by Sam Lansky
They’d met at a twelve-step meeting in Silverlake, where Sam went swoony over his loose, slackerish charm. He was tall and lean and the night they’d met he’d worn a hoodie and sneakers that made him look like an implausibly handsome Brooklyn dad, or the guy that the protagonist of a sitcom dates for an episode or two. He was Paul Rudd sun, Mark Ruffalo moon—all scruff and the right amount of smarm. On their first date, over a long, lazy dinner at Soho House—Noah was a member and actually hung out there, which was douchey, but also hot—Sam was so enamored with him, his warm, unaffected amiability and the frank way he recounted the horrors of his past, which in the retelling seemed somehow breezy, less hellish than instructive. Years of sharing his story in meetings had made him a nimble orator, deft at tempering the dark with the light. He didn’t overtell the story, the way Sam always did; he was clear and concise and true, and his accent, to Sam’s susceptible American ears, made him seem automatically important. “Crystal meth gave me wings,” Noah said.
“Then what happened?” Sam asked, even though he already knew the answer.
Noah’s eyes went dark. “It took away the sky,” he said.
“There’s something different about this guy,” Sam told Kat on the phone that night.
“What’s his deal?” she asked.
“I don’t know, dude,” Sam said. “He’s really sparkly. Like someone who knows he’s getting a second chance and isn’t gonna waste it.”
But the thing with Noah had imploded in the most terrible of ways. Sam should have known better. He always got snookered by charisma. It was his favorite drug.
Gingerly he cracked open his bedroom door, hoping to find stillness, but instead, there the hummingbird was again, humming like a radiator in a New York winter. At the sight of Sam, she began to beat her wings even faster, pounding against the glass again, of the wrong window—the one that was entirely closed. Sam stared at her, or perhaps they were staring at each other—it was hard to say.
He retrieved a broom from the hallway closet and returned to his bedroom, brandishing it like a weapon. Gently he lifted its bristled end toward the bird, pushing it in her direction, and she skipped along the surface of the glass like an ice skater on a rink, searching for an exit that wasn’t there. He pushed it closer to her and off she went, back to the half-opened window, her little claws scuttling and scraping. The sun beamed cheerfully onto his face, haloing the bird in light. Once more he pushed the broom toward her, until she found the opening and flew away.
And just like that, he was alone again.
* * *
But all morning, Sam was haunted by her—the hummingbird. Sitting in his living room, he heard the slapping of wings somewhere in the periphery; when he turned to look, though, there was nothing there. By midafternoon, he felt unsoothed enough to call his mother.
His mother was a wise woman, learned and fierce. When Sam was growing up, she had been expansive in her interests: she researched the life of Jesus, then the holy wells of Ireland, then Native American animal medicine, then the pagan rituals of her Scandinavian ancestors, from which a passion for genealogy had sprung, and so she mapped both sides of the family back centuries deep, making pilgrimages to Norway to meet anyone with whom she shared a scrap of genetic material. After Sam’s parents divorced when he was a teenager, and Sam left Portland with his father to finish his last few years of high school in New York, she settled into her traditions, or maybe they settled into her. She moved to an A-frame cottage in the woods of Oregon, where a rosary hung from the door and a carved wooden scepter adorned with the tail of a fox rested against the kitchen table; she said it was her animal totem. Now on Thursday afternoons she volunteered at a nearby women’s prison, teaching spirituality workshops.
Sam loved this about his mother, loved the way she saw the world even if he didn’t always buy in. When he was visiting her, there was nothing that felt better than untangling the symbolism of a bewitching dream over the morning’s coffee, his performance of begrudgingly discussing it, pretending to be too cynical but sort of believing whatever she said. If he told her he had seen a coyote while driving back to her house that night, her eyes went saucerlike with wonder.
“Oh, man,” she would say, standing to retrieve a book from the shelf, then returning to her overstuffed armchair by the fireplace, tucking the voluminous folds of her bathrobe underneath her. “That is a powerful omen.” She was a village mystic without a tribe who might benefit from her wisdom, and so Sam tried to, whenever possible, as much for her satisfaction as for his own.
