From the angle, Shaw hadn’t been able to see clearly, though he believed he caught a glint of metal before the door closed.
He returned to the path and walked across the Square to Building 7, where he would meet with his trainer, Samuel. He entered the building. A whiteboard on an easel reported that his session was in Room 4. He knocked and it opened.
“Hello, hello, hello! So good to see you again, Novice Carter. Come in, come in!”
Round, cheerful Journeyman Samuel gave the shoulder salute—Shaw did the same—and gestured him to an armchair. Samuel sat in a facing chair. There were small tables beside each. Shaw’s held a bottle of water and a box of Kleenex. In the back of the room was a desk. No windows. The walls—purple, of course—were barren of decorations. The space was small, confining, the air close.
The genie gets his power from the lamp he’s confined in . . .
Samuel sat, crossed his legs and took a pad of paper, which he set on his lap. No electronic tablet here. He picked up a pen.
“How’s your time here going?”
“Okay. I guess. I don’t know. Just a few hours. But what Mr. Eli—Master Eli—said this morning? I kinda liked it.”
Is this what Carter Skye, the troubled forestry worker, would say?
Yes, he decided.
“And you’ve got more in store for you this afternoon.”
Shaw stretched back and examined the room. “Kind of, you know, weird to me. I don’t do so good joining things. End up getting in fights and kicked out.”
“Of course it’s weird. At this stage, for you, it’s like summer camp. Don’t really know the lay of the land. Did you go?”
Shaw’s character uttered a scoff.
Samuel nodded broadly. “I never did either! Mum and Dad couldn’t scrape together the moola. I had to work. In a soda shop. You?”
Young Colter had worked almost every day of his younger years—around the Compound. Hunting for dinner, dressing game, repairing fences, cutting firewood, and learning how to grapple a man twice his size to the ground and disable him with a knee in the solar plexus.
“Odd jobs,” he said.
“A boy who wasn’t afraid of getting his hands dirty! We need more of that, don’t we? This generation, I tell you.” A sour face appeared. “Okay. Let’s get started.” Samuel looked him over closely. “Now, remember, the Process is how you true up, uncover your True Core. You’re probably thinking it’s intimidating, overwhelming. Well, it’s not, not at all. That’s Master Eli’s genius. You don’t need to study Sanskrit or memorize the Bhagavad Gita or recite passages from the Talmud or hold some bizarre yoga pose for hours. Master Eli has made the Process accessible to everyone. Your work is simple as can be.”
“And what is that?”
Samuel stared into Shaw’s eyes. “All you have to do is tell me the truth.”
32.
I’ll ask you about your life—personal and professional—and we identify those aspects where you have strong feelings.”
Samuel made a fist. “Really strong thoughts and feelings. Passionate. About people, places, situations, work. Every interaction and reaction you have. The bad feelings—anger, fear, sorrow—and the good ones—joy, love, comfort. We call them—how clever is this? The Minuses and the Pluses.”
So that’s what they were.
Samuel said, “The important thing is that you feel them intensely. I hate this, I love that.”
“And then?”
The man lifted his hands, palms up. “Then you meditate on what we’ve identified.”
“And that, like, tears down the clapboard house and lets the garden of our True Core grow.”
A crinkle in Samuel’s eyes. “A man who pays attention. Some people don’t. With all kind respect to them, they fuddle about—is that a word? They fuddle and they listen with half an ear or with one ear, not both. My, witty metaphors are escaping me at the moment. But you can see what I’m getting at. You, Novice Carter, are serious about truing up and you’ve got the intelligence to do it. More important, you’ve got the grit, the edge. I like that. Master Eli likes that. He was smart to put you on the expedited track.”
Interesting. It was Eli himself who had picked him.
“When a Plus or Minus rears its good or bad head, we’ll jump on it and dig deeper.”
“So just think about things in my life?”
“Simple as that.”
“And I’m paying for this?” he muttered.
Samuel gave a hearty laugh. “Oh, I like you, Novice Carter. Oh, there’s a bit more to the Process. But Master Eli will share that this afternoon in the Second Discourse. Now, let’s take a look at some Minuses, shall we? We always start with those. Run-ins with the law—understand there’ve been a few of those. Problems with the parents. Those controlled substances, old demon rum.”
He nodded at the box of Kleenex. Shaw looked at it quizzically.
“You get a little cry-ey, it’s all right. It means the Process is working.”
The last time Shaw had teared up was when his fifth metacarpal on his right hand—the little finger—bent in a remarkable and noisy way during a minor climbing mishap.
Skye gave an insulted scoff. Samuel was tickled by the reaction.
Samuel smoothed pages in the open notebook. “Let’s find out a little about you.” He asked about the darker side of Skye’s life: the reclusiveness, the drinking, the drugs, the depression, the restlessness.
He then spent a long time asking about Skye’s job in the forestry field, what companies he’d worked for, did he have aspirations to own a business?
“Lot of Minuses in the world of the daily grind,” Samuel explained.
