14. The Context and the Breeding Ground

“It is increasingly apparent to psychotherapists that the normal state of consciousness in our culture is both the context and the breeding ground of mental disease.” —Alan Watts

In the morning, when the sun hit Jen rudely in the face, she did not recognize the strange, cold room around her. What was this shaky twin bed? It felt odd and flimsy under her body, and she could tell that no more than a foot of mattress and springs separated her from the empty space below. The wall across from her face was painted a strange, old-fashioned color, something halfway between lavender and light blue. She turned her head upward toward the source of the blinding morning light, squinting, and saw that it was entering the room through a small, dusty skylight overhead.

Turning her face away from the light, she began to panic, because not only did she not know what room this was, but she couldn’t quite recall who she was, what her job was, or who were her friends, or what she had been doing yesterday or for the last week, or month, or ever.

She sat up, causing the bed to bounce and buckle in the middle. She scanned the room desperately for a clock so that she would at least know what time it was, hoping that this information might remind her if she were supposed to be doing something right now. Should I be at work, she thought? Where do I work? She turned her head left and right, but didn’t see a clock anywhere.

Her eyes fell on a series of small photographs hanging on the wall across from the bed. A couple standing at the edge of a cliff, a beautiful sunset coloring the sky behind them. The same couple knee-deep in a river, wearing floppy hats. The couple sitting at a dinner table covered in beautiful silver serving urns of different sizes. Jen was sure that she recognized the couple, even though she didn’t seem to know their names. They looked so happy in their exotic settings, always with their arms around each other, beaming at the camera like they only had things to be happy about. She felt jealous of these people that she knew and did not know, so happy and adventurous and sure of themselves. And here she was, alone in a strange room, all alone, with no idea what she was supposed to be doing or who she was supposed to be.

Her gaze shifted from the photographs to the tall bookshelf next to them, looming over the bed. She leaned forward, until she could almost read the titles of the books just across from her face. One book had been laid carelessly across the tops of the others. “Diagnose Your Aura,” Jen read aloud. She knew the title, and she remembered last night, taking the test, putting the book back sloppily in disgust before falling into a restless sleep.

Now her memory came flooding back, jarred by the memory of the book, and of yesterday. She was in Michigan. In the house of Paula’s mother, the woman in the photographs. In a week, Becky and Paula would leave, and she would be all alone here, alone for an entire summer, maybe longer. This would be her bedroom, and she wouldn’t be going back to her other room, her other house, or anything else familiar and comforting. And worst of all, she thought glumly, looking back at the bookshelf, she had no aura.

She tried to remember why she had wanted to come here. What had made her think that she could take care of herself better in a place where she had no friends, knew nobody at all, where there was no yoga studio or library or anything she needed? She suddenly felt the strong desire to lie back down and huddle under the covers, to pull them up far over her head to keep out the light and the cold of morning.

These frightened thoughts of the future were not helping her get up and start her day, she decided; she needed to come up with some positive outlook. She tried to remember why she had wanted to come here so that she could view her situation with the same romantic perspective that had shaped her fantasies of Michigan back when she was in Los Angeles.

She sat up straighter, determined to be brave and face the morning. She crossed her legs in front of her and sat in a meditating position, preparing to think positive thoughts.

This would be a clean slate. She could start over here, and she could make her life the opposite of what it had been in LA. However spoiled she had been before, by fame, by luxury, by fashion and parties and all manner of other frivolous things, now she could redeem herself. She could be simple, and unknown, and plain.

She began to feel more hopeful, and even though she knew that it was a kind of desperate hope, not rugged but frail and contingent, the kind of hope that might break if you put your full weight on it at once, she had no choice but to hang on to it, carefully.

She began to make plans in her head, plans that were a life raft. She would find the library. A town with a university had to have a library, and if they didn’t, she would go to the library on campus. And there might even be yoga somewhere. Maybe a class at the college. She would find it, find her places here. In three months, she’d be so settled and happy that she wouldn’t ever want to go home. She would learn all kinds of new things, have a new, better perspective.

These were plans to keep her head just above water, just far enough to breathe. She imagined herself floating on the surface of a deep, swampy lake, face down, staring at the dark abyss below.

The lake! Jen suddenly remembered that she hadn’t seen it yet. Now would be the best time to first see it, before Becky and Paula woke up. She would be alone, fittingly, to represent her new life of solitude.

Jen rose from the bed, shivering, and bent over the open suitcase lying on the floor, rummaging through the neat piles of t-shirts and pants that Becky had folded for her until she found something warm to wear, her big red sweatshirt. She pulled it on over her pajamas and picked up her plastic flip-flops from the floor. Quietly, she opened the door to her room, listening for any signs of her housemates. But the house was quiet. She could hear breathing from the next room, the room in which Paula’s mother and her husband usually slept, where Becky and Paula were now sharing the bed.

Jen crept across the loft towards the stairs, holding her shoes under her arm, trying not to make noise as her bare feet hit the wood floor. She walked carefully down the staircase, holding onto the banister and stepping gingerly. Downstairs, she stopped in the kitchen. It was so chilly; it must be very early in the morning. Did she really want to go outside right now?

Through the kitchen window, she could see the sheen of something large and flat glinting in the sunlight. That would be the lake, and she did very much want to see it. She was shivering, though, even in the sweatshirt, and not quite ready to open the door to the yard.

What she needed, she decided, was some tea. She could go outside and sit and watch the lake in the early morning light, and drink her tea until she warmed up.

