Broken People

by Sam Lansky

  Buck reheated some of the grilled chicken and quinoa on the stove and they sat quietly in the dining room, eating it. It didn’t taste like much. Maybe it wasn’t supposed to.

  Sam was just about to crawl into bed in the guest bedroom when he heard a knock on the door and Buck entered. He sat down next to Sam on the bed.

  “How was your journey, really?” Sam said. “What happened?”

  “Nothing,” Buck said. “Nothing! Even calling it a journey feels, well, pretty generous. I mean, I was so bored! Nobody told me shamanic work was boring!”

  Sam laughed. He felt a rush of affection toward Buck. “I’m just down to have this experience with you,” Sam said. “No expectations.” This was a lie, of course—his expectations were incredibly lofty—but it felt like the right thing to say.

  “Did anything happen for you?” Buck said.

  “Not really,” Sam said. And it was true. All Sam had really done was go for a ride through his memories, and that was something he could do anywhere—sitting in traffic or on a conference call or just zoning out in the middle of whatever he was doing. Had he felt anything mystical, or even just psychedelic?

  He hesitated. “But I do feel—I don’t know. Weird, I guess. Don’t you feel weird?”

  “I mean, the situation is weird,” Buck said. “Anyway, I’m going to bed. Get some sleep, kiddo.”

  And then he was gone and the house was silent. Sam looked around the bedroom. He turned his phone back on and flipped numbly through Instagram.

  Muscular gays in trimly tailored suits smiling blandly on the step-and-repeat outside the Chateau for some brand’s party. Had Sam been invited? Probably not. Memes. Flat tummy tea. Don’t look at this screen. But he couldn’t put it down. Sam inhaled; the sweater he’d worn during the ceremony smelled like campfire now, all those foreign smoky smells lingering in the fibers. His phone looked alien, possessed—all the things he hadn’t done, all the people whose lives he wanted—and something dark bloomed inside him, like a pen bleeding ink.

  As he scrolled, letting the darkness envelop him, he thought about Kat, about the end of the world she was so sure was coming. He imagined a tsunami roaring from the sea and decimating New York as in a disaster movie, its surging gray-black waves weaving through skyscrapers like snakes, carrying taxicabs and mailboxes and bicycles and bodies. He imagined Los Angeles burning to the ground, canyons and beaches ablaze, cinder and ash. Take me with you, he thought. Take me with you.

  8

  The Ocean

  There was a note from Jacob in the kitchen when Sam awakened the next morning, wiping sleep-grit from his eyes, craving coffee he wasn’t supposed to be drinking, blinking at the blare of morning sunlight, and he stopped at the half-folded piece of yellow legal paper on the counter and read the chicken scratch scrawled on the front:

  GONE TO TENNIS AND YOGA. BACK LATER. J.

  PS: REMEMBER THE FOUR COMMITMENTS.

  Sam snorted. The shaman was out at tennis and yoga while they were on house arrest? Please. This whole thing was such a grift.

  The door to Buck’s bedroom was closed; Sam figured he was still asleep. So he paced around the house. He studied the books lined neatly on the shelves, the little objets d’art laid out on countertops. He refreshed his Twitter feed, scrolling and scrolling and scrolling, for moments, then miles. He took selfies from various angles, trying to find the best lighting.

  He had imagined that everything about this weekend would feel serious, imbued with divine and mystical energy, but instead it was just more of the same. In his head, he called out to the great spirit of the medicine.

  Hello? he said. He listened for an answer but got nothing back.

  He stepped outside to call Kat, sitting in the shade of an oak tree in the yard on a bench.

  “How are you?” he asked.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “I had the worst nightmares last night.”

  Sam rubbed his eyes. The morning was cool and damp. Maybe he’d make a cup of herbal tea. “What were the nightmares about?”

