5

AS I PACKED UP OUR OLD APARTMENT, I PICTURED OUR future children constantly. They frolicked in fields of lupine and poppy with long, sun-kissed curls and splashed alongside the baby seals in the lagoon at summers. They bathed beneath the spring-fed waterfalls of creamy silica blue in mild winters. I dreamed every night of nursing fragile pink babies, their heat burning my breasts as I leaned against driftwood to watch Guy surf. I woke in warm contentment that plummeted into a looming, cavernous emptiness when I realized that my dream was not real. I could ease myself back to sleep only with thoughts that it would be soon.

I obsessed over photographs of the guesthouse we were offered by Mia and her husband, imagining scenes of domestic bliss unfolding inside the pictures. In the living room, all warm whites and smooth stone, I saw Guy asleep on the couch, a white sectional covered in an artful array of sheeps’ pelts, with a baby nestled between neck and chest. In an image of the kitchen, I saw myself buttering toast, barefoot on the terra-cotta floor with a baby strapped to my chest. In a picture of the fireplace, our baby was taking her first wobbling steps in front of the enormous white stucco hearth. I searched for more photos in stories from architecture and design magazines that had gushed over their estate, essentially a compound with acres upon acres and multiple guesthouses. Famous friends, artists and musicians and socialites, usually flitted among them. Now it would be us. Me and Guy and our future children. I became greedy for glimpses of my fantasy life in Bellinas. The month between our visiting Bellinas and our returning as residents was the happiest period of my life. My hopes for our life together fluttered off every photograph like those waves of heat that make a mirage.

It is in a way more painful to remember those daydreams now than to review the many unhappy memories that were yet to come for us in the late-summer months in Bellinas. My happiness in the days leading up to our arrival is not another fantasy. It was not put on. Perhaps it was a case of faking until making, but I don’t remember it that way. “Visualize and manifest.” That is what Manny and the good townspeople of Bellinas would say, or what Manny did say with irritating regularity. I did my best to ignore him for the most part, and my encounters with him retain a foggy quality. If only the body forgot as easily as the mind. This sheet of primer paper is now too wet for me to continue writing, and I must reach for another leaf . . .

In just a few weeks, we sold our apartment—my apartment, really, the one I purchased after my grandmother’s death. What possessions we could not give away, we left on the curb. I would need only a few clothes and my beloved Classics, my loyal friends whom I could not abandon. We imagined, still practicing the language of our chosen land, that the easy, quick sale was a sign that we were in alignment with the universe. Mia sent us photographs of Manny surfing with the seals and of bonfires on the beach and their insufferable sing-alongs. We did not wonder at the hypocrisy of her emails and texts, so out of line with their distrust of technology. She made videos of our future home and emphasized that we were invited to stay for as long as we wanted. For forever, if we chose. I have since read, in my Anna Nováková, that for some magic to take hold, the intended recipient of its workings must choose of her own free will whatever has been laid out to entrap. That we were victims of such a trap seems irrefutable when I think back to our initial arrival in Bellinas on that midsummer’s day in June and our fated return as residents by mid-July.

As further evidence of my ensorcellment, I present to you the following unlikely event: Guy navigated without incident from the airport in San Francisco to Bellinas, using only his memory and my instructions. We drove for the second time the hidden route into town, a two-lane road cut between grassland hills with patches of fir and bay trees shading the now-gold grass on either side. Instead of dapples of lupine and poppy, we passed a grove of blackened palm trees. “Is that smoke?” I asked my husband, who responded only with a shrug.

The intensity of the heat was unexpected after the cool breezes of our honeymoon. The sunlight was flat, bright, heavier than the heat, and still somehow eerier, moodier than I remembered from our drive to the party a month before. The stillness felt odd. Leaves and limbs of eucalyptus and cypress hovered inches from the road’s narrow shoulder, but didn’t stir at the movement of our rental car. Shadows oozed from rocks and trees, merging into deep pools of black on the side of the road. Trees, rocks, homes, people. Hints of darkness were always there in Bellinas. In our time as residents, I found myself turning sharply to catch only the remains of a shadow that I knew was something more, or catching sight unexpectedly in mirrors and windows of the encroaching darkness behind me. Mirrors are faster than any ghost and always tell the truth. “The mirror ain’t got no reason to lie,” my grandmother Constance the Elder used to say, dabbing lotions, or potions for all I know, onto her crow’s feet and sun spots.

