by Sam Lansky
After it was over, they lay next to each other, panting. Then Sam turned over on his side. “Do you think people can change?” he asked.
“Oh God,” Martin said. He scrunched his eyes closed, then opened them again. “Do we have to do the deep pillow talk thing? I get enough of that at home.”
“Just answer the question.”
“Of course people can change,” Martin said. “People are always changing. Like rivers or whatever. We never stay the same. Personally, I’m getting worse all the time.” He side-eyed Sam. “Why are you asking?”
“I was at this thing last night and people were talking about a shaman who can fix everything that’s wrong with you in three days,” Sam said.
“Well, that sounds like a stretch. Unless you’re already pretty close to perfect.”
“What would you change about yourself?” Sam asked.
“I dunno,” Martin said. “I could probably be a better husband. I should be more grateful for everything I have, I guess.” He rubbed his eyes. “You?”
“I’d probably hate myself less, if I could,” Sam said, and as soon as he’d said it, he realized it was too unvarnished a thing to say, but it was too late.
“Why would you say that?” Martin asked. “Why do you hate yourself?” He rested his hand on Sam’s head, in a way that was more intimate than they really were; Sam jerked away.
“Oh, fuck, I don’t know,” Sam said. “I just do. I always have. Doesn’t everyone?”
“No, I don’t think so. Not to make you feel worse.”
“Really? I think of self-loathing as being so universal. We all have so many symptoms.”
“What do you mean by symptoms?” Martin said.
“You know,” Sam said. “Symptoms. You drink or you take drugs or you smoke or you fuck strangers or you don’t fuck anyone or you codependently entangle with people or you overeat or you starve yourself or you binge and purge or you compulsively exercise or you spend money you don’t have or you gamble or you self-harm or you throw yourself into work so you don’t have to bother with having a personal life or you binge-watch shit on Netflix because fictional characters are just so much easier than actual people with all their very real faults and shortcomings or you stay in bed all day trying to blot out the world on those days when it’s all just too much to bear.” He stared up at the ceiling. “But all those behaviors, even though they look so different, are symptoms of the same problem—you can’t be with yourself. Because you don’t like yourself.”
“But why don’t you like yourself?” Martin said impatiently. “You’re a good person.” He cocked his head. “I think. There could be bodies under your bed.”
It was a good question. Sam thought maybe there was no why. Maybe some people are just born self-hating and self-destructive and we die that way. And so we go to therapy and twelve-step groups and we take antidepressants and anxiety meds and we journal and go to yoga and exercise and take baths and drink pressed juices and repeat affirmations to ourselves in the mirror and listen to Brené Brown podcasts. But we’re just swimming against the tide, because the darkness always comes back. All we ever do is learn to manage the symptoms.
“I’m not sure,” Sam said. “I wish it didn’t feel this way.”
Martin fumbled in the bedsheets for his underwear, like he was uncomfortable. He stood and pulled his shirt over his body, as if suddenly realizing that he was exposed, and Sam felt a brief flash of tenderness, and then, just as quickly, it dissipated.
“I’m sorry that it’s so dark for you right now,” Martin said. “Maybe you’re depressed. Have you ever been to therapy?”
Sam fumed silently. Tears sprang into his eyes. He blinked them back. He would not cry—not here. Not with this guy. “Yes,” he said. “I’ve had a lot of therapy. Therapy can be great. But it can also be so...diagnostic.” He said the word like it was a slur. “What about when you already know how and why you’re fucked up, but you can’t seem to fix it, no matter how hard you try? What then?”
“My therapist helped me see how much my unhappiness was a choice,” Martin said. “It was really useful.”
“So you think people choose misery over happiness because, what—they prefer self-hatred?”
“I think you might be attached to it,” Martin said. “I mean, I don’t know you that well.”
“You were inside me five minutes ago,” Sam said.
“That’s like a gay handshake.”
“Oh,” Sam said, “now who’s being dark?”
Martin raised his hands as if to say, I surrender. “I’m gonna go.” He stood and kissed Sam on the forehead. “I hope you find a way to be nicer to yourself,” he said. “You don’t have to be unhappy.”
“I’m not unhappy,” Sam said. “I’m trying.”
“Right,” Martin said, and he shut the door behind him.
* * *
The third sign came later that night in the form of a dream. At first, Sam was falling through an inky sky. He moved his arms, but they weren’t arms—they were wings, only they didn’t work. As he descended into the darkness he heard something that sounded like an ancient hum, a long buzzing. His plumage was spectacular but he was broken. He knew exactly what he was, this sad and mangled thing. Thin spindly bones. Webbing as sinuous as lace. When he opened his mouth, no noise came out. Just a gust of feathers, cobalt as a tropical sea.
He landed at the surface of a window, or maybe it was a mirror. He stared back at himself, the long stem of a pincer obscuring his face. And then he was beating at his reflection, so violently. There was a spray of blood. Finally it cracked open and there were shards of glass everywhere, like diamonds in the soft down of his bloody feathers.
