He opened his eyes. It was morning, but still early. His phone, charging on the nightstand, was ringing. It was Kat, her contact photo a picture of the two of them from some New Year’s they’d spent together years earlier, both grinning goofily, and for a moment Sam was struck by how young they looked. Then he picked up.
“Hello?” he said blearily. He knew she was upset before she spoke, just from the way she inhaled. “What’s wrong?” he said.
“I just had the worst panic attack,” she said. Her breath was shallow.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know—I just—I woke up early with this horrible weight on my chest and I couldn’t stop thinking about that climate change report and how, like, incredibly fucked up the world has become, and then I started thinking about my own ticking clock and how much pressure I’m under from everyone—from my mom, from society, from all the girls at my agency—to have babies when, like, what kind of future would I really be giving them, you know? I mean, kids are getting gunned down in their schools, like, every week.” She groaned, like it was too much to take in. “If you even make it through childhood, you’re inheriting a planet that we’ve already destroyed. Everything is just so bad right now. Everything is bad and I have to go to Melissa Schuman’s fucking wedding this weekend and pack my tits into a truly heinous bridesmaid’s dress and pretend like the world isn’t falling apart, and it’s just like, why? For what?”
“You don’t have to have kids,” Sam said. “So many women—so many people—don’t have kids. That’s okay.”
“But I do want them. I just don’t want them to have to live in this world.”
“I’m so sorry, Kat,” he said. “I really am.” He wanted to offer a solution of some kind—to tell her to stop reading the news, to be in nature, to meditate—but he knew it would be trite and unhelpful. Being a friend didn’t always mean solving the problem. Sometimes it just meant bearing witness.
“Don’t you get stressed out about this shit?” she said, like an accusation.
Sam closed his eyes. “Most of the time it all feels like it’s happening really far away from me. Like the world is something that’s happening to other people, but not to me. Maybe it’s just that there’s so much clutter already in my brain that I can’t take in anything else. As if all of my anxieties are a barrier between me and all the things I should be worried about.” He felt selfish and small. “Sometimes I wonder if this is just what being a person feels like. I thought it would be different.”
Kat took a long beat with this. “I am definitely not a model of mental health but you sound super depressed,” she finally said. “Maybe you should go back on the Wellbutrin.”
“Oh, no. It made my anxiety even worse. I was twitching.”
“Lexapro?”
“My dick completely stopped working.”
“You’re having sex? With America more divided than ever?”
“That’s not the point.”
“What does your therapist say?”
“I stopped going a few months ago.”
“Why? You didn’t tell me that.”
“It just wasn’t productive anymore.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” he said. “Kat, I don’t want to talk about my problems anymore. I’m so tired of listening to myself complain.” He took a deep breath. “I don’t know how to fix it for you, but at least know that you’re not alone. I feel like I’m coming apart most of the time, too.”
“What do we do?”
“I don’t know,” Sam said. “I really don’t want to be like this.”
* * *
After he got off the phone with Kat, he fell back asleep. When he awakened a few hours later, sunlight beaming into the bedroom, petals on the floor again, he saw a message from Buck on his phone.
Going to meet the shaman next Monday, it read. Want to come? He’d sent it early that morning, while Sam had been on the phone with Kat. How funny. It made him feel like there must have been some electricity in the air in that moment, some energetic field that they were tapped into, an invisible current of hope and need. The problem; the answer.
For once, Sam didn’t overthink it. There was nothing to think about, really. He just replied.
Yes, he wrote, and as he typed, his fingers didn’t feel like they belonged to him—as if something was moving them, something that was not him but wasn’t not him, either, and when he looked down at the screen to see what he had written, it was so plaintive it actually surprised him.
It said, Take me with you.
4
Magical Thinking
The shaman wore khakis.
And a collared shirt. And a V-neck sweater. And round eyeglasses. He had close-cropped hair and white teeth. He could have been a substitute teacher, or a suburban dad on a rare night out, or the new boyfriend your divorced aunt brings to Thanksgiving dinner. He was nondescript, unmemorable, square.
His name was Jacob.
They were at an upscale farm-to-table restaurant in Portland, crowded with good-looking young people. The shaman had suggested the place, and now that they were there, the whole thing felt so bougie, much more so than Sam had anticipated, although given Buck’s income bracket it probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise that even his shaman would pick a restaurant that had Aesop hand soap in the bathroom.
“So, Jacob,” Buck said. “Tell us about your work.”
“Sure,” Jacob said. He wiped his mouth and leaned in closer. Like puppets on strings, Sam and Buck both leaned in, too. Jacob’s voice dropped an octave.
“I operate a clinical practice in the field of transdimensional intercession,” Jacob said.
Buck and Sam looked at each other, then back at Jacob. “Right,” Sam said. “What does that mean?”
“Well, let’s start with the first part—transdimensional,” Jacob said. “If you think about the world we live in, the physical world, that’s one dimension. So—I don’t know what you believe, and frankly, it doesn’t matter—but since you’re here, you probably believe that there’s stuff happening, sometimes, that you can’t necessarily see or manipulate in the real world, in this dimension. So maybe you call that God. Maybe it’s many gods. Maybe you call it energy. Maybe for you it’s memory or emotion—subtler things, that everyone agrees exist. But whatever it is, not everything that feels real is right at our fingertips all the time, right? There are things that exist outside of real-world experience, but just because you don’t see them doesn’t mean they aren’t real.”