Broken People

by Sam Lansky

  A groundbreaking, incandescent debut novel about coming to grips with the past and ourselves

  “He fixes everything that’s wrong with you in three days.”

  This is the alluring promise that first hooks Sam when he overhears it at a party in the Hollywood Hills: the story of a globe-trotting master healer who claims to perform “open-soul surgery” on the emotionally damaged. And the shaman seems convincing—enough for neurotic, depressed Sam to sign up for a weekend under his care. But as Sam begins his slippery descent into the seductive world of modern mysticism, he’ll be forced to reckon with his troubled past, his self-delusions and the very nature of what it means to be well.

  But are the great spirits the shaman says he’s summoning real at all? Or are the ghosts in Sam’s memory more powerful than any magic?

  At turns tender and acid, bracing and true, Broken People is a dazzling modern parable about hope, faith and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are.

  Praise for Broken People

  “Searching and brutal, funny and fierce, Sam Lansky’s Broken People faces up to the mess of modern subjectivity—our fears of inadequacy and genuine connection, our longing to be other than we are—and in doing so challenges the coercive, punishing, impossible ideal of wholeness so many of us are told to chase. This is a brave, moving, beautiful novel.”

  —Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness

  “An intimate and raw story of pain and healing. Sam Lansky proves he has command of a poignant and strikingly vulnerable new voice in fiction. Brave, wise, and beautifully unflinching.”

  —Taylor Jenkins Reid, New York Times bestselling author of Daisy Jones & The Six

  “Broken People is a journey to the soul. Sam Lansky’s debut novel sends up LA’s consumerist wellness obsession while exploring the nature of health, acceptance, and human connection. The result is profound and affecting—as savvy as it is searching, as critical as it is compassionate.”

  —Chloe Benjamin, New York Times bestselling author of The Immortalists

  “An epic journey of self-forgiveness that confronts us with the ways in which we’re all broken, then, with the assured hand of a most talented writer, conjures the healing magic within. A mesmerizing read.”

  —Steven Rowley, bestselling author of Lily and the Octopus

  “Broken People is among the strangest and most thrilling reading experiences I’ve had this year. What terrible, selfish lives we all lead—and how beautiful our struggle to transcend them can be.”

  —Richard Lawson, author of All We Can Do Is Wait

  “Broken People leads us through the winds of time and memory to offer a riveting portrait of transformation. I am better for having read it.”

  —Jamie Lee Curtis

  Also by Sam Lansky

  The Gilded Razor: A Memoir

  BROKEN

  PEOPLE

  A NOVEL

  SAM LANSKY

  Sam Lansky is the author of the memoir The Gilded Razor and the West Coast editor at Time magazine. He lives in Los Angeles, California.

  For Dave, who is a part of this story, too

  If you were lonely

  and you saw the earth

  you’d think here is

  the end of loneliness

  and I have reached it by myself.

  —Mary Ruefle

  Contents

  Part One

  1: An Invitation

  2: Hummingbird

  3: Symptoms

  4: Magical Thinking

  5: The Call

  6: The Four Commitments

  Part Two

  7: Rich Gays

  8: The Ocean

  9: Little Things Feel Like Big Things

  10: The Knowing Place

  11: Sick

  Part Three

  12: Integration

  13: The Whole Body

  Acknowledgments

  BEFORE

  Part One

  1

  An Invitation

  “He fixes everything that’s wrong with you in three days.”

  This was how it began: casually, not as a grand pronouncement framed as a life-changing event, but just an off-the-cuff remark, and later Sam would wonder how his life might have gone if he hadn’t overheard it, or if he’d never been there at all, at this dinner party at the home of an architect somewhere in the Hollywood Hills. There were so many alternate realities in which Sam had made other plans, or failed to look at his calendar and forgotten about it, or just decided not to go and canceled at the last minute—after all, not going to things was one of the few great pleasures of adult life—and then what would have happened? Everything would have been different.

  But he had gone to the dinner party. It was a breezy winter night during that hopeful string of days in January just before everyone fully scraps their New Year’s resolutions, the cheer of the holidays a recent enough memory to sustain a few more days of good-naturedness, and the dinner party had the feel, as so many things in Los Angeles did, of having been cast, populated with colorful characters from different backgrounds and industries who the host had hoped would find some conversational common ground at the seams of their interests. There was the heir apparent to a casino empire; a character actress Sam recognized from a guest arc on a Netflix show; the architect’s ex-lover, an interior designer who had done a capsule collection for West Elm or something; and then Sam, a writer—and probably, he had sussed out, the least fancy person in the room. None of the guests really knew one another, only the host, which made the evening feel a little disjointed, nobody being certain where they fit.

  Or maybe, Sam thought, everyone else was actually having a perfectly lovely time and it was just him forever lingering on the fringes of connection, unable to belong—who could say? That wasn’t the point.

  The point was: at the moment Sam heard it, this odd comment cutting through the din of silverware scraping against dishes and the hum of jazz from an overhead speaker, something shifted almost imperceptibly in the room, like a lens refocusing on its subject.