Upon our second arrival in Bellinas, we drove directly to Mia and Manny Rose’s estate. The Roses of Rose Manor on Rose Lane. The Roses whose land cups the length of the village, reaching from the wild, driftwood-strewn beaches to the patches of California oaks and long golden prairies that merge into valleys filled with the bay and cypress trees of their eastern border. Rose Manor, their stately mansion, crowns the tallest hill overlooking the town. Main Street with its historic Victorian homes and short block of commerce merges with the coastal sagebrush and marsh grass that empty into the smooth brown water of the lagoon. A long, sandy beach unspools beside the cool blue ocean. Seals sleep in languid piles under the crushing sunshine. The natural landscape of California is stunning.

Surrounding Rose Manor, the manicured lawn of an English garden gave way abruptly to the wilderness of tall, thick fir trees and moss-covered oaks that marked the beginning of the Hidden Coast State Park at its northern edge, a true terra incognita separated from the compound by a barbed-wire fence and bounded on paper maps with red triangles of caution. When they married, Manny presented the land and its accompanying house, extensively and tastefully remodeled, to his bride as a gift. He had effectively purchased the entire town of Bellinas, excepting the state park, but I did not know that then.

He bought the land and its manor house from an elderly couple, who relented in selling the property that had been in their family for some generations after a chain of misfortunes. The sparseness of the remodel only emphasized the lack of expense spared. Toothy squares of cedar shake shingles between long white trimming were interrupted by gleaming swathes of glass. An atrium stretched from one side of the house into the lawn, facing southwest to overlook the town and the bay, with its lagoon and the marsh and the road out of town. Leafy vines of creeping fig, heartleaf philodendron, and pothos—the devil’s ivy—slithered over the windows that reflected the floating blue rectangle of a swimming pool.

With a suitcase apiece and my box of books, we arrived at our guesthouse on Mia and Manny’s estate to begin our new lives. We were destined to be here, we felt. We were to be among the chosen Bellinians upon whom the elusive state of wellness was karmically and meritocratically guaranteed. This is where I was meant to become a mother, I thought, exiting our rental car, which disappeared without a trace by the next morning. Mia stood silent behind her husband as he stepped forward to hug the both of us at once. “Welcome to your new home,” said Manny, their leader, my new cousin.

Mia, wearing a calm, closed smile and another airy, exquisite gown, moved gracefully to Guy’s side at exactly the moment her husband reached mine. His fingers dug into my ribs. He slid his rough cheek over mine. He would have felt my breath stop. In some ways, Manny is as reliable, as predictable, as Guy, and so I can see the appeal beyond just the financial. As he does every day, he wore a deep blue basketball T-shirt and a coordinated sarong of yellow. Whether each item is one of hundreds sitting new in cedar drawers, or every night each article is washed and pressed by servants or ghosts, I have always wondered. The leather of his hiking boots was scuffed and cracked to replicate the scars earned in the course of heavy use, the laces a bright and clean utilitarian red.

Welcoming us to his home, our home they insisted, Manny positively beamed. It was Mia who seemed reticent. She stood with her fingers clasped at her waist, looking down at her clean bare feet. Not at all what I expected after the exuberance of her midsummer birthday party.

Manny’s clutching embrace might have come off as friendly, if not for its length. His cheek knocked into mine, while his hands, unusually hot even through my sweatshirt, pressed flat against my shoulder blades for several rounds of counting. One. Two. Three. Four. “Welcome to your new home,” he said a third time quietly against my ear. The hairs on my skin rose. The air in my chest felt trapped behind my ribs. One. Two. Three. Four. I barely heard him offer to show us around over my heartbeat and the Velcro rip of his sticky, unshaven cheek away from mine. His right arm enclosed my waist, and with his left, he presented with a slow, showy stroke of generosity and pride his house and its grounds. “This is Rose Manor,” he said this time, directing me with the slightest of pressure into my ribs from his fingertips, as we began to walk.

