Trust Exercise(77)

“What really pissed me off about what you wrote,” Karen tried to tell Sarah as Sarah knelt screaming by Martin, as if Sarah had just one stage direction but was going to do it for all she was worth, “is how you wrote so much just like it happened, and then left out the actual truth. Why even do that? Who do you think you’re protecting?”

“Oh … God…” Martin was keening, curled like a fetus on the floor, a fetus turning like a wheel. The way he was writhing in pain had him somehow rotating in place.

“What have you done to him?” Sarah screamed. As usual, not listening.

“You won’t die,” Karen reassured Martin. “You just won’t be the same.”





Trust Exercise


I ENDED UP sorry I went.

I’m so sorry to hear that. Can you talk about why?

It was crowded. They had to simulcast it outside in the lobby. Even then, there were people who didn’t get into the building at all. I got in. I’d arrived really early. I was so nervous, all I thought about was what I would say. Then I wound up in this mob. There must have been four or five thousand people.

That might feel overwhelming.

I didn’t care about him. I was there for the audience. I just never guessed how large it would be. I felt like a fool afterward. Like I could have ever spotted someone in that crowd. Or like someone could have ever spotted me.

You were nervous about going and the fact that you went is what matters. Even if the outcome wasn’t what you had hoped.

I don’t know what I hoped. I know what I said I hoped, but did I really mean that? I was terrified it would come true. And then I got there and saw there was no way. And that made me wonder if I’d wanted it at all. If I’d set myself up for a disappointment that I’d actually hoped for.

Why do you think you would do that?

To tell myself I’m doing something.

You are doing something. You’ve done a lot of things, and they’ve all been very difficult things.

Thanks. I think that’s all for today.

That’s all the time you want for today?

Yeah. Thanks. I have to be someplace soon actually. Thanks for listening.

Of course. We can



* * *



CLAIRE CLOSED HER laptop. Then she foolishly felt she’d been rude. It wasn’t as if she’d closed a door in someone’s face. Whenever she opened the laptop again, there would be the reminder to tip and rate. Just thinking of it made her open the laptop again to complete the transaction in case, as she suspected, the amount of time she took to tip and rate was kept track of for whatever reason. As usual she clicked “30 percent” and “five stars,” which represented the satisfaction level exactly opposite to hers. Like most economical options, this one didn’t work.

Then she closed the laptop again. Then she reopened the laptop immediately so the screen wouldn’t lock, closed the window inviting her to schedule her next session, and reopened the window to the school’s Facebook page. She played the video of the tribute again. The same way she’d scanned the roiling, roaring crowd that afternoon, while feeling shorter and shorter and smaller and smaller and less and less able to hold her ground and not wind up trampled even wedged in a seat, she now scanned the depths of the video’s frame, feeling as if she saw nothing. Even when she hit Pause to comb over each frozen granule, she couldn’t seem to see a thing.

It hadn’t been the same building she’d gone to almost three years ago. That building, squat and ugly with its bad old ideas about what might seem modern, had apparently already been declared obsolete the day she’d pulled open its doors. The ground had already been broken on its massive replacement. She hadn’t known. There might have been an architect’s model of Our Future Home! on display in the lobby, in fact it seems almost certain there was, but she hadn’t noticed. She hadn’t realized that the building might vanish, that its people might vanish, that she might lose her chance. When she’d left on that day almost three years ago, definitely not having seen an architect’s model of Our Future Home! on display in the lobby as she plunged blindly back out the doors, Claire hadn’t dreamed it might be her last chance. She’d thought okay, today wasn’t her day, but she’d gotten somewhere. She’d stopped short, but she’d gotten somewhere. And another day she’d get farther. And she’d keep getting farther, a bit at a time, until she finally reached there, that place she was trying to go. It never crossed her mind that the building itself, where her answer was housed on some yellowed page or in some squeaky-drawered file cabinet or maybe just in some old person’s wandering mind, could disappear, its ugly gray stones demolished and thrown into Dumpsters and carted off to the beach to become a fake reef for some project with oysters.

The new building where the tribute was held was huge, bright, beautiful, the opposite of the old building which looked like a bunker except for its goofy marquee. The new building stretched out over fake hills that had been built on the site and then planted with expensive-looking native blond grasses. Parts of the building, like the front, started at the normal ground level and were tall as a cathedral while other parts, around the sides, were low and halfway set into the ground with glass sections that opened directly onto little fake meadows of the native blond grasses that eventually rose into curved steps and formed an outdoor amphitheatre. The new building, in its resemblance to a LEED-certified eco-resort located in some northern European paradise like Finland, had actually taken Claire’s breath away through a painful compression of her rib cage and lungs. It felt like a mockery of her perfectly adequate childhood that buildings like this now existed to serve as high schools. Claire had graduated high school only ten years ago but the building made her feel as though she’d graduated in a previous century that had thought a lot less of its children, or maybe had just thought a lot less of the way that it thought about children. This building emanated a smugness that if Claire hadn’t already felt sick with self-doubt would have made her feel sick with disdain.