37. What It Means to Be Civilized

“Due to a misguided idea of what it means to be civilized, the modern male has convinced himself that the spectator is morally superior to the competitor.” —Fred Fawls

Bryce is the type of high-school basketball player who is always called “a team player” and “a hard worker.” He shows up early for every practice. A senior on the varsity team, he always helps his sophomore and junior teammates with their game. He is a solid player, with a reasonably high scoring record, though not as high as some of his teammates. He holds the team record for assists, though, and is considered a “strategic player.” When two of his teammates are recruited by prestigious university teams, he feels sad but not surprised that he has been overlooked; he has never expected to be noticed for his playing.

Before he met his wife, Kevin’s passion was racing motorcycles. His wife feels the sport is too dangerous, reminding him of several local men who have been injured or killed pursuing the sport. There’s a big racing event coming up, which will covered by a cable sports station, and several of Kevin’s friends are competing. As the day of the event approaches, Kevin gets a sickly feeling in his stomach every time he thinks about his friends who are racing. He wishes that he could participate; however, he is so out of practice that he would be unable to race, even if his wife would allow him to.

Joe has worked in human resources at a large bank for seven years and has not had a promotion in five. He does everything that he is supposed to: his work is thorough, he completes his assignments in a timely fashion, he has instigated procedural changes that have maximized efficiency and saved his company thousands of dollars. Yet every time he applies for a higher position, it goes to one of his colleagues. He has become so frustrated that he has considered changing jobs, but he is very close with his immediate supervisor and does not want to abandon him.

In my ten years as a life coach, I have seen countless cases such as these. All of these men are talented and capable, yet their lack of aggression prevents them from achieving the accomplishments they dream of. They don’t believe that they deserve success. They have been gambling against themselves, thinking that everyone else’s needs, goals, and desires are as important as their own.

Maybe you agree with them; you believe that you are no more entitled to success than anyone else. Perhaps this is true. But your job is not to advocate for everyone else. Your job—your birthright as a living being—is to advocate for yourself.

Imagine the president of a country who says, “I want to win the war, but of course, the other country also wants to win, so why should my needs come first?” Imagine the quarterback who says, “My team wants to get to the Superbowl, but the other team wants it more, so I think they should go.” Imagine the antelope who thinks, “This lion is going to eat one of us, so it might as well be me.”

What would we say to this president, this quarterback, this antelope? We would say that they are not doing their jobs! They have neglected to advocate for themselves, and this neglect will lead to their unnecessary downfall.

But their way of thinking is extremely common for many modern men. We are raised to be considerate, to cooperate, to think of other people’s needs as equivalent to our own. And later, we are taught that morality is relative, that good and evil do not exist, that our enemies are simply people with needs and desires, just like us, that all conflicts can be solved through diplomacy.

That all might be true, but it’s not your problem. Your problem—your mission as a living being, your duty, your reason for existing—is to promote your own interest. Once you can agree to this truism, that your purpose for existing is to honor your own self-interest above all other interests and considerations, then I can give you strategies to help you achieve that purpose. But until you are willing to break from the pluralistic ideology of cooperation that you have been indoctrinated into since childhood, you will never be able to activate your full potential as a Fully Actualized Man.

To become Fully Actualized, you must fulfill your role in the Evolutionary Contract. This contract mandates that, for survival of the fittest to work, we must all fight to survive. “But I’m not the fittest,” you might respond. “I am doing my species a favor by removing myself from the gene pool.” You are wrong; that’s not how evolution works. It is not for you to decide whether you are the fittest. Only time and the progression of nature can decide that. What if the first mammal with opposable thumbs had decided that he was a freak, and therefore not fit to pass on his genes? Mankind would have never come into existence, because one individual decided not to fight for his own survival. Whatever you have to offer, you must offer it with pride, unapologetically, knowing that it may be your unique traits that save our species or carry it further into greatness.

Want to Win
As the opening of this chapter suggests, the first step of becoming Fully Actualized is to activate your desire to outperform others. This sounds simple, yet the desire to win has been bred out of many modern men. Instead, we are trained to compromise, to hold back, not to draw attention to our abilities.

When I met Bryce, he had just joined the basketball team at his local community college. He was still a solid player but was overshadowed by other players who were the stars of the team. He often made suggestions for plays they might try in upcoming games, but no one took his ideas seriously.

I asked Bryce what was the difference between himself and the star players on the team.

“Are they more skillful players than you?” I asked him.

“No,” he said, with certainty.

“So why do they get all the attention?” I asked. “What are they doing that you’re not?”

He thought about it for a moment. “They will do anything to win,” Bryce said. “They will play dirty, commit lots of fouls. They try to injure the top players on the other team. They will grab the ball from a weaker player on our own team to make sure we get the shot.”

“Why don’t you do those things?” I asked him.

“Because they’re mean,” said Bryce. “I’m not a mean person.”

“What’s the purpose of playing a game?” I asked.

“It’s for fun,” he said. “There is no purpose.”

“I don’t agree,” I said. “I think the purpose of playing is to win. The fun comes from the knowledge that there will be a winner and a loser, and from the desire to be the winner. Otherwise, games wouldn’t have winners and losers; but almost all of them do.”

I explained to Bryce that a game is not really a game unless you are doing everything possible to try to win. Without that kind of sincere competition, you dishonor the game, your teammates, your opponents, and, most importantly, yourself.