Behind us, Mia and Guy spoke in soft tones and tender touches. A cool breeze relieved the burning sensation at the back of my neck that accompanies both fear and embarrassment. What I had to be embarrassed about, I don’t know, and yet I still chose to attribute this anxiety to a vague deficiency in myself instead of a warning from my body. We walked a few more yards. Manny talked to me the whole time, tilting his head back every now and then to address Mia or Guy, or to bask in his magnanimity. He tallied his acreage and identified the trees on his land as bolsters of his property value and acumen. As with his wife, the beauty of the nature in his possession was not in its essence, but in his ownership.

“Don’t think of me as famous or a genius or whatever. I think of myself as a disruptor, you know? Making the world better. Think of me like you would any other dude,” he implored. With a nod and a smile, I assured him that I would.

Realizing that he cared little to listen to my responses, which he seemed dearly to want and then quickly to dismiss, I stopped listening. My grandmother Constance the Elder would here point out this unsociable rudeness on my part, but my awareness had caught like a thread upon the nail of my isolation, which was vast from whatever direction I looked. Were I trying to set the mood, I might intimate that he licked his chops or pounced on one of the nearby rabbits, but such meaningful scenes must be left in my imagination. For all my admiration, I am no Herodotus!

“How was the flight?” Mia raised her voice slightly to include me in her question.

“No big deal,” answered Guy. “Bumpy.”

“Much bumpier than last time. The plane smelled like a campfire. There were all these plumes of black smoke after we crossed the Rockies,” I added. “The pilot pointed out a couple of wildfires. I saw some lightning strikes in one cloud that was all smoke. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“It wasn’t that bad, Tansy. Come on.”

“You were asleep.”

“Tansy’s right, darling. The fires this year are the worst in decades, and it’s not even August yet. They’ve never come so close to Bellinas as they are now. Most of our neighboring counties have been under an evacuation watch the past day.”

I must have frowned, because she placed her hand on my arm.

“Don’t worry, darling,” said Mia. “Bellinas is protected.”

I chanced catching Manny’s eye to look back at her.

“By the coast,” she added with what must have been a grin to herself.

I could hear the ocean waves crashing as we strolled their grounds. Birds crooned and called to one another. The scent of eucalyptus and cedar drifted on a soft breeze that appeared as if to impress us with the pleasantness of Rose Lane. Even so, I caught the smell of smoke despite whatever protections Mia spoke of. She continued to walk in step with Guy a few feet behind me, and Manny led us along the walkable length of the property.

Already I was lost in private panic, and the faint smell of smoke only added to my fear. Manny seemed either not to notice my state of quiet distress or to mistake it for one of total engrossment in whatever it was he was explaining. Something about “low EMFs.” It was all I could do to focus on the jade green hills that spilled into the diorama-neat grid of sea-village homes with their windows twinkling in the sunshine.

Main Street looped down to a curve of beach, which turned inland to join with the mouth of the lagoon. Steps at the junction of ocean and lagoon led back into Main Street, where the few expected entities of a small town lined up. The bar. The museum. A library—former library, I should say, or future meditation space, as it’s being remodeled. The general store. The incomplete mission turned schoolhouse. All painted in pastels and looking like marzipan, exactly the right size for me to pluck a perfect, fragrant piece from its row and eat. Like most of the residents, I’m sure, I find myself in the company of a persistent, pestering hunger. I read somewhere that caloric deprivation is a tactical hallmark of all good cult leaders. Hunger subdues any stray critical thinking.

Mia made space for us in Bellinas and suddenly we were there, barely a month after our midsummer initiation. As with so much that goes on, I am not sure if I can attribute our swift, hiccup-less move entirely to her magic. She said often enough, or at least once, that Nature, with a capital N, abhors a vacuum. An empty space must be filled with something. The trick is simply to select the trimmings, as if performing magic were as easy as preferring a doughnut filled with either custard or jam. Naturally, the consumption or making of doughnuts and pastry would have been strongly discouraged, their being vehicles for such corrupting influences as heavy cream and real chocolate. Neither flour nor sugar was stocked in their general store, owned, as are all the buildings in downtown Bellinas, by Manny. The shelves are stocked exclusively with Father M products.

