I remember how nervous I was when I went into Masters’s office for my interview. Seeing him in the middle of the room on all fours, hands and feet on the floor, his butt sticking up in the air in downward dog. His body short, thin, and wiry, as if a life-sized action figure had turned out too small. Masters follows a strict training plan every day in order to counteract his predisposition towards a schoolboy physique.
—Mindfulness training, he said without lifting his head or changing position when he heard me come in. We recommend it to all of our employees. I’ll upload the program to your activity tracker when we decide on you.
His words were a relief. The tone was authoritative, as if the decision had been made in my favor long ago. And in spite of my lack of experience in the field of data analysis and my short curriculum vitae. The director of the business academy had recommended me personally.
Masters moved continuously throughout the conversation. Sitting in his office chair, bobbing back and forth. His legs vibrated from constant tiny movements. His left hand drummed on his thigh. Every sixty seconds, he glanced at his fat-burn and heart-rate tracker. According to his fitness profile in the employee database, Masters burns more calories while sitting than others while walking.
When we shook hands to say goodbye, I tried to imitate his pressure exactly.
—A firm handshake, Masters said. I love it.
When I left his office, I could feel the future in my fingertips. The career I had prepared for. The anticipated credit score.
I had the shameful, absurd urge to contact my biomother. To send her a link to the listing on the employee website and the signed contract. Are you proud of me?
Archive No.: PMa1
File Type: Urgent-Message™
Sender: @PsySolutions_ID5215d
Recipient: @dancerofthesky
Riva!
You’re bored. You can’t even stand the view from your apartment window anymore. You want new stimuli. You want a change. But you don’t know how. I would like to help you.
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4
Aston arrives on time for the onboarding and case history. I observe his gait as he walks from the entrance area to reception. His brief interaction with the receptionist. She gestures her arm towards the elevator and tells him which floor to go to. He’s wearing a jacket over a plain V-neck T-shirt and faded jeans, a combination he also wears at small art openings. For larger events, he is outfitted by a style consultant who is known for his unpredictability; anything is possible, from ironically wearing a black turtleneck sweater with a beret to couture designed specifically for the occasion. At his first big opening for Dancer_of_the_Sky™, Aston showed up in a dragon costume made of terry cloth. The picture made it into the headlines on most society blogs. Aston as a light-green stuffed dragon, Riva giggling beside him in her designer dress. Beauty and the beast.
Aston stands in the back left corner of the empty elevator.
He looks around, leans back against the wall, and slides down to the floor. He seems to have forgotten about the cameras. He remains crouched, his hands folded over his head, his elbows resting on his knees. He doesn’t get up again until the elevator dings at the right floor. Slowly standing, vertebra by vertebra, like the end of a yoga exercise. This is the first time that I have observed such behavior in Aston. A clear gesture of despair and helplessness.
It makes me think of Andorra. How she started trembling in the elevator at the childcare institute, her back pressed up against the wall, suddenly overcome by the fear of us getting stuck. She was afraid of earthquakes and other natural disasters, downright obsessed with news articles about typhoons and floods. They were organized on her tablet by type of catastrophe and the number of dead and injured. Although her collection proved that the most serious and highest frequency of earthquakes occur in the peripheries, Andorra would not let go of her fear. She regularly talked about a scenario that haunted her, that she couldn’t escape: Both of us in the elevator at the institute, we had just gotten on at the thirty-fourth floor. Then, a sudden jerk, the cabin stops. A silver metal box dangling on wire ropes over a 300-foot drop. Swaying back and forth, alone.
Aston’s behavior suggests that he’s more nervous than expected. His short responses to my request to meet sounded nonchalant and came quickly, without much thought. Now that he’s inside the building, he may be worried that he’s betraying Riva by meeting me. He hasn’t told her anything about our appointment. That was his decision.
When Aston steps out of the elevator, he regains his composure. He doesn’t look around, but instead walks straight towards therapy room 9, as if he had internalized the building plan. He knocks twice, I call him in.
His handshake is firm. He immediately sits in the therapy chair and doesn’t reciprocate my smile. I start the conference call. Aston greets Masters and Beluga Ganz on the monitors with a nod. Whenever he has to sit in on a meeting, Masters prefers videoconferencing to coming down three floors and sitting directly in the room. He claims that it improves the quality of the conversation if the therapist is the only person that the client has to deal with directly. I often wonder how quickly clients start to ignore the monitors during conversations and focus their attention on me alone.
—Thank you for coming.
Aston’s facial expression still doesn’t reveal a specific attitude towards me or the situation.
—We asked you to join us today, I say, using the standard opening from the inquiry procedure guidelines, to talk to you about your partner Riva Karnovsky’s current condition.
Again, Aston does not react to my smile.
I wait a moment to see if he wants to say something and then continue speaking in order to avoid any unpleasant pauses.