He opened his eyes. It was morning, but still early. His phone, charging on the nightstand, was ringing. It was Kat, her contact photo a picture of the two of them from some New Year’s they’d spent together years earlier, both grinning goofily, and for a moment Sam was struck by how young they looked. Then he picked up.
“Hello?” he said blearily. He knew she was upset before she spoke, just from the way she inhaled. “What’s wrong?” he said.
“I just had the worst panic attack,” she said. Her breath was shallow.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know—I just—I woke up early with this horrible weight on my chest and I couldn’t stop thinking about that climate change report and how, like, incredibly fucked up the world has become, and then I started thinking about my own ticking clock and how much pressure I’m under from everyone—from my mom, from society, from all the girls at my agency—to have babies when, like, what kind of future would I really be giving them, you know? I mean, kids are getting gunned down in their schools, like, every week.” She groaned, like it was too much to take in. “If you even make it through childhood, you’re inheriting a planet that we’ve already destroyed. Everything is just so bad right now. Everything is bad and I have to go to Melissa Schuman’s fucking wedding this weekend and pack my tits into a truly heinous bridesmaid’s dress and pretend like the world isn’t falling apart, and it’s just like, why? For what?”
“You don’t have to have kids,” Sam said. “So many women—so many people—don’t have kids. That’s okay.”
“But I do want them. I just don’t want them to have to live in this world.”
“I’m so sorry, Kat,” he said. “I really am.” He wanted to offer a solution of some kind—to tell her to stop reading the news, to be in nature, to meditate—but he knew it would be trite and unhelpful. Being a friend didn’t always mean solving the problem. Sometimes it just meant bearing witness.
“Don’t you get stressed out about this shit?” she said, like an accusation.
Sam closed his eyes. “Most of the time it all feels like it’s happening really far away from me. Like the world is something that’s happening to other people, but
not to me. Maybe it’s just that there’s so much clutter already in my brain that I can’t take in anything else. As if all of my anxieties are a barrier between me and all the things I should be worried about.” He felt selfish and small. “Sometimes I wonder if this is just what being a person feels like. I thought it would be different.”
Kat took a long beat with this. “I am definitely not a model of mental health but you sound super depressed,” she finally said. “Maybe you should go back on the Wellbutrin.”
“Oh, no. It made my anxiety even worse. I was twitching.”
“Lexapro?”
“My dick completely stopped working.”
“You’re having sex? With America more divided than ever?”
“That’s not the point.”
“What does your therapist say?”
“I stopped going a few months ago.”
“Why? You didn’t tell me that.”
“It just wasn’t productive anymore.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” he said. “Kat, I don’t want to talk about my problems anymore. I’m so tired of listening to myself complain.” He took a deep breath. “I don’t know how to fix it for you, but at least know that you’re not alone. I feel like I’m coming apart most of the time, too.”
“What do we do?”
“I don’t know,” Sam said. “I really don’t want to be like this.”
* * *
After he got off the phone with Kat, he fell back asleep. When he awakened a few hours later, sunlight beaming into the bedroom, petals on the floor again, he saw a message from Buck on his phone.
Going to meet the shaman next Monday, it read. Want to come? He’d sent it early that morning, while Sam had been on the phone with Kat. How funny. It made him feel like there must have been some electricity in the air in that moment, some energetic field that they were tapped into, an invisible current of hope and need. The problem; the answer.
For once, Sam didn’t overthink it. There was nothing to think about, really. He just replied.
Yes, he wrote, and as he typed, his fingers didn’t feel like they belonged to him—as if something was moving them, something that was not him but wasn’t not him, either, and when he looked down at the screen to see what he had written, it was so plaintive it actually surprised him.
It said, Take me with you.
4
Magical Thinking
The shaman wore khakis.
And a collared shirt. And a V-neck sweater. And round eyeglasses. He had close-cropped hair and white teeth. He could have been a substitute teacher, or a suburban dad on a rare night out, or the new boyfriend your divorced aunt brings to Thanksgiving dinner. He was nondescript, unmemorable, square.
His name was Jacob.
They were at an upscale farm-to-table restaurant in Portland, crowded with good-looking young people. The shaman had suggested the place, and now that they were there, the whole thing felt so bougie, much more so than Sam had anticipated, although given Buck’s income bracket it probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise that even his shaman would pick a restaurant that had Aesop hand soap in the bathroom.
“So, Jacob,” Buck said. “Tell us about your work.”
“Sure,” Jacob said. He wiped his mouth and leaned in closer. Like puppets on strings, Sam and Buck both leaned in, too. Jacob’s voice dropped an octave.
“I operate a clinical practice in the field of transdimensional intercession,” Jacob said.
Buck and Sam looked at each other, then back at Jacob. “Right,” Sam said. “What does that mean?”