He told her what had happened with the hummingbird. “Wow,” she said emphatically. Then, again: “Wow.”
“What does it mean?” Sam asked.
“Was the bird agitated?”
“I mean, it was a hummingbird,” Sam said. “I kinda feel like agitation is their natural state. And like, honestly, same.”
“I should really consult some texts before I give you my take on this,” she said. “Let me call you back.”
A few minutes later, Sam’s phone rang. “Okay,” his mother said. “The hummingbird has great significance in many different traditions. The indigenous peoples of the Andes Mountains believe that the hummingbird dies on cold nights but comes back to life when the sun rises, so it represents resurrection and rebirth. Its wings actually move in a figure eight—like the infinity symbol—which make it a powerful marker of eternity and continuity. And because it can fly backward, the hummingbird teaches us that we can look back on our past. But in Native American cultures, they believe that the hummingbird represents a spirit being who helps those in need—like a shaman.”
“It’s a symbol of a shaman?” he said. The back of his head went numb and that thing happened again, like the air in his apartment was changing in its composition, the light filtering in through his blinds growing a little brighter.
“Yes,” she said. “Why?”
“That’s—that’s just weird,” he stammered. “I was at this thing last night and people were talking about a shaman.” He considered it, talking himself out of it. “Then again, it’s LA, so people talking about a shaman probably isn’t that surprising, right? Only this guy is up in Portland, which is another weird coincidence, I guess.” He paused. “What does a shaman do?”
“Oh, a lot of things,” his mother said. “Healing people using ancient wisdom. Plant and animal medicine. Mediating between the realms.” In her steady tone, it sounded unimpeachable.
“So what’s the difference between a healer and a shaman?” Sam asked, biting his nails.
“Healers work with energy,” she said. “And a lot of people work with energy, in different ways. But a shaman is more about the spirit world—connecting with the divine realm and harnessing that power to do good in this one—in the material world.”
“Right.”
“Why are you asking me about this?” she said.
Sam rubbed his eyes. “I don’t know,” he said. “This conversation last night, and the hummingbird this morning—it feels like something. It’s sticky. I can’t explain it.”
“Maybe it’s the call,” she said.
“What call?”
“You know,” she said. “The call of the spirit world. The call of what’s beyond.”
There was a long pause. Sam looked again at his reflection in the mirror that rested in a diagonal angle in one corner of the living room. The mirror was over six feet tall and four feet wide and made of hammered steel—an artifact from his life in New York, from a much fancier apartment than this one. Like everything in his apartment, including Sam himself, he thought, it was so solid, so heavy, so unmistakably of this world.
“Or maybe a hummingbird just flew into your room,” she said to his silence.
* * *
A few hours later, Sam drove to lunch, the leafy streets of West Hollywood giving way to the scrubby strip malls that dotted Santa Monica Bo
ulevard heading east, an airless skyline, midday bumper-to-bumper traffic for no apparent reason. He parked on Larchmont just south of Melrose, putting two hours on the meter.
Elijah was waiting for him on a bench outside Café Gratitude, wearing a rumpled blazer and leather loafers, like a walking advertisement that he’d come from New York, studying a menu as if it was written in a foreign language. Which, for all intents and purposes, it was.
“Elijah,” Sam said, and Elijah looked up and smiled, pulling him into a bro hug, the kind of half handshake, half embrace Sam had never been able to execute right.
“Sammy,” Elijah said. He squeezed Sam’s shoulder. “What the fuck is this place, huh? You’ve really gone full LA on me.”
“We’re all eating plant-based now. Has that not made it back to the East Coast?”
“Christ,” Elijah said, sizing him up. “Look at you. You look so healthy.”
“I don’t want to look healthy, Elijah. I want to look thin.”
Elijah waved a hand dismissively. “Shut up,” he said. “Let’s get a table.”
