The Answers

by Catherine Lacey

  This was how she saw the world, that everything went according to plan, that we subconsciously made our own problems, that every cancer had been invited, every injury earned. I wasn’t sure if I had the nerve to believe this, and if I did, if I really accepted I had asked for everything that had happened to me, I wasn’t sure I could ever forgive myself. But thinking this way seemed to calm her. If she deserved her pain, then she deserved all the good in her life, too.

  I could have used a sense of acceptance like that. I hated the pains in my body, struggled against them and cursed them so much I’d even grown to fear good feelings—a settled stomach, a relaxed back, a full night’s sleep, or a whole day without crying. Even Chandra’s care grew to terrify me. What if it vanished? What if she just gave up and stopped coming by?

  Her kindness, as if we shared blood or history, had always been hard to accept. I was just a person who appeared in her life at random, her assigned college roommate, a homeschooled semi-orphan from a barely literate state, but she still spent hours going over financial-aid and student-loan paperwork I didn’t understand. She lost sleep listening to me debate the merits and demerits of what I should major in—religion, philosophy, history, or English—though she’d made up her mind from the start: theater major, marketing minor. And most crucially, she decoded the world for me, explained all the pop culture I’d never heard of, and let me evade the answer to how I’d made it to eighteen without ever hearing of Michael Jackson. I’d blame the homeschooling or say, We were poor. (She seemed terrified by that word: poor.) Once I mentioned that I’d been raised, for a time, by my aunt, a detail that stopped her questions. People like her didn’t get raised by aunts.

  * * *

  After Chandra and I meditated, or, rather, after she meditated and I did whatever I did there on the floor, she served me maté in gourds and crudités with homemade allergen-free, vegan, sprouted pepita paste she had made, she said, while sending nourishing vibes to my astral body. It tasted grassy, felt thick in my throat.

  Pepitas absorb toxins, she said, watching me eat as if watching someone parallel park. I sat there filling myself with pepitas, as the pepitas, I imagined, filled with my toxins. Chandra took the pulse from each of my wrists and examined my tongue. She closed her eyes for a little while, then told me her spirit guides had just advised her to advise me to complete a full PAK series, as soon as possible, with Ed, her PAKer. It had something to do with past lives or future ones, or perhaps even current lives that Ed and I were somehow living in another dimension. She spoke unflinchingly, as if her spirit guides were a real group of people, a flesh-and-blood committee.

  PAKing changed my life, she said. Not just a door opening … but … a whole house of doors opening? It’s going to do that for you, too. My spirit guides have never been so clear. This is your future. You just have to take it.

  I’d always been skeptical of Chandra’s reports from her spirit guides, as they always seemed to have these plans for her that she couldn’t explain to me yet. She’d once told me they were preparing her for incalculable fame and financial wealth, that her accident was part of a strengthening regimen for this future greatness, that she was going to eventually have her own talk show.

  I didn’t know you wanted a talk show, I told her, but she just smiled.

  It’s not about what I want. The fates are beyond desire.

  I wanted to believe that she might actually have some understanding of fate or any kind of intel on the future, because she seemed to believe in it and she also believed in me. But I also didn’t want to lose her to the belief that life had a code that could be cracked, that there was some ideal way to live.

  Regardless, I trusted her. Perhaps someone would say I had no choice but to trust her and perhaps that is true, but also, and I understand this now, I loved her and I loved her in that rare way, that non-possessive and accepting way that it seems people are always trying and failing to love someone, so I sipped the last of my maté through the metal straw, looked into Chandra’s profoundly healed and spiritually realized eyes, and asked for Ed’s number.

  Three

  I woke as if I’d been slapped. My neck brace had been removed. I was lying on my back. Ed stood beside the massage table, staring down at me.

  How long have I been asleep?

  He pushed a frizzy chunk of hair from his eyes that immediately fell back in.

  Only a few days.

  For a long moment I wondered if sleeping for a few days was some PAKing fine print I hadn’t read. I could barely remember coming into the office or signing anything or even starting the session—just the empty all-white waiting room, no music, no receptionist, two white chairs pushed close in one corner, like twin children cowering in fear.