  “I was swimming,” she said, “and suddenly there were jellyfish everywhere. And I wanted to touch them, because they were beautiful, but I couldn’t, because I knew they would sting me, and I couldn’t swim past them, because they were surrounding me. When I looked overhead to swim up to the surface, they were above me, too. I could feel my lungs filling up with water but I couldn’t move past them. So I drowned. I actually felt myself die. And death wasn’t peaceful. It was terrifying.”

  “Jesus, Kat.” He wanted to tell her about his own thoughts from the night before, but he didn’t want to make matters even worse. “What do you think it meant?”

  “I’m not sure. Should I call your mom and ask?”

  “Honestly, she would love that.” A long pause. “You there?” Sam asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I just looked it up. Apparently dreaming of jellyfish is about painful memories rising up from your subconscious.”

  “Maybe they were mine,” Sam said. As soon as he’d said it, he knew that it sounded crazy, but it also felt true. “The painful memories. Is that weird?”

  “No,” Kat said. “I mean, I’m an empath. Duh.” She paused, like she was waiting for Sam to volunteer some more information. “Is that what was coming up for you? In your ceremony?”

  “Sort of,” he said. “But like, nothing really happened. I didn’t feel anything.” He felt suddenly defensive. “The shaman said that the first night is more about, um, clearing energetic debris.”

  “Debris,” Kat repeated. “What kind of debris?”

  “You know, like...” Sam was unable to explain what kind of debris it might be. It had sounded much more plausible when Jacob had said it the night before, at the end of ceremony, than it did now, in the harsh light of day. “Just like, cosmic debris or whatever.”

  “Oh, cosmic debris.” He could hear her rolling her eyes.

  “Maybe my expectations were too high for this whole thing.”

  “Your expectations are too high for everything, though,” Kat said. “It’s, like, part of who you are.”

  * * *

  After he finished his call, Sam walked the perimeter of the property, the fence that enclosed the backyard and path through the garden, along the side of the house, that led to the driveway. Distantly, he could hear the whistling of traffic. It was Friday morning, all those commuters forcing their way down Laurel Canyon from the Valley, braking and honking.

  Sam’s head throbbed. For a moment he considered getting in the car and leaving, just to be a part of the world again, to escape the chilling quietude of this house and this ceremony. His car, parked on the street right outside the gate. Jacob was gone. Nobody was awake. He could go, quickly, and get an iced green tea. Traffic was moving in the other direction—he’d be back in fifteen minutes. It wouldn’t be coffee—it was barely cheating.

  Sam walked down the driveway that led to the gate. As he approached, his movements slowed slightly, as if his limbs were growing sluggish, something leaden settling into his body, which was suddenly leviathan. His breath quickened, even as the rest of him lagged.

  That’s weird, Sam thought. Maybe he needed that shot of caffeine more urgently than he’d even realized.

  But as he approached the gate the feeling, at once sedate and anxious, seemed to rise in his throat like he might vomit. The sunlight was too bright, and everything was wrong. He stopped at the gate and rested his hands on his knees, panting. He leaned forward, the crown of his head grazing the wooden slats of the gate, and the feeling made little shocks of electricity descend down his neck and through the tissues of his back, and he was sure he would throw up. He couldn’t go any farther. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to anymore—it was that he couldn’t.

  Slowly he backed away from the gate and straightened his spine. He turned away, facing the house again. Sensation
returned to his face. He pressed the back of his hand against his forehead and it was hot to the touch. His breath slowed. He felt normal again.

  Shaken, he returned to the house.

  * * *

  The day passed restlessly, Sam flipping through coffee table books from Buck’s library, or flopped on the couch scrolling endlessly through his Instagram. Finally, begrudgingly, Sam unpacked his laptop. “I’m going to go sit on the lawn and do some writing,” he said to Buck, who had returned to bed, where he was lying atop the covers, corpse-like, with his hands folded across his chest and his eyes closed.