—We want to help you help Riva. Our main aim is to provide Riva with the support she needs to find her way out of this acute stress situation—her crisis. We’re worried about her.
—Who is we?
Considering our communication thus far, I would not have expected such a confrontational attitude from Aston. His facial expression is aggressive. He looks me right in the eye. In his messages, he seemed polite and cooperative. I got the impression that he was thankful for the invitation.
—Hitomi Yoshida, I say, holding my hand out to him again.
He shakes it briefly. I smile as agreeably as possible.
—PsySolutions has been working with people like Riva for decades. If you help us, we can promise you that she’ll get better soon.
—Who is we?
Aston’s posture seems tense. His voice sounds strained, the repetition of the sentence has something combative to it. I try to keep my tone as harmless and friendly as possible.
—This is Hugo M. Masters, head of the sports psychology department, and this is Beluga Ganz from quality assurance.
Ganz nods to Aston, Masters seems to be elsewhere with his thoughts.
—We all want to help Riva, I say. Riva’s fans are worried, just like your fans would be worried if you suddenly stopped taking pictures.
—And Riva’s fans hired you?
I glance at Masters’s monitor from the corner of my eye. His facial expression is neutral. He doesn’t look back at me.
—Not directly, no. The request comes from the academy. But we see it as a direct reaction to thousands of requests from fans.
Again, I glance at Masters, which Aston notices and follows. Masters hints at a nod.
—Dom Wu hired you?
Aston poses his question to Masters.
—He’s one of our contacts at the academy, yes, I say quickly.
Since Masters doesn’t react, Aston turns to me again.
—Dom didn’t tell me about it, he says.
I sense uncertainty. A reorganization of the situation.
—Obviously, Riva’s not talking to anyone about what happened right now, I say.
But talking helps, it’s that simple. If we can get Riva to confide in you or Dom, she has a chance of getting better.
—What do you mean, what happened? What did happen? What do you know about what happened?
Although he sounds angry, Aston’s questions already seem less hostile to me.
—That’s exactly what it’s about, finding out what happened, I say. We suspect that a critical life event was the trigger. An unfortunate turn of fate, if you will. Do you have any idea what that might have been?
Aston doesn’t respond.
Judging from my observations, I consider him emotionally stable. The episode in the elevator is the first sign that Riva’s crisis is also weighing on him. On most days, he works ten to sixteen hours in his studio. Initially, with Riva’s resignation and the subsequent loss of his biggest project, he seemed artistically blocked. However, he has since acquired several new projects. As far as his output is concerned, he finds himself, apparently, in a highly creative period. From the corner of my eye, I can see Masters’s head moving.
—Aston, I say, you’re in a very difficult situation. You’re on your own. We want to help you.
—I thought you wanted me to help you.
—This is not about us at all. It’s about Riva. Riva and you.
I see Masters nodding and I continue to speak.
—Did you know that the Chinese word for crisis is made up of the characters for danger and opportunity? A crisis is an opportunity for change, Aston.
—Are you Chinese?
— No.
The question seems so absurd to me that I let out little chuckle. From the corner of my eye, I notice Masters’s facial muscles stiffen. At my employment interview he pointed out several times how important it was to him that his employees follow the inquiry procedure guidelines down to the smallest detail. Open emotional reactions like laughter are completely unacceptable. That is, unless the client laughs first.
—Riva’s in a severe depressive phase, I say. As far as we can tell from outside, her condition has deteriorated considerably over the past few days. She is currently unable to seek out help for herself, to trust herself. You are closest to Riva, she trusts you. We can help you strengthen that trust.
Aston’s eyes are on the floor. He shrugs and shakes his head. Within a few minutes, his body language has changed from aggressive defensiveness to helplessness. I sense that he is letting go of his inner resistance. During my training, this was called a breaking point: the moment when a previously uncooperative subject begins to recognize the superior role of the therapist.
For most clients, the situation doesn’t even get that far. Even when it comes to compulsory therapy sessions, the subjects are largely cooperative. I’m repeatedly surprised by how open and earnest my Call-a-Coach™ clients can be when revealing the details of their situation to me. It’s important to them that I have all the information I need to make an informed judgment. When they conceal things, they usually don’t do so deliberately, but out of an inability to select, to classify. I listen and sort the fragments of their past into different columns: important, possibly important, unimportant. Finding his work performance strained by his numerous romantic affairs, a man in his mid-fifties once listed off all of the women in his life to me by name. There were fifty-three women. I let him talk and wrote down every one of them. Over the course of several follow-up conversations, I crossed out those he didn’t mention again. In the end, three names remained. He was completely surprised by this result and thanked me effusively, as if I had freed him from the burden of responsibility towards the other women.
—Riva is contractually obligated to attend coaching sessions upon her resignation, so that we can determine whether she is unable to work, I say. If she continues to refuse to respond to our invitations, we will be forced to take action.
—What kind of action?
