by Sam Lansky
He turned. It was Noah.
“It’s you,” Sam said, surprised that Noah would be here, but of course he was. He embraced Noah. “How are you?”
Noah lit a cigarette. “Good,” he said. “Been good, yeah. I’ve been meaning to call you, actually—I’m going back to England in a few weeks. Might be for a bit.” He took a drag. “Well, might be for good, really.”
“You’re moving?” Sam said.
“Whole fucking visa thing,” he said. “But I miss London, anyway.” He paused. “And the people here—well, everyone’s lovely, but they’re a little self-obsessed, aren’t they?”
Sam laughed. “I’ll miss you,” he said. He paused. He hadn’t rehearsed this, but it had to be said. “You know, Noah, the thing that happened when I was in the hospital... I’m really sorry about that. That must have been awful for you.”
“Oh, that?” Noah said, and his eyes were shiny and friendly.
“Yeah,” Sam said. “That whole thing just weighs really heavy on me.” He paused. “Or it used to, maybe. I don’t really know yet.”
“Really?” Noah said, as if he was considering it for the first time. “I hadn’t given it a thought since it happened.”
“But I thought that was such a big part of why, you know...”
“We split up?”
“Yeah.”
“I just wanted to do my own thing for a while,” Noah said. “And you can be, like, very intense.” He raised his hands, as if to say, Sorry. “No offense.”
“Oh my God,” Sam said, and he laughed again, and the sound of his laughter wasn’t snide—it was mirthful, even joyful. It felt like the punchline: to see now, so clearly, the way he had turned the people in his life into characters. He’d picked the narrative, then fit people, in his experience of them, to reinforce it. What if you don’t do that anymore? he thought.
A taxi honked and pulled Sam out of his reverie. He reoriented himself—there was Central Park South, up ahead. He was almost to the Upper East Side. That was where he was going, although he hadn’t realized it.
It wasn’t all perfect. That was important, too, and in the days and weeks that followed the ceremony, Sam was struck by how easy it was to backslide into old behaviors, that progress wasn’t linear, that he could still be the same version of himself he was trying to leave behind. A few weeks after ceremony, he binged again. It came on out of nowhere, like a blackout—he was driving home from a friend’s house, after a perfectly pleasant night, and suddenly he was in the drive-through of a fast-food restaurant, ordering half the menu, and when he came back into awareness of what he was doing, he was already on the couch, surrounded by those greasy paper bags and his belly was swollen and he was so confused, like the promise had been broken, and he had this piercing, terrible thought: Did it even fucking work? Have I changed at all?
He ran to the bathroom and bent over the toilet, needing to get it out of him, so urgently—it had been years since he had purged like that, and he had to, even though he didn’t want to—and he called out to her, the spirit, Where are you now?, staring down at the water, furious that he had ended up back here.
And then the hairs on his arms stood up on end and he felt her, like he’d felt her in ceremony, and he lay down on the tile floor and cried for a little while, then went to bed. The next morning he woke up early and went to a yoga class and on the floor, lying in savasana, he put his hand on his belly and whispered I’m sorry to his body and then, there, he felt her again, and he knew he was okay.
He had other grievances, too, of course—there was always traffic on Fountain and bills to be paid and emails marked urgent for no reason, and he still spent too much time thinking about his imperfect body and his stalled career and his financial insecurity and his lack of romantic prospects, but in a way that he couldn’t quite articulate, it all felt manageable, when it used to be incapacitating, and the despair that had once threatened to swallow him whole just wasn’t anywhere near as vast as it had been before, and on those nights where he felt lonely or sad, he just tried to wrap his arms around his body and be with himself instead of running from it, the way he always had before, and even when it rose to its highest intensity and the old and familiar monsters began to claw at his throat, it wasn’t so acute.
And soon, so much sooner than he expected, that—different—felt normal. That was the worst part, the normalizing of it—what felt at first like a superpower becoming something that he took for granted, that he could talk to people without being deafened by the noise of his neuroses, that he could look at his own reflection without disgust, that he was rarely interested in fucking strangers or binge eating or any of the old fixes he used to resort to in order to get through the day, and even when he tried them, they didn’t quite work anymore. Sometimes when he felt stressed or lonely or self-critical, he had to remind himself just how much better it was than it had been before. But there was a difference between remembering a feeling and feeling it, and he couldn’t feel it anymore, that big empty. He only recalled it.
Still, he promised himself that he wouldn’t forget how bad it had been before. He was grateful that she had let him keep the box that it came in, and if he turned his attention to his belly, he could feel it, the thing inside him that had once been emptiness, only now it felt different—less like emptiness and more like space.
And soon he realized that if he called out to her in those moments of crisis, she would visit him, descending down Sam’s spine: a tingling that started in his head and spread through his shoulders. In those moments, he knew it was her, and that reminder, even a gentle one, that he was all right, was really all the solace he needed. Most of the time, anyway.
At some point, Sam figured, she would call him back to ceremony, and when she did, he would go. But he was unhurried. It was strange and divine enough to feel all these new forms of connection. Some clear evenings, walking back to his apartment, he felt the wind move in the palm trees and he knew that was her, too.