“Well, let’s start with the first part—transdimensional,” Jacob said. “If you think about the world we live in, the physical world, that’s one dimension. So—I don’t know what you believe, and frankly, it doesn’t matter—but since you’re here, you probably believe that there’s stuff happening, sometimes, that you can’t necessarily see or manipulate in the real world, in this dimension. So maybe you call that God. Maybe it’s many gods. Maybe you call it energy. Maybe for you it’s memory or emotion—subtler things, that everyone agrees exist. But whatever it is, not everything that feels real is right at our fingertips all the time, right? There are things that exist outside of real-world experience, but just because you don’t see them doesn’t mean they aren’t real.”
Sam nodded. “Okay,” he said. He was curious where all of this was leading.
“So you might ask yourself, what is the place where all that stuff exists? Let’s call that another dimension. Maybe it’s a lot of other dimensions. But it’s out there, somewhere.” Jacob motioned at nothing. “Or maybe it’s in here.” He pointed at his chest. “Or maybe it’s both. But what you have to understand is that the universe, in its totality, is a multidimensional cosmic energy field, comprised of many worlds, which include infinite realms of nonmaterial, transtemporal and transspatial consciousness. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we are part of this interdependent field system. And under certain circumstances, it becomes possible for us to communicate with other life forms, objects and beings. Is that clear?”
The way he spoke was slightly tense. It was as if he was tracking the movements of everyone in the room behind him—not distractedly, but as though he could sense their energy shift as a server bent down to remove a plate or light a candle. He wasn’t timid; there was something forceful and a little bit steely about him. Sam could tell this was a man who cared little about being liked, and he was both envious of and intimidated by this quality.
“Absolutely not, but keep going,” Buck said. He looked spellbound. “This is fascinating.”
“Okay, let me put it more simply,” Jacob said. “When I say ‘transdimensional,’ what I’m talking about is opening the gate between this dimension, that we’re in right now, and other ones, and allowing travel between the two. Does that follow?”
“Sort of,” Sam said.
“That brings me to the second part—intercession.”
“And what is that?” Buck asked.
“It means I’m intervening on your behalf,” Jacob said. “To call in the great power of the spirits that live in those other dimensions into this one to heal you. You also may end up crossing dimensions, traveling into others and inviting what lives there into yours. But the bulk of the work is done by me, as the intercessor, working with the spirits that are out there in other dimensions to remove whatever is causing suffering. We clear it out. I call it a clinical practice because that’s really what it is—it’s like surgery. And like surgery, it’s very intense. It can be quite painful. But it is extremely effective.”
“And where, Jacob,” Buck said, “did you learn to do all this?”
“I’ve trained with cultures around the world,” he said. “And my practice synthesizes teachings from many different traditions. With the Tungus of Siberia, in the birthplace of shamanism. With the holy swords of the Hmong tribe in Laos. With Bwiti practitioners in Gabon, working with the Tabernanthe iboga. And I lived in the Amazon with the curanderos of the Shipibo tribe, who taught me how to work with the healing properties of la medicina.” He said this as untheatrically as if he was listing any other kind of educational or professional history: Wharton, then two years at Goldman.
“I’ve heard Laos is beautiful,” Buck said. “There’s an Aman there, right?”
“Okay,” Sam said. “Can I zoom out for a second?”
“Certainly,” Jacob said.
“I get that all of this is mysterious and mystical and I don’t need you to give me a blow-by-blow of exactly how it all works. But on a practical level, what exactly do you do?”
“I work over the course of three evenings,” Jacob said. “And on each evening, I hold a ceremony. Although in many ways the three-day experience is its own sort of extended ceremony.”
“What happens in the ceremony?” Buck asked.
“A number of things,” Jacob said. “There’s an energy clearing. Some prayers. Songs. And I administer plant medicine.”
“Plant medicine?” Sam said.
“I work with a number of different medicines,” Jacob said. “Tobacco. Sage. Cacao. But primarily I work with ayahuasca.”
“Oh,” Sam said.
Buck looked at Sam, registering the disappointment on Sam’s face. “What’s ayahuasca?” he said.
“It’s a psychedelic, right? You trip?” Sam sighed. “Yeah, I don’t think I can do that.” He’d heard a little bit about ayahuasca, which seemed to be a thing trendy, wellness-minded people were doing in private but rarely discussed in polite company, like cocaine for the self-improvement set. Sam had been sober for so long that he had stopped trying to keep up with the latest in mind-altering substances. The sheer fact that he had to double-check whether hors d’oeuvres at parties in Los Angeles contained cannabis or not was irritating enough. That he’d come all this way—and put a plane ticket on his nearly maxed-out credit card to get a pitch for an ayahuasca trip—was just demoralizing.
“Why do you say that?” Jacob asked.
“I’m in recovery,” Sam said. “I mean, I’ve taken hallucinogens—I did mushrooms and acid when I was a teenager—but I’ve been completely clean for over eight years. I don’t do anything anymore.”