  I’m kidding, he said, you were asleep for a few minutes. It happens a lot during this first assessment. I hope Chandra warned you that my readings are very powerful.

  I said she had though I still knew almost nothing about PAKing or what it was or how it worked. Maybe, I worried, PAKing was just an excuse for this guy to have a woman strip to her underwear and fall asleep in his office. Since I’d become so absurdly thin, I had noticed a certain kind of look I’d get from a certain kind of man, a mix of pedophile and vampire. (I would be so easy to conquer, to feel large above.) Ed didn’t seem to be that sort of man, though when I considered the legions of semiconscious and desperate women who had likely come before me, it wasn’t hard to imagine he might fondle their feet while pretending to read their auras, or maybe he would just stare at their undressed bodies, uselessly thinking good thoughts in their direction, or, worse, jerking off into a bare hand, or, even worse—all sorts of things—but I needed to be well again more than I needed protection from someone’s possible perversion. And what if my skepticism of Ed was already working against me, preventing me from getting whatever he might legitimately be doing or healing on some dimension I couldn’t yet see?

  How is she, by the way?

  Who?

  Chandra—how’s she doing?

  Oh. She’s good, I guess.

  Of course she is, he said, nodding and smiling in a way that suggested he knew much more about Chandra than I did.

  I touched my neck, noticed the throbbing pain had been replaced by a warm fizzle.

  You won’t be needing the brace anymore. That much was easy, but the assessment uncovered several blockages that will take much longer to resolve, so … I need to ask you, Mary—are you really ready for this work?

  I think s—

  You need not verbalize, he interrupted. I’m speaking to your aura … Okay?

  We were silent but open-eyed for a long while. I was still just lying there. He was still just standing over me. If he was going to talk to my aura, I thought he might seem to be concentrating, not just staring off in that waiting-on-a-bus way.

  Okay? he asked again. Is that okay?

  He was staring at my knees. He raised one hand as if he had a question and moved the other in circles above my head.

  Okay?

  I wondered if I should answer, thought I shouldn’t, but couldn’t, for some reason, help myself.

  Is what—

  Shhhh …

  The hand over my face was shaking slightly.

  I’ll wait, he said, so we did for a while, a minute or five, until he finally lowered both his hands.

  This is going to take some additional effort, I see.

  He pinched the bridge of his nose in a functional way, as if turning something on or off in him. My foot had stopped twitching for the first time in a week, and the cluster of painful lumps that had risen up on my right arm that morning had dissolved back into my body. Ed sat on something across the room that almost looked like a hammock. I didn’t know if I was allowed to move yet or not, didn’t know if I should even look at him or speak. I shut my eyes.

  So, Mary … This is serious work. Chandra certainly told you about the seriousness of this work, didn’t she? The equal amount of concentration and mindfulnes
s I’ll need you to bring to this in order for us to make progress?

  I didn’t say anything for a while, not sure if he was still talking to my aura.

  You can verbalize now, Mary—do you understand this work is deeply serious?

  I understand, I said, but I know now that I didn’t understand then, or maybe ever. (Serious as opposed to what?) What I did understand was that whatever Ed had done to me so far had already relieved pain that had been stubborn against thousands of dollars of treatments, though I couldn’t be sure if Ed was responsible the way penicillin is or the way a sugar pill could be. There was no explanation for what he had done to me—I felt almost normal. I braced for a new symptom or an old one to return, but nothing came.

  Listen—and I don’t say this to scare you—but PAKing will deeply alter the way that you live—your relationships with others, the way you conceptualize yourself—everything. If you choose to complete a full series, your life and body will never be the same.

  We listened to the white-noise machines for a moment. I thought about how much I wanted everything in my life to change.

  Are you familiar with the concept of the pneuma?

  Not really.

  Not really what?