Was this how religious people felt? Not to have faith in something you hope exists, but to have actually felt the presence of something beyond this world. To know it was real. To be sure.
Thank you, he whispered out into the night. Thank you.
* * *
The other thing Sam found himself thinking about a lot in the days after he came out of the ceremony was what it had been like to get sober all those years earlier. He rarely thought about that time of his life anymore, maybe because he’d written it down already, and in so many ways the writing of that first book, his memoir, had been about being able to set it aside and put it away in the past, where it belonged—as though purging it from his memory onto the page made it a thing rather than his life, depersonalizing it in some crucial way. When he was writing the book, while he was with Charles, he’d had to think nonstop about what it had felt like to be a sick and broken drug addict in order to tell the story of it, and then once the book was over and done with, he’d stopped thinking about it altogether. Even when people asked him about it—like that first night at Buck’s house, at the dinner party, when the woman with all the bracelets had pressed him for details—he resisted, reciting the same one-line elevator pitch to summarize his book, and accordingly, his life as a young addict, that he’d been using since it came out.
But suddenly he was thinking about it all the time, in a way that he hadn’t in years, maybe because everything was new again, and he could finally remember it in a way that hadn’t been in his book—to tell the story a different way.
And Sam remembered now, as he walked through the streets of New York, the way it had been when he had made that first decision, some morning in Boston when he was nineteen, hearing his mother’s voice on the telephone: Come home. The way the words rang out, high and panicked, like two desperate notes. He stepped into the memory, now, but he wasn’t afraid of what he would find there.
He had been nineteen
and he was high all the time and he was walking then, too, away from his little apartment in Cambridge, where he’d crash-landed after rehab, but in the memory he was walking in a direction he’d never walked in before. How easy it was to get comfortable in certain routes, routes that began to feel as familiar as a favorite sweater; and after Sam had moved into that apartment in Cambridge, he only took one way home, walking from the train station at Davis Square through a little park down a winding footpath where, occasionally, bicyclists would ride past, ringing their bright singsong bells, and from where the path ended at Massachusetts Avenue, Sam could see his apartment building standing across the street, the light in the window that he had left on during the day. There was a little convenience store on the corner where he would buy cigarettes and junk food. Down Mass Ave in one direction was Porter Square, and up the other was the nearest ATM, as Sam had discovered late one night when he had to pay a drug dealer, as well as a barber shop where one spring afternoon an old man with knobbed hands shaved his head.
But Sam had never walked south of Massachusetts Avenue in all the months he lived there, just had never had occasion to, and at that point in his life—frequently strung out on drugs, and terrified of everything—he wasn’t the sort of person who would explore his neighborhood just for fun.
And yet, on that morning, or afternoon, whenever he woke up or came to, still buzzing from the drugs he had taken the night before, the crystal meth he had smoked or snorted still rippling through him, and the man who had come over to get high and lost in his body the way Sam needed to get lost in his still dozing in his bed, Sam felt adventurous, or curious, and he walked the other way, in the direction he had not visited before. And he would say or because he genuinely couldn’t remember, both because memory was so flexible in the recounting of it and because of the way operating under the influence warps the surfaces of experiences. Remembering an altered state was a process of trying to impose logic onto that which was inherently illogical; how could he puzzle out the factual basics of what he did, let alone why he did it? He was always an unreliable narrator, if only to himself.
So Sam didn’t know why he walked that way, but he did, and maybe there was a street with a row of beautiful old houses and it was spring—when did it become spring?—and maybe for a moment he couldn’t believe that it had been here all along, just around the corner, if only he had thought to come here and see it. And at some point his phone must have vibrated in his pocket and so he would have looked at the screen and seen that it was his mother calling—and surely there would have been a moment where he debated, as he always did, whether to pick it up or let it go to voice mail—and when she asked him how he was, maybe he told her lies or maybe he made excuses. But he did not remember those things, not really.
He remembered only the sound of her voice, and for a moment all the static dropped out and he heard her, so clearly: Come home. Come home and get clean.
And this is how life goes: there will be times where you feel like nothing more than a patchwork quilt of all the worst parts of yourself, and then there will be times when the call to be better is just so lovely and clear, like a bell ringing at a frequency all the voices that keep you up at night can’t hear. Maybe he had only had those calls twice in his life—the first, with his own mother, when she had called him to sobriety, and the second, with this one, the spirit of the medicine, when she had called him to healing. She’d been wanting him to come home, too. And he felt it now, the certainty of it. Perfect clarity, that rarest and most precious of things. Those were the moments worth remembering. Those were the moments worth recounting.
That chapter of his life, the years he’d spent as an addict—it didn’t have to be some big story about what a shitty person he was. He could just remember it, acknowledge it and let it go.
This was the thing that he knew now, that he had never quite understood before: the way memory could be both the lock and the key, how easily it kept him in the bondage of old stories he didn’t need anymore, and how easily, too, it could show him everything he needed to know about who he was.
