Sam loved this about his mother, loved the way she saw the world even if he didn’t always buy in. When he was visiting her, there was nothing that felt better than untangling the symbolism of a bewitching dream over the morning’s coffee, his performance of begrudgingly discussing it, pretending to be too cynical but sort of believing whatever she said. If he told her he had seen a coyote while driving back to her house that night, her eyes went saucerlike with wonder.
“Oh, man,” she would say, standing to retrieve a book from the shelf, then returning to her overstuffed armchair by the fireplace, tucking the voluminous folds of her bathrobe underneath her. “That is a powerful omen.” She was a village mystic without a tribe who might benefit from her wisdom, and so Sam tried to, whenever possible, as much for her satisfaction as for his own.
He told her what had happened with the hummingbird. “Wow,” she said emphatically. Then, again: “Wow.”
“What does it mean?” Sam asked.
“Was the bird agitated?”
“I mean, it was a hummingbird,” Sam said. “I kinda feel like agitation is their natural state. And like, honestly, same.”
“I should really consult some texts before I give you my take on this,” she said. “Let me call you back.”
A few minutes later, Sam’s phone rang. “Okay,” his mother said. “The hummingbird has great significance in many different traditions. The indigenous peoples of the Andes Mountains believe that the hummingbird dies on cold nights but comes back to life when the sun rises, so it represents resurrection and rebirth. Its wings actually move in a figure eight—like the infinity symbol—which make it a powerful marker of eternity and continuity. And because it can fly backward, the hummingbird teaches us that we can look back on our past. But in Native American cultures, they believe that the hummingbird represents a spirit being who helps those in need—like a shaman.”
“It’s a symbol of a shaman?” he said. The back of his head went numb and that thing happened again, like the air in his apartment was changing in its composition, the light filtering in through his blinds growing a little brighter.
“Yes,” she said. “Why?”
“That’s—that’s just weird,” he stammered. “I was at this thing last night and people were talking about a shaman.” He considered it, talking himself out of it. “Then again, it’s LA, so people talking about a shaman probably isn’t that surprising, right? Only this guy is up in Portland, which is another weird coincidence, I guess.” He paused. “What does a shaman do?”
“Oh, a lot of things,” his mother said. “Healing people using ancient wisdom. Plant and animal medicine. Mediating between the realms.” In her steady tone, it sounded unimpeachable.
“So what’s the difference between a healer and a shaman?” Sam asked, biting his nails.
“Healers work with energy,” she said. “And a lot of people work with energy, in different ways. But a shaman is more about the spirit world—connecting with the divine realm and harnessing that power to do good in this one—in the material world.”
“Right.”
“Why are you asking me about this?” she said.
Sam rubbed his eyes. “I don’t know,” he said. “This conversation last night, and the hummingbird this morning—it feels like something. It’s sticky. I can’t explain it.”
“Maybe it’s the call,” she said.
“What call?”
“You know,” she said. “The call of the spirit world. The call of what’s beyond.”
There was a long pause. Sam looked again at his reflection in the mirror that rested in a diagonal angle in one corner of the living room. The mirror was over six feet tall and four feet wide and made of hammered steel—an artifact from his life in New York, from a much fancier apartment than this one. Like everything in his apartment, including Sam himself, he thought, it was so solid, so heavy, so unmistakably of this world.
“Or maybe a hummingbird just flew into your room,” she said to his silence.
* * *
A few hours later, Sam drove to lunch, the leafy streets of West Hollywood giving way to the scrubby strip malls that dotted Santa Monica Boulevard heading east, an airless skyline, midday bumper-to-bumper traffic for no apparent reason. He parked on Larchmont just south of Melrose, putting two hours on the meter.
Elijah was waiting for him on a bench outside Café Gratitude, wearing a rumpled blazer and leather loafers, like a walking advertisement that he’d come from New York, studying a menu as if it was written in a foreign language. Which, for all intents and purposes, it was.
“Elijah,” Sam said, and Elijah looked up and smiled, pulling him into a bro hug, the kind of half handshake, half embrace Sam had never been able to execute right.
“Sammy,” Elijah said. He squeezed Sam’s shoulder. “What the fuck is this place, huh? You’ve really gone full LA on me.”
“We’re all eating plant-based now. Has that not made it back to the East Coast?”
“Christ,” Elijah said, sizing him up. “Look at you. You look so healthy.”
“I don’t want to look healthy, Elijah. I want to look thin.”
Elijah waved a hand dismissively. “Shut up,” he said. “Let’s get a table.”
Elijah was Sam’s book agent, and he was a good one, or so Sam hoped, although to be fair he was the only one Sam had ever had. He had signed Sam as a client when he was just a year out of college and had only a few freelance clips under his belt. Together they’d shaped the proposal for what became Sam’s first book, the memoir about his troubled adolescence and efforts to get clean. Elijah had rightly identified that Sam’s story fit tidily into an existing genre: addiction memoir was a reliable bet, and the book had sold to a major publisher. But they hadn’t seen eye to eye in their subsequent conversations about Sam’s next book. When Elijah had written him to say that he would be in town for a few meetings, Sam had seized the opportunity to meet with him in person. He would sell him on this book. And if not that, at least it would be a free lunch.
“So,” Sam said after they sat down. “Did you read the pages I sent you?”
Elijah made a humming noise with his mouth. “I did, yeah,” he said. “I’m just not entirely sure you have it yet, Sammy. I don’t know the story you’re trying to tell. I don’t really see you on the page.”
Sam felt his shoulders arch reflexively. He forced them down his back. “What does that mean? It’s my story. How can I not be on the page?”