Bryce took my advice and began to focus more persistently on winning. He noticed that this change of perspective immediately affected his level of play. Before, his attention during a game had been on team dynamics; he would always look to see who was open and in position for a shot, making sure to pass to players who hadn’t had a chance to score yet or who weren’t getting much action. He would be careful not to foul the other team’s players. Now, he put all of those concerns aside and focused on scoring points. He did whatever it took to get himself into a position where he could score, even if it meant elbowing past one of his opponents. If he was not in the position to score, he would pass to the strongest teammate who was open.

Because of his increased contribution, Bryce’s team began to win more games and move up in their conference rankings. His coaches began to take interest in him, and the local newspaper profiled him as a “local athlete to watch.” When he was ready to transfer to a four-year school, he was accepted onto a prestigious team that one of his high school teammates was already playing for.

“Your game has really come up,” the classmate told him.

A lot of men are like Bryce—they consider themselves to be nice people, and they believe that they are doing the world a favor by not competing at their highest level. But it is not a favor to dumb down your abilities; it is an insult. What Bryce discovered is that people respect a competitor—no one more so than those who have to compete against him.

If you think that it is not in your nature to compete because you are a nice, cooperative person who does not want to dominate others, consider how you behave in traffic. When you are in a rush and somebody cuts in front of you, driving slowly, you do you sympathize and cooperate with his incompetence? Do you slow down as well so that the person doesn’t feel bad that they made a mistake? Do you say to yourself, “I won’t acknowledge his poor driving. He probably just isn’t a very experienced driver. I don’t want him to get discouraged and stop driving altogether!” No, you do not. You change lanes and speed past the person, possibly shooting him a dirty look as you do so. In a situation where you know you want to win—to get to your destination on time—your goal is your singular focus, and you have no tolerance for those who stand between you and your objectives.

When the stakes matter to you, you are willing to make winning your only priority. The issue is not that you can’t want to win—it’s that you choose not to want to win. You choose to give life your best capabilities when it really matters to you. Why shouldn’t all your pursuits matter that much to you, enough to make you want to work your hardest and do your best?

Stop Worrying about Others
The second step in becoming a Fully Actualized Man is to put your own needs above the needs of others. Yes, it is a nice thing to help other people, when they need our help, and when giving help does not undermine our own desires and objectives. But your own interests must always be your first priority. Otherwise you will not be fulfilling your part of the Evolutionary Contract.

My experience working with Kevin demonstrates this principle:

I asked Kevin what was stopping him from achieving his dream of racing motorcycles again. He told me that his wife did not want him to race. I asked him why this mattered; why should he have to do what she wanted? What about what he wanted? He said that he didn’t want to make her upset. I asked him what would happen if she got upset.

“She would leave me,” he said.

“How do you know that?” I asked him.

“She told me. She said, ‘I’m not going to hang around waiting for you to get yourself killed on that motorcycle.”

I asked him, “Why would you stay in a relationship with someone who uses emotional blackmail to keep you from doing things that are important to you?”

Kevin thought about this question for quite a while. He did not have an answer for me that day. When I saw him again, several months had passed. Kevin told me excitedly that he had begun to train for motorcycle races.

“What did your wife say about it?” I asked him.

“She left me,” he said.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.

“But you were right,” he told me. “It’s much better to be single and be able to do what I want.”

Kevin went on to tell me how much his life had improved since his wife had left. He was free to do whatever was necessary to pursue his passions.

“I don’t need to worry about making anybody happy,” he said. “I can stay out at the track all weekend, and I don’t need to come home for meals or anything. Sometimes I sleep at my friend’s place closer to the track and don’t go to my apartment for days on end.”

Kevin’s only regret was that he missed his two young children, now that they weren’t living with him.

“They’ll appreciate your decision when they’re older,” I told him. “Kids want their parents to be happy.”

When you stop worrying about others, you may lose friends, or anger your family and loved ones. But if their “love” was contingent on you doing things that benefited them, was it really love at all? To become Fully Actualized, you must never lose sight of your own goals and objectives, even if they are challenging or upsetting to those around you.

Be Arrogant
You know that guy who gets under your skin every time you’re forced to interact with him? He thinks he’s better than everybody. He has many strengths, and he lords his abilities over those around him. He is unsympathetic towards other people’s individual difficulties and problems; he expects everyone else to rise to the level of his unreasonable standards.

You need to become that guy. You need to have confidence in your own abilities and not worry about seeming conceited. Why should you minimize your own talents and achievements just to make lesser people feel better about themselves? If you are the best in a particular area, if you are an expert, you should not hesitate to let those around you know it. Opportunities to use your expertise will not come to you unless people recognize that you are an expert.

Joe came to me bitter and frustrated about the poor treatment he received at his job.

“I do all the work around there,” he said. “But it’s like no one notices. I have been turned down for at least seven promotions, which went to people who were less experienced and less qualified.”

“Why don’t you quit?” I asked him. “You could get another job.”

“I know,” said Joe. In fact, Joe knew somebody at a rival company who had offered him a position.

“Why don’t you take it?” I asked.

“I don’t want to upset my supervisor,” Joe said. “It’s not his fault that I haven’t been promoted. Also, I think I would have the same problems at the rival company.”

“Do you like James Bond movies?” I asked Joe.

He looked surprised. “Yes, I do,” he said.

“Okay,” I told him. “Think about what James Bond would do in your position.”

“James Bond would never work in human resources,” Joe said.