  “What do you mean?” Sam asked, in a high, strange voice that didn’t sound like him. He had been quiet for most of the evening, sitting stick-straight with his belly sucked in and his chest puffed out to try to make himself look thinner, picking at the grilled chicken breast and asparagus on his plate as conversations bloomed around him, amiable chatter about misspent winter holidays and the Republican sweep of the recent election, which was worrying to the people at the party because they were liberal but not too worrying because they were all, as far as Sam could tell, rich. Now suddenly he was fully engaged, enough so to interrupt what had previously been a private dialogue between the architect and a pretty but brittle older woman, a stack of Cartier love bracelets clanking on her thin wrists, who was seated between the two of them.

  Sam dropped his voice down an octave. “I’m so sorry, that was rude of me—I just totally inserted myself into your conversation,” he said. “But what does that mean—he fixes everything that’s wrong with you in three days?”

  The architect extended his hands outward as if to say, Who knows? His name was Buck, and he was handsome in a gently creased, effortless way: ruggedly built, with salt-and-pepper hair and a puckish smile, and eyes that hinted at magic, and that particular tendency Sam loved in other gay men, the ability to code-switch from masculine to luxuriously queeny depending on who he was speaking to, his gruff tenor turning suddenly velvety.

  “He’s some healer,” Buck said. “A master shaman. A client in Marin County spent a weekend with him and said it was the most extraordinary experience of her li
fe.”

  Sam blinked a couple times. “Right, but what does he do? I mean, fixing everything that’s wrong with people! Does he claim to, like, cure terminal illnesses?”

  “No, no,” Buck said. “Maybe I said it wrong.” He dabbed at the corner of his mouth with a napkin. “My client said that the shaman heals other conditions. Depression, anxiety, addiction, trauma—that sort of thing. Emotional stuff. She was in the absolute grips of postpartum depression and after three days with the shaman she was cured. Like ten years of therapy in a single weekend, she said. He works in small groups, doing private retreats. I was thinking about hiring him for my fiftieth next month.” He laughed. “I probably shouldn’t go into fifty like this.”

  “But how?” Sam said, a little desperately. He looked around at the other guests, who were now watching this exchange, rapt, as it assumed a new intensity that verged on impolite. “I mean, if you could do ten years of therapy in a single weekend, wouldn’t everyone be doing that with this shaman instead of, like, going to therapy?”

  “Five stars on Yelp,” someone said.

  Quickly the conversation turned back to easier subjects, and for a moment Sam considered trying to keep the discussion going, but he didn’t know how to do so elegantly, and so he just dropped it, and this felt deeply weird to him—that no one was even remotely curious about getting more details about this mysterious master shaman who could fix everything that was wrong with you in three days.

  But then, a few minutes later, the woman next to Sam brought it up again. “You sounded very curious about the shaman,” she said. Maybe she’d read it on him that he wanted to keep talking about it.

  “It’s just not the sort of thing you hear every day,” Sam said. “And I’m interested in...how people change, I guess. If people can change.”

  “What would you change about yourself if you could?”

  Sam took in the question. Everything, he thought. “I don’t know,” he said instead.

  “Buck said you’re a writer,” she said. “That you published a novel.”

  “Yes. Well, no. Not a novel,” Sam said. “A memoir.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “A novel is fiction,” Sam said. “A memoir is an autobiography, but it reads more like fiction. It’s a person telling a story from their life.”

  She studied him appraisingly. “You look a little young to have written a memoir,” she said, pronouncing the word in an affected Francophone style, mem-wah. “Famous parents? Or did you fall into a ravine mountain-climbing and claw your way to safety or something?”

  “No,” he said, feeling his face grow warm. “Just a colorful account of all the dumb things I did when I was a teenager in New York.” This was usually how he explained it when it came up in these situations. He balled his hands into little fists under the table.

  “I knew you weren’t a mountain climber,” she said, satisfied. “Well, I’ll read it anyway.” She took a sip of her wine. “Will you write more books?”

  “Yes,” Sam said. “I mean—I’d like to. I should be so lucky.”

  “What’s the next one about?”

  “Love and sex. That kind of thing.”

  She shook her head. “When I was young, we just talked with our girlfriends about who we were sleeping with—not the whole world. You millennials make everything so public!” She looked off at nothing. “I did always want to write a book, though. It seems so romantic.” Then she turned back to Sam. “My friend Danielle Steel writes books. Do you know her?”

  Sam shook his head slowly. “No,” he said. “No, I don’t know Danielle Steel.”

  “Oh.”

  “So what would you change about yourself, if you could?” he asked.

  She considered it for a moment. “My neck.” She pulled back the vaguely crepe-like skin beneath her jawline until it was taut, the stacks of bracelets sliding noisily down her forearms. “But I’ll go to Dr. Markowitz for that.” She released it and laughed hoarsely. “Not some medium or whatever.”

  “Your neck looks great,” Sam said gently. “You don’t need to do anything to your neck.”

  “You’re sweet,” she said, pulling at her neck again. “I wish I’d been more grateful for my youth when I was young. But so it goes, right?”

