I was twenty-two, had a degree, a job, had traveled the world with Chandra, had read all sorts of books they’d never read, knew all kinds of things they refused to know. I thought I’d make them understand, with rhetoric, with everything I had learned. I didn’t realize I was ending it all, that it would really be that easy for me to vanish from the family.
It’s astounding how ignorant and arrogant you’ve become, Merle said after a long silence.
Oh, Florence said, let’s not fight about this. We all know this fighting won’t get us anywhere.
Damn right it doesn’t get us anywhere.
Damn was the only curse I’d ever heard him use, a total of four times: when his toolshed collapsed; when he chopped his fingertip; when an oak fell on our goat during an ice storm; when he found someone’s escaped pet python had swallowed two hens from the coop—easy fixes, all of them; he rebuilt the shed, cauterized the wound, cooked the goat, and shot the python, but solving the problem of me was not so simple.
Aunt Clara dropped her fork hard on her plate and spoke gently: Merle, darlin’, I’m so sorry, but I can’t put up with that kind of language at my dinner table and surely not on Thanksgiving.
He regarded Clara as if she were just a house cat that had sauntered into the room, then went back to his food.
I’m sorry, I said to no one in particular.
I was already prepared to retreat, to sink back into my once-a-year role as the permanently prodigal daughter, our unspoken agreement that I show up at Aunt Clara’s house, eat a meal, sleep a night, and leave the next day on the Greyhound. This was all that kept us a family.
I shouldn’t bring it up, I said. It’s my fault.
Though Florence had tried writing me letters for a while—telling me of the tomato, squash, and string bean harvest, the tally of animals Merle had killed, how many pounds of jerky one deer had turned into—those had stopped after a year or so. They’d always been signed Love, Your Mother and Father, always in her hand. There was never an ounce of anything personal, never a question about me, and though I half hated those letters, I loved them, too.
She can do whatever she wants, Merle said as he stood up, and walked calmly to the back door, slamming it shut.
He just needs some air, Florence said. You know how he gets without a good lungful of air.
It was well after dark when he walked out of the little patch of suburban woods behind Clara’s house. He was gripping the shotgun he kept in the truck in one hand and two skinned squirrels dangling from a branch in the other.
Listen, he said as he stepped inside, not bothering to remove his muddy boots, and I thought he was going to go on one of his rants about my way of life creating income that became taxes that supported war, about war being inherently at odds with a life following Christ, that the only way to live was to refuse all forms of capitalism and subsist on God’s gifts, tending land and animals, but he just paced around—almost speaking, then not—tracking mud across the beige carpet.
Clara loudly began the dishes.
The daughter shall not bear the iniquity of the father, he said eventually, a hacked quote from Ezekiel, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the daughter: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon her.
I tried to come up with a verse of my own, but all I could think of was Nietzsche, as if philosophy had fully displaced all the Bible verses I’d memorized in childhood. I wonder what he would have done if I had come up with something from the New Testament about kindness and tolerance.
Provoke not your children to wrath, I said, hesitant, dusting off my memory of Ephesians.
How can you quote from the Word you’ve rejected? He squinted as if I were so far away from him he could hardly recognize the face that echoed his. There’s no room in you for the sanctity of the Bible when you believe anything you read.
I tried to remember another quote—one I had leaned heavily on in my early years away, when I was still trying to make room for Christianity among other philosophies and long discussions with atheist valedictorians—but nothing came. I looked at Merle for a moment, and now that moment stretches out long in my memory—his skin had thinned across his face and his beard was longer and grayer than I’d ever seen it. I remember noticing, perhaps for the first time, the thick creases just below his cheekbones.
He slammed the back door again, moved toward the carcasses with a knife, and from the window we watched him gut the little animals, their blood pouring onto the deck.
Florence was sipping black coffee from a teacup.
She didn’t look at me. She may have never looked at me again.
She said, Oh, he got some squirrels.
Eight
It was hard for me to take this seriously. Ed was on his back on the floor, legs straight toward the ceiling, and I was draped over them, arching my back across his socked feet, arms overhead, body hanging in a C. This was the second time we’d done this particular move and I held a heavy metal ball in each hand, to which Ed had told me to send my breath, but I couldn’t tell if I was doing it right. He flexed his toes against my back in a slow, deliberate pattern.
I’d been hanging there a while when he broke the silence.
So, do you have a boyfriend, girlfriend, partner, anything?
It was hard to talk, blood weighting my face, but I said, No.
Oh, well, that might be for the best. Lots of people get divorced or separated during a PAKing series.
Gravity contradicting my head—I could barely speak.
Because you’re reorganizing the way your energetic body processes the external world. People you seemed close to suddenly become very foreign, though it’s always for the best. A whittling away of the energies that can’t exist harmoniously with your pneuma.
His silence was expectant, but I had nothing to say and no way to say anything I could say. I felt this spiraling sensation growing in my legs while a sharp, warm oval formed between my shoulder blades.
Really, you’re not even seeing anyone?
I said nothing.
Because it feels like someone is sending out psychic cords to you … Are you familiar with psychic cords?
