Broken People

by Sam Lansky

  “Sorry—what is ayahuasca?” Buck said, a little louder than was necessary. The waiter set their appetizers down on the table. Jacob waited until he was gone to answer the question.

  “It’s a very powerful plant,” Jacob said. “A medicine from the jungle of the Amazon that helps heal the body, mind and spirit. When used responsibly, in ceremony, its effects can be profound. I have used it as part of my practice for many years now.”

  “So what does it do?” Buck asked. Sam shot him a look. He was jealous of Buck, suddenly—jealous like he’d never been watching anyone drink a glass of wine over dinner, which was something Sam had explored comprehensively enough to know that it didn’t work for him. But this was different: ayahuasca was something Sam had never tried, had never even considered, and it was maddening that Buck could have this conversation in a way that was so open and curious when Sam could not.

  “Well, it’s very misunderstood,” Jacob said. “On a cosmic level, ayahuasca is a living intelligence from the plant kingdom that opens you up to the spirit dimension. But as I mentioned, this is a clinical practice. Think of it like anesthesia. It makes the transformation possible, but it is not the transformation. In this analogy, I’m the doctor. And the spirit that ayahuasca allows for connection to—that’s the scalpel.”

  “But don’t people just, like, go drink it in Peru and have crazy visions?” Sam said. “That’s all I’ve ever heard about it.”

  “People use ayahuasca in that way, yes,” Jacob said. “But most Westerners are given so much medicine right off the bat that they just get blasted out into space with no ability to navigate it. That’s like asking everyone to be their own shaman, which is impossible to do without any training. In my practice, I am working on you. That’s why I only work in very small groups, tailoring the experience for each individual, gradually opening you up to the medicine.”

  “So,” Sam said. “How you’re explaining this is, people drink the ayahuasca, you open the door for the spirit, and then the spirit comes in and fixes people?” It already sounded suspect—like all he really did was get people intoxicated enough they would believe anything.

  “There’s a little more to it than that, but yes,” Jacob said.

  “And what do you heal?” Sam asked. “Or, the spirit, I guess? The spirit as it acts through you?” It wasn’t totally clear.

  “It is possible to heal many things with this work,” Jacob said. “Physical maladies. Broken hearts. Autoimmune disorders. Addictions. Ancestral trauma.” He sounded melancholy as he said this, like he had tended to too many of these conditions before.

  “Okay, I have another question,” Sam said. “Is this, like, a magical thinking thing, where you have to believe in spirits and stuff? Or does this work on, like, miserable, cynical people, too?” He realized that he had sounded a little too breathless and tried to backpedal. “Not that I can do it. Or am going to do it. I’m just curious.”

  “The spirit doesn’t care whether you believe in her or not,” Jacob said.

  “Her?” Sam said. “It’s a her?”

  “Yes,” Jacob said. “Her. The mother. Or grandmother. The great spirit of the medicine. She will show you what you need to see.”

  “Like, with visions?” Buck said.

  “Maybe,” Jacob said. “And then there are times when it’s not what she shows you but what she removes. She burns away that which you no longer need, so you can truly understand all the stuff that’s ordinarily protected by unconscious defense mechanisms. There’s so much that’s running below the threshold of regular consciousness that’s toxic or limiting. She gets rid of that. Often through various forms of purging.”

  “You throw up a lot, right?” Sam asked.

  “Sometimes,” Jacob said. “Not necessarily. It’s whatever you need to let go of. Sometimes it’s vomit. Sometimes it’s laughter. Sometimes it’s tears. Sometimes it’s shit. We all have things we need to release. This medicine just helps with that.”

  Sam wondered which form his release would take, if he were to do this. He hoped it would be laughter or tears. The others sounded not quite worth it, especially in front of Buck, who was now, to Sam’s relief, signing the check for their very expensive dinner.

  “But, to be clear,” Sam said, “there’s really no way to know if any of this works until the person gets in there with you, right?”

  “It works,” Jacob said simply. “But if you want to understand more, I can show you.”