Elijah was Sam’s book agent, and he was a good one, or so Sam hoped, although to be fair he was the only one Sam had ever had. He had signed Sam as a client when he was just a year out of college and had only a few freelance clips under his belt. Together they’d shaped the proposal for what became Sam’s first book, the memoir about his troubled adolescence and efforts to get clean. Elijah had rightly identified that Sam’s story fit tidily into an existing genre: addiction memoir was a reliable bet, and the book had sold to a major publisher. But they hadn’t seen eye to eye in their subsequent conversations about Sam’s next book. When Elijah had written him to say that he would be in town for a few meetings, Sam had seized the opportunity to meet with him in person. He would sell him on this book. And if not that, at least it would be a free lunch.
“So,” Sam said after they sat down. “Did you read the pages I sent you?”
Elijah made a humming noise with his mouth. “I did, yeah,” he said. “I’m just not entirely sure you have it yet, Sammy. I don’t know the story you’re trying to tell. I don’t really see you on the page.”
Sam felt his shoulders arch reflexively. He forced them down his back. “What does that mean? It’s my story. How can I not be on the page?”
“I mean—listen, part of the problem is the form, right? I know we’ve had this conversation a handful of times already but I really have to caution you against trying to write another memoir. It’s such a hard genre. Especially for men. I mean, it’s a women’s genre, frankly—and I just think it’s very limiting for you—and if you’re going to do it, well, it has to be extremely focused, with a very strong and marketable hook, and I just don’t think you have that yet. I’m not even really sure what it’s about.”
“It’s about finding myself in my twenties,” Sam said defensively. He looked over Elijah’s shoulder, where a girl in a fringed suede crop top was posing for a photo with her turmeric latte, its saffron foam clinging to her lip. Her friend passed her the phone to review the pictures. Story or grid? the girl asked.
“But you haven’t found yourself,” Elijah was saying. “If you want me to be honest, it feels like you don’t really have the distance to tell this story yet. Like you haven’t learned all the lessons. I see this problem, this lack of self-awareness, so often in confessional writing.”
Sam hated that word—confessional. How diminishing it was. “Oh, I think I’m self-aware,” he said. “I know my problems intimately. I just have no idea how to solve them.”
“And that’s it! That’s the gap between self-knowledge and wisdom. You don’t have the wisdom yet,” Elijah said. “And if you’re going to write a memoir, you need that. This might be therapeutic to write, or even necessary, but it isn’t satisfying to read, and your misery makes you unlikable on the page.” He raised his hands. “Now, maybe if you wanted to write a novel, or a reported work of nonfiction, that might make more sense for you, but I just don’t see a commercial path forward with this.”
The girl in the fringe was taking pictures of her avocado toast now. Am I basic? she asked her friend, who laughed. Yes!
“But this is the only thing I know how to do,” Sam said.
“Memoir is just—” Elijah sighed. “Listen, don’t get me wrong—I’ll sell it if it’s sellable—but it feels like we’re raising a generation of narcissists who believe that their experience is important enough to justify broadcasting to the world. And most of them just...aren’t. Everyone’s a memoirist. Social media is just one big memoir.”
“No, we’re a generation of public diarists,” Sam said. “Your Throwback Thursday—that’s a memoir. There’s a difference.”
“What’s a Throwback Thursday?” Elijah said.
“Never mind,” Sam said. “Elijah, I really believe in this story.”
“I’m sure you do,” Elijah said. “But not all stories demand to be told.”
“So is that what you’re saying?” Sam said. Something inside him twisted. “Elijah, I’ve been working on this for over a year. You’re saying this story isn’t worth telling?”
“No, I just mean...” Elijah sighed. “Maybe there just isn’t a book here.” He rested his hands on the table as if he were about to deliver some bad news, and now his voice sounded kinder, even if what he had to say was brutal. “You know your problem? Because you are young, you think everything that happens to you is interesting.”
* * *
Sam slammed the door hard as he got back into the car. He fumbled in the center console for the in-case-of-emergency pack of cigarettes he had stashed away. He lit one, rolling down the windows as plumes of smoke surrounded him, then sped away.