I told Joe that this was a mental exercise, an imagination game. “Imagine that James Bond feels he is not being treated well by the Secret Intelligence Service. What would he do?”

“I guess he wouldn’t stand for it,” said Joe.

“So what actions would he take?” I asked.

“He would quit,” Joe said.

“Would he get a job at another intelligence service?” I asked.

“No,” said Joe. “He would work for himself, so he could never be screwed over by his bosses again.”

“I think you know what you need to do,” I told Joe.

Joe decided not to quit right away. Instead, he began doing research and making some connections. After a year, he was able to found his own transnational company which handled human resources remotely, from India. His company helped many banks save hundreds of thousands of dollars by moving their human resource departments to India. In a few years, both his old company and the rival company that had offered him a job outsourced their human resource departments to his company. Joe’s supervisor was laid off, along with the rest of Joe’s former department, but Joe was able to offer him a position at his company in India.

Joe had all the knowledge and skills to run his own company, yet he was unwilling to capitalize on these advantages. He allowed himself to be treated as less than his true worth, all because he didn’t want to hurt his supervisor’s feelings. Once he was willing to insist on the respect he deserved, he gained the power and prestige he had dreamed of.

When you meet a man who annoys you by being too self-confident, too full of himself, too obnoxiously self-promoting, ask yourself: why am I bothered by his confidence? Is it because I know that he is better than me or because I know that I am better than him? If the former is true, you have no reason to be annoyed at him; it is your own inferiority that should annoy you. And if the latter is true, it is your duty to prove your superiority so this man will better understand his place in the world.

Act the Part
Reading about these steps to becoming a Fully Actualized Man, you may feel overwhelmed. Perhaps you are thinking, “I would like to be like those men you describe—but that’s just not me.” That’s a common reaction. It is not easy to undo years of cultural conditioning. It is a grueling task to change everything about how you view the world and your place in it. But the rewards of this change are great: being truly engaged, truly alive, not a spectator but a competitor.

Studies have shown that pretending to be happy—the mere act of smiling, even—raises people’s actual feelings of happiness. The same is true for acting confident, dominant, or arrogant. You do not need to feel aggressive to be aggressive. Think of the most aggresive person you know, and use him as a model for your behaviors. You may have noticed that I often encourage men to find role models to help them imagine how a Fully Realized Man would act. Eventually, of course, you must learn to be your own man and not follow anyone’s example too closely. But we all learn our life philosophies from those we look up to; that’s why it is crucial to choose your role models wisely. In time, with practice, you will find it easy, even natural, to assert your innate aggressive nature without the need for outside inspiration.

In closing this chapter, I’ll tell you a secret: one of these men that I described in this chapter was me. Hell, all of these men were me, just as all of us are these men at certain points in our lives. But one of these men was really me. And I talked to myself, at that time, as a coach would talk to a player, or as a ranking officer would advise a soldier, or a father would offer guidance to his son. And I told myself: you can make your dreams come true.

What I discovered, once I was able to take my own advice, was that there was nothing in the world that I could not do. I did not need to sit on the sidelines, cheering appreciatively as other people did amazing, brave, risky, rewarding things that I secretly longed to do myself. I did not need to be a spectator. I could get in there. I could be a competitor. So can you. The world is full of opportunities. You just need the conviction to take them.

Chapter 38

36. The Great Myths

“It was the men who got involved in spinning most of the great myths. The women were too busy; they had too damn much to do to sit around thinking about stories.” —Joseph Campbell

“You can take that off,” said Nicolai Snail, pointing at Jen’s chest. Jen liked his accent, but it took her a second to figure out what he had said; the final word sounded like “ov.”

“What?” Jen asked, confused.

“The smock,” said Nicolai Snail.

Jen looked down and saw that she was still wearing the bright yellow crossing-guard vest that marked her as a visitor to the Snail Plant. She had completely forgotten about it. She looked across the giant table at Master Park to see if he was still wearing his, but all she saw was the plain white shirt he had been wearing when they first entered the plant. She couldn’t remember when he had taken the vest off—he had definitely put it on at the entrance, but she didn’t remember seeing it after that.

“Oh, right,” she said. She pulled the vest over her head, folded it into a neat square, and then placed it under her seat.

“Sorry about all that,” said Nicolai Snail, waving his hand first in the direction of the vest, then at the heavily secured door. “We’ve had scares, terrorism, you know. I’m sure it all seems a bit unnecessary to you.”

“Oh, no,” said Jen, embarrassed by Nicolai Snail’s accusing tone.

“It is unnecessary,” Master Park interrupted. “One little problem seven years ago and you make this whole place like a prison.”

“Little problem?” said Nicolai Snail. He turned to face Jen, opening his eyes wide for emphasis. “Our rival company planted a bomb in my office.”

“It didn’t go off,” said Master Park.

“Do you hear this?” Nicolai Snail asked. He looked first at the back of the man he had just beaten at chess, who was still facing the window and did not turn around. Then he looked at Jen, who kept her face studiously blank, since she did not want to be seen as siding with this stranger over her teacher. “It didn’t go off? It didn’t go off because my security guards found it and diffused it. Otherwise, I would have been killed!”

Master Park did seem affected by Nicolai Snail’s hysteria; he was calm and placid in his crisp white shirt. “You overreacted,” he said. “Remember, ‘An unnecessary display of power is an invitation to be attacked.’”

“What’s that, a taekwondo saying?” Nicolai Snail asked.

“No, Fred Fawls,” said Master Park. “It’s from The New Aggressive Male.”