No.
Ah, well. They’re fixations, attachments, psychic energy that one person directs toward another, often in a nonconsensual manner.
He slowly pressed his toes into and out of my back. I became incredibly dizzy.
Say, an overprotective parent or a needy partner or whatever the case may be. Those sorts of psychic cords can interfere greatly with my practice, so I do need to know about any situation you may be in that would involve psychic cording. It presents a major hazard to my work and safety. Did you recently end a relationship? Lose a family member?
No one, I said, wishing he would just stop talking. I’d assumed that PAKing would be serene, silent. Soothing music of an undeterminable spiritual origin. Sage, sandalwood, something. Not all this small talk during the most awkward maneuvers. During our second session, while I was secured in this medieval-looking wooden apparatus, he’d asked if I had any recent dreams. I hardly ever remember them, I said, so he asked if I had ever heard of the band Yo La Tengo, to which I had no answer (of course I hadn’t) so I just pretended that I was concentrating on my breathing. Ed began explaining this Yo La Tengo thing, how he was listening to a record of theirs, on vinyl, he emphasized, and he’d been thinking about a genre of music called shoegaze, something about the body language of the shoegazer, the perpetual crumpling or downward slope of the gazer’s neck, and then he changed the subject, abruptly, to nettle root—had I ever taken nettle root? Had anyone ever advised that I take nettle root? I was in a subdued, semi-meditative state, but he repeated himself, louder—Mary, have you ever taken nettle root?—and I said, Um, no, to which he immediately began chanting.
And where should I have looked when he chanted? Did he want an audience or was this supposed to be the sound track to my introspection? Also, what was
nettle root?
I had to constantly fight the feeling that PAKing was just absurd—two adults in a room, contorted with each other, one of them occasionally chanting in what didn’t even seem to be a language, occasionally making random small talk, an odd blend of exercise, therapy, first date, and ceremony. All his talk seemed like a distraction from our supposedly serious work, but it was Ed—the expert, the PAKer, the possible psychic—who always started the small talking. So maybe idle chatting was somehow necessary to my possible healing, and maybe my reluctance to respond to Ed was further evidence that my aura was uncooperative, unwilling to be healed. I understood nothing, felt child-dumb and strange.
There’s likely someone in your future, he said. I was prone on the massage table, hooked up to a machine by these little metal clips on my earlobes and fingertips. My face felt cool, as if covered in aloe, and I had no memory of getting from the last position to where I was now.
That’s probably what I’m sensing, he continued. Some premonitions. Someone is just around the corner for you. Have you ever met someone and felt like you already knew them? Your spirits were probably preemptively sending psychic cords to each other, without even realizing it. Our spirits know so much more than we can.
I remembered Paul, the thrilling and terrifying feeling that he already knew me, but when I opened my eyes there was just Ed, his clumpy blond hair and limp gaze. I closed my eyes again and my lids pulsed with a bright blue light. What was I doing here, spending all this money I didn’t have for this man to talk and hum and touch me? I couldn’t deny that it was giving or correlating with the only relief I’d felt in a year, but did I have to trust Ed or just endure him for PAKing to work?
Perhaps I should leave and never come back. I didn’t have a solid opinion on the possibility of anyone’s having psychic abilities or a fluency in reading auras, nor did I want to form an opinion about these things, to be one of those people with convictions about things they can’t prove or disprove.
And yet, I can’t find a way to explain what began happening at this session. He put a pink crystal in my right hand and was pressing an oily wooden sphere into my biceps when he’d started muttering something. At first I couldn’t hear what it was or I thought it was in another language, one of his chants, but he spoke up—
E … Six … Four …
I thought of Ephesians 6:4—provoke not your children to wrath—felt my heart spike and flutter. The thought of Ephesians brought the memory of Merle and this immediately exhausted me, or maybe it was something Ed was doing, or maybe it was just my life, my strange and always stranger life, taking all the life out of me. I closed my eyes, tried to get as far away from myself as I could.
E … Six … Four, he said again. The E stands for something.
Was he waiting for me to tell him what? Did he already know? I didn’t want to say it, didn’t want to give him any clues. I think I fell asleep here or time compacted and passed quickly for some other reason, but later Ed asked me if I knew a man who wore a red hat.
A bit older, perhaps, like a grandfather, something like that. I said I didn’t know anyone like this and he nodded and smiled. He said I would soon, that he was certain. The rest of the session went quietly, and after I’d gotten redressed he told me, his hand on my shoulder, that he knew I was undergoing a huge loss.
I realize that you’re not able to talk about it yet, but just to let you know, you will need to find a way to open up in order for us to effectively continue our work, and the sooner you allow yourself to do that, the better off we’ll be, okay?
I don’t know what you’re talking about.
And I didn’t. I think back to this moment sometimes now, look back at that person I was, months before I couldn’t unknow what had happened. He held his hands a few inches from my waist.
There’s a large, dark cloud hovering on the lower right side of your rib cage. A woman, something like a mother figure, has passed on to the other side.