After walking the loop around the immediate grounds, we returned to the driveway and our soon-to-disappear rental car. All our worldly possessions waited in a few bags in the gravel, watching as I stared and counted the turrets—four—of Rose Manor. I thought their home resembled a castle more than a farmhouse. Guy continued to gush over their generosity, which I could not dispute. Our reliance on, and indebtedness to, Mia and her husband felt suffocating. Such realities had been abstract before, and thus avoidable. I asked more than once if we might pay them some rent, only to be shushed by my cousins, to be told by Mia that talk of money was “banal.” To Manny, it was “boring” and “insulting.”

To my cousins, and their friends, money was ubiquitous and invisible as air. That our savings incurred from the sale of our apartment would eventually run out seemed to occur only to me, which I should have expected. I had always been in charge of our finances, by default more than choice or aptitude. For this brief window, however, this exclusive class comprising the beautiful, the pedigreed, the fashionable, and the creative—that most aspired-to group—included Tansy and Guy Black, however peripheral or charitable our membership. At the mouth of the driveway standing before our only living family, we were counted among this vaguely artistic elite, and we had done nothing at all to get there. We fit in better than the others they tried out before us. I am still among the living, at least for now.

As we neared the guesthouses, I recognized with a thrill the cottage I’d filled with my fantasies for the previous month. We’d been guided through the cabin on videos from Mia, though I never saw a phone or computer in her hand. I suppose that exceptions are allowed to lure in new members, and for Manny’s whims of ego probably. For all my anxiety, the shock of realizing how alone I was, how far from my friends and the city I’d called home for over a decade, the thought of arriving at our little house and filling it with love, and yes, a child, excited me. Our house sat wide, with a small second floor on one side. I felt certain that I could see my future self in one or all of its windows cooing over a round, happy baby.

The back-and-forth between excitement and dread induced a bout of nauseating vertigo. I alternately felt very small or as big as Rose Manor. An Alice in Wonderland effect, it is called. Were cypress trees beside the door meant to twist that way? Everything seemed to be a part of some swirling vortex, of which I was, if not the center, then very near to it. The call of a bird fell on me in a coiling, unfamiliar loop. An owl, perhaps. Its echo crept farther into the treetops as we walked beyond and did not stop at the house I longed to see. The invisible implications of their generosity dwarfed the tangible, which were, to say the least, enormous. For weeks, I had longed to see the inside of our new house, but we kept walking as Manny jabbered on. I wanted to turn around and go back, but my nausea eased the farther we walked from our guesthouse.

A soft, otherworldly tinkling of bells brought me out of my anxiety. At first, I thought only I heard them. I was not entirely sure of the sound’s existence, like the sensation of crunching ice crystals from a snow cone in melting bites between teeth and tongue that is barely detectable outside of yourself. Summer is the saddest season, I have always felt. The chiming was too cheerful for my state of mind, and I eventually decided that I was, in fact, not imagining it. Without bothering to wait for a break in Manny’s explaining, in need of the sound of my own voice to reconnect with reality, I managed to ask, just a bit too loudly, as I find can happen after long stretches of not speaking, if anyone else could hear what I was hearing. My inquiry had to be repeated, as Manny’s expression indicated that he was accustomed neither to interruption nor to conversation.

“Are those church bells in the distance?” I asked. “Maybe some wind chimes nearby?” I rephrased my question to assuage some of his pique with the flattery of feigned interest, though, as was typical of the afternoons in Bellinas, there was no wind blowing. The town’s church bells had dispersed the fog hours before our arrival with the daily three o’clock rainbow. The tension on his face started in his neck, peaked on his forehead, then released and resettled into his tan. He lifted his sarong with a flourish of his fingers, and atop the woolly ribs of his thermal socks that connected his underused boots with his shins I saw the source of those murmuring knells, which were not distant bells or nearby chimes or my imagination but, in fact, what can only be described as an anklet.

“The bells ward off bad spirits,” he said, in the same tone one would use if asked for the time, which, incidentally, he decried continually as a construct of capitalism. I said nothing—what could I say to such an assertion?—and he continued to fill the space with his own voice. “We’re a high-vibe household around here, if you haven’t noticed yet,” he offered with what I am sure was meant to be a humble and self-deprecating grin.

The notion of vibes of any stature had not really occurred to me, and I managed to eke out a validating word or two. “Totally” or “Definitely.” Possibly I said, “Of course.” I doubt he noticed one way or another. At the fashion magazine, and with Guy for that matter, I’d long learned that men of self-importance will always keep talking, sparing the need for a reply, should you find yourself without one. A vestige of chivalry, no doubt.