Rummaging through the cabinets, she found a mug and two flavors of tea: a giant box of plain black Lipton tea and a smaller box of fancy organic blended herbal tea with licorice and spearmint. She was about to choose the herbal tea out of habit; she had stopped drinking caffeine as part of her fast. But the bitterness of black tea sounded appealing, and she decided that some caffeine might be okay, this once, to help her through this first day. She heated her mug full of water in the microwave and dropped the teabag in. While she waited, she dropped her shoes to the floor and slid her feet inside. Then, wrapping the hot mug handle in a dishtowel, she opened the door to the back yard and stepped outside.

The morning smelled fresh and wet, and a bit swampy. The grass was damp as it brushed the sides of Jen’s feet. The yard had a picnic bench, and a small barbecue, and a few plastic chairs scattered around. And straight ahead, a ways down, several plastic chairs had been placed in a little sandy bank, and then there was the lake. Jen walked down towards it, the bottoms of her pajama pants getting heavy and wet. She walked through the grass until she reached the chairs. Then she stopped, and stood next to them, and stared at the lake, and drank her dark, bitter, steaming tea from the mug, wrapped in the kitchen towel. The tea tasted good, even without lemon, she thought. She drank tea every day, herbal tea at least, but she hadn’t tasted anything except lemon in months.

The lake was big and green, and lined all around with thick woods like those that surrounded the house. In the distance, far across the lake, balconies and roofs were visible jutting out of the woods, attached to houses that were mostly obscured by the trees. She could not see how far the water extended sideways; she would need to swim out and look someday. There were bushy reeds growing in the swampy water near her, but past those, the water was flat and clear, and glimmering in the morning sun.

Jen stood watching the water until all of her tea was gone, and even for a few minutes more, clutching the empty mug for the warmth it was still giving to her hands. It was very, very beautiful here, she decided.

As she walked back across the yard, she became curious about those houses on the other side of the lake. Who lived there, she wondered? And how far away were they? The distance seemed enormous, and yet those people were very likely some of her closest neighbors. She stopped and turned to look, squinting at the balcony of a funny grass-green house that was almost invisible amongst the trees. And as she looked, she saw something, small and dark, sitting, facing forward. She couldn’t quite make out its features. But she felt certain that it was a person, sitting on the balcony, staring back at her from across the lake.

When Becky and Paula woke up a couple of hours later, the first thing they wanted to do was go into town for some food and supplies, and to show Jen around the town a little.

Paula drove her mother’s SUV, which Jen would be borrowing, down the bumpy road back to North Middleton. “Let’s start at the food co-op for groceries,” Paula said, turning her head towards Jen, who was in the back seat again. The car jolted as the tire hit a pit in the road, and Paula turned her eyes back forward.

Becky groaned loudly at the impact and wrapped her hands around her stomach. “Good,” Becky said, “I’ll go anywhere with food.” She was wearing dark sunglasses and a baggy, shapeless sweatshirt. Her face looked pale and drawn. For the three weeks since their reconciliation, Becky had been looking sickly and tired almost every morning. Jen wondered if she was the one making Becky ill, by causing her so much stress over the Skipper situation, the broken rib, and the move. That must be it, Jen thought to herself, and she felt horrible.

Staring into the dense woods outside the car window, Jen contemplated the structure of her life, marveling that she should be in a position to cause another person so much aggravation simply by messing things up for herself. Becky has to live off of me like a parasite, Jen thought, feeling sickened. I need to set her free, she resolved. She wasn’t sure how to do it, but she would have a better idea when she returned to Los Angeles. After months of separation, it might happen naturally somehow, without Jen having to make any deliberate change at all.

“They’ve got plenty of food at the co-op, if you don’t mind that it’s all healthy,” Paula said, sounding as though healthy were a bad thing.

The co-op was on a side street near the university. As Jen watched out her window, she couldn’t imagine that a business could be located here. She saw an old apartment building, and then another, and then a series of run-down houses that she imagined were occupied by student renters. Every porch had an old sofa on it. Some yards had plastic lawn chairs, and a few were littered with beer bottles.

Then, interrupting the uniform row of houses, something different appeared: a strange, sparkling gem, a building so overflowing with ornate detail that Jen couldn’t take it all in visually as the car passed by. She was about to ask Paula what it was, but Paula spoke first.

“There it is,” said Paula, pulling into a small parking lot next to the building.

As they walked up, Jen got a better look at the building, which, with its low, flat design, seemed to be a converted garage. It was covered in a mosaic depiction of the solar system, with planets and meteors and spaceships of all colors, all whirling around a giant yellow sun, sparkling with bits of glass and broken mirror reflecting the light of the real sun high overhead. The yard was covered in sculptures of all sorts—animals, human figures, bird-feeders, rendered in clay, metal, and stone— intertwined with overgrown rose bushes and raspberry vines.

The sign above the door was a large piece of amateur art-welding. Twisted metal letters spelled out the name, “The People’s Food Co-op,” adorned with tin flowers and bordered with ragged strips of rebar.

Jen had assumed that things in Michigan would be more tame and old-fashioned than in Los Angeles, but she had never seen anything at all like this, ever, in her entire life.

“Ugly,” said Paula, sniffing at a carved wooden statue of a bear as they walked by it.

On the way in, they passed quite a few people: young mothers with babies in strollers, college students toting backpacks, stocky middle-aged men with long ponytails and sandals. None of them seemed to notice Jen. She was wearing the baseball cap and nonprescription eyeglasses that she often wore to go outside in Los Angeles, but there everyone stared at her anyway. Here, she had the strange and novel feeling that she could be anybody, any anonymous person, just like Becky and Paula. No one’s gaze stopped on her, no one turned abruptly to give her a second look as she walked by. It felt a little sad not to be recognized, but also exciting.