On a reflex, I looked down, but nothing was there. Nothing I could see.
Oh … well. I guess I’ll just let you know.
When you’re ready, Ed said, nodding, unashamed in his eye contact. And, oh, one more thing. Do you know anyone named June?
I said nothing.
I keep hearing it around you—June, June—almost like there’s some spirit calling for someone. I don’t always get such messages like this, but it was very clear with you today. Do you know anyone named June? Perhaps a relative, a pet?
No. I knew who I was and who I wasn’t.
Anything significant ever happen to you in the month of June?
Nothing I can remember.
A birthday or anniversary of something? Anything?
No.
No clues. I would give him no clues at all.
We stared at each other, and though I wanted to look away, I found I somehow couldn’t. What were we to each other, Ed and me? Was this a kind of love, a relationship? A willful manipulation—almost a kind of church, two people alone, doing things to each other. What more could anyone want than to try to change and be changed by someone?
I said, See you next week, and left.
Nine
My PAKing session had stretched my lunch break to almost three hours, but no one seemed to notice. When my tongue had gone numb a few weeks back, I sent out a memo about my lost voice, so no one even bothered to speak to me anymore, e-mailing everything. Though I could talk again, I hadn’t told anyone, preferring the silence, but the moment I returned to my desk that afternoon, my phone rang.
Mary? Matheson asked, but he didn’t wait for me to confirm myself. Sorry to call you at work, but we’re wondering if you can come in this afternoon to discuss the position.
I slipped out the back, took the service elevator to the street, dashed to the subway as if being chased. The address he gave me was in a neighborhood full of French patisseries, chocolatiers, and the sort of high-fashion shops that seemed angry to be themselves. The doorman already knew my name, walked me to a specific elevator, pressed PH, turned a key, and waved goodbye as the doors shut.
Matheson was there when the elevator opened on the top floor. He smiled and led me down a gray hallway with high ceilings, then through three doors to an all-white office—white desk, white walls, white chairs, white rug on a white floor. Behind him, a sweeping view of the water and bridges.
I’ll have to ask you to sign this nondisclosure agreement before I can give you any more information. Is that all right with you?
As I read the contract, not quite understanding it or perhaps not even really reading it, the three smallest toes on my right foot throbbed and a crick took root in my neck. I couldn’t remember whether Ed had told me the neck had something to do with expression or abandonment or intuition, but I signed the contract, pushed it back across the desk to Matheson.
So everything I tell you from here on out is confidential.
I nodded.
And you won’t relay any of the information or questions I or anyone else on the team will ask you, whether publicly or privately, regardless of circumstance, and you further realize that even accidentally revealing any classified information could put your standing with us in jeopardy and potentially could be the grounds for legal action taken against you.
I understand.
All right, great. So. I’m quickly going to show you a few photographs and I want you to tell me if any of these people look familiar to you, all right?
He held up a portrait of a man in a white shirt. The man—I didn’t recognize him—seemed to really enjoy being himself. I nodded no.
Not even a little?
I looked at him harder, but he seemed to exist solely as a photograph, as if knowing him would have required being in that photograph, too.
No.
What about this one?
He held up a different photograph, a different man, same answer, then a woman, another woman, another man, a woman and a man together, another man, two more men after
that, but none of them cued anything.
Okay, so. Mary, have you heard the name Kurt Sky?
I don’t think so.
And just double-checking, you haven’t heard of the movie Diamond Lives?
No.
Okay, and what about The Palace Island? That was with Allie Benson—have you heard of her?
No, neither.
But you’re probably familiar with the TV series City of Men, right?
I’m not.
You haven’t even heard of it? It was very respected. Even the public-radio crowd was into that one. You didn’t see the billboards? Subways ads, nothing?
They all sort of blend together to me.
Wow. Okay, so that’s actually great. That’s what we suspected. Kurt Sky, my employer, is a very well-respected and recognizable actor and, I should add, a … phenomenal person—Matheson teared up quickly, as if he’d rehearsed it—who has changed my life … in … tremendous … ways. Excuse me, I just—well.
He took a shallow breath, fluttered his eyes.
With the help of a team of biotechnology researchers, as well as Kurt’s meditation counselor and psychoanalyst, we have devised a plan, based on empirical evidence, that essentially assigns the roles fulfilled by a life partner to a team of specialized team members to enact Relational Experiments meant to illuminate the inner workings of love and companionship. This endeavor is both a scientific experiment we’re conducting for the good of society at large and a healing exercise for Kurt in particular, a sort of recalibration of his understanding of himself in relationship to others. We’re calling it the Girlfriend Experiment—GX for short—and we’re considering you for the role of Emotional Girlfriend to Kurt.
I was briefly shocked, not that someone even had such an idea, but that it was feasible that I could be someone’s girlfriend of any kind. I had forgotten, in a way, that I was a girl, that people had girlfriends, that girls like me were sometimes those friends. To be hired as a girlfriend, sure, this seemed abnormal, but then again so many things seemed abnormal to me that I’d long ago learned not to trust that instinct.
The Answers Page 5