He had been so afraid that he would feel like a fraud walking into twelve-step meetings after the ceremony, that no matter how useful it proved, having undergone this experiment with the shaman would somehow contaminate the integrity of his sobriety, but when he went to a meeting a few days after, he felt like he belonged more now than he had before. He looked around at the people in the room, and it all felt so human, so worthy, and he was warm and unguarded as he stacked chairs at the end, giving out his phone number and telling newcomers to keep coming back, and in those moments he wasn’t thinking about himself at all.
So it took a little while, but soon Sam felt like maybe this was the person he was supposed to be, someone who woke up early and meditated for a few minutes, someone who picked up the phone when people called him, someone who made a list of ten things he was grateful for every night before bed for no reason other than that it made him feel good, and when he fucked up, he just tried not to do it again. Was it really that simple? he wondered sometimes. And did I really need a shaman to show me all that?
He didn’t talk about it, really, except with a few close friends. It wasn’t that he was ashamed of it, or secretive. It was more that he wanted everyone else to get the call on their own, the way he had, to find it if they were meant to find it and in their own time.
Kat asked him once, “Do you ever wonder if it really happened the way it felt like it did or if you were just super fucked-up on ayahuasca? Like, was any of the magic stuff real?”
Sam thought about it for a long moment. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It was real to me.”
Sam turned the corner of East Sixty-Third Street toward Second Avenue. He had arrived at the building where he’d lived with Charles. He hadn’t been back in two years, since the morning he left for Los Angeles.
He sat down on the lip of the white brick planters that lined the facade of the building a few yards away from the awning. A doorman in a black suit helped a woman with her shopping bags into the building, making small talk, both of them laughing about something. Sam looked around him. He hadn’t remembered this little garden—was that new? The flowers in it were in full bloom.
He’d half expected to cry, but he didn’t. Instead he just sat there for a long while, thinking. Remembering. Not letting the memories constellate into a narrative, but just letting them pass through him, in and out, like breath.
13
The Whole Body
The next morning, Sam woke up to the sound of thunder, his eyes adjusting to the darkness. The neon lights of the clock on the nightstand told him it was just past 6:00 a.m. Shit. He looked around the hotel room, registering the economically sized desk and blackout curtains. New York. You are back in New York and that is fine. You know what to do.
He made a cup of coffee. He sat cross-legged on the hotel bed and put on a playlist of chants he had heard in the kundalini yoga class he went to some mornings in Los Angeles, ignoring the notifications that had rolled in overnight on his phone. He closed his eyes and sang aloud to himself in Gurmukhi: Har har har gobinday. Ra ma da sa. Ek ong kar sat nam. He did not look at his email inbox or unread text messages or Instagram or Twitter. He put on shorts, a tank top and a hooded rain slicker and headed out into the drizzly morning. He went to a class in Tribeca, where an instructor in cream tights and a cream crop top led him in an hour of movement, tapping heels that led into squats that became jumping jacks before giving way to unchoreographed flailing. “Get out of the fucking mirror and get back in your fucking body!” she yelled over the Maggie Rogers song that was thudding out of the speakers. He did push-ups back into child’s pose, a set of four movements, each with a corresponding message, which he thought at his body in a clear internal voice: Thank you. I love you. Forgive me. I’m sorry. After it was over, he went back to the hotel and showered. He put a crystal around his neck, a chunk of clear quart
z on a golden chain. And once all this was done, he felt the same way he’d felt right after ceremony: peaceful and embodied and alive, like he’d taken a different door into the same room.
In his office, he found that he kept touching the crystal, tugging at it, feeling the tension of its chain pulling around his neck. It brought him back to something.
* * *
That night, he dressed quietly in his hotel room. He slipped into blue jeans and a plain black T-shirt. He looked at himself in the mirror and took a deep breath. You look fat, a voice in his head said.
So what? a louder voice said.
He said out loud, “You’re okay.”
He felt better. He sat on the side of the bed and tied his shoes.
He took a cab to the Flatiron. It was dusk. He slipped through the curtained entryway of a new restaurant that had opened a few months earlier, everything gleaming and white. The hostess showed him to his table.
When Charles walked in, Sam almost didn’t recognize him. He looked exactly the same as he always had, wearing a shiny bomber jacket and designer loafers, as usual, his eyes bright blue and expressive, his mouth pink, a little scruff. But in Sam’s mind, over the course of remembering him so many times, he had forgotten what his face actually looked like, the specificity of it. He had made Charles a character, one so vivid that he had ceased to be a person. Now here he was, in flesh and blood, and it was curious to behold him.
Charles smiled. “Hey,” he said softly.
Sam stood up, coming around the side of the table. They embraced for a minute, and Sam inhaled the scent that lived at the nape of his neck, linen and oudh. It had been so long since he’d smelled it.
“I really missed you,” Sam said.
“I missed you, too,” Charles said.
They sat down. “How have you been?” Sam said, and as the words came out of his mouth, he realized he genuinely wanted to know how Charles was, not with an agenda—not because it would tell Sam something about himself, about his real or perceived value, about whether Charles was thriving or suffering without him now, two years later, but simply because he loved Charles and he cared how he was doing.