Paula wanted to get the grocery shopping over with, but Becky insisted that they visit the café first. “I need some food, and coffee,” she groaned. She had already eaten toast this morning, Jen thought; that was barely an hour ago. Jen wondered why Becky was so hungry, considering that she was getting less exercise than usual. She usually taught multiple yoga classes every day in addition to practicing on her own, but she had taken a couple of days off before the trip to help Jen pack and get her things in order.

Off to the side of the cash register was a cute corner by the window with tables and chairs and a little espresso cart. Paula and Jen ordered drinks and picked out pastries from the case next to the counter, while Becky stood in line at the register to pay. Then Paula led Jen to a small table beside the window.

“This is the best one,” Paula said, setting her coffee on the table and pulling out a chair for Jen to sit on.

They sat eating their pastries, a bran muffin with raisins for Jen and a cheese-filled Danish for Paula, and watched Becky waiting in line to pay for the food they were already eating. Becky was behind two people: a leathery-skinned middle-aged woman with long, stringy gray hair, reminiscent of Paula’s own dreads, and a skinny, smooth-faced young man with the long, overgrown beard of an elderly hillbilly.

“Look at these people,” Paula said with disgust. “I hate this store.”

Jen found this comment odd, considering that Paula’s careless fashion sensibilities fit in perfectly here. Paula’s disdain for North Middleton had been evident since the moment of their arrival, but her venom seemed the most concentrated here, amongst those who would seem to be her own people.

“This is a great place to be celibate,” Paula added, in a more cheerful tone, as though pointing out the bright side of a bad situation.

As Jen watched the line of unkempt, scrawny people waiting to buy their organic greens and gluten-free bread, she couldn’t help but agree with Paula. Will these be the people I meet here, she wondered? She couldn’t imagine befriending these inscrutable bohemians, with their practical clothing and blank, over-sunned faces.

Becky was at the front of the line, now. Jen watched her step up to the counter, across from the cashier, who was facing Jen. She saw his arm muscles flex under his t-shirt as he punched numbers into the register. Becky said something to him, presumably about the pastries and coffee that she was purchasing for her friends, because he turned his head to look directly at Jen and Paula. His gaze met Jen’s, and she noticed his eyes—bright blue, a striking contrast to his dark, shaggy hair.

He stared at Jen for a moment, smiling slightly. She smiled back, a similarly small, shy smile.

“Oh, finally one of them recognizes you,” said Paula. “People here are so clueless. They don’t see anything they don’t expect to see.”

Yes, he recognized me, thought Jen, with surprise, as though this didn’t happen to her every day. That’s why he smiled. She turned her head away from the cashier and nodded in agreement at Paula.

But secretly, she didn’t think that this was the reason he smiled at all. Secretly, with a certainty that could only be an indication that this was fate, she knew right away that this man would be her new friend.

Chapter 15:
http://kickoutofyou.blogspot.com/2008/11/15-then-man-dreaming.html

13b. An Unfortunate Tendency

“The human being has an unfortunate tendency to wish to please.” —Philip K. Dick

Flipping back through the pages near the end of the book, Jen found the beginning of the diagnostic test, which was not called a “test” at all. Instead, in bold letters, it was titled “Aura Diagnostic Tool.” Below that, the first page was all explanation and instructions.

“This Aura Diagnostic Tool will allow you to determine the primary color of your aura,” said the first paragraph. “This will give you insight into the current state of your Life Force.”

“The questions on this Tool—one hundred total—have been carefully developed to access and measure particular frequencies of your Psychic Energy.

“Auras change over time, as the stages of your life progress. You may not always have the same dominant aura that you have right now. For this reason, you should not think of this Tool as measuring a permanent state. Instead, consider your immediate present as you answer the questions on this Tool.”

These are long instructions, thought Jen impatiently. She scanned quickly through the following paragraphs, which described the accuracy and effectiveness of the Tool, looking for anything important. The only thing she found was at the bottom of the page, which said: “Materials: you will need a pen and paper.”

Jen hopped off the bed and over to the writing desk and found a small notepad in the top drawer. There were lots of pens in the drawer, but when she tested them on the notepad, they all left deep, colorless scratches across the page. Rooting farther back, she found a shimmery purple pen whose plastic casing was decorated with little lavender pictures of shooting stars and flying horses. Jen drew a large scribble on the bottom of the page. The metallic ink was pale and difficult to read. Jen considered looking for a darker pen, but she was anxious to get started, and if she thought about it, the pen’s ephemeral color seemed fitting for the project she was about to embark upon.

Jen sat back down on the bed and opened the book to the beginning of the Tool. The instructions said that the questions were to be answered using the following responses:

A. This is always true.
B. This is often true.
C. This is usually not true.
D.This is never true.

Jen remembered taking a similar type of survey a few months ago when she had visited a new dentist. She wondered if the questions would be similar: “I am happy with my smile.” “My teeth are as white as I would like them to be.”

In fact, this guess was not far off, as the first questions all seemed related to her body. The first one read:

I eat a lot of food.

Hmm, thought Jen. This was difficult already. How much food was “a lot”? Didn’t everybody eat a lot of food, every day, just to stay alive?

Jen thought back to the instructions. “Consider your immediate present,” the book had said. Presently, during the past three weeks to be specific, she had been consuming more food than she had eaten in years. She hadn’t been limiting carbs, or fat; she had been eating whatever Becky cooked, as much as she could stomach until she became too queasy to eat any more.