  “What—you want to drug us with ayahuasca right now?” Sam said.

  Jacob laughed. “No,” he said. “But I can give you a preview.”

  * * *

  Sam had met Buck for the first time the summer he had arrived in California; they had been seated next to each other at a dinner theater show, some campy thing at the Rockwell in Los Feliz that a friend had invited Sam to. Sam was taken with Buck instantly. He was good-looking, with silvery hair and a slightly manic quality, one of those people who radiated success. They exchanged phone numbers. Later, Sam asked his friend, a well-connected Instagram gay, if he knew who Buck was.

  “Oh, sure,” the friend said. “He’s in the gay mafia. I’m pretty sure he only dates, like, underwear models he meets at yacht parties.”

  Sam briefly considered his pathological fear of being shirtless in public and decided to let this one go. It was easier to assume men wouldn’t be interested in him than to run the risk of being rejected. Soon he had forgotten all about Buck.

  But about a year later, on a dreary winter night, Sam was leaving a holiday party at Tower Bar, standing at the valet waiting for his car, when he saw Buck by the door, studying his phone. “Buck,” he said. Buck looked up, not recognizing him. “Sam,” he said, introducing himself. “We met last year at that—”

  “Oh, right!” Buck said. “At that show. How have you been?”

  “Great,” Sam lied. “Are you on your way out?”

  “Yeah, just leaving dinner,” Buck said. “Calling an Uber.”

  “I’ll give you a ride,” Sam said, almost without thinking about it. It was a strange offer for him to make, but the impulse overtook him before he had a moment to reconsider.

  “Don’t be silly,” Buck said.

  “No, I’m happy to,” Sam said.

  Buck shrugged. “If you say so,” he said, and Sam’s car pulled up at the valet.

  They made their way down Sunset, past Saddle Ranch, where tourists in cowboy hats and what looked like a bedraggled bachelorette party stood outside, smoking cigarettes, and past the Chateau, where a clutch of paparazzi was gathered at the mouth of Marmont Lane, waiting for a glimpse of some starlet stumbling out of the back of a chauffeured Suburban, when Buck spoke. “So what’s been going on?” he asked.

  “Same old,” Sam said. “Working. Writing. You’re an architect, right?” He remembered, of course, but he didn’t want Buck to know that he recalled their first interaction that closely.

  “Yeah,” Buck said. “That’s all fine. Working on a big project out in Santa Barbara. It was a rough year, though.”

  “Why?” Sam asked. He pulled into the left-turn lane at Crescent Heights, the drone of his turn signal hypnotic as a metronome. Most of life in LA was just waiting to turn left.

  “I had a really bad breakup,” Buck said. “It was—it was kind of traumatic, actually.” He laughed, more to cut the tension than because it was funny. “I’m seeing this kid, right? And yeah, he was a lot younger than me—I mean, listen, I remember the Carter administration—but I thought he was different, you know? He was really smart. And ambitious. Seemed like he had his head screwed on straight.”

  “How old was he?” Sam asked.

  “Nineteen,” Buck said. He raised his hands defensively. “I know, I know.”

  “It happens to the best of us,” Sam said. But it didn’t. Sam couldn’t imagine wanting to be with someone that young
. He wondered if he’d crave it when he was Buck’s age, whether the years he’d spent searching for a father figure in a partner would invert.

  “So he wanted me to come with him to Coachella,” Buck was saying, “which was probably my first mistake. And then we got there and he...” He laughed. “He ditched me for his friends! Just left me there, like such a fuckin’ idiot. Took all the molly I’d bought, too. It was so humiliating.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sam said. “That’s shitty.”

  “I don’t know if it was even about him so much as it was about—you know, really having to look at myself,” Buck said. “Like, why I keep picking the wrong people. Why I keep dating these boys who are half my age, or younger, even. What am I trying to connect with? Why can’t I just, you know, act my age? I’m just so stuck.”

  “Being gay is a nightmare,” Sam said.

  “It is!” Buck said.