Gripping his cover story hard, Shaw tried to appear calm as he fabricated. He was hoping his memory wouldn’t fail him. He’d heard about the Method, where a theater or movie actor draws on real events and relationships in his own life as a springboard to shape the character he’s playing. But in reality, Shaw’s life had no grounding in Carter Skye’s. So his palms sweated as he spun a tale of a thirty-something man of some promise, whose emotional glitches had derailed him.
Samuel then asked about his romantic life. He pulled out Margot’s avatar and answered the questions as they came flying toward him.
He sipped water. Wiped some sweat.
Without any watch or clock—and unable to hear the voice of the Timekeeping Goddess, Shaw was disoriented. Had it been an hour? He hoped the session was finished.
Samuel flipped through his notes, nodding. Then he took his glasses off and polished them. “Remember I told you what your job was?”
Shaw nodded. “To tell you the truth.”
“Exactly.” Samuel now slipped the glasses back on and leaned forward. The kindly grandfather vanished. His face was cold: “Let’s cut the bullshit. Tell me what you’re really doing here.”
33.
Hell, how had he been tripped up?
To be a good liar, you need a good memory. Had he contradicted himself?
Had he sounded too sophisticated for a former con and street hustler?
Had the beardless Santa Claus been too disarming? Shaw too unguarded?
But there was nothing to do but keep the show going. He conjured a perplexed look. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, you’ve had some boo-hoo moments in your jobs.” A tap on the notebook. “And Daddy or Mommy passed down a feelin’-sad gene or two. And you got too restless for your girlfriend’s liking. But those’re mosquito bites. People don’t come to the Osiris Foundation and pay this kind of money and undergo all this work for boo-hoo. They come out of desperation. Not a single thing you’ve told me paints you as desperate.” The eyes through the round-lens spectacles bored into his. “I want to know . . . the . . . truth.”
Without a moment’s hesitation Colter Shaw blurted, “My brother.”
>
And thought: The hell have I just done?
* * *
—
Later, Shaw would wonder if perhaps he mentioned Russell because of the Method.
Or maybe it was simply an improvised survival technique. He instinctively knew he had to maintain his cover—and avoid a beating and, not inconceivably, death—so he’d blurted out a credible answer to the question.
But Colter Shaw also had to admit that maybe what had happened was this: Here in the close room, sitting before a perceptive and smart and sympathetic man, the undercover fiction had been suspended. Shaw, not Skye, was here, a Companion at the Foundation, and really was suffering from the tragedy of a missing brother. He really was undergoing the first stage of the Process in an effort to true up. He really did desire to move up to the Apprentice level, then become a Journeyman and a member of the Inner Circle, earning a coveted silver amulet.
It was perfectly natural for him to blurt out that the main reason he was here was the consuming Minus in his life: the sorrow of his brother’s vanishing.
He thought with some bitter irony of Eli’s story about Osiris and his brother.
Samuel was jotting. He looked up. “Ah, yes, yes. I see in your face, Novice Carter, that we’re onto something. We get many people here about their siblings. See, that’s the trifecta of the Process. People are plagued with Minuses from love, from work and from their families. Parents, of course. What a minefield that is! My own father and mother were certainly poster parents for the ill-equipped. I am, after all, ensconced here. Master Eli truly saved my bacon when it came to Mom and Dad. But siblings too. Ever a source for joy . . . and consternation. Your brother. His name?”
“Randall.” Too close to Russell? No matter. He had spoken; there was no going back.
“Randy?”
“No. Randall.”
“Was he named after a relative?”
Ashton Shaw had named his children after pioneers. Russell, for the nineteenth-century explorer Osborne Russell; Colter, for mountain man John Colter; and Dorie, after Marie Aioe Dorion, one of the first mountain women in North America.
“So Randall has brought you here.” Samuel’s voice was low as he added, “Has he passed away?”
“We don’t know.”
“We?”
“The family. My mother, my sister.”
Okay, watch yourself. Get ahead of the situation.
More water.
“So he left home, and never was in touch?”
“That’s it, yeah.”
“I see. A question of to be or not to be. Or to shift from the infinitive conjugation to the present tense—is or is not. Look at that narrowing of your eye, Novice Carter. If I had a stethoscope on your chest, I suspect I’d hear a little acceleration of the lubdub, lubdub, wouldn’t I?”
“Maybe. I guess.”
Then the man’s eyes narrowed and the smile vanished. “You understand I joke because we’re treading through dangerous territory when we start uncovering the big Minuses. The serious ones. I want you to feel at ease. What we’re doing here is vital to truing up, to your becoming a Journeyman, free of the Minuses that have prevented you from reaching the garden of your True Core. You’re hurting, you came here to fix that. Master Eli wants to help you, he lives to help you. And we can help. We will help.”
Samuel was right about the ticker.
Lubdub . . .
“Tell me about it.”
“He was my big brother, my protector. Then he was gone. Just left.”
“You hesitated just a wink there once again. Before ‘my’ protector. You have mettle, Novice Carter, mettle and street smarts. And you know how to use your fists. I don’t really think you would need protecting at any age. No, within your family, I suspect someone else would need looking out for. Your mother, maybe. No . . . wait. You’re the product of a strong mother too. Your sister. Am I near the mark?”