“B,” said Jen aloud, marking the letter on her notepad. Often true. She moved on to the second one.

I am slender.

This one was even more disconcerting. Certainly she was slender now, but she might not be for long. With all the food she was eating, she was certain to gain weight. And then, there was also the distinct possibility that her body was about to begin a transition, that she was about to start growing larger and larger, past the borders of her own frame, like her legs in that old nightmare. She had a flash, a vision of a large, round belly, bursting out from between the lapels of a jacket like a smuggled cantaloupe.

But again, she was straying away from the present, this time into the future rather than the past. The answer, for now, seemed to be that she was slender. But just in case, she chose “B” again—often true.

I frequently feel dizzy or nauseated.

Once again, focusing on the immediate present altered her answer. Jen hadn’t ever felt dizzy or nauseated on a regular basis until the last month or so. It seemed odd to characterize herself based on such an anomalous time period. But whatever was happening now was the most important, she thought. She struggled between A and B for a moment, trying to remember how dizzy and nauseous she had been, exactly. As she thought, a wave of queasiness washed over her, and for a moment she felt that she might vomit. Then the feeling passed, as it did every time, many times throughout the day, she realized.

She wrote “A” in the column of letters on the notepad.

Once she got used to thinking purely in the present, the remaining questions about bodies were easy to answer: she “often” had fair skin (she took this answer to mean that her skin was medium-fair), she “often” had aching feelings in her body (thanks to her broken rib), and she “always” enjoyed the taste of astringent foods such as lemon. She “almost never” was ashamed of her own appearance, and she “never” craved fatty or sweet foods.

After the first thirty questions or so, she noted a shift in the subject matter. The new questions all had to do with her personality. These were more difficult to answer, since she needed to assess not only her own feelings, but other people’s feelings about her. She realized that she knew very little about what other people thought of her. For example, one question said:

People often describe me as cold or standoffish.

Jen’s first inclination was to answer “A,” always true. She always felt standoffish, always felt that she was alienating everyone around her through her failure to engage properly. She had spent years smiling for cameras, warmly greeting members of the press, happily signing autographs, but it never felt like enough. Whenever she failed to make eye contact with someone smiling at her on the street, or turned away from someone aiming a cell-phone camera at her, or stretched at the beginning of yoga class rather than making chit-chat with curious classmates, she felt like the coldest, rudest, least generous person on earth. Always true, she thought sadly.

Before marking down her answer, though, Jen reread the question. It didn’t ask what she thought of herself, she discovered; it asked how other people described her. So rather than trying to imagine what other people thought about her, Jen tried to interpret the question in the most literal manner possible: to the best of her own knowledge, did people describe her as cold?

She tried to think of who might describe her. There were very few people in her life who spoke honestly to her: Becky, Paula, her mother. All of them had faulted her for various shortcomings: inconsiderateness, laziness, lying to herself. Not eating enough. Not eating the right things. Not being tough enough, too fragile, not resilient. Not open-minded. Those were the ones she could remember right now. But nothing about being cold, unless you counted her mother’s admonitions that she was too “uptight.” Nothing about unfriendly, which is what “standoffish” meant, right? So at least to the people that she knew, the people who mattered to her, she did not appear to be as cold and distant as she often felt.

The only other places she had seen herself described were in magazines, and she had stopped reading those years ago. She tried to recall the last time she had read an article about herself; it was that article about Skipper, she realized with disgust. She tried to remember how it had described her. It had implied that she was crazy, she realized. And promiscuous. But not cold, not standoffish. Nothing about that.

All right, then, she concluded. Not cold or standoffish. But she could not dismiss the idea that people she did not know, those at the health club, those on the street, were describing her that way, without her knowing. “C,” she wrote, not usually, as a concession to those people.

As with the “body” section, the questions in this “personality” section became easier to answer with practice. Some were obvious, such as the fact that her relationship with her family was “usually not” close, or that she “often” kept her most important thoughts to herself rather than sharing them.

A few questions had answers that shifted if she only considered the immediate present. She wanted to answer that she “always” had a good relationship with her closest friend, but remembering the recent months when she had gone for days at a time without even speaking to Becky, and the awkwardness that still loomed over their interactions, she changed her response to “often.”

When she was about two-thirds of the way through the hundred questions, the focus of the Tool changed once more. This time the topic was a bit more difficult to pin down, but there was clearly some affinity between the questions. As she read each one, she tried to articulate the overall topic: perhaps it was her goals, or her desires, or her view of the world. Her philosophy, she thought, remembering Skipper for the third time in the last hour.

Whatever the topic, these questions were the most difficult to respond to, given her current state of transition. The answers to many of the questions seemed to have changed as of today; nowhere was this so evident as in the following statement:

I am comfortable where I live.

Oh no, thought Jen. Where I live right now? Here finally was a question that forced her to make a commitment to her new surroundings. She could answer based on her house in LA, in which case the answer would be “A,” always, she always loved her house. She would miss it, she realized, as much and perhaps more than she would miss her friends. This new house seemed cute enough, and cozy, but it did not make her feel comfortable. “Where I live,” she thought, looking at the question again. I don’t even know where I live. She lived off the map, in the uncharted, alien middle of the country, in a house that belonged to strangers that she had never met.

“D,” she answered with a sigh—never.

