Джеффри Дивер - The Goodbye Man

“Hello, hello, hello! So good to see you again, Novice Carter. Come in, come in!”

Round, cheerful Journeyman Samuel gave the shoulder salute — Shaw did the same — and gestured him to an armchair. Samuel sat in a facing chair. There were small tables beside each. Shaw’s held a bottle of water and a box of Kleenex. In the back of the room was a desk. No windows. The walls — purple, of course — were barren of decorations. The space was small, confining, the air close.

The genie gets his power from the lamp he’s confined in...

Samuel sat, crossed his legs and took a pad of paper, which he set on his lap. No electronic tablet here. He picked up a pen.

“How’s your time here going?”

“Okay. I guess. I don’t know. Just a few hours. But what Mr. Eli — Master Eli — said this morning? I kinda liked it.”

Is this what Carter Skye, the troubled forestry worker, would say?

Yes, he decided.

“And you’ve got more in store for you this afternoon.”

Shaw stretched back and examined the room. “Kind of, you know, weird to me. I don’t do so good joining things. End up getting in fights and kicked out.”

“Of course it’s weird. At this stage, for you, it’s like summer camp. Don’t really know the lay of the land. Did you go?”

Shaw’s character uttered a scoff.

Samuel nodded broadly. “I never did either! Mum and Dad couldn’t scrape together the moola. I had to work. In a soda shop. You?”

Young Colter had worked almost every day of his younger years — around the Compound. Hunting for dinner, dressing game, repairing fences, cutting firewood, and learning how to grapple a man twice his size to the ground and disable him with a knee in the solar plexus.

“Odd jobs,” he said.

“A boy who wasn’t afraid of getting his hands dirty! We need more of that, don’t we? This generation, I tell you.” A sour face appeared. “Okay. Let’s get started.” Samuel looked him over closely. “Now, remember, the Process is how you true up, uncover your True Core. You’re probably thinking it’s intimidating, overwhelming. Well, it’s not, not at all. That’s Master Eli’s genius. You don’t need to study Sanskrit or memorize the Bhagavad Gita or recite passages from the Talmud or hold some bizarre yoga pose for hours. Master Eli has made the Process accessible to everyone. Your work is simple as can be.”

“And what is that?”

Samuel stared into Shaw’s eyes. “All you have to do is tell me the truth.”

“I’ll ask you about your life — personal and professional — and we identify those aspects where you have strong feelings.”

Samuel made a fist. “ Really strong thoughts and feelings. Passionate. About people, places, situations, work. Every interaction and reaction you have. The bad feelings — anger, fear, sorrow — and the good ones — joy, love, comfort. We call them — how clever is this? The Minuses and the Pluses.”

So that’s what they were.

Samuel said, “The important thing is that you feel them intensely. I hate this, I love that.”

“And then?”

The man lifted his hands, palms up. “Then you meditate on what we’ve identified.”

“And that, like, tears down the clapboard house and lets the garden of our True Core grow.”

A crinkle in Samuel’s eyes. “A man who pays attention. Some people don’t. With all kind respect to them, they fuddle about — is that a word? They fuddle and they listen with half an ear or with one ear, not both. My, witty metaphors are escaping me at the moment. But you can see what I’m getting at. You, Novice Carter, are serious about truing up and you’ve got the intelligence to do it. More important, you’ve got the grit, the edge. I like that. Master Eli likes that. He was smart to put you on the expedited track.”

Interesting. It was Eli himself who had picked him.

“When a Plus or Minus rears its good or bad head, we’ll jump on it and dig deeper.”

“So just think about things in my life?”

“Simple as that.”

“And I’m paying for this?” he muttered.

Samuel gave a hearty laugh. “Oh, I like you, Novice Carter. Oh, there’s a bit more to the Process. But Master Eli will share that this afternoon in the Second Discourse. Now, let’s take a look at some Minuses, shall we? We always start with those. Run-ins with the law — understand there’ve been a few of those. Problems with the parents. Those controlled substances, old demon rum.”

He nodded at the box of Kleenex. Shaw looked at it quizzically.

“You get a little cry-ey, it’s all right. It means the Process is working.”

The last time Shaw had teared up was when his fifth metacarpal on his right hand — the little finger — bent in a remarkable and noisy way during a minor climbing mishap.

Skye gave an insulted scoff. Samuel was tickled by the reaction.

Samuel smoothed pages in the open notebook. “Let’s find out a little about you.” He asked about the darker side of Skye’s life: the reclusiveness, the drinking, the drugs, the depression, the restlessness.

He then spent a long time asking about Skye’s job in the forestry field, what companies he’d worked for, did he have aspirations to own a business?

“Lot of Minuses in the world of the daily grind,” Samuel explained.

Gripping his cover story hard, Shaw tried to appear calm as he fabricated. He was hoping his memory wouldn’t fail him. He’d heard about the Method, where a theater or movie actor draws on real events and relationships in his own life as a springboard to shape the character he’s playing. But in reality, Shaw’s life had no grounding in Carter Skye’s. So his palms sweated as he spun a tale of a thirty-something man of some promise, whose emotional glitches had derailed him.

Samuel then asked about his romantic life. He pulled out Margot’s avatar and answered the questions as they came flying toward him.

He sipped water. Wiped some sweat.

Without any watch or clock — and unable to hear the voice of the Timekeeping Goddess, Shaw was disoriented. Had it been an hour? He hoped the session was finished.

Samuel flipped through his notes, nodding. Then he took his glasses off and polished them. “Remember I told you what your job was?”

Shaw nodded. “To tell you the truth.”

“Exactly.” Samuel now slipped the glasses back on and leaned forward. The kindly grandfather vanished. His face was cold: “Let’s cut the bullshit. Tell me what you’re really doing here.”

Hell, how had he been tripped up?

To be a good liar, you need a good memory. Had he contradicted himself?

Had he sounded too sophisticated for a former con and street hustler?

Had the beardless Santa Claus been too disarming? Shaw too unguarded?

But there was nothing to do but keep the show going. He conjured a perplexed look. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, you’ve had some boo-hoo moments in your jobs.” A tap on the notebook. “And Daddy or Mommy passed down a feelin’-sad gene or two. And you got too restless for your girlfriend’s liking. But those’re mosquito bites. People don’t come to the Osiris Foundation and pay this kind of money and undergo all this work for boo-hoo. They come out of desperation. Not a single thing you’ve told me paints you as desperate.” The eyes through the round-lens spectacles bored into his. “I want to know... the... truth.”

Without a moment’s hesitation Colter Shaw blurted, “My brother.”

And thought: The hell have I just done?

Later, Shaw would wonder if perhaps he mentioned Russell because of the Method.

Or maybe it was simply an improvised survival technique. He instinctively knew he had to maintain his cover — and avoid a beating and, not inconceivably, death — so he’d blurted out a credible answer to the question.