“Okay, I’ll have you turn over now.” Mireille makes the sheets into a little tent and looks away while Mr. Chucklesman harrumphs himself over.
It’s obvious how to live well. You become someone who meditates regularly, freeing yourself from your own ego and living in the present. When you’re not meditating, you involve yourself in charitable acts, helping others, being generous, caring for the needy. When you’re not doing any of those things, you eat sparingly of vegetables and enjoy the natural world. It bothers Luke that people know this and don’t do it. Mireille isn’t as bothered by how perverse people are. People being so messed up meant they needed actors to tell stories so we could try to understand ourselves. Well, and messed up people needed massage therapists, too. She’d be totally out of a job if everyone acted like an astronaut.
Pain has value, of course it has value.
When Mireille was eleven years old she’d been crossing the street in Houston with her mother, and maybe there had been a car turning, or maybe she’d not been paying attention, but her mother had sort of grabbed her to pull her away from something and a teenager had plowed into her mother with his skateboard and then stalked off saying, “Stupid bitch. Ugly bitch.” But the big thing she remembers was her mother’s crooked embarrassed smile, and the sense that a person was never safe; even if you were a United States astronaut you could be made to look awkward by someone calling you a stupid bitch, and she’d been mortified by this apparent weakness of her mother, and instead of rushing to her defense and saying, “Oh my God, what an asshole” or giving her mother a hug or something, Mireille had just pretended—very badly—that she hadn’t really seen it.
Mireille had been ashamed. She is ashamed now of being ashamed. That memory will never get any better, only worse. That’s a kind of pain.
At a certain point, you probably had to stop thinking about what your mother did or didn’t do to you, and start thinking about what you did or didn’t do to your mother. All this stuff about the natural order—parents are supposed to do or be this or that—that was maybe made up by people who were still pissed at their parents. Anytime people talked about the natural order you should be skeptical.
She can sit down now, and work on Mr. Shuckman’s neck. People’s faces sometimes look beautiful when you view them upside down.
Mireille had given her mother a massage when she last visited. Her mother was modest, so Mireille hadn’t ever seen her naked. She thought her mother would be sort of tense and weird about getting a massage, but she’d been completely relaxed and open, even falling asleep at one point. How could her mother trust her so much, to fall asleep in her hands, when Mireille was such a terrible daughter?
She’d been brilliant at being her father’s daughter. If he had lived longer, she could still be that, although it’s possible that by now she would have outgrown her prodigy.
“Oh, I love having my scalp rubbed,” says Mr. Shushbagger.
Mireille knows he is loving it, she can almost feel how good it feels to him.
Her father had once told her that she was an empath. That she felt things deeply because she was sensitive to others, picked up on their emotional cues so completely that she took them within her own body and mind. That she didn’t intellectualize her emotions. That all of this was a gift.
? ? ?
LUKE HAD WANTED to know her reaction to the thought experiment. If a record of her cells had been copied and teletransported to Mars, and re-created perfectly, would she still be her, or a replica?
“How badly do I want to go to Mars?” she asked.
“Oh. That’s not. I mean the thought experiment—”
“Okay, sure, perfect replicas of your cells and all your memories and everything make you the same person. Except you’re now also a person who got teletransported. And who is now on Mars. Wouldn’t that change you? And I know this isn’t the point of the thing, but I don’t think anyone should be teletransported to Mars. It should hurt a little, to go to Mars.”
“Okay, that’s our session,” Mireille says. She wipes the guy’s feet with warm towels, and gently places his robe across his knees, aligns his slippers on the mat. “How do you feel?” she asks, placing a calm and benedictory palm against his forehead.
“Oh my God, I feel amazing,” he says. “You’re really gifted.”
Mireille takes her hand away.
DMITRI
Dmitri is having a picnic. He is sitting on a blanket, on a hill, in a public park. There are people on another blanket not ten feet from him, older people, adults. A woman bounces a baby on her lap and says, “Oopsadaisy! Oopsadaisy!” One of the others on her blanket is capturing this on a screen. Dmitri doesn’t know how the people on that blanket connect to each other—which is married to whom or are they a family or what. Dmitri pulls his baseball cap down lower.
“Teach me something to say in Russian,” Robert says.
“Chush’ sobach’ya.” A group of schoolchildren are being marched across the stone rotunda below their hill. Everyone is talking about how nice the weather is. The weather in New York is pretty much the same as at home. Freeze your balls off in winter and sweat your balls off in summer and ten good days in between. This is one of those days.
“Chush’ sobach’ya.” Robert’s accent is not bad. “What am I saying?”
“It is like bullshit,” Dmitri says.
This is Dmitri’s first date. That is what Robert is calling it. The last time they’d seen each other, Robert said, “I think we need to have our first date.” Dmitri thought he was joking. They had met up ten times, more than Dmitri had ever met up with anyone else.