There were a number of similar questions about her level of comfort with her current life. Many of them received “never” answers, based on Jen’s total lack of knowledge about where she was, what she was planning, where she would be in a month or six months or a year. “My life feels settled at the present moment”—never. “I have concrete plans for the future”—never. “I feel that I am in a rut”—she felt comforted, maybe even cheerful, as she answered “never” yet again.

Her favorite question in this category was:

I have hope for the future.

The statement seemed sweet and quaint and Jen very much wanted to agree with it. She thought for a moment. The future seemed so fuzzy right now; she could barely imagine what tomorrow would be like, and next week, after Becky and Paula’s departure, seemed incomprehensible. Still, she realized, thinking of her quiet life, and the lake, she felt incredibly hopeful, and, in spite of her fear, more excited about her future than she had felt for years.

“A,” she answered—always.

As she continued to search for the theme of this section, Jen noticed another trend. Unlike the previous sections, whose questions had been, if not easily answered, at least familiar, this section contained a number of questions whose topics never would have occurred to Jen, questions about her perceptions: “I prefer round shapes to square ones.” “I would rather listen to music than look at a painting.” “I believe that gray is a color.”
Jen felt that her answers to most of these questions were a bit erratic; today she felt that circles were preferable to squares, the circles being less pointy and safer, but this preference hardly seemed permanent or even significant. On the other hand, several questions alerted her to some deeply-rooted belief or tendency that she had never been aware of, such as:

I enjoy placing things into categories.

Jen laughed aloud, thinking of her own categorization of the books on the shelf and the questions on the test. On the hunch that this was not a new behavior for her, she answered “A,” always. Well, now I’ve learned something about myself, she thought. So even if I end up being an Amethyst, this test won’t have been totally worthless.

Several of the questions in this section startled Jen, making her feel that she was about to cry. One was:

I am happy spending many hours or days by myself.

Jen thought back to the weeks she had spent biding her time in the Encino library between yoga classes, reading on the couches next to sleeping vagrants and practicing yoga poses in the most remote, hidden aisles. She had enjoyed this time to herself; she had felt purposeful and focused, and self-sufficient in a way that she did not when her daily activities were being prescribed by a director or producer, or a husband, or even by Becky. Still, there had always been an underlying sense of loneliness, knowing that no one was taking care of her, no one noticing that she was missing all day or wondering why her clothing had become so unusually ragged. And that was nothing, she thought to herself, nothing at all compared to how this will be. But this way of thinking made her feel like she was about to dive off the brink of a canyon, to float above the ground in a hang-glider, watching her feet dangle vulnerably above the rivers and fields visible so far below. She quickly answered “B,” often, and flipped to the last page of questions, which focused mainly on more innocuous subjects.

The final question on the Tool seemed portentous:

I have or would like to have children.

Jen wondered what she thought about this question. Did she want a child? The change in her life would be enormous, she thought. When she was married, she had often contemplated the possibility of children. The appeal was less about the children themselves, and more about what they signified for the marriage: stability, permanence, the idea that the father would always be linked to you in some way, no matter what happened between you, through this bond of common responsibility and DNA.

Now, she realized, if she were to have a child, there would be no man in her life to share the work, the decisions, to enjoy the feeling of finally having a family with. On the other hand, she thought, there would be no obligations, no compromising, no negotiating. And no marital relationship to be destroyed by the constant pressure, the high-stakes disagreements and debates, the strain of being more business partners than lovers.

Perhaps she would like to have a child by herself, she thought. She wasn’t sure; she couldn’t think it all through right now. She wrote “B,” often, in the final slot on her sheet of paper.

Now that Jen had finished the test (or the Tool, she corrected herself), she stared down at her work, the hundred numbers and letters. Their pattern on the page, the neat rows, looked shifting and surreal in the shimmery lavender ink. Jen hoped the Tool wouldn’t be too difficult to score; she felt impatient to learn her diagnosis.

On the page following the final questions, there were directions for calculating a score. Jen gasped indignantly to learn that the scoring method was hopelessly complicated. Each question had its own set of scores, depending on how it had been answered, and the scores needed to be organized into different columns. She turned her sheet of paper over and started new columns on the back, and began the tedious task of translating her answers into numbers. She noticed that the points assigned to each question increased progressively through the test, so that her final answers about colors and children were worth about five times as much as her early answers about her body.

Jen remembered that she had seen a calculator in the drawer, and she rose from the bed to fetch it. Using the calculator, she was able to total up each of the three columns prescribed by the directions. Then, still following the directions, she multiplied the first column by 2.5, subtracted the second column, and then multiplied that by the third. The result was a palindrome: 161. She double-checked her math, verifying the total of each individual column and then repeating the final three mathematical operations. She wanted to make sure her diagnosis was accurate.

It had been a long time since she had done math, she thought to herself. Becky did all her taxes and bookkeeping, so Jen never needed to calculate anything. Now she regretted missing out; it was kind of fun, actually, methodical and relaxing. She wondered if she’d have more chances to do math in her new, self-reliant life.

On the page following the calculation instructions was a chart explaining how to connect one’s score to an aura. The chart, like the calculations preceding it, was frustratingly complex. This must be what it’s like to do taxes, Jen thought, feeling a bit like a freak for never having done hers. She read the instructions slowly, making sure not to skip any steps that would lead to a faulty diagnosis. She found the numbers corresponding to the Ruby aura—but they did not include 161. Then she found those for Onyx. These numbers were all very low, under twenty, and they did not include her number. The numbers for Sapphire, conversely, were all quite high, over one thousand. Jen gasped as she realized that the only two left were Jade and Amethyst. Please not Amethyst, please not Amethyst, she prayed, scanning the numbers for that most undesired of auras. Triumphantly, she found that 161 was not included. I’m Jade, she thought excitedly, rushing with her eyes to find her number listed under that aura. But when she found the numbers for Jade, once again, 161 was not included.

