Nine Perfect Strangers (32 page)

56

 

Yao

“What are they
doing
?” asked Masha.

“I think Tony is going to try to launch off their backs like he's in a game of football,” said Yao worriedly.

“That's crazy,” said Masha. “He's too heavy! He will hurt them!”

“They're hungry and tired,” said Yao. “They're not thinking straight.”

“It's so obvious what they should do,” said Masha.

“Yes,” said Yao. Lars had the right idea.

“Why are they not building a simple human pyramid?” said Masha.

Yao looked at her to see if she was serious.

“They are just not that smart,” said Masha. “This is the problem we face, Yao. They are not smart people.”

57

 

Frances

Napoleon and Ben had positioned themselves beneath the rafter, their heads lowered, their bodies tensed.

“Should we jump at the same time?” suggested Napoleon. “Give you more height?”

“No,” said Tony. “Just stand still.”

“I don't think this is such a good idea,” said Carmel.

“It's a ludicrous idea,” said Lars.

“Now that you mention it,” began Heather, but it was too late.

Tony ran from the doorway at full pace.

He leaped up vertically, one knee dug into Napoleon's back, the other into Ben's shoulder. For a fraction of a second, Frances saw the young man within the old. The athlete he'd once been was there in the length of his body and the resolve in his eyes.

He got up there! Impossibly high! He was going to do it! What a
hero
! One hand slapped the rafter, but then he crashed to the floor on his side with an almighty thud. Napoleon and Ben staggered in opposite directions, muffling curses.

“That wasn't at all predictable,” sighed Lars.

Tony sat up, cradling one elbow, his face as white as toothpaste.

Frances got onto her knees next to him, to be supportive, even though her knees crunched. “Are you okay?”

“I'm fine,” he said through gritted teeth. “I think I just dislocated my shoulder.”

Frances's stomach turned at the sight of his shoulder protruding at a strange, distressing angle.

“Don't move it,” said Heather.

“No,” said Tony. “I need to move it. It's going to pop back in when I move it.”

He moved his arm. There was an audible pop.

Frances toppled in a dead faint straight into his lap.

58

 

Zoe

Zoe's poor dad clutched his back where he'd just borne the entire weight of one Smiley Hogburn. She was kind of surprised that her mother had allowed that little exercise to go ahead. Maybe it was the drugs, or her crazy fury over the drugs, or maybe it was just that she and her dad were starstruck by meeting an AFL legend.

“Sorry, everyone,” said Tony. “Last night I dreamed I was playing again. This felt … this felt like it would be easy.” He gently patted poor Frances on the cheek. “Wake up, lady writer.”

Frances sat up self-consciously from Tony's lap and pressed a single fingertip to the center of her forehead. She looked around her. “Did we get the package down?”

“Not quite,” said Zoe's dad, who never wanted anyone to feel like a failure. “Very close!”

Zoe looked around for something to throw up at the rafter. She picked up a three-quarters-full bottle of water, held it in the palm of her hand, and took aim.

She hit the package straight on. It fell into Ben's hands.

“Nice shot.” He handed it to her.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Open it,” instructed Jessica, as if Zoe had been intending to just look at it for a while.

The package had that firm, soft consistency of something encased in bubble wrap. She fumbled with the masking tape and tore at the brown paper.

“Careful,” said her mother. “It might be breakable.”

Zoe pulled at the tape on the bubble wrap and was reminded of opening a birthday gift, surrounded by people at a party, all eyes on her and Zach. Tomorrow was their twenty-first birthday. It might be time to reclaim it. She thought that maybe, once they got back to Melbourne, she would tell her parents that she wanted to go to La Fattoria for pizza to celebrate her twenty-first. It felt suddenly as if it might be possible to do some of the things they'd stopped doing after Zach died. It wouldn't be the same without him, it would never be the same, but it felt possible
.
She would still take off the olives and leave them along the edge of her plate for Zach.

And now she really, really felt like pizza. Her mouth watered at the thought of pepperoni. She would never take pepperoni for granted again.

She unrolled the bubble wrap. Inside was a small hand-painted wooden doll of a little girl wearing a scarf around her head and an apron around her waist. She had red circles on her cheeks and quizzically angled eyebrows. She seemed to be saying to Zoe, “Uh, hello?”

Zoe turned it around and held it upside down.

“It's a Russian doll,” said her mother.

“Oh, right.” Zoe twisted the top and bottom halves of the doll in opposite directions to reveal the smaller doll inside.

She handed the halves to her mother, and opened the next doll.

