed to be the guinea pigs. Masha would be the psychedelic therapist. She herself, because of her medical history, could not do the therapy, but that was fine because she had already had transcendent experiences through her meditation and her famous near-death experience.

  The psychedelic therapy had been, as Masha promised, transformative.

  Even if medicating the guests turned out to be a mistake, he would never regret that.

  It started with a journey down a tunnel that was possibly a waterslide (but the water was not wet, which was a brilliant idea) that ultimately spat him out in a cinema, where he sat on a red velvet seat and ate buttery popcorn while he watched as his whole life was played back to him, frame by frame, from the moment of his birth, right through school and university, up until the moment he arrived at Tranquillum House, except that he didn’t just watch it happen, he re-experienced every incident, every failure, every success, and this time around he’d understood everything.

  He understood that he’d loved Bernadette, his fiancée, more than she’d ever loved him and that she was never going to be the right woman for him. He understood that his parents had never been suited to each other either. He understood that he had the wrong personality to be a paramedic. (He was depleted, rather than energised, by bursts of adrenaline.)

  Most significant of all, he learned that his phobia about mistakes had begun when he was a child.

  It was an incident he was sure he had never heard about from his parents or remembered before, but under the influence of psychedelic drugs he re-experienced it in vivid detail.

  He was no more than two or three years old, in the kitchen of their old house. His mother briefly left the room and he thought to himself, I know! I’ll help do the stirring, and he’d carefully pulled a chair over to the stove, and he was so pleased with himself that he’d worked out this smart solution. He’d climbed up on the chair and he was about to reach out to the bubbling saucepan when his mother came back into the kitchen and shouted at him, so loudly, and his heart leapt out of his chest and he fell from the chair into endless space and his mother caught him, and shook him so hard his teeth chattered. He understood at last that he had internalised his mother’s terror at her mistake, not his.

  Delilah, who refused to reveal much about her own experiences, had been unimpressed by Yao’s revelations. ‘So it’s your mother’s fault you’re a nervous nellie? Because she saved you from being scalded? What a terrible mother. No wonder you’re so damaged, Yao.’

  Yao ignored her. Sometimes Delilah seemed angry with him. He did not know why and he didn’t care, because the day after his psychedelic therapy he woke dizzy with a new freedom: the freedom to make mistakes.

  Perhaps this was his first mistake.

  He looked at the screen showing nine people who did not look to be transformed in any way. They looked tired, agitated and angry. They were meant to be out by now, beginning the next stage of their ‘rebirth’.

  The ‘code-breaker puzzle’ should have taken an hour at most. It was meant to be a fun, stimulating group activity to help them bond as a group. Back in Masha’s corporate days, she’d once been on a team-building retreat where they’d done a similar exercise and everyone had loved it. She said that people had come out of the room laughing and high-fiving each other.

  Masha said she had come up with something sophisticated, subtle and symbolic that would integrate perfectly with their psychedelic experiences. (‘Never afraid to blow her own trumpet, is she?’ Delilah had said to Yao. Yao had put it down to jealousy. What woman wouldn’t be jealous of Masha?)

  Yao had worried that it was perhaps too subtle, but what did it matter? The code-breaking wasn’t integral to their transformations. If the guests couldn’t break the code within the hour, they would let them out and lead them straight to the dining room for platters of fresh fruit and organic, sugar-free hot chocolate for breakfast. Yao had been looking forward to that part, imagining how everyone’s faces would light up as he, Masha and Delilah triumphantly entered the dining room, plates aloft. People would clap, he’d thought.

  Yao had eaten a nectarine after his own psychedelic therapy session, and he could still remember the sensation of his teeth sinking into that sweet flesh.

  Once they’d eaten, the group was to share what they’d learned through their experiences. After that, beautiful hardbound journals would be handed out, so that everyone could write down how they planned to integrate what they’d learned about themselves into their lives back home.

  But nothing was going according to plan.

  It felt like it had first gone off track with Heather’s unexpected question, ‘Have you been medicating us?’, which meant that Masha’s presentation of the treatment had begun on a defensive note, although she’d responded brilliantly, even under attack. People had got so angry, as if they truly believed something sinister was going on, when this was all for their benefit.

  Yao had checked and rechecked the dosages, the possible side effects, the guests’ medical histories, their daily blood tests. There should have been only positive outcomes. He had checked everyone’s vital signs throughout the night. Nothing had gone wrong. There had been no unexpected side effects. Napoleon had become agitated, but Yao had given him a dose of lorazepam and he’d calmed down.

  It was true that the therapy side of it, from Yao’s perspective at least, had been a little clunky. There was a disappointing banality to some of the insights the guests experienced, especially when compared to his own transcendent revelations. But Masha had been thrilled. After all the guests had fallen asleep, she’d locked the door of the meditation studio, flushed with success.

  They had not imagined this.

  As the time had passed, both Yao and Delilah had begun to say, ‘I think we should let them out. Or give them a clue.’

  But Masha was convinced that they would work it out. ‘This is essential to their rebirthing,’ she’d said. ‘They need to fight their way out like a baby squeezes its way out of the birth canal.’

  Delilah had made a small sound like a cough or a snort.

  ‘We have given them so many hints,’ Masha kept saying. ‘Surely they are not so stupid.’

  The problem was that the longer they left them locked up, the hungrier and angrier and stupider they got.

  ‘Even if they do work it out,’ said Yao now, ‘I think their primary emotion will still be anger.’

  ‘You may be right,’ said Masha. She shrugged. ‘We may need to be more creative going forward. Let us see what happens.’

  Yao
saw himself on that chair, his small, pudgy hand reaching for the pot of boiling water.

  ‘Look!’ said Masha. She pointed at the screen. ‘Finally. We have progress.’

  chapter fifty-five

  Frances

  Frances and Tony sat next to each other in companionable silence. Most people were sitting now, except for Napoleon, who paced constantly. No-one was attempting to decode the security lock of the cellar door.

  Someone hummed ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’. Frances thought it was Napoleon. She sang the words in her head along with him: Up above the world so high, Like a diamond in the sky.

  She thought of the night of the starlight meditation and her sleigh ride across the starry sky with Gillian. Lars had been singing ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ before. That was the song that had been playing when she first lay down on the stretcher.

  She mentally listed the other songs that had played through the headphones.

  ‘Vincent’.

  ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’.

  Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’.

  They all related to stars or the sky or the moon.

  What had Masha said last night? Something like: All your life, you’ve been looking down. You have to look up.

  ‘I think we’re meant to look up,’ she said. She got to her feet.

  ‘What?’ Lars propped himself up on his elbows. ‘Look up where?’

  ‘All the songs were about stars and the moon and the sky,’ she said. ‘And Masha said that we have to look up.’

  The younger ones caught on first. Zoe, Ben and Jessica leaped to their feet and began to walk around the room, craning their necks to study the vaulted stone ceiling with curved wooden rafters. The older ones followed more slowly and warily.

  ‘What do you think we’re looking for?’ asked Napoleon.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Frances.

  After a moment, she said sadly, ‘Maybe I’m wrong.’

  ‘There!’ Heather pointed. ‘See? Do you see?’