  Buck nodded wordlessly and Sam went to sit outside in the shade in the backyard, until he noticed that the yurt was still erected on the edge of the grass, and so he crawled through the open flap and sprawled out on the ground, awkwardly resting his back against a cushion, breathing in that damp canvas smell.

  He did need to do some writing, although of course when he said he was going to do some writing, that almost never meant actually writing; rather, he just read and reread the pages he’d already written, the same pages that Elijah had found so disappointing. It rarely felt productive. It was more like a tic, something useless and ritualized, something he did because he had always done it and because he could no longer stop. He began to cry, feeling frustrated, although he wasn’t sure exactly why.

  It was at that moment—of course it was—that the flap to the yurt opened and Buck poked his head inside. “There you are,” he said. “At least someone’s getting some use out of this gorgeous yurt.”

  Sam wiped away a few tears. Buck sat down next to him. “Jacob’s back,” he said. Then, a little snidely: “Our fearless leader.”

  “Okay,” Sam said. “I just need a minute.”

  “You all right?” he asked. Sam shrugged. “What is it?” Buck said.

  There it was—that question, again. What is it?

  “I don’t know,” Sam said helplessly. He looked at Buck. “Do you know what yours is?”

  “Fear, probably,” Buck said.

  “Of what?”

  “Oh, everything,” Buck said. He ran his hands through his silvery hair, making the muscles in his arms tighten and bulge. “Being alone. Getting older. Losing what I have. All of those things at once, really. I don’t want to be this age without someone to build a life with. I don’t want to keep picking the wrong people. I’m scared, you know? That I’ll never get it right.” He sighed. “I don’t believe that life was meant to be lived alone, but I’ve spent so much of mine that way. And I can’t understand why. I mean, is this how I grow old and die? Chasing after younger men, this Peter Pan syndrome, trying to touch a youth I spent closeted and scared—to make up for lost time I can’t ever really get back?” He shook his head. “You know, my generation—the ones who lived through the plague—sometimes it feels like we’re all so terrified of our own mortality that we’re doomed to spend our lives fighting it. Just trying to be young forever. Running against time.”

  Sam looked at Buck, and his chiseled form seemed suddenly to sag, making what Sam had always seen as strength look like something else—puffed up, like an inflatable thing that could be punctured at any moment.

  “Is that really how you feel?” Sam asked.

  “Sometimes,” Buck said. “Not all the time. But, you know, those of us who survived—we saw things you can’t unsee. That changes you. It makes you want to be invincible.”

  “If you’re strong, you can’t be sick,” Sam said.

  “Yes.”

  “Is that why gay men are all so obsessed with youth and beauty and our bodies?” Sam said. “Or is that a terrible generalization? Or is the whole world like that?”

  Buck shrugged. He pointed at Sam’s open laptop. “What are you writing?”

  “I don’t know anymore,” Sam said. He thought about Kat’s dream, about the jellyfish, about the ocean. “You know how they say, like, the majority of the ocean is still undiscovered, because you can’t get deep enough to study it? That’s what it feels like. I want to go deep enough to see what lives there, but I can’t.”

  “She’s good for that.” They looked up and Jacob was sitting cross-legged at the opening to the yurt, hands on his knees. How long had he been there? “I know last night may have been underwhelming,” he continued. “That’s very common. But for many people, the second night is the night where a lot of healing happens. You’re open. Ask for her to come to you.” And now Jacob was tender in a way Sam hadn’t seen him be before, that firmness falling away to reveal something unexpectedly soft. “She wants that for you,” he said. “Can you put your faith in her?”

  Sam nodded. “I’ll try,” he said.

  “Good,” Jacob said. “You are ready. You found me for a reason. So often we mistake fear for unwillingness. But your courage is a measure of how you push through fear to discover what’s on the other side of it. Self-knowledge. Healing. Change.”

  Some chattering part of Sam’s mind thought, That sounds like a basic inspirational quote I’d see on Instagram. And then another part of him thought, I hope that’s true. He wondered if this weekend would make him basic. He wondered if he already was.

