“WITH MIND OVER matter, nothing matters,” Mitch Laver said to me after taking virtual Roger Clemens’s heat off his face. That’s what they preach and teach at the White Hot Center.
Mr. Bob wasn’t lying about people not understanding the true boundaries of physics. When it comes to the physical world we have our known knowns and our known unknowns, but we also have our unknown unknowns. The White Hot Center traffics in the unknown unknowns.
You’d understand if you’d been to the White Hot Center.
It started with the sessions. Mornings, Chet would fetch me from my room at first light and escort me to the training center. The grass would still be wet with dew, and as we walked we’d pass foraging peacocks and peahens. Chet wore an all-black tracksuit. Mine was canary yellow. Only his had the phoenix insignia. Clearly there was some kind of code behind the colors, but I’d been unable to figure it out. Except for my trainers and Chet, I had been almost totally isolated from others. A slight, Asian-looking woman delivered the meals to my bungalow and someone (Chet, maybe) was cleaning up after me and restocking the canary yellow track-suits and fresh underwear in my wardrobe, but I never saw them. When I wasn’t in training, I would be eating, and then shortly thereafter, sleeping, jostled awake by Chet the next morning.
Blacktopped walkways snaked around the grounds, little white chain fences reminding everyone to stay on them. Buildings of every imaginable architectural style were visible across the hilly grounds. I could see a Le Corbusier, a Gehry, Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Koolhaas. My own bungalow where I mostly slept off my treatments was clearly a Frank Lloyd Wright. It was like a child playing with models had planted them all over the grounds. Later, I asked Chet about it and he said that in some cases, certain guests would fulfill their remunerative responsibilities with commissions.
But at the start, it was just the walk and then Chet rapping three times on the door to a low, domed hut-like structure. The door would yawn open and Chet would nudge me inside into the darkness. The hut was filled with a gelatinous goo that sucked me in through some kind of peristalsis, pulling me deeper until the only slice of light disappeared as Chet shut the door behind me. For what seemed like hours—but who knows how long it was?—I would sit, suspended in the goo, and then a voice that was more like a vibration that my body just understood asked me questions. It was a lot like therapy, only as conducted by gelatinous goo that spoke to you in vibrations.
The questions might be something like, What is your first memory? And I would tell the goo all about when I was two, maybe three, and my mother and father and I were taking a train west to New Mexico for a family reunion and they had left me in the sleeper car, strapped down to the bed by some kind of netting so I wouldn’t fall off as the train swayed. I remembered, more than anything, wanting to turn over from stomach to back, but I couldn’t because the netting was pressing me down, keeping me safe, but also killing me because I so badly had to turn over.
I said that I told the goo these things, but it was more like I thought them and somehow the goo understood those thoughts.
And why do you remember this? the goo said/vibrated/communicated, after I shared my first memory.
“I don’t know,” I replied.
Because you were trapped.
I didn’t really see it that way, but who was I to argue with the goo?
Another time it asked about my first kiss and I remembered Meredith Babcock, the lead in our fifth-grade musical. She had a solo, an Indian squaw singing about the white man’s march over her tribal lands as they laid the track for their iron horse, the railroad. She was simultaneously heartbroken at the loss of her ancestral home and resigned to the march of progress, but you can’t stop progress. Not with a song, anyway. At the end she’s adopted by a robber baron and goes to Harvard and becomes a lawyer and sues the federal government for reparations.
We all wished her ill. We wanted to hear a crack in her perfect pitch. We wanted her to fuck up big-time. At lunch, we punched her sandwich flat inside the brown bag and told her she sucked. At recess, she’d climb to the top of the jungle gym equipment and read a book while we threw clods of mud at her. In the halls, we kicked her heels and threatened to push her down the stairs. Sometimes we’d chase her halfway home, shouting I don’t remember. She’d throw her head back and call us “cretins.” We had no idea what that meant.
Deformed idiot, the goo chimed in.
I thanked the goo for the information, and told him how I was going to be part of the tech crew, do the lights, but then one of the square dancers broke his arm at recess and I was all that was left to fill in. They said if I didn’t do the dancing they wouldn’t let me do the lights, so what the fuck was I supposed to do, that’s like blackmail. There wasn’t time to mimeograph new programs, but they said they would marker off my name on each and every single one, which even at the time seemed like bullshit, but I couldn’t be sure, so I caved. I didn’t even have time to learn the steps. I just wore some jackass checked shirt and blue kerchief around my neck and marched around. My partner had psoriasis, so instead of holding hands when we were supposed to hold hands she shoved her balled-up fist into my palm. In class she used to pick at the scabs underneath her desk and flick them to the carpet. At the end of the day you could see a whole collection down there. I don’t think she even noticed she was doing it. Once, on a field trip, her mother was one of the chaperones, and the girl was picking away, and I saw her mother slap her hands and grunt at her.
“We must have been the fucking worst,” I told the goo.
And is that who you kissed? The girl with the psoriasis?
“No,” I told the goo. I told the goo that I had kissed Meredith Babcock, that it was after the play at a party at one of the parents’ houses and somehow we were playing spin the bottle. We made sure not to invite her in as part of the circle, but she was watching while pretending not to care, and when it was my turn the bottle stopped in between two people and pointed at Meredith Babcock and she said, “Let’s go.”
We went to the backyard, behind a bush, the designated kissing spot. I told the goo that as I followed her I watched her long, straight black hair swish in perfect rhythm with her steps. We knelt behind the bushes and looked at each other. I was eleven and had no real interest in kissing anyone. Meredith Babcock looked at me and blinked several times and she said, “Do you think I was good?” and rather than saying anything, that’s when I leaned in and kissed her and I hoped that was an appropriate answer.
And why do you remember that?
I didn’t know.
Because of the wanting, the goo said.
We progressed like this through most of my life, dredging up things I wouldn’t have figured I remembered, along with other things I’d never forget, like the incident with my father when we thought he’d stabbed me with the ski pole, or, what I’d done to my own son. The last question of the day was always, What do you want?
I replied with abstractions: “to be happy,” “to be loved,” and the goo must’ve been unhappy with these answers because it would quiver and surge and expel me out of the hut at Chet’s feet and he would gather me up and take me home.
At the end of another unceremonious dumping, Chet and I started walking together back toward my quarters. It seemed as though my session had ended earlier than usual. Dusk had already fallen, but that day I could see some light still hanging across the horizon. Since the initial greeting ceremony I hadn’t seen any of the other “guests.”
“Where is everybody?” I asked Chet.
“We do a lot of testing while you’re unconscious during the journey here, which allows us to put everyone at the Center on a customized program specifically designed to their particular body chemistry and biorhythms. To paraphrase, you’re on your path, they’re on theirs, sir.”
“How am I doing?”
“Soon you will have a full review and reflection session, but for now, we all agree that you’re progressing appropriately.”
“Can I ask you a question, Chet?
“Anything, sir.”
“Is this place real?”
“What do you mean, sir?”
“Am I dead? Am I dreaming?”
“What do you think, sir?”
“It just doesn’t seem possible.”
“Who’s to say what’s possible?” he replied. We’d arrived at my quarters. I could see my dinner waiting for me, steam coming off the plate. It looked like meat loaf.
“I dunno,” I replied. “Not me.”
“Why not you?” Chet said, clapping me on the back as he opened the door for me.
I went in and tucked into the food immediately. I thought it would be the best food I ever tasted and it was. While I ate, in my head I said, Why not me? Why not me?