“Ah, yes,” said Nicolai Snail. “I should have recognized it. Well, I’m sure this Fred Fawls fellow—whoever he might be—never had to diffuse a bomb in his office.”

He leaned back in his chair, stretched his arms over his head, and yawned, giving up his fight. Jen looked past him at the middle-aged man in the torn t-shirt, who was still staring obstinately out the window. For all his agitation about enemy attacks, Nicolai Snail didn’t seemed bothered by the dark brooding of the opponent who was right here in the room with him. He leaned back in his chair and tightened his ponytail, a distracted look in his eye.

“So,” he said to Jen after a moment. “Are you playing today?”

“She’s playing,” said Master Park, his authoritative tone suggesting that he was worried Jen would want to back out.

“Good, then we will have our fourth after all,” said Nicolai Snail, smiling.

“Where’s the guru?” Master Park asked. He was running his hand back and forth over the thickly polished surface of the table.

“He couldn’t come to town at the last minute,” said Nicolai Snail. “He had something to do in Los Angeles.”

He turned to Jen. “Vanto Hatch,” he said. “Have you heard of him? He usually visits us every other Wednesday. He is supposed to be here playing today. Quite the busy man.”

Jen opened her eyes wide, but when she spoke, she kept her voice calm. “Yeah, I’ve heard of him,” she said, trying to sound like this new development was not completely surprising and confusing. She knew that Vanto Hatch was an old friend of Nicolai Snail’s—but he was flying into Michigan twice a month to play chess?

“What is it this time?” Master Park asked. “Groundbreakers emergency? Someone has lost their foundation? Someone has holes in their blueprint?”

And Master Park knows him, Jen thought? Why hadn't he ever said anything about him, or about Groundbreakers?

“He had to accept an award,” said Nicolai Snail. “Greatest accomplishment for a self-help author or something like that.”

In reaction to this piece of news, the brooding man finally turned from the window to face the interior of the room, crossing his arms and pressing the back of his dirty-looking t-shirt against the delicately tinted glass.

“He’s too busy being a rock star to bother with us,” said the man, his voice sounding as cranky as his demeanor.

“Jen,” said Nicolai Snail, “this is Oggy Osterberg. The artist.”

Jen remembered his name. He was the sculptor whose work had been on display in front of the visitors’ center when she had gone there with Rob. Rob had told her that he was a student of Master Park’s, but she didn’t realize that he was still in town; she had never seen him at the school.

Oggy gave her a cursory look and nod. “Yes,” he said, turning his gaze immediately away from her and towards Master Park. “I’ll take the killer. She can have the tycoon,” he said.

Jen wasn’t sure what to make of this statement, until she saw Master Park rise from his chair and move to the one across from Oggy Osterberg. She felt a faint tremor of fear as she realized she was going to have to play chess against one of these intimidating men, and that Master Park would not be on hand to help her. She had never played against anyone but him.

“Okay,” Nicolai Snail said to Jen, smiling warmly. “Then it’s us.” He pulled his chair to the side, so that he faced Jen, and slid the unused chess board between them.

He held out two fists for her to choose what color she would play. She pointed towards his right fist, and he unclenched it to reveal a black pawn cupped in the palm of his large, flat hand.

Jen gasped aloud.

“What’s wrong?” Nicolai Snail asked.

She didn’t want to tell him, but out of the dozens of games she had played against Master Park, she could count on one hand the times that she had chosen black. Her habit of choosing white had become so regular that, in the past few weeks, they had bypassed the choosing process altogether and simply assumed that she would play white. Since white always had the first move, Jen didn’t know any of the strategy for going second.

“Nothing,” she said. “Black is great.”

“How long have you been playing?” Nicolai Snail asked, as he turned the board to face the black pieces towards Jen.

“Not very long,” she said. “A couple months.”

“Park’s been teaching you?”

“Yeah,” said Jen. “And I’ve been reading some books.”

“By Thomas Fo?” Nicolai Snail asked.

“Yes,” said Jen, her surprise evident in her voice. Of course it made sense that Master Park’s chess friends would know his favorite chess author, but she hadn’t expected it. She tended to think of Thomas Fo as her author, not Master Park’s, since she had first discovered his books about Zen on Paula’s mother’s bookshelf.

“Thomas Fo is the best,” said Nicolai Snail, projecting his voice towards the board where Master Park and Oggy Osterberg were already deep into their own game. “We are all very fond of his work around here.”

Jen saw Master Park’s lips curl into the slightest hint of an acknowledging smile. Oggy Osterberg’s scowl remained unaltered as he stared down at the board.

Nicolai Snail’s opening moves were conventional, but it still unnerved Jen to be on the defensive, accustomed as she was to going first. She hated the feeling of responding to his moves, rather than being the one to set the direction of the game. Stop being so passive, she told herself, trying to break from his agenda. But each of his moves demanded its own response from her, and she could not figure out how to set up her own strategy.

After her seventh move, Nicolai Snail looked up from the board. “I’ve been trying to get Park to bring you in here for months,” he said in a conspiratorial whisper. “He told me you were too busy. But I am guessing he never even invited you. So tell me, am I correct?”

Jen froze, unsure of what to say. Her first inclination was to answer honestly, that she had indeed never been invited until now. Her second thought was to lie, to defend Master Park and prove Nicolai Snail wrong. She could tell him that she had been invited, and had indeed been too busy with her training.