  “Are you ready for ceremony?” Jacob said.

  Sam looked at Buck, who nodded. “Yeah,” Sam said.

  “All right,” Jacob said. He smiled at Sam. “Hey,” he said. “I’m glad you didn’t leave.”

  Sam froze. Some part of him wanted to feign obliviousness, to pretend like he didn’t know what Jacob meant, even though he did. But he knew this probably wouldn’t work. It wasn’t even worth the attempt. So he decided, once again, to accept the weird surreality of this, the impossible possibility that the shaman knew what had happened earlier at the gate, that in his seeing-beyond power, he had actually seen something that he could not possibly have seen.

  Sam let that feeling crash over him like a wave.

  9

  Little Things Feel Like Big Things

  Back in the main house, the three men gathered in the den again, rearranging the cushions and pillows, folding up the blankets that had been left strewn messily across the floor. Sam felt serene as he lay back against the side of the sofa, arranging his legs out before him with his ankles turned outward, feeling the gentle stretch through his hamstrings and calves. If he had been listless during the day, sundown had brought with it a relaxation. All he had to do was get through the night.

  Jacob poured the medicine again, waving a feather around him and whooshing through his teeth. He drank, then called Buck up to the mat. Again, more murmuring. Then he called Sam up.

  Sam took it again like a shot, one smooth gulp. It tasted more bitter than it had the night before.

  He settled back against the cushions and closed his eyes. He breathed slowly and deliberately.

  This is boring, he thought. Boring.

  There was silence in the room. The smell of smoke. The rustling of feathers. And then Jacob began beating on the drum, softly, then harder.

  I really need this to work, Sam thought. Can something please just happen tonight?

  The sound of the drum was hypnotic. Its slow, steady clap was like Sam’s heartbeat, pounding loudly in his ears, and then it sounded less like a drum and more like the sharp slap of waves crashing against rocks, and as the sound ceased to be Jacob’s drum and became the rushing of water, Sam felt himself sinking, like he was being submerged in an elevator through the ocean and dropping down a few stories into a memory that was a little deeper than the previous night’s tape—deep but filled with light, like the glint of the sun on the bay, and Sam squinted, but he couldn’t remember where it was, this place; and then he felt his face smile because it was such a good place, a sun-warmed place where he had felt so loved and hopeful.

  * * *

  He was with Charles at their favorite restaurant, overlooking the water on Three Mile Harbor in East Hampton. The
y were celebrating, but then, they were always celebrating something; Charles was so good at that, not just real special occasions but the most minor of things—a promising meeting at work, or a friend’s good fortune—merited a nice dinner out. For the first few months they were together, they had celebrated their anniversary every Sunday night, at one of the restaurants Charles liked, Le Bilboquet or JoJo, or picking up fried seaweed and chicken satay from Philippe and eating it in bed on ornate silver trays, which always made Sam feel a bit like a Victorian dowager in a novel he would have read as a kid; but really, why would they go outside and face the city when a whole world existed in this bedroom, the wood-paneled womb, watching romantic comedies on Netflix and smoking out the window?

  “Happy anniversary,” they’d say to each other, grinning at the pleasure of having found one another, at the stupid and endlessly affirming joy of being in love.

  What were they celebrating that night? Sam could see the shape of Charles’s pink mouth, his flute fizzing with rosé, could taste the sweet and bitter tones of his iced tea. “To Woodhollow Drive,” Charles said, and Sam had laughed, delighted.

  “To Woodhollow Drive!” he said. Had he ever been happier?

  Sam had found it, the house on Woodhollow Drive, on a lark. It was in the woods of East Hampton, where homes were more modestly priced than the shingled megamansions and oversize farmhouses that dotted the land south of the highway. “Look at this house,” he said to Charles, pointing excitedly at his laptop, where he had pulled up pictures on the listing. The house on Woodhollow Drive, they repeated to one another, marveling at how cinematic it sounded.