  Ed never seemed to try to earn my trust, which made me trust him more. His voice was simultaneously gruff and ditzy. Every day he wore the same baggy hemp pants and tunics. Sometimes he had ashy smudges on his face that seemed only half-accidental.

  I just mean I’m not that familiar with pneuma. Something about the soul, I think …

  The literal translation from Greek is “breath,” but as a concept in my healing practice it has to do with the creative life force within each of us. Kinesthesia is also of Greek origin, meaning, roughly, “an awareness of movement”—so, a question, Mary. Are you moving right now?

  I was still lying on the padded table, motionless, so I said, No, though I knew he’d only asked in order to correct me.

  Wrong. Your body is actually moving a tremendous amount right now, far more than it needs to be. This is what has happened to you: your pneuma is in a state of chaos and stress, which has set it into constant motion, but your awareness of that chaos has been suppressed out of fear. This pneumatic agitation has gone unchecked for so long that it has been translated into the physical language of your body, hence all your symptoms. Your pneuma is both trying to be ignored and trying to be treated. It’s simultaneously asking for help and trying to avoid receiving that help.

  It was a relief for someone to explain what was wrong, what had happened. No one else, none of those doctors in their white jackets or their scrubs—or their comically patterned scrubs if they were trying to bring a sense of humor into a place of smashed bones and dead hearts—none of those people had even tried to explain anything to me. All they could say was that they couldn’t say anything for sure, that bodies were a mystery, that even blood tests, ultrasounds, X-rays, MRIs, were only little guesses. Whole hospitals shrugged.

  But now Ed was giving me an answer: the pneuma. It didn’t matter if I believed in the pneuma or not. It didn’t even matter if he was right. It was an explanation. A story.

  The root of your symptoms is deeply embedded and intertwined with your nonphysical self, so it makes sense that Western medicine hasn’t been helpful for you.

  Ed’s hair frizz swayed in a draft. I had the odd sense that time had somehow bent, that it was coming at me on a diagonal. My scalp covered itself in sweat.

  Your energetic body is telling me that you want to be healed so desperately you are actually stopping yourself from being healed. Are you aware of that?

  Isn’t it funny that a person could want something so much she might do everything she could to stop herself from getting it? So funny.

  That sounds about right, I said.

  He nodded slow and deep, the moral to his own story. All your problems and all the answers to those problems exist in the boundaries of your body.

  I thought I might start crying though I didn’t know why. There was a humming behind my eyes but nothing came. Ed picked up a pale gray stone and came back to the table, held it a few inches above the bridge of my nose.

  I’ve created a deionized field around your body, a temporary splint for your aura, and that is giving your pneuma some relief, but in order to create a lasting solution we’ll need to go through a complete PAKing cycle over the next few months, maybe longer. I realize it’s expensive, but you should know I have to prepare for a full day before a PAKing session and it takes at least two days to recover. My waiting list has a dozen people on it, but because of Chandra’s recommendation and your condition, I could start seeing you as soon as next week.

  He was moving the stone in an arc above my face, lightly touching each temple. Somehow it was clear I didn’t have to say or do anything.

  But for now I’ll administer some more dramatic energetic maneuvers to open those blockages, so if you could just totally relax, remain attentive to your energetic body, and trust my guidance, that would help us out tremendously.

  He put the stone down on my sternum and closed his eyes, then extended his hands to hover over my chest. I tried to clear my mind and maybe I did or maybe he did because the rest of the session was a blur and all I remember now was the slow walk home, my foot not twitching, my neck brace half-stuffed in my purse. I wasn’t in pain but I wasn’t completely out of pain either. I felt as if several strong hands were gripping my legs, my back, pressing the muscles closer to the bones.

  No fighting. No flying, Ed said as I left. Just float.