She looked across the table at Nicolai Snail. His well-kept hair and tasteful sweater spoke of confidence and power. But Jen saw something more in his eyes, something less self-assured. And then, suddenly, she could read it as clearly as if it were a sentence written across the top of his groomed eyebrows: he wanted something from her. She wasn’t sure whether it was something business related, or political, or romantic, or sexual, or something far less tangible than any of those—something as simple as her approval—but there was definitely something he was after.

And she saw that whatever he wanted was distracting him, and he was not really thinking about the game in front of him. And she resolved, in a quick moment of decisiveness that she hoped would make Master Park proud if he could witness her thoughts, that she was going to win.

She remembered the words from The New Aggressive Male:

Don’t defer. Don’t be rude, nor polite; be unconcerned.

And she decided to answer his question with another question.

“Why did you want him to invite me?” she asked.

He shrank a little bit, as though a bright light had flashed in his eyes, and she knew for certain that she had him. “That should be obvious,” he said, reaching down to move his knight into an attacking position.

“No,” she said, sliding her bishop up to defend her pawn.

He stared at the board for a moment, then advanced his own bishop.

“Well,” he said. “This is the room where all the most important and interesting people in North Middleton come to meet.”

Jen looked silently down at the board. She was going to let him derail his own train of thought. Don’t be rude or polite, she thought. Don’t say anything. Don’t defer.

Nicolai Snail allowed the silence to hang between them for a moment, until it seemed he could not bear it any longer. “You don’t consider yourself to one of the most important and interesting people in North Middleton?” he said.

“I live in Cone,” she replied.

“You know what I mean,” he said, his agitation showing in the abrupt way he slapped his pawn down on its new space.

She picked up her knight, which she had not yet moved at all, and placed it in front of her row of pawns.

“I suppose you think I’m vain,” said Nicolai Snail, his voice sounding authentically sullen now. “It’s fine. You can think that.”

Jen didn’t say anything. She looked at the board. Nicolai Snail looked down at the board, too.

“Shit,” he said. Her knight was threatening both his knight and his bishop; he was going to have to lose one, and it was early in the game to be down a piece. She saw him bite down hard on his lip as he considered the unpalatable range of possible moves ahead of him. This is sort of fun, Jen thought.

“Nice work,” said Master Park an hour later, as they returned down the hall towards the parking garage, holding their yellow vests under their arms.

“You saw my game?” Jen asked. She had beat Nicolai Snail, using the same sequence Master Park had used on her at least ten times to put him in checkmate. She had only had the one game; after he lost to both Nicolai Snail and Master Park, Oggy Osterberg had pronounced himself too tired to play any further, declaring, “I’m going to take a nap for a few days,” before slamming the heavy door behind him.

“I saw you turn Nicolai into a stammering idiot,” said Master Park. Jen didn’t respond, but inside, she felt like she had just been nominated for an Oscar.

After they dropped their vests at the front desk—“You’re supposed to wear it, Park,” the security guard had growled—and returned to the car, Master Park turned to Jen as he pulled out of the parking lot.

“You should have been playing black more,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault I always draw white,” Jen said.

“Actually, it is,” said Master Park. “I’ve been fixing it so you always draw white.”

Jen was so surprised that she couldn’t speak for a moment. She stared blankly at the looming pink walls of the Snail Plant as they passed by her window.

“Why?” she asked, finally.

“You need to learn to be more aggressive,” he said. “I thought it would be good for you to have the first move.”

“How did you get me to always pick white?” she asked.

“Sleight of hand,” he said. “I learned it from one of my students.”

She tried to remember if she had ever seen him do anything unusual with his hand or his sleeve before he extended his fists, but nothing came to mind. “Do you do that when you play those guys?” she asked, wondering how Oggy Osterberg would respond to such subterfuge.

“I can’t,” he said. “They know the trick. I think Nicolai used it on you. He likes to go first.”

Figures, Jen thought, wrapping her arms across her face to block the glare of the setting sun.

Chapter 37

35. Politics Itself

“In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.” —George Orwell

Like the gaping insides of a gigantic pink sea clam, the parking garage of the Snail Plant loomed through the windshield of Master Park’s car.

“I’ve never seen this side,” said Jen, as they pulled into a parking space marked “compact.” It was an appropriate designation for Master Park’s aging sedan, but less so for the bloated SUV and truck in the two adjacent spaces.

She remembered Rob telling her about the mysterious employee entrance, but she had only ever seen the front side of the plant, like a sprawling fortress dominating a good seven or eight blocks of Main Street. She remembered the little gate to the courtyard where she had first met Master Park and spied on his taekwondo class; it seemed like a whole other life. Master Park had snuck out the gate after his class; but there was a real entrance, one too fussy to be bothered with.

Master Park seemed to recognize her meaning.

“We’re official today,” he said, opening his door carefully to avoid hitting the vehicle next to him. Jen turned sideways to slip out of the cracked passenger-side door and through the gap between Master Park’s car and the silver truck next to it.

They entered the building through a door that led directly from the basement of the parking lot to a large security desk. The guard seemed to know Master Park already, but he asked to see Jen’s ID.

As she rummaged through her purse looking for her California driver’s license, men of all ages passed the desk, flashed identification cards at the guard, and hurried down the hallway and around the corner. Finally, she handed him her license. He squinted at it and then up at her face several times, and she thought she saw him raise his eyebrows a few millimeters, but he handed it back to her without further comment.

