by Trisha Telep
“C’mon, girl,” I said. The little red-haired dachshund wasn’t jumping around my feet or straining for the door the way she usually did when she knew we were about to do our loop up the hill to the white marble lion that sits outside the front gate of one of the mansions. I always touch the lion’s paw, as if to tell him “see, we made it,” and also for luck.
But it was as if Paloma knew that things weren’t quite right in her world, that her mistress was still shaken from visiting Josh in the hospital. I took Vermeer calla lilies in a glass vase to put on his windowsill. I wanted them to be the first thing he saw when he woke up. (If he woke up.) The nurses all thought I was Josh’s sister, because that’s what his mother had told them. It was what my English teacher might call a “mythic truth”—even if it wasn’t true on the outside, it felt true on the inside.
I had known Josh since kindergarten, when both of our sets of parents were still together. When we were six, we sat cross-legged in the corner of the tennis court in his backyard and pricked the tips of our little fingers with a sewing needle and squeezed out drops of blood. Then we wrapped our pinkies together and swore we’d be blood-siblings for life. Corny, I know, but what can I say. We were six.
I coaxed Paloma out the door. She shook herself, dog tags jangling, then trotted along beside me as if the lemon-colored sunlight, the flowering bushes and palms and pines and eucalyptus, the sprawling houses set behind walls and gates, were conspiring to make her feel better.
The white house came up on our right. I’ve always been curious about it. I’ve never seen anyone go in or out of it, never glimpsed a car moving through the curve of driveway flanked with drooping palm trees. The house wasn’t gated off from the street, but sat exposed like a bone in the sun. You sometimes see shabby, neglected houses in Bel Air, squatting on lots that have accumulated millions of dollars of value over the decades, belonging to people who refuse to sell them even if they can’t afford their upkeep, who plan to live in those houses until they die.
But nobody lived in this house. The windows were dark and blind.
Today, instead of walking past it, I paused at the lip of the driveway. Paloma took the opportunity to fling herself on her back in the grass and roll around. I listened to the chatter of birds, the roar of a nearby leaf-blower. I didn’t really know what I was doing. It was like an invisible hand reached through my skin, grabbed one of my ribs, tugged me gently toward the house. Trust your instincts, my mother is always telling me, the implication being that if she had trusted hers she would never have married my father.
I walked up the driveway, through the pools of shade beneath the palms, up the three steps to the door. I still didn’t know what I was doing. It was like something my body knew and announced to me, like when it’s time to eat or go to sleep. Except now it was time to knock on the door, so I did, one rap, two raps, three, and then my hand dropped to my side and I thought, Am I crazy? What am I doing?
I turned around to go when a voice from inside said, “Sasha, come in.”
I did not hear that. I did not hear someone say my name.
The dog was sitting on the step, cocking her narrow head at me. The wind pushed a cloud overhead, and the air darkened for a moment and then went bright again.
The door gave a clicking sound, and swung inward.
I saw white walls and a clean hardwood floor and more space than I would have expected. A man was standing in the middle of the hall. The light entering the windows behind him cast him in silhouette. Paloma gave a happy bark and jolted forward. I didn’t realize my hand had slackened on the leash until the end jerked out beneath my fingers and Paloma was hurtling herself at the man. “Hello, Paloma,” he said, and stooped to pick her up. She writhed in his arms and tried to lick his face.
“Excuse me,” I said, “but that’s my dog.”
The man stepped forward. Maybe he saw the way I tensed because he was careful to keep some distance between us. “You’re a little late, Sasha,” he said.
The shadows fell away from him, and I could see that his eyes, even across the space that separated us, were very blue. His face did seem familiar. It was long with good cheekbones and a strong nose. He wore jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt, and he was lean and long-limbed. I guessed him to be a few years older than me—nineteen, maybe twenty?
“We have to get started,” he said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Your lessons.”
“My what?”
“Sasha, don’t you recognize me?”
“Who are you?”
“You know my name,” he said. “Wait a moment, and it will come to you. We have an appointment, Sasha. A series of them, in fact. But we don’t have a lot of time. I’ll have to go back soon.”
This had to be some kind of setup. He was too good-looking, for one thing. He belonged on a movie screen or the cover of a romance novel or in someone’s fantasy. Maybe I’d been chosen for some kind of reality show? This was Los Angeles, after all, and every now and then you saw film trucks in the neighborhood, parked along the narrow curving roads while traffic directed around them.
