Part One
1
An Invitation
“He fixes everything that’s wrong with you in three days.”
This was how it began: casually, not as a grand pronouncement framed as a life-changing event, but just an off-the-cuff remark, and later Sam would wonder how his life might have gone if he hadn’t overheard it, or if he’d never been there at all, at this dinner party at the home of an architect somewhere in the Hollywood Hills. There were so many alternate realities in which Sam had made other plans, or failed to look at his calendar and forgotten about it, or just decided not to go and canceled at the last minute—after all, not going to things was one of the few great pleasures of adult life—and then what would have happened? Everything would have been different.
But he had gone to the dinner party. It was a breezy winter night during that hopeful string of days in January just before everyone fully scraps their New Year’s resolutions, the cheer of the holidays a recent enough memory to sustain a few more days of good-naturedness, and the dinner party had the feel, as so many things in Los Angeles did, of having been cast, populated with colorful characters from different backgrounds and industries who the host had hoped would find some conversational common ground at the seams of their interests. There was the heir apparent to a casino empire; a character actress Sam recognized from a guest arc on a Netflix show; the architect’s ex-lover, an interior designer who had done a capsule collection for West Elm or something; and then Sam, a writer—and probably, he had sussed out, the least fancy person in the room. None of the guests really knew one another, only the host, which made the evening feel a little disjointed, nobody being certain where they fit.
Or maybe, Sam thought, everyone else was actually having a perfectly lovely time and it was just him forever lingering on the fringes of connection, unable to belong—who could say? That wasn’t the point.
The point was: at the moment Sam heard it, this odd comment cutting through the din of silverware scraping against dishes and the hum of jazz from an overhead speaker, something shifted almost imperceptibly in the room, like a lens refocusing on its subject.
“What do you mean?” Sam asked, in a high, strange voice that didn’t sound like him. He had been quiet for most of the evening, sitting stick-straight with his belly sucked in and his chest puffed out to try to make himself look thinner, picking at the grilled chicken breast and asparagus on his plate as conversations bloomed around him, amiable chatter about misspent winter holidays and the Republican sweep of the recent election, which was worrying to the people at the party because they were liberal but not too worrying because they were all, as far as Sam could tell, rich. Now suddenly he was fully engaged, enough so to interrupt what had previously been a private dialogue between the architect and a pretty but brittle older woman, a stack of Cartier love bracelets clanking on her thin wrists, who was seated between the two of them.
Sam dropped his voice down an octave. “I’m so sorry, that was rude of me—I just totally inserted myself into your conversation,” he said. “But what does that mean—he fixes everything that’s wrong with you in three days?”
The architect extended his hands outward as if to say, Who knows? His name was Buck, and he was handsome in a gently creased, effortless way: ruggedly built, with salt-and-pepper hair and a puckish smile, and eyes that hinted at magic, and that particular tendency Sam loved in other gay men, the ability to code-switch from masculine to luxuriously queeny depending on who he was speaking to, his gruff tenor turning suddenly velvety.
“He’s some healer,” Buck said. “A master shaman. A client in Marin County spent a weekend with him and said it was the most extraordinary experience of her life.”
Sam blinked a couple times. “Right, but what does he do? I mean, fixing everything that’s wrong with people! Does he claim to, like, cure terminal illnesses?”
“No, no,” Buck said. “Maybe I said it wrong.” He dabbed at the corner of his mouth with a napkin. “My client said that the shaman heals other conditions. Depression, anxiety, addiction, trauma—that sort of thing. Emotional stuff. She was in the absolute grips of postpartum depression and after three days with the shaman she was cured. Like ten years of therapy in a single weekend, she said. He works in small groups, doing private retreats. I was thinking about hiring him for my fiftieth next month.” He laughed. “I probably shouldn’t go into fifty like this.”
“But how?” Sam said, a little desperately. He looked around at the other guests, who were now watching this exchange, rapt, as it assumed a new intensity that verged on impolite. “I mean, if you could do ten years of therapy in a single weekend, wouldn’t everyone be doing that with this shaman instead of, like, going to therapy?”
“Five stars on Yelp,” someone said.
Quickly the conversation turned back to easier subjects, and for a moment Sam considered trying to keep the discussion going, but he didn’t know how to do so elegantly, and so he just dropped it, and this felt deeply weird to him—that no one was even remotely curious about getting more details about this mysterious master shaman who could fix everything that was wrong with you in three days.
But then, a few minutes later, the woman next to Sam brought it up again. “You sounded very curious about the shaman,” she said. Maybe she’d read it on him that he wanted to keep talking about it.
“It’s just not the sort of thing you hear every day,” Sam said. “And I’m interested in...how people change, I guess. If people can change.”
“What would you change about yourself if you could?”
Sam took in the question. Everything, he thought. “I don’t know,” he said instead.
“Buck said you’re a writer,” she said. “That you published a novel.”
“Yes. Well, no. Not a novel,” Sam said. “A memoir.”
“What’s the difference?”
“A novel is fiction,” Sam said. “A memoir is an autobiography, but it reads more like fiction. It’s a person telling a story from their life.”
She studied him appraisingly. “You look a little young to have written a memoir,” she said, pronouncing the word in an affected Francophone style, mem-wah. “Famous parents? Or did you fall into a ravine mountain-climbing and claw your way to safety or something?”
“No,” he said, feeling his face grow warm. “Just a colorful account of all the dumb things I did when I was a teenager in New York.” This was usually how he explained it when it came up in these situations. He balled his hands into little fists under the table.
“I knew you weren’t a mountain climber,” she said, satisfied. “Well, I’ll read it anyway.” She took a sip of her wine. “Will you write more books?”