“Here,” he said, handing Master Park two yellow bib-smocks. Master Park pulled his swiftly over his head, revealing the word “VISITOR” stenciled in square black letters across the chest. She was a little clumsier putting hers on, unable at first to sort out all the various straps and arm-holes. Once it was in place, it hung down to her knees and made her feel like an elementary school crossing guard.

“Ridiculous,” said Master Park, as walked down the hall, his words seemingly directed more at himself than Jen. “Nicolai Snail is out of his mind.” She looked from side to side, wondering if any of the Snail employees walking alongside them had heard Master Park’s comment, but no one seemed concerned.

As Jen, Master Park, and the Snail employees rounded the corner, everyone but Jen and Master Park veered abruptly into a large doorway on the left. Jen slowed her pace, unsure whether she was supposed to follow them.

Master Park tapped her arm, so lightly she could barely feel it, but the motion steered her straight ahead.

“Men’s dressing room,” said Master Park.

Before Jen could ask why they needed a dressing room, they passed a second door, which must have been the room’s exit. Men in sunny yellow jumpsuits poured out of the door, their color matching Jen’s borrowed vest, the same yellow jumpsuits that the men had worn to do taekwondo in the courtyard, though Jen hadn’t remembered them until just now.

“Where’s the women’s dressing room?” Jen asked.

“Hmm,” said Mater Park, sounding puzzled by the question. “I’m not sure. I think there might be one down at the entrance by the other end of the parking garage.” But his dubious tone suggested that he could not remember seeing a female employee at the Snail Plant, much less a room for her to change in.

They followed the horde of yellow men through a maze of passages so convoluted that after five minutes, Jen had no idea whether she was heading away from the entrance or back towards it.

“How’s Olivia?” Master Park asked. His directness surprised her. She felt awkward about the whole thing: having her own student when she herself was little more than a novice, the fact that, until a week ago, this student had been her nemesis, their inauspicious first day of instruction. Jen had waited two days to formally accept Olivia’s request, but she had known that she would do so from the moment Olivia left the juice bar. She felt like a sucker for being charmed by Olivia’s story; still, she couldn’t help but respond to its overriding themes of discipline and renunciation that were so common to her own life.

She had been teaching Olivia every night for the last two weeks, working it in around her own training schedule, just as Shane had once done for her. Whenever she felt strange about it, she comforted herself by thinking about a passage she had read in the New Aggressive Male book that Master Park had given her to read:

“There is no point to having enemies. When you perceive somebody to be your enemy, you give him instant power over you. He raises your blood pressure and distracts your focus. In the eyes of a smart man, there are three types of people: those he trusts, those he does not trust, and those whom he perceives wish to hurt him. The first, he keeps close; the second, he keeps at a distance; the third, he keeps closest of all.”

Jen was unsure whether Olivia was “someone she didn’t trust” or “someone whom she perceived wished to hurt her.” At the moment, her intuition pointed more towards the former, but her actions seemed to point towards the latter; she was spending more time with Olivia than anyone else.

It’s okay, Jen told herself. She really is someone who tried to hurt me. So it is only fair for me to keep her closest of all.

There was another passage in the book that was helping Jen feel all right about her relationship with Olivia. It was in a chapter called,” Dominating the Conversation.” The section that stuck in Jen’s mind discussed how to deal with conversational conflict.

“Don’t defer. Don’t be rude, nor polite; be unconcerned. Practice this with people in your everyday life who you usually avoid conflict with: your boss or an annoying coworker, your mother-in-law, even your girlfriend or wife. Rather than appeasing, arguing, or avoiding, try stating the truth calmly and factually. This will be highly disconcerting to your opponent.”

This tactic had largely shaped Jen’s interactions with Olivia.

“How does that look?” Olivia would ask, throwing a sidekick that was uncannily precise for someone who had only learned it a week ago.

“It looks good,” Jen would say, unsmiling, showing no sign of approval other than the word itself. “Snap it back faster.” She focused on giving instruction without conveying pleasure or disdain for Olivia’s accomplishments and shortcomings. Hearing her own dispassionate voice, Jen thought to herself, I sound like a martial arts teacher. Perhaps that why Olivia never seemed disconcerted, as the book had predicted she would; perhaps she had expected it.

“Here,” said Master Park, as they finally emerged from one of a series of dark hallways into a large open vestibule lined with elevators. Jen slowed her pace, but Master Park walked past them, to a plain wooden door, painted the same color as the drab walls, almost invisible except for the lighted green exit sign above it.

He opened the door and led Jen up flight after flight of stairs. Four, five, six, she counted, as they turned the corner onto each successive, poorly-swept landing.

At the seventh floor, she knew they would have to exit, because the stairway beyond it was blocked with a bolted screen gate; “Roof Access—Authorized Personnel Only,” it read. For a moment, she felt worried that Master Park was going to make her sneak past somehow, just as he had done with the gate to the courtyard. But he opened the door to the seventh floor and walked through without holding it for her.

They emerged to a hallway so beautiful that Jen couldn’t help but cry out in amazement. The wall across from the stairway and the elevators was all glass, tinted a pale turquoise color that caught the sunlight and projected dancing diamonds all across the walls and floor.

“Look!” she said, walking to the window and looking down. They were several floors up now, not six—they must have been more than one story underground when they entered the stairway—but perhaps three or four. Still, from this height, she could recognize the courtyard below, the first place that she had met Master Park and watched the yellow-suited students doing their taekwondo exercises.

