by Sam Lansky
How strange, he thought. But it felt as though Jacob’s hands were eroding it. Sam could feel it happening, the edges of it being sanded down, small chunks of it breaking off like pebbles, and those bits of detritus were flowing up through him—Sam felt them, coursing through his bloodstream, could feel it as they skipped and pinged along the insides of his body like a pinball machine—and he knew that anatomically this was impossible but he felt it nonetheless, physically.
And then as these bits of detritus rushed through him while Jacob’s hands worked over the black mass, Sam’s attention turned, suddenly, to the sensation in his head, a buzzing and churning. Or maybe it was in his skull, like his head was a washing machine, and there was something moving in a rapid spin cycle quickly in clockwise motions around the inside of his head. It felt as if his skull itself was made of glass instead of bone, and his glass skull was hollow like a fishbowl, and inside the glass skull was a fluid that contained many fish, swimming very rapidly in the same circles.
The buzz grew to a roar until it was almost deafening. He opened his mouth to speak but he could not. Jacob’s hands were on his belly still, pushing and twisting and kneading, and the debris was still flooding through his system. Sam could feel it in every limb of his body, shifting through his shoulders and pulsating down his arms, down into his hands, and tears streamed out of the corners of his eyes. He wasn’t sad; the feeling was deeper than emotion. His jaw was quaking. With great effort, he touched his hand to his mouth and his lips were vibrating, so quickly that he couldn’t even feel the individual strokes, like it was one continuous motion. His chest burned.
“Can you feel it?” Jacob said. “That’s where it lives in the body.”
Sam nodded his head. Tears streamed down the sides of his face.
“It’s really stuck,” Jacob said.
Sam could barely speak. “Get it out,” he finally said. “Please. Get it out.”
“I can’t,” Jacob said. “I can shift its position but I can’t remove it. Not on my own.”
He lifted his hands off Sam’s stomach for the first time in several minutes. No, Sam wanted to cry. Don’t stop. His mouth was sticky with mucus. His stomach growled. Why was he hungry? They’d just eaten. His mouth stopped vibrating. That circular motion in his head slowed to a crawl, then went still. He took a deep breath.
After a moment, he sat up. Buck stared at him, agape.
“You did great,” Jacob said.
Sam wiped away his tears. He closed his eyes and opened them a few times. The room stopped shaking.
“What was that?” Sam asked. He gripped the sides of the massage table. He looked over at Buck, who had an odd look on his face, like he was trying to puzzle out what had just happened, and suddenly it struck Sam that the entire episode had only taken place inside of him, that Buck hadn’t experienced any of it—like an earthquake only he had felt.
“It’s what you’re carrying,” Jacob said. “A lot of people store their pain in their abdomen. That’s why they call it your core, right? Yours is very deep and very old. It’s going to be hard to get rid of. But we can do it. The medicine will help. And the spirits will do their work.”
“And that’s it?” Sam said. “We just have to get it out?”
“Not quite,” Jacob said. “You have a lot of work to do. There’s something in your lungs, too.”
“My lungs?” Sam said. He shivered.
Jacob nodded. “Do you get sick often?”
“Not really,” Sam said. Something flickered inside him, like a quick knock on the door of a lightless room.
“The crown of your head is also blocked,” Jacob said. “We need to open that up. Energetically.”
“I don’t understand,” Sam said, swinging his legs over the side of the massage table. “I mean, anatomically, it doesn’t make any sense. This stuff is in my head, not in different body parts. It’s all synapses firing in my brain, right? Neural pathways or whatever.”
“How do you know?” Jacob said.
“I mean, I just do,” Sam said. He crossed his arms. “It’s, like, science.”
“And how’s science been working out for you?” Jacob said, a little snidely. He shook his head, looking disappointed; his expression made Sam feel like a disobedient pupil. “Of course we always think the newest technology is the best. But what you have to understand is that people across the world have been using the tools of shamanic healing to fix what ails them for millennia. There’s no patent, no marketing, no clinical trial. And many of these traditions are endangered. But they have survived for a reason. Because they work. I mean...” He backed away from Sam a few paces, and suddenly Sam felt like he had offended Jacob. “I don’t need any more clients. At this point, you know what I can do.” He smiled coldly. “It’s really up to you whether you want it or not.”
Sam didn’t know what he wanted. He looked back at the altar and focused his attention on the Knight of Cups, which showed a lone man on a horse, dressed in armor, holding a golden chalice in his outstretched arm. It looked as if he was waiting to be served.
5
The Call
When Sam’s mother was eighteen, she was working at a diner on the outskirts of Seattle, where she was raised. Late in the mornings, fishermen came in from the bay, their faces ruddy and their hands chapped, ordering chicken fried steak and drinking acrid black coffee. It was the summer she graduated from high school, before she went off to college, to adulthood and all the unknown beyonds of her life.
She had felt different for as long as she could remember, apart-from, some nagging sense of unbelonging. She knew she was intuitive and empathic—that she could sense things might happen before they did, that she could locate the secret in someone before they knew it themselves, that she could feel the private reserve of pain in a stranger and that her own heart would ache. But she considered it a burden. Never a tool.