“That’s right.”
“And her name?”
“Doris.”
Too damn close. Watch it, Shaw told himself sternly, picturing again Hugh’s fierce blow to the reporter’s face.
“So Randall was protecting her from what? Or whom? Your father? Was he . . . inappropriate?”
“No, no, nothing like that.”
Samuel’s tone and furrowed brow were that of an attentive and benevolent father—a man very different from Ashton Shaw, later in his life, whose shifting eyes and mouth chewy from the antipsychotics forced Shaw to look away from him. A man whose words, brilliant in his younger days, grew increasingly inane and dark toward the end.
“Go on.”
Shaw was thinking: I come here to find out why a man died in my care, and to help out a complete stranger, and I end up in a shrink’s session. Colter Shaw was a man who had never been to therapy, resisting even Margot’s suggestion. He recalled an incident from several years ago, his lover tossing her light blond curls off her shoulder looking over at him from behind her desk in the university archeological department. She asked him point-blank if they could go see a therapist. He’d demurred. Sometimes he thought this had been a grave mistake; sometimes not.
Restless . . .
“Doris was strong, is strong. But Father pushed her too far. He thought he was doing it for her own good. He was putting her in danger.”
“At sports?”
Ashton tried to force her, at thirteen, to rock climb a sheer hundred-foot cliff by herself at night. And that was just one of the trials the demented man had in store for his children. To toughen them up. To teach them how to survive.
“Yes. He was pushing her too hard. He put her at risk, physically. Mentally too.”
“And Randall put a stop to it?”
“Yes.”
“We’re near something here, Novice Carter. But hovering only. A troubled, dangerous father . . . an older brother looking out for a little sister. You . . . you haven’t mentioned your role in this story. Let’s talk about that.”
Palms glistened once more.
“Not long after the last incident with Doris, our father died.”
“How?” Samuel asked quickly.
Shaw paused. “At first, it looked like an accident.”
“‘Looked like.’ That’s a loaded phrase. But it wasn’t?”
“No. Murder or manslaughter.”
“My. And you thought . . . ?”
Shaw said, “I thought my brother killed him.”
“Patricide. Well.”
“He didn’t. We found out later who really did it. Ru—Randall had nothing to do with it. But he disappeared right after the funeral. Which didn’t make sense.” Shaw lifted his hands. “And no word since. It’s been years.”
“And you think he knew you suspected him. And hated you for it.”
Shaw nodded.
“And you never had a chance to talk to him. To apologize or explain.”
“No. All these years. I’ve tried to find him and talk to him. No luck.”
Samuel leaned back. “What would you say was the greatest Minus regarding your brother? What hurts the most?”
“He’d been my friend.” Shaw took a breath. “I was his. And I ruined it.”
“Well, Novice Carter, we’ve made excellent progress on our first session. Best to give it a rest for now. We’ll break that Minus down. Grind it up like making gravel from rocks. Don’t worry. You’re doing fine. We’ll leave it there for now. Go and journal about what you told me. But don’t go far. You don’t want to be late for Master Eli’s Second Discourse. No, sir, you’ll want to hear every word.”
34.
How bad was it?”
Shaw turned.
Victoria stood ten feet behind him.
“I saw you come out of Building Seven. You don’t look so good.”
Shaw shrugged
.
She gave a wan laugh and her high forehead wrinkled slightly with faint, early-thirties lines. “Who’s your trainer?”
“Journeyman Samuel.”
“He’s good. No hardball tactics like some of them. Still, it’s tough to be interrogated over every detail of your life. About the library business. What had my late husband done professionally, how did that affect me? What do I feel about my father being a rich bank lawyer? Do I resent him?”
“That’s how it went. What do I know about the forestry business and logging companies? I’m a surveyor. Then there was the family stuff.”
“That can be hard.”
He shrugged as if he didn’t want to talk about the session any more. “How long until you’re a Journeyman?”
“A few days, I hope. There’s still work to do. Some other steps. The Endurances.”
Odd she used that word. Ashton Shaw insisted that the children pass survival endurance tests, one of which was Doris’s late-night climb that broke the family apart.
He laughed grimly to himself. He’d used the fictional name. He corrected: his sister, Dorion.
“Greetings, Companions” came the soft, male voice from behind them.
Shaw recognized it immediately.
They both turned. Approaching was Eli and his entourage: Anja and Steve, along with the two AU minders, Squat and Gray.
Everyone exchanged the salute, except for Anja. She nodded and with a faint smile stepped back slightly.
“Novice Carter and Apprentice Victoria,” Eli said. He appeared pleased to see them.
“Master Eli.” Victoria’s voice quavered and her head dipped, as if she were in the presence of royalty.
Shaw nodded to the man. Up close, he could see that Eli’s blue eyes were so light the color had to come from theatrical contact lenses.
“How did your first session go today?” he asked Shaw.
“Okay, I guess. Kind of a kick in the gut, looking at those Minuses.”
“Oh, how well I know. But that’s the way it should be. The way it has to be, for the Process to work. I’ve planned it out carefully. I spent years fine-tuning the machine.”
The Goodbye Man Page 16