“Ah yes,” said Master Park, standing next to her to look. “I’m here too much. I forget to appreciate it sometimes.”

Jen suddenly remembered that she had been expecting to play chess in that courtyard. “Didn’t you say we were going to play down there?” she asked.

“Too cold,” said Master Park. “We only actually play there in summer. The rest of the time I suppose we are just overlooking the courtyard.”

Of course, Jen thought, wondering why she hadn’t questioned his statement before. She had been envisioning a bunch of old men with funny haircuts sitting at tables in the courtyard, just as they did year-round in the park in Santa Monica. It had been getting warmer in Michigan, perhaps even warm enough for courtyard taekwondo, but certainly still far too cold for something as sedentary as courtyard chess.

Master Park began to walk again, down the hall to the right, and Jen followed him, wondering where they would be playing. This building seemed awfully fancy for the workers to be playing games in; she didn’t get the sense that they were headed towards a break or recreation room. She remembered Rob saying that this building was the one the Snail Corporation always took guests to, because it was so fancy. Perhaps the players weren’t Snail employees, but some kind of guests? Jen hadn’t even thought to ask Master Park who the other players would be.

They followed the hallway, circling the courtyard, without passing a single Snail employee. Finally, Master Park stopped at a large, heavy-looking door. He pressed a button at the side of the door, and a voice projected from speaker: “Who is it?”

“Park,” he said, letting out an angry, vocal sigh.

Something clicked electronically inside the door. Jen wondered what all this security was about; why were they playing chess in a locked room with an intercom?

After a few more seconds, the door swung open. A tall, slender man wearing khaki slacks and an expensive-looking black sweater greeted them. His hair was tied back into a ponytail that reached close to his waist.

“Come in, come in,” he said, hastily, ushering them into the room as the heavy door swung shut behind them with a loud clicking noise.

They walked into a luxurious board room that was even more beautiful than the hallway. The far wall was all glass, in the same shade of turquoise as the windows in the hall. But unlike those windows, it was also adorned with delicate vines creeping downwards from the top of the window, already dotted with tiny purple flower buds.

The inside of the room was filled with plush, velvety armchairs, positioned around a conference table that seemed to have been fashioned from the highly polished cross-section of a giant, gnarled tree.

On the table, there were two stately-looking chess sets. One was set up for a new game; the other had its pieces distributed around the board. The only other person in the room was sitting behind this second set, a small, wiry-looking man whose face looked about sixty, though he was dressed like a teenager in a torn-up t-shirt and dirty jeans. He sat with one sneakered foot up on the seat of his fancy chair, hugging his arms around his knee and scowling down at the board.

The tall, pony-tailed man lowered himself into the other seat nearest this chessboard without even saying hello to Jen or Master Park, although he did flash Jen a quick smile of recognition that seemed to suggest that they were old friends.

Master Park pulled out a chair for her and then sat down himself to watch the game in progress. The chair was as comfortable as it had looked, but Jen felt distinctly ill at ease. She had expected a bunch of Snail workers, the same sort of friendly, tough-looking guys that she had seen in the taekwondo class. She had not prepared herself for this fancy board room or for such a small, intense group of players.

Despite her annoyance, she forced herself to turn her attention to the board. Now she understood why the man in the scruffy t-shirt was so surly—judging by the captured pieces on the each side of the board, he was down by two pawns and a bishop.

Looking at the board itself, it took her a moment to turn the pieces into something that made sense. For a moment, they were as opaque as a wall of squiggly shapes; and then, as though a light had turned on, the meaning of the positions became clear as decisively as one of those posters with the hidden images that could only be seen if you looked at them crossed-eyed.

The bishop that he did have was stuck behind his queen-side pawns, pinned there by the pony-tailed man’s well-positioned knight. Jen watched intently, becoming increasingly stressed on behalf of the white pieces, as the black pieces moved in slowly but decisively for the kill. Jen was reminded of a spider she had seen once on a nature show; it immobilized its prey limb by limb, until it had no choice but to lie still and await its death.

After seven moves, the man in the t-shirt lay his king on its side, rose from his chair, and walked over to the window, were he stood staring out with his arms crossed and his back to everyone in the room.

The man in the nice clothes and the ponytail turned to Jen and Master Park, seemingly unconcerned about his brooding friend.

“Park!” he exclaimed, greeting him as though they had not been sitting in the same room for the last half hour. He opened his arms as though he were about to lean across the giant table and embrace Master Park. Instead, he extended one long arm.

“Nicolai,” said Master Park, leaning forward to reach the taller man’s hand across the table.

Nicolai, Jen thought; where had she heard that name?

As though he had heard her question, Master Park introduced him: “Jen, this is Nicolai Snail.”

Nicolai Snail—the founder and CEO of Snail Construction and Mining Equipment.

Nicolai Snail extended his hand with as much affection as he had shown Master Park. “It is a pleasure to finally meet you,” he said, his voice made somber with a tint of an accent that Jen remembered, from the historical plaques at the Snail visitor’s center, must be Russian. “It feels like I have had to wait forever.”

Chapter 36

34. What We Pretend to Be

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” —Kurt Vonnegut

Master Park was there immediately, his eyes narrow and angry behind the squares of his eyeglasses. He grabbed Jen by the shoulders—the first time she could remember him touching her directly—and shook her.

“Are you crazy?” he yelled. “What are you doing?”