“It was given to me to me by my shaman when we hiked Everest a few years ago.”

“Oh,” I said, intuiting this as among the appropriate interjections expected by my host. Or was he my neighbor? My family . . . ? “Did you have to train for a long time?”

“Definitely. I mean, I got a trainer who had me running a couple miles every morning. And I mean every morning, except for the weekends. I had to completely change my eating habits. Got a juicer and cut out grains. I lost ten pounds in the first month. It was brutal, but, you know, I realized that’s how we’re all supposed to live.” He interrupted himself to force eye contact, and what could I do but oblige? “It was the best thing that could ever have happened to me, definitely the inspiration for Father M Wellness. I completely changed my lifestyle. It was after Everest, when Craig, my shaman, was leading me in this crazy intense vision quest, that Spirit gave me the idea to give up my business and start my wellness brand. I mean, that was right after the IPO. I was already doing the podcast, but that was mainly to ground myself, you know? Then that became a monster success.”

“This is a beautiful piece of land you have here, Manny,” I said, but my attempt to change the subject seemed not to register with him. “How did you deal with the altitude?” I then asked, not knowing where else to enter the conversation and noticing just how high up the hill of Rose Lane was compared with the rest of town. The lower plateau of what was called the Big Mesa neighborhood was very near, though, and then Main Street at sea level was not too far below that, with crisscrossing trails connecting them all. You could really see everything from here, and it was only a fifteen-or-so-minute walk to the few shops along Main Street. “I guess you get used to it if you’re as into summiting as much as I am.”

I nodded again and looked toward the ocean. It seemed quite calm from Rose Manor. A burst of haze against the steel gray water indicated a pod of whales.

“That’s really the only mountain I’ve climbed,” he continued. “We choppered up to base camp, after a gnarly weekend in Kathmandu, me and some of my Zembla team. This was before I stepped down. We live streamed the summit, you know. It got hella clicks, I’m surprised you didn’t watch it. I can pull it up on the big screen, no problem, if you want to watch. We try to be offline as much as possible here, but we have a screening room for special occasions. The network messes with your cell structure, you know?”

“I didn’t know. Wouldn’t it help with your new wellness brand to keep your social network accounts active?” I hazarded.

“It might, but the fact is, Tansy, that we think the internet is corrosive to the body-mind experience. Degrades the spirit. There’s all this new science about it. My goal is to make Bellinas a totally EMF-free zone within three years.”

“EMF?” I asked, understanding the gist of what he meant, but unsure of the initialism, which he’d mentioned before.

“I thought you were an educated woman, Tansy,” he chided. “Electromagnetic fields. You know—radiation. Like from microwaves. It’s everywhere nowadays. Wi-Fi. Cell phones. Towers. Really interferes with tuning in to the universe. Messes with the body in all kinds of gnarly ways. We’re about clean living and high vibes in Bellinas.”

“Didn’t you invent some of that?” I asked before I could stop myself.

“I made it easier for people to connect with each other, definitely.”

“What about all the people who use Zembla for everything? Isn’t it the only way to access the internet in some places?”

“Tansy, stop being so negative—” I heard my husband start.

“Yeah, but it’s also, like, free will, you know?” Manny said, holding a hand up to Guy. “It’s their choice to go online. That’s going to be the real divide between people in the future, Tansy. People who believe in aligning their souls with Spirit, and the masses who don’t get it and waste their lives looking at screens. That’s what we’re trying to do here in Bellinas. Build a better future. That’s what Father M is all about. That’s what Zembla is about. Helping people for the good of mankind. If you’ve seen the light, you can’t go back. Like, you cannot. I have people to do business stuff for me so I don’t have to answer emails all day.”

Mia stepped forward, in artful charity I must credit her, and laid a quieting hand on her husband’s shoulder. She caught my eye, and I took the chance to step away from the damp crook of his arm, under which I had been trapped for the whole tour. In the quiet communications between women, whether acquainted or strangers, was reliable sanctuary. The unsaid agreements to cluster near restrooms. The slowing down or speeding up of pace to accompany each other in parking lots and sidewalks. Exactly how many scores of disasters have been prevented by the uncredited intervention of one woman helping another will remain as unknown, it seems, as the mother of history herself.