Within moments there was a row of five dolls of increasingly smaller sizes on the floor between them.

“Wait, is that the last one?” said Carmel. “It's empty. Normally there is a tiny final doll that you can't open.”

“No message?” said Frances. “I thought the security code would be inside the last one!”

“So what the hell does that mean then?” said Ben.

“I don't know.” Zoe tried to suppress a yawn. She was all at once exhausted. She longed for her own bed, for her phone, for pizza, for all this to be over.

“Okay, this is really starting to piss me off now,” said Lars.

59

 

Masha

Masha saw Yao's smile of relief fade from his face as he watched the screen.

“But wait, why isn't the code in the doll?” He turned to Masha. “The plan was to put the security code in the doll!”

Masha lifted up the last tiny doll from where it sat on her keyboard and held it between her fingertips. “Yes, you're right, that was the original plan.”

“So … but why isn't it there?” Yao's eyebrows were drawn together just like those of the doll.

“I had an epiphany,” said Masha. “While I was meditating. Suddenly I knew what needed to be done in order for them to achieve true transformation after their psychedelic experiences. This—what is happening to these nine people right now—is quite literally a koan. It is a koan
in practice
.” He must surely see the brilliance of it.

Yao stared at her without comprehension.

“A koan is a paradox that leads to enlightenment!” said Masha. “A koan demonstrates the inadequacy of their logical thinking!”

“I know what a koan is,” said Yao slowly.

“Once they surrender and accept that there is no solution, well then, they will be free. That is the central paradox of this koan,” said Masha. “
The solution is no solution.
”

“The solution is no solution,” repeated Yao.

“Exactly. Do you remember this koan? A master who lived as a hermit on a mountain was asked by a man, ‘What is the way?' and the master said, ‘What a fine mountain this is.' The man felt frustrated. He said, ‘I am not asking you about the mountain, but about the way!' The master said, ‘So long as you cannot go beyond the mountain, my son, you cannot reach the way.'”

“So in this case the mountain is … the security door?”

“Take detailed notes,” said Masha impatiently. She pointed at the screen and at his notepad. “Don't forget. This is very important for the book we will write.”

“They've been in there for too long,” said Yao. “They're hungry and tired. They are going to lose their minds.”

“
Exactly
,” said Masha. She herself had not eaten now for more days than she could remember and she had not slept since the night before the therapy sessions. She touched Yao lightly in the center of his chest with her finger. She knew the power of her touch on him. She had not yet fully exploited that power but she would if necessary. “
Exactly
. They must lose their minds! You know this. The self is an illusion. The self does not exist.”

“Sure, okay,” said Yao. “But, Masha—”

“They must
surrender
,” said Masha.

“I think they're going to report us to the police,” said Yao.

Masha laughed. “Remember the Rumi quote, Yao.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I'll meet you there
. Isn't that beautiful?”

“I don't think the justice system is interested in fields,” said Yao.

“We can't give up on them, Yao.” Masha gestured at the screen. “They have all come so far.”

“So how long are you planning on keeping them locked up?” Yao's voice sounded thin and strained, as if he'd become an old man.

“That's not the right question,” said Masha tenderly, her eyes on the computer monitor, as some of the guests gathered around the door to the studio. They were taking it in turns to punch in different combinations of numbers. Lars punched the door with his fist like a spoiled child.

“I think I should let them out now,” said Yao.

“They must open that door themselves,” she said.

“They can't,” said Yao.

“They can,” said Masha.

She thought about the sunny Australian lives these people had been handed at birth. They had only ever known supermarket shelves that overflowed with choice. They had never seen an empty grocery store with nothing but boxes of Indian tea. They did not
need
attributes like ingenuity or resourcefulness. The clock struck five and they turned off their computers and went to the beach because they did not have a hundred university-educated candidates all too willing to take their job off their hands.

“Oh yes, I did that for U2 tickets once,” an Australian woman at Masha's work said when Masha described the horrendous queues that lasted for days at the embassies and how she and her husband took turns to wait, and Masha said, “Yes, very much the same.”

She remembered how, when they were right in the middle of the application process, her husband received a card in the mail to report to the KGB office.

“It will be fine,” her husband said. “Do not worry.”

It was like he was already an Australian, the phrase “no worries” built into his psyche before he even knew the words, but in the Soviet era people had received those cards and never come back.

When Masha dropped him off outside that tall gray building he kissed her and said, “Go home,” but she didn't go home; she sat in that
car for five hours, the simmering terror in her heart misting up the windows, and she would never forget the relief that detonated through her body when she saw him walking down the street toward her, grinning like a boy on an Australian beach.

