Тед Чан - Exhalation - Stories

Ornella stood and turned to Nat. “Come with me and I’ll issue the payment.” She could hear her parallel self telling Morrow the same thing. The screen shifted away from Roderick’s face to Morrow’s, and then the screen went dark; he wasn’t going to let his prism out of his sight until the money was in his account.

Nat, by contrast, was content to leave her prism on the table with Scott. She looked at him awkwardly for a moment, and then said, “I’m very sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you,” Scott said, wiping away tears.

Nat followed Ornella into the room where she had her desk. Ornella unlocked her work phone and opened the digital wallet. She and Nat exchanged their account numbers and then laid their phones next to each other on the desk. Ornella entered the dollar amount and hit SEND. Nat’s phone acknowledged the offered transfer, but Nat didn’t touch the ACCEPT button.

“I suppose Scott has a lot of fans who would have given him that prism for free,” said Nat, staring at the screen.

Ornella nodded, although Nat wasn’t looking at her. “Yes,” she said. “He absolutely does.”

“There are probably people who aren’t even fans of his who would have done the same.”

“Probably.” Ornella was about to say that there were still good Samaritans in the world, but didn’t want to offend Nat by implying she wasn’t one of them. After a long moment, Ornella said, “Since the money’s right there, do you mind if I make a personal observation?”

“Go ahead.”

“You’re not like Morrow.”

“How do you mean?”

“I understand why he’s doing this.” How could she put this tactfully? “He sees a grieving person as an opportunity to make a profit.”

Nat gave a reluctant nod. “Yeah, he does.”

“But you’re not like that. So why are you doing this?”

“Everyone needs money.”

Ornella felt emboldened enough to be frank. “If you don’t mind me saying it, there are better ways of making money than this.”

“I don’t mind. I’ve been thinking the same thing myself.”

Ornella wasn’t sure what she should say. Eventually, she said, “Scott’s happy to pay you for what you’ve done. But if you wouldn’t feel good about taking the money, no one says you have to.”

Nat’s finger hovered over the button.

For the past several weeks, Dana had made sure that in her sessions with Jorge she didn’t bring up the vandalism incident. Instead they talked about his efforts to recognize his own good qualities and ignore what other people might or might not think of him. She felt they were making progress and thought that she might be able to broach the topic in the near future.

So she was surprised when Jorge began a session by saying, “I’ve been wondering if I should go back to Lydoscope and ask them to contact my paraselves again.”

“Really? Why?”

“I want to know if they’ve acted out since the last time I checked.”

“Was there anything that prompted this?”

Jorge described a recent interaction with his manager. “And I felt really angry, like I wanted to smash things. And that made me think about what we talked about before, that it was like I had gotten the results of a medical test when I went to Lydoscope. I started thinking that maybe the test wasn’t sensitive enough.”

“And if you learn that your paraselves have acted out recently, then that would mean there’s something serious that the first test didn’t pick up?”

“I don’t know,” said Jorge. “Maybe.”

Dana decided to push him a little on this. “Jorge, I want to suggest something. Even if your paraselves haven’t acted on their anger recently, maybe it’s worth thinking about what happened here in this branch.”

“But how can I know if it was a freak accident or not unless I check my paraselves?”

“It was obviously out of character for you,” said Dana. “There’s no question about that. But it was still something you did. You, not your paraselves.”

“You’re saying I’m terrible.”

“That is absolutely not what I’m saying,” she assured him. “I know you’re a good person. But even a good person can get angry. You got angry and you acted on it. That’s okay. And it’s okay to acknowledge that you have that side of your personality.”

Jorge sat silently for a minute, and Dana worried that she had pushed him too far. Then he said, “Maybe you’re right. But isn’t it important that it was out of character for me, instead of being something typical for me?”

“Of course it is. But even if you were acting out of character, you have to take responsibility for your actions.”

A look of fear crossed his face. “You mean I have to tell my manager what I did?”

“I’m not talking about legal responsibility,” Dana reassured him. “I don’t care whether your manager ever finds out. What I mean by taking responsibility is admitting to yourself what you did, and taking it into consideration when deciding what you do in the future.”

He sighed. “Why can’t I just forget that this ever happened?”

“If I genuinely thought you’d be happier forgetting that it ever happened, I’d be fine with that. But the fact that you’ve spent so much energy on this indicates that it’s bothering you.”

Jorge looked down, and nodded. “You’re right. It has been.” He looked back up at her. “So what should I do now?”

“How would you feel about talking to Sharon about what happened?”

He paused for a long time. “I suppose…if I also tell her about how my paraselves didn’t do the same things, then maybe she’d know that it wasn’t something fundamental about me. Then she wouldn’t get the wrong idea.”

Dana allowed herself a tiny smile; he’d achieved a breakthrough.

A new town, a new apartment; Nat hadn’t found a new job yet, but it was early yet. It had been easy to find an NA meeting to attend, though. Originally she had wanted to go to the prism support group one last time and tell them everything, but the more she thought about it, the more she was sure that doing so would have been purely for her own benefit, not anyone else’s. Lyle was in a good place now; he wouldn’t appreciate learning that she’d had ulterior motives the whole time they’d known each other. Same for the rest of the group. Better for them to keep thinking that the Nat they knew was the real Nat.

Which was why she was now at an NA meeting. It was bigger than the prism support group—prisms would never be able to match drugs in terms of appeal—and it was the usual mix: people you’d never suspect were addicts and people who completely looked the part. She had no idea whether this group was hard core about working the steps or submitting to a higher power. She wasn’t even sure she wanted to attend meetings regularly; she was just going to play it by ear.

The first person to speak was a man who described waking up from an overdose to realize that his thirteen-year-old daughter had had to give him an injection of Narcan. It wasn’t easy to listen to, but Nat found something vaguely comforting about being back in a group of people whose experiences she could relate to. A woman spoke next, and then another man; neither recounted anything particularly harrowing, which was a relief. Nat didn’t want to speak immediately after anyone with a horror story.

The group leader was a soft-spoken man with a salt-and-pepper beard. “I see some new faces here tonight. Would you like to say something to the group?”

Nat raised her hand, introduced herself. “I haven’t been to one of these in a few years. I’ve been able to stay clean without them. But some things happened to me recently…it’s not that I felt I needed a meeting to keep me from relapsing, but I’ve been thinking about stuff, and guess I wanted a place to talk.”