“So, what do you think of Rose Lane?” said Mia to me.

Again the chiming appeared at the very border of my perception, imagined or from Manny’s fidgeting. I half wondered if Mia had arranged for this shaman fellow to gift the anklet so that she could always gauge the location of her husband, like putting a bell on the collar of a cat or a cow. She could surreptitiously and without suspicion adjust her own activities as necessary with his approach.

Guy answered with enthusiasm, before I could claim my voice. “I can’t believe we’re finally here,” said my husband, which somewhat approximated my own sentiments. “It’s just incredible. I don’t know that we’ll ever be able to repay you. When I think about how we lived in New York . . .”

His instinct to degrade our life together thus far as an offering to these relatives whom we barely knew . . . well, it was not unusual. I had worked hard to maintain a home for us. To create a safe future. Did his gushing over their graces, at what I felt was my expense, bother me? I am sure that it did. I assumed it was something most wives endured, though. Enduring was an unpleasant requirement of matrimony, this resignation to a low-grade spiritual inflammation that comes with letting things go for what was always called “the greater good,” but was really the delicate feelings of husbands. The wind brushed away my irritation in cool, soft strokes.

“Your bungalow is the one farthest from our house,” Mia continued. “We hope that you find it comfortable.”

Bungalow! How could I be expected to fit in with the way they lived. It was so cinematic. So photogenic. The glamour. The wealth. Bungalow. My life until that moment had yet to require the use of such a word as bungalow. It already had smoke puffing out of its chimney into the clear sky, though the temperature was as pleasant as ever. A perfect summer day.

“A little privacy might be nice as you settle in. We thought we’d let you explore your new home yourselves.”

“Are you sure? We really don’t have much to unpack.” My husband looked crestfallen at the idea of our being left alone together.

“I’ll see you for dinner in an hour or so, but we don’t keep track of the time too strictly. We tend to run things by the weather. I hope you don’t mind, but we usually have a small group of friends from town over on Sundays. They all live on the Big Mesa, but a few of them started out in the guesthouses, like you two. We thought it might be nice for you to meet some of your new neighbors. Actually, you met them all at the party a few weeks ago,” she said.

“You’re so thoughtful,” was all I could say, with a look I am sure was as disappointed as Guy’s. I was tired and annoyed by his dismissal of our lives until now. The dizziness returned as I stood before our bungalow.

Mia’s hands were again clasped at her waist, her eyes on her feet. I had yet to see her wearing shoes, but her feet were clean and pink, despite our walk.

“Yeah, we hold a weekly meeting every Sunday,” said Manny, the bell sounds replaced by a ringing in my ears. But then, you know what Anna Nováková says of bells that fall from clear skies, and given what happened next, what is there to critique in her auguries?

“Like a book club?”

It was one of those questions that leave you feeling surprised as well as stupid as soon as it has emerged from your mouth. The kind of question that reminds you of all your other social gaffes, made worse by the embarrassed look on your partner’s face. This was a look I knew well from Guy, which I did not need to see at that moment to know that he wore it, so intense was the burning at the back of my neck. There is hardly anything worse than knowing you are a source of shame to the one you love the most. If only I could have the wind carry my cries of redemption, yes, but also of warning to him. “She was right,” they might call out to him. “Listen to your wife!” they might have said. To control the elements, to have the wind shake him by the shoulders, as I so often wanted to do. Some witchcraft is tempting. His belittling of me bound me to him. I see that now. I was tethered to him by anger and a need to redeem myself. Romantics will say that there is an invisible string that binds together couples destined to marry. Lovers walk through life tugging and twisting and untangling until they meet their matches at the end of the thread. Mine must have been knotted around my neck.

“Kind of,” he said. “We read things together sometimes. I’m sure that you’ll both be in on everything soon enough.” It was an odd thing to say, but in a state of hunger and embarrassment, I let it go.

“One more small thing,” said Mia. “You mustn’t venture into the forest alone. The park begins at the fence behind your bungalow, and there are all kinds of dangerous things roaming about. We see mountain lions a lot, and there’s a bear spotting every now and then. Stick to the trails, and never go into the woods alone.”

As in most stories like mine, warnings abound. They fall unsolicited from the lips of the monster herself, as if to allay any future pangs of a mildly guilty conscience, and go unheeded.