Puzzled, Jen ran her eyes back over the list of numbers. Then she used her finger, tracing along the gridlines, growing increasingly worried that she would need to go back and total all the numbers all over again.

Finally her eye fell on a small list of numbers in the bottom right-hand corner of the chart, away from the other groupings of numbers and colors. These numbers were all three-digit palindromes, and 161 was among them. She traced her finger back across the chart to find the jewel-tone that matched her responses. But there was no word in the box where the color name should have been. Instead there were three small asterisks in a row.

Jen looked to the bottom of the page, and found three more asterisks, followed by a short passage.

“Your aura is inconclusive,” read the passage. Jen felt a rush of disappointment. Of course she had messed up this test; she had felt that something was wrong the entire time she was taking it.

“Do not be alarmed,” the passage continued. “This result does not mean that you do not have an aura, or that there is a problem with your aura. Instead, the Tool indicates that your aura is in a state of radical instability. It is recommended that you wait at least one month before employing the Tool again.”

Jen silently berated herself. She had never been good at tests, but this one was a Tool, not a test, and she had thought it was impossible to mess up, aside from ending up with the dreaded Amethyst aura. She should have been more consistent in her answers, she told herself. She should have thought through how she was answering. No, she realized: the true problem was that she had taken the book’s instructions too literally, answering the questions based on her present moment, not on who she had been over time. Of course she couldn’t answer well today; she had no idea where she was, what was going on with her body, what her activities in this new place would be. She knew nothing. How could she expect to properly diagnose her personality on the same day that she had been extracted, violently it seemed at the moment, from her homeland and plopped down in the middle of this terrifying flat field?

She resolved to take the test again. "Once I get settled in,” she said aloud to herself.

Just as she spoke, Paula burst into the room looking flushed and energetic and smelling of marijuana, which, Jen remembered now, seemed to play a key role in the grounding of the house. Paula must have gotten ready for bed after the grounding ritual. Her dreadlocks were pulled into a messy ponytail that Jen found oddly attractive, and she was wearing worn plaid pajama bottoms and a tank top with no bra.

“What did you say?” Paula asked.

“Nothing,” said Jen, embarrassed. Then, to change the subject, she added, "You guys didn't ground the rooms up here."

"No," said Paula, "we got too tired. We'll finish in the morning. Plus we didn't want to bother you--what have you been doing?"

“I was just reading,” Jen said.

Paula looked dismissively over at the bookshelf. “Those are kind of the b-list books,” she said. “They keep the good ones in the big house in Toledo.”

Jen remembered her categorization question. “Hey, do you know anything about the books on the bottom shelf?”

Paula walked the few paces to the bookshelf and fell into the same yoga-trained squat that Becky so often assumed on a whim. She pulled a few of the worn books from the shelf to look at the titles that had worn off the bindings.

“Oh,” said Paula. “These are all mine. Wow,” she added, holding up a psychedelically designed paperback called The Cosmic Trigger. “I haven’t seen this book in years.” She pulled out another book, The Art of War, and flipped through the pages.

“These are my really old books, like from when I was in college,” Paula said. “My mom must have kept the ones she liked.”

Paula put the book back on the shelf and stood up, her eyes traveling to the book on Jen’s lap.

“Did you take the test?” Paula asked.

“Tool,” said Jen, stalling for time.

“What?” asked Paula, but she didn’t wait for an explanation. “Which aura were you?”

“Jade,” said Jen, feeling horrible the moment the lie reached her own ears.

“Wow,” said Paula, impressed. “That’s the one everyone wants to be.”

“What’s yours?” asked Jen, trying to prevent any further discussion of her own bogus aura.

Paula sighed. “Amethyst,” she said, in a resigned voice. “I took that test a dozen times, and it was always Amethyst.”

“What’s wrong with Amethyst?” asked Jen, making her voice blank with disingenuous naiveté.

Jen still wasn’t sure why she had lied; she told herself that she was merely trying to avoid a complicated conversation about her indecisive aura, but she didn’t quite trust her own motivations.

“I hate Amethyst,” Paula said, her voice dripping with self-pitying disdain. “It’s the worst one.”

Chapter 14:
http://kickoutofyou.blogspot.com/2008/10/14-context-and-breeding-ground.html

13a. An Entire New Universe

“Few people had the awareness I now possessed. Because of my limitations an entire new universe had revealed itself to me, a benign and living hyperenvironment endowed with absolute wisdom.” —Philip K. Dick.

The sun was setting as they finally turned off the state road and onto North Middleton Road, which led to Main Street. Jen had spent the last hour falling in and out of a shallow sleep. Every time she opened her eyes, she looked warily out the window, hoping to catch a glimpse of some more welcoming terrain: hills, forests, a quaint little town. Each time she was disappointed to find that the flat, bare fields persisted, appearing all the more ominous in the darkening twilight.

At first, North Middleton also looked like a barren field. The theoretically major road that they exited onto was so bumpy and worn that Jen thought it might not actually be paved. Leaning forward to peer through the windshield, Jen thought she could see something like a town looming ahead in the dim light.

“Welcome to North Middleton,” said Paula, yawning as she spoke.

“Stop it,” snapped Becky. “No sounding sleepy. I still have—” she squinted at the GPS screen—“four miles to drive.”