Only a few months later she and her husband stood at the airport with American dollars hidden in their socks while a sneering customs officer upturned the entire contents of their carefully packed suitcases, because they were traitors betraying their country by leaving, and her grandmother's necklace broke and beads scattered like pieces of her heart.

Only those who have feared they will lose everything feel true gratitude for their lucky lives.

“We must terrify them,” she told Yao. “That is what they need.”

“Terrify them?” said Yao. His voice quavered. He was probably tired and hungry himself. “I don't think we should terrify our guests.”

Masha stood. He looked up at her; like her child, like her lover. She could feel the unbreakable spiritual connection between them. He would never defy her.

“Tonight will be their dark night of the soul,” she said.

“Dark night of the soul?”

“A dark night of the soul is essential for rapid spiritual progress,” said Masha. “You've had your own dark night of the soul. I've had mine. We need to break them before we can make them whole again. You know this, Yao.”

She saw the flicker of doubt in his eyes. She stepped closer to him, so close that they were almost touching.

“Tomorrow they will be reborn,” she said.

“I just don't know—”

Masha stepped closer still and for the merest fraction of a second she let her eyes drop to his lips. Let the darling boy think the impossible was possible.

“We are doing something extraordinary for these people, Yao,” said Masha.

“I'm going to let them out,” said Yao, but there was no conviction in his voice.

“No,” said Masha. She lifted her hand tenderly to his neck, careful not to reveal the silvery glint of the syringe. “No, you're not.”

60

 

Frances

Frances twirled an empty water bottle on her finger, round and round, until it flew off and skittered across the floor.

“Stop that,” said Carmel severely, and Frances could tell that was the voice Carmel used when one of her little girls was being annoying.

“Sorry,” she said at the same time as Carmel said, “Sorry.”

It was, according to Napoleon's watch, 9
P.M.
They had been in here now for just over thirty hours. They hadn't eaten for over forty-eight hours.

People had begun complaining of headaches, light-headedness, fatigue, and nausea. Waves of irritability swept the room at intervals. People bickered, then apologized, then snapped again. Voices quivered with emotion and skidded into hysterical laughter. Some people drifted off to sleep and then woke with a loud gasp. Napoleon was the only one who stayed consistently calm. It felt like he was their unofficially appointed leader, even though he wasn't issuing any instructions.

“Don't drink too much water,” Heather had told Frances when she'd
seen her returning from the bathroom after filling her water bottle yet again. “Only drink when you're thirsty. You can die from drinking too much water because you flush out all the salt in your system. You can go into cardiac arrest.”

“Okay,” said Frances resignedly. “Thank you.” She'd thought drinking lots of water would stave off the hunger pangs, although she wasn't as hungry as she thought she would be. The desire for food had peaked just before they'd found the useless Russian-doll package and then gradually begun to wane until it became more abstract; she felt like she needed
something
, but food didn't seem to be the answer.

Her friend Ellen was a fan of intermittent fasting and she'd told Frances that she always experienced feelings of euphoria. Frances didn't feel euphoric, but her mind felt scrubbed clean, clear and bright. Was that the drugs or the fasting?

Whatever it was, the clarity was an illusion, because she was having difficulty differentiating what had and hadn't happened since she'd gotten here. Did she dream of her bloody nose in the pool? She hadn't really seen her dad last night, had she? Of course she hadn't. Yet the memory of talking with her father felt more vivid than her memory of the bloody nose in the pool.

How could that be?

Time slowed.

And slowed.

Slowed.

To.

A.

Point.

That.

Was.

So.

Slow.

It.

Was.

Unsustainable.

Soon time would stop, literally stop, and they would all be trapped in a single moment forever. That didn't seem too fantastical a thought after last night's smoothie experience, when time had elongated and contracted, over and over, like a piece of elastic being stretched and released.

There was a long heated discussion about when and if they should turn the lights out.

It had not occurred to Frances that there was no natural light down here. It was Napoleon who'd figured it out; he'd been the one to find the light switch this morning when he woke up. He said he'd crawled around the room on his hands and knees and run his hands around the walls until he found it. When he flicked the switch to demonstrate for them, the room was plunged into a thick impenetrable darkness that felt like death.

Frances voted for the lights to go off at midnight. She wanted to sleep: sleeping would pass the time, and she knew she'd never sleep with those blazing downlights. Others thought that they shouldn't risk sleeping; they should be “ready to take action.”