  Four

  My first PAKing session had taken me out of the office for almost three hours, so I was staying late—to catch up on some invoices, I explained to Meg as she left, but I actually meant to use my work computer to apply for a second job to raise the cash to pay for a complete PAKing series. There weren’t really any invoices to catch up on, I just needed to put in some hours at the office, pretending what I did was useful. Travel agencies, we knew, were dying, and Universal Travel had been downsizing almost constantly since I’d started working there. I didn’t have any of the skills they were looking for in an accounts manager, but the pay was too low for anyone qualified for the job. I’d only applied because I thought free travel might be a perk, but even the agents only got slight discounts and I never became an agent—You’re not the type, I was told. I remained in the fluorescent-lit, low-ceilinged back part of the office, sending e-mails to people who owed us money and excuses to people whom we owed money. Checks. Invoices. Checking invoices. E-mails. That’s all I ever did.

  But that night all I sent were cover letters and résumés to random night gigs culled off Craigslist—restaurant hosting, temp stuff, various forms of assisting. Somewhat reluctantly, I also responded to an ad I found on a health food store’s bulletin board.

  The ad listed several qualifications (Ivy degree, CPR training, spotless mental health record, knowledge of foreign affairs, strong communication skills, and—above all: discretion), though the details of the job, the ad noted, could not be specifically described in the ad, NOT because of the legality of the job, but because describing the specific duties of this job would likely attract candidates poorly suited for this (high-paying, low-time-commitment, weekends and occasional weeknights) job, which, the ad said, wasn’t even really a job, but a sort of income-generating experience.

  An auto-reply came a few minutes later—

  We are moving very quickly to fill the positions. Please complete and respond as quickly and as thoroughly as you can.

  Best Wishes,

  Matheson.

  —with a full application attached—several forms; a personality test; a handwriting-analysis worksheet I had to print, complete, and scan; a natal-chart questionnaire; a clearance for a background check; and ten short essay questions on disparate topics.

  I immediately went to work, completing it two hours later. What would a background check even uncover about me? My debts? That I was a medical my
stery? The places my passport had been? (If anyone could run a truly accurate background check on me, I knew all they’d find would be Merle and Mother in that dusty brown cabin. The name Junia. The navy Bible I’d left behind. But no one would ever find that.)

  Walking through the inert office that night, the dark broken only by the flicker of a screen saver dancing alone, I thought that if I could ever do a background check on myself, I knew exactly what I’d do with it. I wouldn’t even read it, just take it somewhere sacred and set it on fire.

  * * *

  The next night I was belly down on the living room floor trying to read a book when the phone rang. It was a quarter till eleven. No one called anymore except for Chandra and I knew she was religious about not using any technology after dusk.

  May I speak to Mary Parsons?

  This is she.

  Hiii, Mary. Forgive me for calling so late. How are you this evening?

  I’m—fine … But really I felt odd and alive, my body still throbbing from whatever Ed had done to me.

  Good, good. Well, my name is Melissa and I read your application—you responded to one of our flyers? Anyway, we’d like to invite you in for an interview tomorrow.

  She told me to arrive at suite 704 in a building near Union Square at 1:23, exactly, and it was 1:23, exactly, when the door to suite 704 swung open before I even had a chance to buzz. A pale blond girl exited, hunched and glanceless, as if she had just endured something unspeakable. Melissa and Matheson offered soft handshakes—Hi, hello, Mary, nice to meet you, how are you, thanks for being prompt—their voices overlapping so that I didn’t know how to respond.

  Of course, I said, afraid my nervousness seemed condescending.

  I am so sorry about the lighting, Matheson said, flicking an overgroomed bang from his forehead, but we’ll just have to deal, I suppose.

  Suite 704 was an anonymous conference room, an overpolished faux-wood table nearly filling the space. I took a seat as Matheson wrote something on his clipboard, inhaling and exhaling like a yoga teacher in preparation. The asymmetrical cut of Melissa’s neckline below the extreme symmetry of her face created a deep sense of inferiority in me. She stared at me as if she was unable to conceal her contempt for anyone who was not as groomed and sleek as she was. I couldn’t tell if she was a very young woman disguised as someone older or the other way around. Matheson was dressed like an executive of some fashionable company, but still had the face of a teenage model—suspiciously clear skin, high cheekbones, square jaw, attractive in a surreal, alarming way.