Until the day a young man came into the diner. She served him coffee and brought him French toast, a pat of butter pooling on its browned skin. When she set the plate down and he looked at her, his bright blue eyes bore through her. She had never been seen like that before.
She ran into the kitchen to catch her breath amid the steam and boiling grease. Her whole body shook. Her pulse raced.
When she returned to the table, the young man was gone. But he had left her a note.
It said, I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE.
He haunted her. He came to her in dreams. His eyes were cool and penetrating. His hand was outstretched as if he might pull her away. In the mornings, she woke up to find her sheets soaked with sweat. She wondered if she would ever see him again.
A few weeks later, there he was, standing on the street outside a movie theater. The sky was heavy with clouds. He smiled when he saw her. Her hands were quivering. He asked if she would join him and his friends on a camping trip up north that weekend. She said yes. She could not have said anything other than yes. Not to him.
The first night, alone in her tent, she shot up out of sleep. The woods were silent, but he was calling her. Not with his voice. Another way.
She unzipped herself from her sleeping bag and left her tent. The wind sang softly in the trees, but there was no other sound, except her footsteps, deliberate through the grass. And still, he called to her. Her name reverberated through her mind in the sound of his voice. She crossed the campsite and continued through the woods, down a long trail that led to a lake. It was summer and the air was sultry. The moon hung low in the sky, white and lucent.
She reached a dock. The lake was still. He was already standing there at the edge of the water. He turned and they looked at one another. He had been waiting for her.
This, she said, was how it began.
* * *
“How what began?” Sam asked. They were standing in the kitchen of his mother’s house, tucked in the trees in the hills overlooking Portland, a
pot of tea steeping on the stove, a fire snapping in the furnace.
She smiled. “The call,” she said. “My call. My invitation to the spirit realm.” She wore a long, draped cardigan in an earthy tan and her blond hair was tucked behind her ears. “It’s the spirit world’s way of telling you that your work is to begin.”
“And my work is to do ayahuasca with this guy?”
“Do you think that you should?” she said. When Sam was a child, his mother had been a therapist. Though she had long since closed her practice, she still had a tendency to probe, to return a question with a question. Sometimes he wondered if that was why he’d had such a hard time breaking ground in therapy. It was like trying to learn a language that was already his mother tongue.
“Before tonight, I would have said no,” he said. Sobriety’s greatest mercy was that, in a grayscale world, it was utterly black-and-white. The idea of tarnishing it for any reason, no matter how compelling, was worrisome to him.
She looked out the window, into the night. Sam wondered what she was thinking. Maybe she was thinking about the passage of time, birthday parties and family vacations, and how Sam had soured from a precocious, eager kid to an angry, withdrawn teenager. Maybe she was thinking about rehabs and hospital rooms, and the way the light looked in the trees on the spring day, nearly a decade earlier, when Sam had come home to her little house in the woods, nineteen years old and newly clean from a last bender that shook him so deeply he swore he would stop using, and he really meant it. Or maybe she was thinking about something else entirely, memories that belonged to all the other lives she’d lived before becoming his mother. Sam could feel what she was feeling, sometimes, but that was it.
“So what do you think I should do?” Sam asked.
“I can’t tell you what to do,” she said. “But I don’t think you’ve arrived here by mistake.” She hesitated. “Sam, you spend an awful lot of time in the material world. Maybe it’s time to think about the other worlds you should be tending to.”
She stood and walked to a long, thin table in the entryway of her home. Sam had seen it a thousand times, but he had never quite registered it until just now. There was a tower of white stone, a few ancient coins, a picture of the Virgin Mary and several other little artifacts. It was an altar, not unlike the one in Jacob’s office. She picked up a small red velvet pouch, cinched with a drawstring, and handed it to Sam. He opened it and emptied its contents into his hand. It was a tooth, porcelain white and marbled with gray streaks, about as long as his index finger and curved with a pointed tip.
“It’s a bear tooth,” she said. “I acquired it on my travels many years ago. It was found in a cave in the Carpathian Mountains in present-day Romania. It’s probably thirty thousand years old.”
“Why are you giving this to me?”
“In the Lakota tradition,” she said, “the cave bear is one of the symbols of the West Gate—the looking-within place of introspection and inner knowing. I’ve used this tooth on my altar for years to call upon the power of the West Gate when I have needed to go inward. Perhaps it will help you, too.” She was serious. Sacred.
Sam tried to remember if she had been like this when he was younger. He thought she probably had, but she had been more parent than person, and now he regretted the years he’d wasted missing it.
“Thank you,” Sam said. He closed his fist around the tooth. “Why did you tell me about him? About the guy you met?”
She smiled, like she had a secret. “Because sometimes spirits take human form to show us what we need to see.”
* * *
“Don’t do it,” Kat said. They were having breakfast in the hotel lobby the next morning. Sam had woken up early and thrown on an oversize sweater and baseball hat, creeping out of the hotel room so as not to wake Buck, who was still sleeping. Kat had come from yoga and her hair was still damp, a flush in her cheeks.