“And that’s just to the center of town,” Paula added. “Then the real driving begins.”

As they drove further down the road, the dark shape that Jen had seen grew closer and larger, until it formed into a gigantic cement wall on the right side of the car, which continued for what would have been blocks and blocks if there were any cross-streets.

“The Snail Plant,” said Paula, turning to look at Jen in the back seat.

“It’s huge,” said Jen, shocked that anything so large and solid could have appeared in the middle of so much nothingness.

“It has to be,” Paula responded. “They’re building giant machines in there—digging machines and dump-trucks and…backhoes.” Paula struggled to think of the names.

Once the factory wall ended, the surroundings changed to look more like a real town. Trees lined the streets, and Jen saw the lights of what appeared to be little shops and businesses.

“Turn left onto Main Street,” said the GPS. Paula reached up and clicked it off.

“We’re here,” she said. “This is the university.”

Off to the left side of the road, there was a grassy hill lined with mismatched stone walls and arches. Jen couldn’t see much of it in the dark, but she could make out figures, presumably students, trudging along the sidewalk.

“We’ll get the tour tomorrow,” said Becky impatiently. "How do I get to…” She stopped, uncertainly.

“Cone,” said Paula, adding a mnemonic to help Becky remember: “Like ‘cone.’”

Jen was tired enough to think this was funny. She began giggling uncontrollably, despite her nervousness, or perhaps because of it. Becky didn’t laugh, but stared resolutely ahead at the road.

Getting to Cone involved driving to the opposite end of Main Street, turning right, and following an actual unpaved road (it felt even bumpier than North Middleton Road, Jen thought) for about three miles. The lake house was on a little dirt road off of this main dirt road. At least the terrain had finally shifted, Jen thought; they were now surrounded by a dense forest that began as soon as they turned off Main Street. Jen marveled that this dark, shadowy woodland could exist just miles from the flat, treeless expanses of the state highway.

By the time they pulled in front of the house, Becky was as grumpy as Jen had ever seen her. She rushed them into the house, snapping at Jen to leave the luggage in the car. “We need to get inside and see if there’s anything to eat in there. Otherwise we have to go back out,” she said.

Luckily, the house was well-stocked with canned food. Becky and Paula heated up vegetarian chili and served it with toasted bread from the freezer. While they worked in the kitchen, Jen toured the house.

The first room from the front door was the living room, small and cozy with large windows and a fireplace. Behind it was the kitchen, which had a view of the backyard, and beyond that, the lake. It didn’t look like much in the dark, just a large, black void between the trees, but Paula assured Jen that it was very pretty in the day. Upstairs there was a loft and two small bedrooms, one of which also functioned as an office with a little desk and a bookshelf. She liked this room and thought perhaps it would be the one she would sleep in. The bookshelf made her nervous, though, positioned precariously across from the bed. She wouldn’t want it to fall on her in her sleep; no one would ever know to come save her out here.

She asked Paula about the room as they dipped their toast in the chili. “Is that bookshelf upstairs safe across from the bed?”

“You’re thinking like a Californian,” Paula responded bluntly. “There aren’t earthquakes here.”

“Oh,” said Jen, who had forgotten that earthquakes weren’t a universal phenomenon. But couldn’t other things knock a bookshelf down, she wondered? “What about tornadoes?” she asked.

“If there’s a tornado, you need to go in the basement,” Paula said. “By the time it gets here, the bookshelf is going to be the last thing you’ll need to worry about.”

Jen hadn’t realized that there was a basement. Paula showed it to her after dinner—an unobtrusive doorway opening up to a creepy staircase draped with spider webs. “It’s actually okay down there,” said Paula, seeing Jen’s frightened face. “I’ll dust those off later.”

Before bed, Paula and Becky decided to “ground” the house, a Groundbreakers ritual for initiating a new living space. Jen had seen the procedure before—it involved copper rods and energy-cleansing verbal affirmations—and she didn’t feel the need to participate. They started down in the scary basement, in order to build a solid foundation, and planned to work their way up through every room of the house.

Jen decided to check out the books in her new bedroom instead. She climbed the narrow staircase up to the loft and sat down on the bed across from the bookshelf. On the wall next to the shelf hung a collection of photographs, all featuring the same two people. One was a fit, tanned, middle-aged woman with light-brown hair, presumably Paula’s mother. The other was a light-skinned black man with long dreadlocks that were much neater than Paula’s. “Her husband,” Jen guessed, wondering how he felt about Paula’s unkempt hair.

Jen scanned the shelves, looking for which books she might want to read. She had finished Siddhartha a few weeks ago, and then reread it. Now she was reading another gift book, Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet, but she was almost done with that one as well. She hadn’t brought any other books but those two, and she planned to be spending a lot of time by herself.

As she scanned the shelf, Jen realized that she was not just looking for a book, but for an answer, a direction. Her life, right at this moment, was possibly the most radically unstructured that it had ever been. She had no plan; she did not know where she was; left to her own devices, she would barely be able to find her way back into town. And Becky and Paula would be leaving in a week—then she would be all alone, left to entertain herself in this creepy house surrounded by hundreds of miles of alien terrain. She scanned the shelf with the needy desperation of someone praying for an easy cure. Like a dieter trying to get full at a salad bar, like the frustrated men lining the floor of the dance club at last call, waiting for anyone at all to come along and save them from the lonely, humiliating drive home alone.