“Who knows what they're planning next?” Jessica shot a hostile look at the camera. At some point she had scrubbed off all her makeup. She looked ten years younger, younger even than Zoe; too young to be pregnant, too young to be wealthy. Without the makeup, the cosmetic enhancements looked like acne: a teenage blight that would pass when she grew up.

“I don't think anything sinister is going to happen in the middle of the night,” Carmel said.

“We were woken up for the starlight meditation,” said Heather. “It's entirely possible.”

“I liked the starlight meditation,” said Carmel.

Heather sighed. “Carmel, you really need to kind of reframe your thinking about what's going on here.”

“I vote for lights off,” said Frances in a low voice. Napoleon had
showed them where the microphones were installed in the corners of the room. He'd told them all, in whispers, that if they wanted to share something they didn't want heard they should sit in the center of the room with their backs to the camera and keep their voices as low as possible. “I think we should give Masha the impression of total
acceptance.
”

“I agree,” whispered Zoe. “She's exactly like my year eleven maths teacher. You always had to let her think she'd won.”

“I'd prefer lights on,” said Tony. “We're at a disadvantage if we can't see.”

In the end, there were more in favor of “lights on.”

So here they all sat. Lights on. Occasional low murmurs of conversation like you'd hear in a library or a doctor's waiting room.

Long periods of silence.

Frances's body kept twitching and then she would remember that there was no book to pick up, no movie to switch on or bedside lamp to switch off. Sometimes she'd be almost on her feet, before she realized that the decisive thing she was planning on doing was
leaving the room
. Her subconscious refused to accept her incarceration.

Carmel came and sat next to Frances. “Do you think we've gone into ketosis yet?” she asked.

“What's ketosis?” asked Frances. She knew perfectly well what it was.

“It's where your body starts to burn fat because—”

“You don't need to lose weight,” interrupted Frances. She tried not to snap, but she had not been thinking about food and now she was.

“I used to be thinner,” said Carmel. She stretched her perfectly normal legs out in front of her.

“We all used to be thinner,” sighed Frances.

“Last night I hallucinated that I didn't have a body,” said Carmel. “I feel like there was maybe a message my subconscious was trying to give me.”

“It's so obscure. What could that message
possibly
be?” mused Frances.

Carmel laughed. “I know.” She grabbed the flesh on her stomach and squeezed. “I'm stuck in this cycle of self-loathing.”

“What did you do before you had children?” asked Frances. She wanted to know if there was more to Carmel than just hating her body and having four children. Early in Frances's career, a friend complained that the mothers in her books were too one-dimensional and Frances had thought secretly,
Don't they only have one dimension?
She'd tried to give them more depth after that. She even gave them the leading roles, although it was hard to know where to put the children while their mothers were falling in love. When her editorial notes came back, Jo had written all over the margins:
Who is looking after the kids?
Frances had to go back through the manuscript and make babysitting arrangements. It was annoying.

“Private equity,” said Carmel.

Goodness. Frances wouldn't have picked that. She wasn't even quite sure what it
meant.
How were they going to find a middle ground between private equity and romance?

“Did you … like it?” Surely that was safe.

“Loved it,” said Carmel. “
Loved
it. It was a long time ago now, of course. Now, I've got a part-time, entry-level job which is basically just data entry to try to keep the cash coming in. But back then I was kind of a high-flyer, or on my way to becoming one. I worked long hours, I'd get up at five every day and swim laps before work, and I ate whatever the hell I wanted, and I found women who talked about their weight excruciatingly boring.”

Frances smiled.

“I
know
. And then I got married and had kids and I got totally swallowed up by this ‘Mum' persona. We were only meant to have two, but my husband wanted a son, so we kept trying, and I ended up with four girls—and then out of the blue, my husband said he wasn't attracted to me anymore and he left.”

Frances said nothing for a moment as she considered the particular cruelty of this kind of all-too-common midlife breakup and how it crushed a woman's self-worth. “Were you still attracted to
him
?”

Carmel thought about it. “Some days.” She put her thumb to the empty spot on her ring finger. “I still loved him. I know I did, because some days I'd think, Oh, what a relief, I still love him, it would be so inconvenient if I didn't love him.”

Frances thought of all the things she could say: You'll meet someone else. You don't need a man to complete you. Your body does not define you. You need to fall in love with you. Let's talk about something other than men, Carmel, before we fail the Bechdel test.

She said, “You know what? I think you are most
definitely
in ketosis.”

Carmel smiled, and at that moment the room went dark.