I glanced around, checking for places where cameras might be viewing my every move. But the place seemed ... truly empty, like it was just this guy, my dog, and me.
“Sasha, it’s time we get started,” the guy said. “It’s past time.”
“For all I know,” I said, “you’re a serial killer.”
“I promise you I’m not a serial killer.”
“Like you’d admit it if you were.”
“You know my name,” he said quietly. “Here, I’m going to write it down...” He suddenly had a pen and notepad in his hands—I had to blink, where had they come from?—and scrawled something down. He ripped off the top paper, folded it in half and held it out to me. “Tell me,” he said quietly. “Tell me the name, my name, that I wrote down on this paper.”
“I have no idea who you are.” But I felt something ... shift ... in my brain. And suddenly I knew—knew in a way that went all through my body—that he was right, that I had met him before, and that my whole life had been leading to this moment.
“Haiden,” I said.
He smiled and dropped the notepaper. It fluttered to rest on the ground with the name staring up at both of us in printed block letters:
HAIDEN.
2
So I stood there for I don’t know how much longer, the guy—Haiden—looking at me with those preternatural blue eyes. Part of me was still thinking: reality show. Kind of clinging to the idea. But then I felt that invisible hand tug my rib again.
Trust your instincts. So I stepped across the threshold and into the hallway.
And I swear I felt the air shimmer, as if part of reality had rearranged itself around me. If he does turn out to be a serial killer, I thought, I’m going to feel really, really stupid.
I followed him into a long sunken room with a stone fireplace in the corner. The only piece of furniture was a table in the middle. There was a bowl of fruit on it. Apples. They had the kind of dewy, rounded perfection you only see in magazines.
“What are we doing?” I asked. Paloma trailed behind us, her toenails clicking off the hardwood. “What do you mean by ‘lessons’?” Absently I reached out for the fruit on the table. I was picking out an apple when Haiden barked, “Don’t!”
The apple dropped from my hand, rolled across the table.
“Don’t eat that,” Haiden said, “don’t eat any of that fruit until you’re absolutely sure and ready. Do you understand me?”
“Until I’m ready for what?”
Haiden watched me for a moment. Then, ignoring my question, he said, “What if I told you there was another realm that ran alongside this one?” Haiden had something in his hands—like the pen and notepad, it had just somehow appeared there—and he approached me with it.
It was a black scrap of fabric. A blindfold.
“I’m going to teach you how to see and feel and communica
te with it. I’m going to teach you a kind of clairvoyance. Clairsensing.”
“You’re seriously going to put that thing on me?”
“It’s the first exercise,” he said patiently. Then he said, “Sasha, are we going to do this or not?”
“My dog likes you,” I said, “and my dog never likes anybody.”
“Dogs and I understand each other.”
I liked the idea of another realm. It reminded me of the stories I used to write when I was a little kid, back when I had this idea that I wanted to be a novelist.
Maybe that’s why I let him blindfold me. I liked his voice, and his vaguely European accent, and the rich warm sense of his presence beside me. His hands, as he fastened the blindfold, were gentle.
“The point of this,” he explained to me, “is to demonstrate that you already know everything you need to know. It’s all living there deep inside you. What you need to do is focus inward. You need to clear away all the distractions—all the things you think you know—all the things people told you when you were little and didn’t know not to believe them. In a way, you’re not learning so much as un learning.”
“Cool,” I said.
I mean, what else was there to say?
“I painted an X on the floor,” Haiden said, “and it’s your task to find it. I want you to use your inner sense of direction. I want you to feel your way toward it.”
I imagined how ridiculous this would look on a reality show: me stumbling around with a blindfold trying to find some secret X as this awesome-looking actor chattered on about unlearning. I pictured the kids at school howling laughter at me in the hallways. But I also remembered the way Paloma had gone right up to him, no hesitation, and the way his name had surfaced in my brain like that.
He was right. I had met him before. I didn’t understand it, but in that moment I didn’t have to. All I had to do was find the X. That was what mattered.
I could feel that gentle tug inside me, leading me across the room. I stepped slowly, the blindfold dark and silky on my eyes. When the sensation of tugging stopped, I stopped too. I lifted my hands to the blindfold and slipped it off and turned to look at Haiden. He was standing beside the table holding the apple that I had dropped. Paloma was on her haunches beside him, as if she was his dog, not mine.
Traitor, I thought.
“So?” I said.
“Look down,” Haiden said.