He knew Elijah had been fair in his assessment, that he had identified the thing Sam was most afraid of anyone seeing—which was that he really didn’t know what he had spent the last year writing. He had begun out of necessity, telling the story of everything that had precipitated his departure from New York, and then had attempted to fashion something resembling a narrative out of that cathartic outpouring, trying to discern why it had all happened the way it did, a Rorschach test with the blood on the page. But this was the maddening paradox of writing about your life: in order for it to be any good, you had to know what it all meant, and in order to know what it all meant, you had to write about it, and there he was, a snake eating its own tail, scouring his past for answers he didn’t have.
And then, stopped at a traffic light on Fairfax, the thought flashed through Sam. What if the shaman could fix it? It was impossible. But what a seductive fantasy, this notion that he could have all his issues resolved overnight. Imagine the book he could write then, with all that profound self-knowledge.
Except life did not work that way. People did not heal in a weekend through some mystical experience. It did not matter how much money you had to try to buy it. It was not possible.
Sam reminded himself of this as he drove back to West Hollywood, past the juice bars and yoga studios and walk-in psychics, and past a crystal store, where a slab of raw amethyst sparkled, smugly, from inside a glass case.
3
Symptoms
Sam paced around his apartment as the sun set. He read and reread the pages he’d been working on, the ones Elijah had found lacking. Furiously, he ordered takeout, a bowl of seaweed and vegetables from a vegan restaurant; if he was going to be a professional failure, he told himself, at least he would not be fat. But by the time it arrived, he had worked himself back up into a frenzy and was no longer interested in wellness. He just wanted to feel secure and heavy. He wanted to eat the feeling, to eat at the feeling, to eat in a way that would both harm the feeling and harm himself for having the audacity to feel it.
He threw the bowl away without opening it. Waste of money. This is why you’re broke. He ordered two burgers from Shake Shack and did not eat them so much as
he inhaled them, tearing at the chewy bun with his teeth, tasting the way the salt made his mouth go at once dry and gummy. He smoked three cigarettes on his fire escape, one after the other, sending text messages to all the guys he’d had casual sex with in the last year. Just thinking about you. How have you been? He opened Grindr and began to scroll through the rows of toned torsos, squeezing the flesh on his stomach anxiously.
But then, mercifully, one of the guys he’d texted responded—Martin. Come over, Sam said. He brushed his teeth and punched the remnants of the takeout trash deep into the garbage, lighting a candle to mask the stale aroma of the binge. There was nothing to be done about how queasy he now felt, but this—this need to act out—was like an override switch that would keep his nausea at bay, at least until after this was over.
Sam wasn’t even that attracted to Martin, who was boyishly handsome but a sloppy, overeager kisser, yet being with him was preferable to spending the evening alone, spiraling. Mostly Sam was irked that Martin was, as far as he knew, happily married; Sam knew they had an open relationship, to which he had no philosophical objections, but Sam hated the idea that Martin could sleep with him and then go home to a stable partner. It was so gluttonous, to seek sex on top of love. Sam followed Martin on Instagram and resented him profoundly. Every time he posted a photo of his husband with some affectionate caption—“So lucky to have found this guy!” followed by a string of heart-eyed emoji—Sam felt that rage bubbling up inside him, all those spiteful tides of envy and want rising like bile in the back of his throat. This guy. Sam hated that.
But when Martin arrived at his door twenty minutes later, wearing a guilty smile, it didn’t matter that he was him. As far as Sam was concerned, it could have been anyone. In fact, Martin had put on some weight around his midsection in the months since they’d last seen each other, which was welcome for Sam; it meant that he would feel less self-conscious, less ashamed of his body, reasoning that, on some level, he couldn’t be rejected by a guy who was fatter than he was—and the ugliness of that thought, and the security it gave him, made Sam feel even darker—but still, he was safer here than with any of the strong-jawed guys with trim physiques who crowded Santa Monica Boulevard just east of Robertson on weekends, spilling out of gay bars, their foreheads dewy with sweat, liquor-tipsy and free in their bodies. And as Sam tugged Martin into bed, he had the sensation of sinking, into his basest impulses and into that uneasy crevice that existed between desire and disgust, junk-food sex, his chest heaving, his worst self, soft bellies, all that hunger.