  “And this kind of thing makes you doubt yourself,” Sam said. “Right? That’s the thing about heartbreak. You can grieve the loss of the person you cared about. But you grieve yourself, too. The version of you that was naive enough to trust. And then you second-guess yourself. Because if your intuition led you to him, how good can it really be?”

  “Yes,” Buck said. “That’s exactly it.” He looked over at Sam. “And, you know, I’m lonely, I guess. So I’ve just been drinking—all the time. I’m sorry. I know you’re sober. I know you wrote that book about it.”

  “Thanks,” Sam said, not quite sure what to say.

  “Was it hard?”

  “To write the book?” Sam thought about it. “Of course. I think writing about yourself is probably the easiest thing to do and the hardest thing to do well. Do you know the writer Vivian Gornick?”

  Buck shook his head.

  “She talks about how in a memoir, there’s two separate forces on the page, both called ‘I’—the character ‘I’ and the narrator ‘I.’ The character ‘I’ is the one in the story, the one everything is happening to. But the narrator ‘I’ is the one controlling how the story is told, and what new understanding you impart in the telling of it. It’s not a memoir because something happened to you. It’s a memoir because you learned something from it. Because you found a narrative persona—that ‘I’—who is the parts of you that can best tell the story.”

  “So you must have found that,” Buck said. “If you were able to write the book.”

  Sam shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “Sometimes I feel like I did. I had a writing teacher who told me, it’s not about what you remember—it’s about why you remember it that way. But that version of you stays frozen in time forever in this thing that sits on a bookshelf. It’s weird.” He felt suddenly self-conscious. “Sorry,” he said. “I never get to talk about this stuff.”

  “I think we all do that, don’t we?” Buck said. “We all, you know, tell stories about ourselves and get attached to the version of us that we think we are. You just made yours public.”

  They pulled up in front of a ranch-style house. “Thanks for the ride,” Buck said. “I like talking to you.” It was so simple, the way he said it. There was something boyish about it, something vulnerable.

  “I like talking to you, too,” Sam said. “You know, with the drinking...” He hesitated, not sure whether to go further. “If you ever want to go to a meeting sometime, or need someone to talk to, I’m here.”

  “Thanks,” Buck said. “I appreciate that. Really.” He opened the door. Then, almost like an afterthought, he said, “I’m traveling over the holidays but let’s get together in the new year. You should come for dinner.”

  “I’d love that,” Sam said.

  And then Sam had gone to that dinner party where all this had begun. How odd it was. If there had been a shorter line at the valet at Tower Bar; if he’d stopped to use the restroom before leaving; he might never have seen Buck, and he wouldn’t be here at all.

  * * *

  The men had stopped at an office building. Jacob stepped forward, fumbling with the keys, and they followed down a dimly lit corridor. At an unmarked door halfway down the hall, Jacob retrieved his keys once more.

  “This is my office,” he said, opening the door. He switched on a table lamp, illuminating the room.

  Buck and Sam stepped inside after him, surveying the space. There was a massage table, covered with a plain white sheet, and a set of overstuffed chairs in either corner of the room, a window looking out at a side yard. A shelf was adorned with a few trinkets: a cylindrical tower of clear white crystal, perhaps a foot high, and a stone hand with prayer beads draped between its fingers, and a small pot containing a round tab of charcoal and some loose incense, and a tarot card lying faceup—the Knight of Cups—with its remaining deck facedown. Sam inhaled and caught a whiff of some aroma—sage, maybe, tinged with juniper.

  Jacob turned to face them. “Now,” he said. “Which one of you shall I demonstrate on?”

  Sam turned to Buck, trying to mask his panic. “You do it,” Sam said. “This was your idea.”

  “Absolutely not,” Buck said. “I want to see what happens. You go.”

  “Does it hurt?” Sam said to Jacob.

  “No,” Jacob said. “I mean, it depends on what we find. But it shouldn’t.”

  “All right,” Sam said. “I’ll be the guinea pig.”