Aston looks up at me.
—Required medications. Relocation. You won’t be able to keep the apartment for long.
—She won’t leave the house. She won’t show up at the sessions.
—Then we’ll do it over video. Or audio. That’s not a problem.
—She won’t pick up.
—Then take the call for her. Support Riva.
—How do you imagine that? Aston asks.
He seems ready to listen now.
—We’ll work together, I say. I’ll help you deal with Riva and you can answer our questions.
Aston nods almost imperceptibly.
—Have there been any changes in your or Riva’s life in the recent weeks and months? For example, did you fight?
—Not really, Aston says. Maybe she’s been a bit different than usual.
—What makes you say that?
—The last time there was an accident on a diving show, it was a younger colleague that Riva knew well. When the news came out that she hadn’t survived, Riva laughed and said: I would be happy.
—I would be happy?
—Yes. In the sense of: I wish I could have an accident, too.
—Did you dig any deeper?
—I didn’t think she meant it.
When I get back to the floor where my office is located, Masters intercepts me in the hallway.
—How far along are you with the document analysis? he asks.
—I’m making some headway. The analyst isn’t done with the data mining yet.
—Put more pressure on him.
Masters’s tie knot is crooked. He must have loosened it for a moment and then forgotten to tighten it again. I consider whether I should point it out.
—There are fifty-eight hours until the deadline for the as-is analysis, Masters says, as if he were reading the data.
I nod.
—In order to take the necessary course of action, we need full cooperation from Karnovsky’s partner, he adds. And don’t laugh again. During a client interview, I mean. It undermines your authority. You don’t want to appear insecure.
I nod. Masters moves sideways past me in the direction of his office. From behind, you can’t see his crooked tie, he looks neat and tidy, easily interchangeable in his dark-blue virgin wool suit. I imagine him between meetings, his office door closed as he leans back in his chair and loosens his tie to take four deep breaths.
As soon as I upload the meeting minutes onto the securecloud™, Masters immediately starts making corrections. With each revision, I feel a sharp sting, as if his notes were being written with a needle on my body.
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5
I like coming back to my apartment. I feel a great sense of pride when I use my key fob and hear the click of the lock along with the clear high-pitched tone that signals its release. My apartment is located in the twenty-fourth district, only four districts away from the first flagship buildings. I’ve been on the waiting list since I started my training at the business academy. My VIP assignment at PsySolutions is what finally got me in. Every time I walk through the door, I stop on the threshold for a moment and let my eyes wander across my little kingdom, filled with a sense of certainty, assurance that I’m on the right path.
Before I activate my tablet for the evening shift at Call-a-Coach™, I give myself some time to sit on a stool at the kitchen counter and eat a light dinner in my apartment.
I read the news while I eat, occasionally glancing out the window at the lit windows in other buildings. I can do little more than imagine the activity down on the street, since the people and various modes of transport are almost indistinguishable in the dark. At the office tower opposite my apartment, there are always individual floors and units with their lights on at night; apparently, someone is always up working. So far, I haven’t been able to recognize a regular pattern—no specific windows where the light shines every night. I notice that this inconsistency makes me nervous. As a child, I would often stare for hours at the
apartments across the street that still had their lights on at night. Seeing a lit window at night would give me a sense of security. I imagined living there and sitting at the table with the people whose silhouettes I could see. Today it feels like an unbridgeable divide. The residents of the other buildings seem like people on screens, pixel formations that exist independently of real bodies.
I usually do the evening meditation sessions from my mindfulness program seated at the kitchen counter with my eyes open. I like the way the world outside slowly blurs at the moment of relaxation, the way my gaze turns inward. How, instead of the hum of the air conditioning, I can hear the inside of my ears. It sounds like the sea, even though I know it’s just my blood circulation.
The last time I was by the sea was as a child. Every year we went with the institute to the same resort, there were several pools and a beach with grayish-white sand. The other children preferred the pools, the clear chlorinated water, the slides and diving boards. For some unknown reason, I was drawn to the sea. Even though it was embarrassing for me, I would go to the beach alone every day. I would sit hidden in a corner right next to the barrier and look out at the water.
I use this memory in my visualization exercises. Once the meditation app has started and is playing its even, metronome-like rhythm, I think about the beach. Just like I did then, I observe the sea with its complicated wave formations, its constantly breaking surface. The white foam, the algae and driftwood like sea creatures reaching out of the water from a distance.
Andorra was the only one who ever came over from the pool and sat next to me from time to time. For several minutes, we would sit there cross-legged, so close that our knees touched. But sitting always got too boring for her, she wanted to go into the water. I sometimes let myself be persuaded, but regretted it every time. As soon as I was immersed in it, the sea lost everything that was sublime about it; it was suddenly cold, salty, and dirty. It would cling to me for hours, even after I had thoroughly washed my skin and hair.
The High-Rise Diver Page 4