He crunched into the apple.
I was standing right on the middle of the X.
3
I wasn’t sure what that proved. My mind went into gymnastics trying to fit this into a rational explanation. Maybe I had agreed to do a reality show and then someone had put me under hypnosis? Maybe this was all some kind of subliminal programming? But that seemed just as nuts as Haiden’s talk about “another realm.”
For the rest of the “lesson” Haiden had me stare into a candle flame. “This is to help you develop your focus and concentration,” he said. “You need a clear mind in order to see clearly.” He gave me the candle to take home. He told me to practice meditating with it for half an hour every day. That was my homework.
And then the lesson was over, and Paloma and I were out on the street again. If it wasn’t for the candle in my hand I would have thought the whole thing some kind of hallucination, a waking dream. Especially when I checked my watch and saw that, from the time I entered the house until now, exactly two minutes had passed. In the presence of Haiden in the abandoned white house, time, it seemed, had stood still.
4
That night, my mother was rushing around to get ready for her date with this Silicon Valley mogul dude who was totally all wrong for her, except my mother hadn’t figured that out yet. Her instincts can be slow to kick in. “Have you seen my black Chanel clutch?” she asked, popping her head into my bedroom. “I can’t find it anywhere—”
I thought for a moment, then felt an image of it surface in my mind, much like Haiden’s name had done. “It’s in the top left-hand corner of the hall closet,” I said, “beneath a balled-up sweater.”
She looked at me for a moment and shook her blond head. “You’re amazing,” she said, and blew me a kiss. Then I heard her clatter down the stairs.
It hadn’t occurred to her to ask what I was doing, standing in the middle of my bedroom and looking around me. I felt like an alien dropped in from another planet trying to put together clues about the locals.
The candle in its little brass holder sat on my desk. The session with Haiden had left me with a calm settled feeling. My room felt different, like it belonged to someone who resembled me but wasn’t ... me. There were posters on the walls of bands I no longer listened to. The rhinestone-studded cover for my iPhone seemed childish and stupid. There were application forms on my desk from colleges that I realized, in a sudden blazing flash, I didn’t even want to go to. I had decided I was going to be a lawyer. Now I found myself wondering why. Because I was good at English lit, because I liked to read and write, because it was so much more practical than trying to be a writer, which was a crazy ambition anyway? Because I wanted to earn lots of money and wear cool power suits? Because it was a good answer to give people when they asked you what you were going to be when you grew up (assuming you ever did)?
Haiden’s words hummed through my brain.
You need a clear mind in order to see clearly.
My life was filled with a lot of noise, a lot of bright lights, a lot of daily drama that, in the end, didn’t add up to much. My grades were slipping because I found it harder and harder to keep still, to absorb what the teachers said in class or to complete my homework. Now, though, with my mother gone and the house quiet and lonely and the image of Haiden’s flame still bright in my mind, and the memory of Haiden’s voice still warm in my ear, I sat down at my desk and pulled out my textbooks and immersed myself in work. Hours slipped by and I barely noticed. Suddenly I was caught up. I pushed back my chair with a rich feeling of satisfaction. Then I noticed the candle....
I hadn’t done Haiden’s homework yet.
I found the silver lighter I used to sneak cigarettes on the back balcony, lit the candle, and stared into the flame for maybe half a minute. Except then I started feeling stupid. It was just a candle, for crying out loud. I could imagine my friend Ashley rolling her eyes at me. I blew it out and went to call her instead.
5
That week I found a lost cat I recognized from posters pinned on telephone poles around the neighborhood and returned her to her owner. Ashley lost her cell phone and I helped her remember that she had left it behind at King’s Cross Café, where the manager was waiting for her to reclaim it.
“I’m good at finding lost things,” I once said to Josh, “it’s like a talent or something.”
“No,” he told me, a little mischievously. “Lost things are good at finding you.”
His condition was unchanging. His room filled with flowers and little stuffed animals and get-well cards. I visited him almost every day and pulled the chair up beside his hospital bed and talked about everything and nothing. I imagined that he could hear me, deep down in his slumber, and that any moment he might stir and open his eyes and say, where am I? like in the movies.
But it didn’t happen.
I told him—and only him—about the episode with Haiden in the abandoned white house on Bel Air Road. “It seems more and more surreal all the time,” I said. “Maybe I dreamed it. Maybe I went temporarily insane and imagined the whole thing. But I keep thinking about him.”