  “Great,” Jacob said. He cleared his throat. “You can sit there,” he said to Buck, who sat down on one of the chairs in the corner. “And you can sit here,” he said to Sam, pointing to the massage table.

  Sam took a perch on the edge of the table and folded his hands in his lap. He felt a flurry of nerves.

  Jacob fixed his gaze on Sam. His eyes were not unkind but they were unyielding in a way that was disconcerting, as if he already knew everything that Sam wasn’t ready to share.

  “So what is it?” Jacob said softly.

  “What do you mean?” Sam said. He laughed anxiously, looking at Buck for support. Buck lifted his hands as if to say, I don’t know.

  “Don’t look at him,” Jacob said. “Look at me. What is it?” His gaze was penetrating.

  “I don’t know,” Sam said. He didn’t want to do this in front of Buck. He couldn’t be this exposed. He stood up to leave, not knowing where he would go. Then he sat back down again.

  “It’s okay,” Jacob said soothingly, like he was casting a spell.

  “Oh,” Sam said heavily. What is it? “I’m just fucked,” he said.

  “Can you be more specific?” Jacob said.

  “I don’t know,” Sam said. He couldn’t look at Buck. “I guess I’ve had enough therapy to know that I don’t like myself very much.”

  “What does that feel like?” Jacob said.

  “It feels like...” Sam trailed off. “I have this loud internal narrator who tells me that I’m a piece of shit, that I don’t deserve anything I have, that any day now the whole thing will come crashing down. It’s delusional, but I can’t stop it. And I have this sense of not being right in my skin. Like I don’t belong in this.” He tugged at his flanks. “I don’t know how to be a person.”

  “That’s why you took drugs,” Jacob said. “To numb.” Sam nodded. “Was it always that way?” Jacob asked.

  “I don’t know,” Sam said. “I can’t remember. It feels like it’s gotten worse.”

  “After he left,” Jacob said, his eyes knowing.

  “Yes,” Sam said. It flashed through him then, knife-quick, that this was how these people operated—in ways that were just vague enough that they could probably resonate. Everyone had a “he” who left. It didn’t mean anything. It didn’t mean that this guy had any special powers. All it meant was that he’d done this before. He knew how to target people’s vulnerable places and how to say the right thing at the right time. This wasn’t some big mystical revelation. It was just a new business pitch.

/>   “I’m going to ask you to lie faceup,” Jacob said. Sam glanced at Buck, who looked mesmerized by this strange tableau.

  “Okay,” Sam said. He arranged himself supine, staring up at the white ceiling.

  Jacob was hovering his hands a few inches over Sam, moving them across the length of his body, circling the table. His hands were above his legs, then over the crown of his head, then above his stomach. Gently Jacob laid his hands there, on Sam’s belly, over his T-shirt.

  “Is this okay?” he asked.

  Sam nodded.

  Slowly Jacob began to knead the soft flesh of Sam’s belly with his hands, working it in circular motions. The sensation wasn’t soothing or disruptive, but it was foreign. Sam had never been touched like that before, and certainly not there, on his core, the most vulnerable part of him, which remained squishy no matter how little he ate or how vigorously he exercised. It wasn’t a place where he wanted anyone’s attention, and with only the thin cotton barrier of his shirt it felt so intimate.

  Sam opened his eyes, then closed them again. On the inside of his eyelids were kaleidoscopes of tiny rainbow pinpricks of light and he allowed himself to get lost in their luminescence, to let them carry him into the dark space of his mind. Like a siren on the wind, he could hear a humming and chanting with no discernible words, a song that sounded ancient. It didn’t sound like Jacob, whose speaking voice was low and gruff, because the voice was high and clear, but it had to be him, Sam thought. Then there was a round of whistling and sharp inhalations, like Jacob was trying to suck in air through a straw.

  And then, sharply, Sam became aware of a black mass in his belly, sore and tumescent, the color and texture of lava rock; he could see it almost, but mostly he felt it, and it struck him as odd that he’d never felt it before since he knew intuitively that it had been there for a long time. It was tough as stone and its weight was enormous inside of him.