  When she said this, it occurred to Sam that he should appreciate his own youth now while he still had it; and then this, the next thought, that there was a very real possibility that he would still be pathologically self-conscious and anxious when he was this woman’s age, and that idea, of the years sprawling out before him, of never being able to quiet the chorus of self-obsessed insecurity, of it just going on like this for decades, filled Sam with a dread so black that it was nauseating.

  It would be better to be dead, he thought, and the feeling was potent in a way that made him want to say it out loud, to stand up from the dinner table and announce, “I want to be dead!” He did not want to die, in a practical sense—the corporeal permanence of death terrified him—but rather, to already be dead, to skip the death process and coast into a static condition of un-being, was something he fantasized about often. Certainly that had to be better than sustained consciousness.

  Does everyone feel that way?

  Say something.

  “So it goes,” Sam said loudly, and he took a bite of chicken breast and chewed it very slowly.

  * * *

  At the end of the night, Sam put on his jacket and said goodbye to the other guests. Buck was in the kitchen, filing dishes into the sink. It smelled like olive oil and lavender, and Sam thought, for a moment, about how nice it would be to have a home like this.

  “Thank you for having me,” Sam said. “It was great to get to know your friends.” This was a lie. He had been uncomfortable for the entire night, anxiety gnawing at him, that sense of being uneasy wherever he was ratcheting up in intensity the longer he’d stayed. He felt ambiently guilty, as he often did. Maybe it was because he hadn’t brought a bottle of wine, as everyone else had, even though he was sober and so he would not have been able to drink it; but, as he had considered it, a recovering alcoholic showing up to a dinner party carrying a bottle of wine was likelier to cause concern than the rudeness of showing up empty-handed.

  A Diptyque candle, he thought. You should have brought a Diptyque candle.

  Buck turned to face him. In some animal part of Sam’s brain he wondered whether Buck wanted to sleep with him, and whether that was something that Sam himself would like, too. Sam thought that he would. He didn’t know Buck well but the older man seemed interested in Sam, although Sam couldn’t quite divine what the nature of that interest was—if it was friendly or flirtatious, driven by lust or curiosity. For a moment he imagined himself wrapped in Buck’s arms, Buck’s stubble on Sam’s face—how good it would feel to be held, rough or tender—and then, just as quickly, that desire browned to loneliness, like fruit oxidizing, and Sam felt stupid and greedy for wanting it in the first place.

  “I’m glad you came,” Buck said. His voice was softer now, more liquid. The two men stood for a moment, hips squared toward one another, and again Sam noticed the way the atmosphere thinned slightly. “If you’re curious about the shaman,” Buck said, “I’m flying up to have dinner with him in a couple weeks. You should come with.” He said this so coolly it sounded unremarkable. Maybe for Buck it was.

  “Where does he live?” Sam said. “The shaman.”

  “Oregon,” Buck said. “Portland.”

  “Oh, that’s where I’m from,” Sam said, surprised.

  “Kismet.”

  “I think you basically have to be a shaman to live in Portland,” Sam said. “Or a vegan chef. Or a scrappy, fiercely opinionated writer at an alt-weekly. Or you work at a coffee shop but pay your rent by selling restored vintage clothes on Etsy. Those are the only four jobs in Portland. Everyone does one of those four things.” />
  Buck didn’t laugh. “Right,” he said. “You should come.”

  “It’s really nice of you to invite me.”

  Now Buck smiled, but it was at how Sam had sidestepped the offer. “Think about it,” he said.

  * * *

  Outside Buck’s house on the street, in the cool still night, a siren wailing somewhere distantly, Sam hugged his arms around his shoulders and walked toward his car. At certain moments it still felt implausible that he actually lived here, in Los Angeles, after having spent so many years in New York, like at any moment he might wake up to find that he had just dozed off on the F train early one morning and dreamed up the last two years of his life. He liked silent, empty nights like this—not the crowded anonymity of being one of a thousand bodies weaving their way up and down congested Manhattan sidewalks but an open sky, a sleepy residential neighborhood, his feet padding soundlessly down the hill. In New York, Sam had been lonely but never alone. Here his solitude was verifiable, externalized; it existed out in the world, shadowed by streetlight.

  He was twenty-eight now. Time only moved forward. He was old enough to feel ashamed of not having accomplished more, though people liked to remind him, in a way that irritated him, that he had accomplished quite a lot, but when he went to things like a rich guy’s dinner party he still felt like a little kid playing dress-up, miming out the behaviors of his parents but never quite getting it right—a laugh that went on a little too long, fumbling with the dinnerware, standing on the edge of a circle of people chatting congenially and swirling their drinks as he waited for a point of entry that never materialized.

  Maybe it was because he was sober that he always felt out of place. Still, he kept getting invited to things, which was curious to him—that his discomfort was felt but not seen, that he had developed enough of a mask over years of enduring awkward social situations that people couldn’t instantly intuit how he felt all the time. What a thing, he thought—to be well liked by everyone but yourself.