Looking at the bindings filling the top shelf, Jen noticed an array of thin, spidery letters and baroque flourishes. These were texts on spirituality, she realized, looking at the titles: Sun Worship: The Ancient Way stood next to a book about the Kabala. One deep blue book was called Zen Buddhism and Modern Sexuality; she shuddered, thinking of Skipper.

She scanned down the shelves, trying to identify the other subject groupings. The next shelf down had a number of travel books promising to guide readers through such disparate terrain as Bali and Java and The Dunes of North-Western Michigan. Next to that was a special section on physical activities. These were mostly yoga: Light on Yoga by B.K.S. Iyengar, next to Yoga for Baby and You!. But next to that, a book about tai chi and another about sea kayaking.

Jen squatted down to look at the shelf second from the floor: bold letters and bright primary colors marked the bindings of the self-help books. Your Money and Your Life, shouted one. And Making Love Work. Jen was scandalized when her eyes fell upon Open Marriages Today—she quickly lowered her eyes to the bottom shelf.

Jen scanned this last shelf, puzzled by what joined the books here. Even their bindings evinced no clear trend—some were brightly colored, some light and modest. Many were worn by heavy use, so that it was impossible to read their titles. Jen pulled on of these from the shelf, a medium-sized paperback whose cover was held on with masking tape.

Diagnose Your Aura, the book’s cover exclaimed, in rainbow-colored letters.

“Hmm,” said Jen aloud, in a world-weary tone that sounded as though she were highly skeptical. She matched it with a suspicious facial expression, her eyes narrowed and her mouth pursed into a bit of a sneer.

And yet, she realized suddenly, she was acting. Acting for no one, since there was no one around to witness her honest curiosity as she flipped through the pages. She knew exactly what Becky would call this, she thought, with an unnerving jolt of recognition: mind-havoc. Lying to yourself to live up to an expected idea of who you should be.

Fine, she thought. I’m not embarrassed. I’m going to see what my aura is.

Her inclination was to stay near the bookshelf so she could put the book back if Becky and Paula returned. But instead she carried the book to head of the bed, where she could sit and read it in full self-acceptance of her own ridiculousness.

Sitting cross-legged against the headboard, she set the book in her lap. It fell open to a page towards the end that had clearly been read more than all the others. The heading on the page said “Amethyst.”

Whoever owned this book, this must have been their aura—probably Paula’s mother, Jen thought, trying and failing to imagine that dreadlocked man from the photograph obsessively studying his own aura.

The page opened with a short overview of the aura’s characteristics. She read the opening lines: “The Amethyst aura denotes charisma, flamboyance, and decadence. People with this aura tend to be performers such as musicians, dancers, and actors.”

Don’t let that be my aura, Jen thought, in a desperate, unconscious prayer. She flipped the pages of the book, looking for descriptions of the other auras. She passed the more detailed sections about each aura, with headings like career, money, and love. Towards the back of the book was a long list of questions; it was the test to diagnose one’s own aura, she realized.

Finally she found another page with a large heading, this time “Ruby.” The overview in this section said, “Ruby is the aura of action. People with Ruby auras are adventurers and world-travelers. They are often impulsive and don’t always think through their actions.” This sounded better than the amethyst aura, but not by much. Jen wondered if any of the auras had favorable traits or if they were all just subtly differentiated gradations of obnoxiousness.

She kept flipping, hoping to find an aura that she actually liked the description of. The next one she found was Sapphire. “This aura indicates someone who is brave, trustworthy, and principled,” the book said. Better, Jen thought, continuing to read. “People with Sapphire auras tend to work as school teachers, nurses, fire fighters or police officers.”

This aura sounded admirable, but Jen was pretty sure it didn’t describe her. She needed to find one that she wanted to be, so that she would know what to hope for as she took the test.

“Onyx,” was the next aura that Jen found. “An Onyx aura generally indicates one of two things,” the book said. “It may be found when the subject is at a very dark point at his or her life, such as a deep depression or rage. The other colors of the aura become muted as the Life Force is obstructed by negative emotions.”

Jen read on, intrigued to find out the other reason that someone might have an Onyx aura. Perhaps this was her aura, and some dark spell was hanging over her. Maybe the book would tell her some way to clear her energy and make her aura shine with a new, healthier color.

“However, some people purposely cultivate an Onyx aura,” the book continued. “These people are usually involved in the dark arts, such as sorcerers and vampires.”

All right then, Jen thought, trying to calmly withhold judgment, but her embarrassment was rising again as she flipped hastily away from this section of the book.

Jen worried that she had read about all of the auras without finding one that seemed to fit her personality. She thumbed hastily through the pages but kept finding the same auras: Amethyst, Ruby, Sapphire, Onyx. Finally, in frustration, she opened to the table of contents and found that there was one final aura described at the end of the book, right before the test: Jade. She turned hopefully to the listed page.

“The Jade aura reflects contemplation, self-discipline, and an even temper,” it said. This sounded pretty good, Jen thought; maybe this was the one. “People with this aura tend to work in spiritual professions such as priests, rabbis, or monks. They might also be teachers of energetic practices such as yoga or martial arts.”

Okay, thought Jen, slamming the book closed in satisfaction. There’s my aura. She held the closed book in her lap for a moment, thinking pleasurably of the Jade aura and how it would confirm her new ascetic lifestyle, before remembering that she should take the test in order to consider herself fully “diagnosed.” Now she felt a bit nervous, as she realized that the book might not agree with her own self-assessment. Anything but Amethyst, she pled silently to the book. Even Onyx would be better than Amethyst.

Chapter 13b:
http://kickoutofyou.blogspot.com/2008/10/13b-unfortunate-tendency.html