“Really?” Sam said. “You don’t think?”
She sipped her latte. “I don’t know,” she said. “It seems dangerous. You don’t know anything about this guy. You want to open a portal to another dimension? What if he draws in demons by accident?” She set down her cup. “Or what if you’re one of those people who, like, visits the other side and never really comes back?”
“I thought you would be into this,” Sam said. “Self-care is your religion.”
“That was before I knew he was going to be drugging you,” she said. “The ayahuasca thing feels like a slippery slope.”
“How so?”
“I’m one of the only people in your life who remembers what you were like before you got sober,” she said. “I was there. I was with you. It was really bad. You don’t remember because you were always fucked up. But I do. And I don’t want to come visit you in rehab again.” She shook her head. “This feels like a step backward.”
Sam did remember, but only snatches of it: a bloody nose in a gas station bathroom, Kat holding the tissue to his face. Her slapping him awake when he took too much and nodded out on her couch.
“It’s been years, Kat. In therapy. Doing twelve-step stuff. Going on and off antidepressants. And I’m still miserable.”
“Maybe things aren’t perfect but at least you’re basically safe being sober,” she said. “This could be so destabilizing for you.”
“I already feel destabilized,” Sam said. He felt suddenly defensive.
“We’re all anxious and depressed,” she said. “You know that, right? You don’t feel good about yourself? Nobody feels good about themselves! Welcome to being a person in the world.”
“Did you read all those studies I sent you? About how they’re using ayahuasca experimentally with alcoholics and people with eating disorders?”
“Yes, I read them,” Kat said. “Well, I scanned them. But those people are, like, in crisis. Are you?”
“I felt it,” Sam said. “I felt where the thing lived inside me. In my belly. Do you get how significant that is? It was like being pinched or punched. It was real.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t a gluten thing?” she asked. Sam bit his lip. She pulled back in her chair.
“I guess I just always thought that people are the way we are,” he said. “Like, we grow and evolve, to a certain extent, and maybe our behavior changes, but so much of what makes us ourselves is innate, or intractable. But what if the bad stuff is like a parasite? What if it’s something you can actually isolate and remove, like—I don’t know, spiritual surgery?”
“Oh,” she said. “You’ve already made your mind up, haven’t you?”
“No,” he said. “I’m still thinking about it.”
She shook her head. “No, you’re saying that’s what you’re doing, but you’ve already decided.” She pointed at him. “I know you.”
She was right, he realized. He had known as soon as Jacob had laid his hands on his body the night before. Or maybe he had known as soon as he saw the hummingbird. Or earlier still, that first night at Buck’s house. Something was happening, the ground shifting underfoot, and all the things that used to feel steady were volatile now.
“Are you mad?” he said.
“No,” she said. “I just hope you know what you’re doing.”
“Is it problematic to work with a white shaman who’s, like, appropriating the teachings and practices of indigenous cultures for personal gain?”
“Definitely,” Kat said. Then she shrugged. “But life is a late-capitalist hellscape, so your mystical journey might as well be one, too.”
* * *
Sam returned to the hotel room to find Buck already up, standing at the vanity. For a moment, he looked at Buck’s reflection in the mirror. The musculature of his tanned back, the swell of his chest, the shock of silvery brown hair. The Louis Vuitton duffel on the ottoman.
It reminded him of something, some faraway memory. Another man, another hotel room, another piec
e of expensive luggage. Another crossroads. The memory of it hung over this morning like a shadow. Or maybe it hung over every day, and that was the elemental wrongness he always felt.
Buck was applying moisturizer to his forehead, a little primly. Beautiful, broken Buck, who couldn’t grow up. Then Sam looked past him, toward his own face in the mirror.
For a moment it seemed completely preposterous. The idea that they could open a doorway to another dimension to usher in some great and ancient spirit to bring them healing. How wild a thought, and how stupid. Not just for anyone, but especially for them, preening modern gays who had so much and appreciated so little.
Gullible, superstitious Angelenos with baggage to spare.
Damaged people, vain and self-seeking, just trying to change.
“Buck,” Sam said. They looked at each other.
“Are we doing this?” Buck said.
“Yeah,” Sam said. “We are.” In that instant it felt like the easiest thing in the world, as if there was nothing to lose and everything to gain, the joyous surprise of a clear blue sky. And this: the idea, so rare and so seductive, that absolutely anything was possible.
6
The Four Commitments
“Shall we discuss what’s going to happen tonight?” Jacob said. Buck and Sam both nodded.
They were at Buck’s house. A month had passed since the trip up to Portland. Jacob had sent over detailed instructions for the weeks leading up to the retreat, including a rigorous diet: no alcohol or drugs; no meat; no sugar; no salt. Sam had followed it carefully, although this was more in the hopes of losing some weight than out of respect for the process. Jacob had also advised against sexual contact of any kind, including masturbation, for two weeks leading up to the ceremony. Sam had hoped that the combination of being deprived of both food and sex would elevate him into a state of ascetic transcendence; instead it had made him irritable and tightly wound.