“I don’t know if I can take that in,” Sam said. “My anxiety is already so bad just scraping through my life as it is. If I truly engage the possibility that the planet is dying, it will incapacitate me and I’ll end up just completely withdrawing from the world and never leaving my apartment again. You know?”
“But isn’t that exact attitude how we ended up here?” Kat said. “None of us can accept how fucked the earth is so we just keep, like, busying ourselves with work and life, pretending like it’s going to be fine! I just keep thinking, like, why is my boss sending me 9:00 p.m. emails about this new business pitch tomorrow when we’re in the middle of a mass extinction event? And when can I tell him to fuck off and just move to a commune in Southeast Asia or something to live in peace until the Big One hits?”
“I’ll meet you there,” Sam said. “I’m ready to go analog.” He thought about it. “Although you know they won’t have pressed juices or a spin studio on the commune.”
“But I only need those things in the first place to distract myself from the fact that the world is ending,” Kat said. “Which is probably why my credit card is maxed out. And did I tell you two new stretch marks on my thigh popped overnight? Literally overnight, Sam.”
“Having a body is the worst.”
“The worst,” she echoed, like it was a chant. “My New Year’s resolution was to be more gentle with mine, so I’ve been following all these body-positivity activists on Instagram, right? And I’m dying to believe that they’ve found a way to truly accept themselves and embrace their curves and find health at every size, but I just don’t understand how it’s possible.” Her voice dropped. “Like, am I really just supposed to look at some pictures of bigger-bodied women and read a Rupi Kaur poem and undo a literal fucking lifetime of having it messaged to me by society that my value as a woman is contingent on the size and shape of my body?”
“I don’t know,” Sam said. “I don’t think gay men are told that by society so much as we’re told that by each other. Which is fucking harrowing, too.” He sighed. “And part of me just wants to pull the rip cord and stop habitually undereating to maintain a body weight that’s within the bounds of gay-acceptable, but if I do that, will I ever find a husband? But will I ever find a husband anyway? So wouldn’t it be better to just be fat and happy?”
“More important,” Kat said, “does any of this even matter when everything is on fire all the time?”
“I wish I had never been born into a body,” Sam said. “My soul should have been born into a haunted painting, or a cursed pendant that torments a family for generations.”
“A haunted painting!” Kat said, like it was a bright idea. “I’d be so much better at that than I am at being a human woman.”
Sam paused. “I went to this fancy dinner party tonight and this guy was talking about some shaman who fixes all of your emotional problems in three days.”
“Dude,” Kat said. “How do we get in to see him?”
“It gets spookier,” Sam said. “He lives in Portland.”
“No shit. Do you think I’ve seen him at my barre class?”
Sam laughed. “But do you think it’s possible? To just, like, fix people?”
“Of course not. If it was, rich people would just, like, hire a shaman and be happy,” Kat said. “And all the rich people I know are miserable.” A horn honked in the background. “Learn to drive!” she yelled. “Sorry. Not you.”
Sam pulled into his garage. “The guy invited me to go up to Portland and meet the shaman. Should I do it?”
“Absolutely,” Kat said. “Like, what if you do it and you’re just, like, one of those people who floats through life on a cloud? What if he makes you, like, not neurotic and self-destructive and body-image-dysmorphic and burdened and you just, like, love your body and feel good about yourself and shit?”
“I think if my anxiety and depression were going anywhere, they would have gone there by now, right?” Sam said. “Like, I’m pretty sure this is just how I am.” He drummed his fingers on the dashboard. “You know. That sweet spot between normal and completely fucking losing it all the time.”
“‘Normal’ is bullshit,” Kat said. “It’s, like, something Big Pharma invented in the ’60s to make consumers feel bad about themselves. You sound exactly like everybody else who’s at least semiconscious as we collectively speed toward the cliff with our brakes cut—Fuck, there’s never anywhere to park.” He could hear the murmur of rain splashing on the windows, her car pulling to a stop. “I’m late for my yin class. Let me call you back.”
* * *
Sam sat in the car for a long moment after the call ended, staring ahead, lost in thought. It wasn’t possible, this idea that you could completely change in a single weekend.
He knew that.
2
Hummingbird
The second sign came the very next morning, when Sam awakened to find something unusual in his bedroom.
The window by his bed, slatted and casement-style, with a rusty old crank that groaned when he turned it, had been open all through the mild Los Angeles winter, which had allowed the bougainvillea that crept up the facade of his apartment building to wrap its tendrils around the narrow glass panes. This produced the illusion of waking up each morning in a garden, the floor littered with a few pale pink petals. Some months earlier he’d opened the window to let a little fresh air in and had just never closed it. He liked feeling both outdoors and in, liked the smells of lavender and smoke that drifted into the room.
But now there was something in his room, a form furiously beating its wings and slapping against his window from the inside. When Sam first stirred, disoriented and still half asleep, he wasn’t sure what it was, but he could see its frantic motions. Was it an enormous flying cockroach? Were those a thing in California?
Yet when he sat up, reaching for his glasses, he realized it wasn’t an insect at all. It was a hummingbird, iridescent blue with a long pincerlike beak. She was frightened, insensibly smacking against the glass and bougainvillea with startling force. It would not have shocked Sam if the window frame had cracked from the thrust of her movements. She was just an inch or so from the opening in the window, but the spiny fingers of the bougainvillea’s vines and leaves had obscured her exit route, leaving her trapped.
Sam moved closer to her and her movements grew more panicked. He reached out with one hand as if to whisk her outside, but she flew out into the room, circling frantically over his bed, then making a run for the other window, which was closed. She whipped against the glass helplessly, urgently, as if possessed.