“Thank you, Stella. And thank you for the invitation to come on this journey,” Hugh said with a polite smile, clearly satisfied with her answer.
The spiritual assistants emerged from the shadows of the dome with trays of large blue soup bowls with handles on either side. They proceeded to place the heavy china in front of each person, including Stella. Janey looked into it to find a bizarre concoction of brown sludge with the distinctive smell of burnt soil and mushrooms. Janey was surprised to see that Stella was partaking of the liquid. She’d assumed that someone would need to remain the grown-up in this room. And as if she’d read her mind, Stella looked up from her own bowl and smiled directly at Janey. “In this ceremony, I will be going on the journey with you. It’s of the utmost importance that the guide is on the same spiritual plane as the students. Now we drink. Don’t sip and don’t chug, but find a healthy balance between the two and let the medicine slide down your throat. You may be tempted to hold your nose but resist. The sense of smell is so, so important to this journey.”
Janey had never heard the word “journey” uttered so many times.
“Lift your cups, close your eyes, and let the medicine do its work.” Janey lifted the bowl to her mouth with both hands holding on to the handles. It was warm but not hot. She did as Stella instructed, closed her eyes and let the liquid slide into her mouth, ignoring the smell, disregarding the somewhat chunky consistency. With her bowl nearly drained, Janey felt her gag reflex kick in and made a small sound. Within seconds she felt hands on her shoulders, gently massaging the muscles around her shoulder blades and neck. She knew without turning around that it was Stella, who then leaned down and placed a necklace with a fine chain tenderly around Janey’s neck.
“Let’s keep our eyes closed, everyone.” Stella was back to the middle of the circle. “And take a series of deep clearing breaths to let our digestive systems begin to do their work.”
Janey stretched her legs out and played with pointing and flexing her naked toes, enjoying the sensation of her thighs and calves sinking into the grass, waiting for the show to begin. She felt the same urgent anticipation she’d felt as a teenager when she smoked a joint with Beau and went to go see a Pink Floyd show at the Charleston planetarium.
Time became flexible from then on, and Janey couldn’t grasp what was happening in any sequential order. Her eyes grew heavy and felt like they were closed for an hour, but it could have been thirty seconds. She stroked the soft grass, then moved her fingers to her face to smell the dirt on them.
After what could have been a week, Stella cleared her throat.
“Let us now call on the moon goddess, Diana, to guide us on our individual paths tonight. We cannot see her—the new moon means she’s hiding from us—but we can certainly feel her power, and as the eclipse draws nearer she will reveal herself.”
When Janey opened her eyes she noticed that a metal bucket had been placed in front of her. She had just a few seconds to wonder why it was there before she understood. Her body began convulsing and retching as she vomited into the bin. She couldn’t look into the bucket without getting ill again, but it felt as if the things coming out of her body were not things she had actually eaten. All around her, everyone was doing the same thing. And though throwing up was one of Janey’s least favorite things, she didn’t feel self-conscious about doing it in a room full of strangers.
Once everyone was finished, Stella began again. Janey had noticed the shaman hadn’t vomited, or if she had, she’d left the room to do it in private.
“Roll onto your sides. Lie in the fetal position until you feel ready to stand. Feel your flow, wander around, feel your bodies. Feel your neighbors’ bodies.”
Janey rose to her feet and took a moment to steady herself, throwing her arm in front of her to regain her balance. She didn’t feel intoxicated, rather the exact opposite: all of her senses were heightened instead of dulled. She must have had her eyes closed longer than everyone else. Ivy was already lying belly down on the ground, topless, while two spiritual assistants took turns gently smacking her back with wooden sticks. Janey put one foot in front of the other and made her way to the spiral staircase, holding tight to the railing the whole way down.
On the third floor she found CJ standing in front of a floor-length mirror twirling like a ballerina and laughing hysterically. Janey watched as she bent into a demi-plié and bowed to herself, straightened and smiled coyly, almost flirtatiously, to her reflection.
Janey continued down another floor. All of a sudden she felt wretched and lonely and empty and miserable. She sank to the floor and began to pick at her biceps. It felt as if ants were crawling all over her arms.
The entire room began to expand and then contract. Expand and contract. The walls began to hum, at first a low vibration and then an entire chorus. “You’re fired, Janey. Fired Janey. Fired Janey.”
In seconds, two spiritual assistants were on her. One pulled her into his lap and began running his fingers through her hair. Was he French-braiding it? No one had French-braided her hair since she was little, but she used to love it when Miss Lorna ran her long slender fingers through her thick hair, separating it into sections and then weaving them back together. And then it felt like it was her mother braiding her hair and Janey relaxed into her soft belly, let all of her anxiety and tension from the past month melt into Miss Lorna’s substantial frame. Love and forgiveness and kindness and acceptance swept through her body. She heard Lorna’s voice whisper in her ear: “Honey, what do you want to be when you grow up?”
She responded, “I don’t know, Mama. I want to be happy.”
Janey may have sat there for an hour before she felt loose and light enough to continue her explorations. Four of the others had gotten into Stella’s mask and drum collection and were wearing elaborate tribal masks over their faces. The crew of them, which Janey now realized involved Ivy, beat dramatically on thigh-high calfskin drums. She waltzed back up the staircase and paused in front of the mirror where CJ had channeled her inner child. Janey sat down cross-legged and stared at her reflection. She saw herself as she must have looked at age ten with the French braid in her hair. She smiled at herself.
You’re so pretty, she thought. And then another person was sitting next to her in her reflection. It was Beau. Little Beau, not grown-up Beau, and he was smiling mischievously at her.
His lips didn’t move, but she heard his voice in her head.
Let’s steal Miss Lorna’s car and drive to the beach.
I need you to give me a hundred dollars. You can’t ask questions, just give it to me.
You know you aren’t as perfect as you think, Janey Sweet. Sometimes I think you’re downright ugly.