Jen didn’t know what to say. The men from the advanced class had swarmed around the reporter on the ground, offering to help her up, asking her if she was okay. Jen wanted to punch her again, to kick her in the face. It took all of her energy to restrain herself.

“Go sit over there,” said Master Park, pointing at the chair behind the front desk. “Don’t move.”

She sat in the swiveling office chair, feeling like a bad child forced to sit in the corner, and watched Master Park help Olivia up and lead her outside. Through the glass of the front door, she could see them talking. Her male classmates were leaving one by one, most of them avoiding eye contact as they passed her, although a few of them smiled grimly at her, their expressions conveying that they knew she must have had a good reason. One slightly-built green belt, a college student Jen had trained with a few times since he was close to her size, stopped in front of the desk. “What did she do to you?” he asked under his breath.

Even though Master Park was facing the other direction, Jen didn’t want to risk him turning around and seeing her talking to someone. “Nothing,” she said quietly. He didn’t seem offended by her reticence. He just flashed her a sympathetic smile and left.

That’s nice about taekwondo students, Jen thought; they don’t pry.

Master Park and Olivia stood outside talking for almost fifteen minutes, according to the clock on the wall, which Jen couldn’t help but stare at as she sat in the empty room, waiting. Master Park stood with his weight balanced evenly, his arms crossed. Olivia was gesturing with her hands as though trying to negotiate some kind of deal.

Finally they came back inside and walked over to the desk. Master Park had a rigid look about him that suggested some formal business. I hope they aren’t going to ask for an apology, Jen thought; she didn’t know if she would be able to offer one.

But instead, Master Park nodded his head towards Olivia.

“She wants you to go have a drink with her,” he said.

Jen was surprised for a moment, but quickly regained her composure. Of course she does, Jen thought. She’s been chasing me all over North Middleton.

“I don’t drink” said Jen.

“It’ll be juice,” said Olivia.

Jen looked up at Master Park. He was impassive, his arms still folded across the front of his crisp white jacket. “I don’t care,” he said. “It’s up to you.”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” said Jen.

“Give me one hour,” Olivia said. “After that, I’ll never come back here again if you don’t want me to. You’ll never have to see me again.”

Jen looked at the clock. It was nine forty-five. “Okay,” she said. “Where are we going?”

“The juice bar,” said Olivia. “You can follow me in your car.”

In the parking lot a few minutes later, Olivia pulled her car up in front of Jen’s. Jen was expecting one of the large, black SUVs that had waited in ambush for her outside the co-op. Instead, Olivia was driving a squat little Volkswagen, painted a faded red color except for the driver’s side door, which was black.

Jen drove behind her into the center of town. Just before they reached the university, Olivia flashed her right-side turn signal. It occurred to Jen that she had never turned this direction off of Main Street; the food co-op and the tea house were both on the other side.

Jen followed Olivia down a side street whose sidewalks were flooded with students, even though it was almost ten o’clock on a Tuesday, toting heavy backpacks as they poured in and out of the bars and coffee shops. Olivia parked in front of a run-down storefront whose sign read “North Middleton Juice Collective.”

The small space inside was crowded with young women whose style of dress reminded her of Paula’s comfortable, earth-tone wardrobe, except in place of her dreadlocks, most of these women had short, boyish haircuts that contrasted their flowing garments. They had filled up every visible seat, their backpacks occupying every chair that they were not sitting on. Several of them looked up from their work and smiled when Olivia walked in. “Hey, Olivia, want me to move this?” asked a woman in an oversized oatmeal-colored turtleneck, pointing at the stack of books, sweatshirts, jackets and scarves overflowing from the chair next to her.

“No, that’s okay,” said Olivia. “There’s a back room,” she said to Jen, leading her into a tiny area behind a wall that housed four more tables, all of them occupied except one. Olivia threw her jacket over the top of the empty table and walked back to the front to order.

The counter was staffed by two young, shorn-headed women who appeared indistinguishable from their clientele. Jen raised her eyes to the expansive menu posted on a chalkboard above their heads. It was printed in colored chalk, with writing that grew increasingly smaller as it approached the bottom.

Olivia turned to Jen. “What do you want to drink?”

Jen glanced again at the dizzying menu, squinting her eyes to sharpen the tiny letters. The words that popped out at her from the swirl of hand-printed writing normally would have appealed to her: carrot, melon, flaxseed, cucumber. But there was a heavy smell in the air, like bleach and steam and mushrooms, that killed Jen’s appetite; or perhaps it was just the effect of standing so close behind Olivia, her nemesis.

She was tempted not to order anything, but she didn’t want to seem passive aggressive. She had promised Olivia an hour; she resolved to be pleasant until her time was up.

“Whatever you’re having is fine,” Jen said.

“Okay,” said Olivia, turning to the girl at the counter. “Two Greenpeaces.”

Jen scanned the board for the translation: kale, grapefruit, celery, garlic. Not the combination she would have chosen. At least it’ll be healthy, she thought.

She cringed at the price, six dollars for a small. Pulling her wallet from the pocket of her jacket, she asked, “Can I give you some money?”

“Don’t worry, it’s free,” said Olivia, turning from the counter. Jen looked at the girl who took their order; she had already started helping the next customer, despite the fact that Olivia hadn’t paid for their expensive drinks. She really must be a regular here, Jen thought.

Jen sat down while Olivia waited for their drinks to be freshly squeezed. When she finally appeared around the corner, she placed two tall glasses filled with frothy brownish-green drinks on the table and sat down across from Jen.

Jen looked at the clock on the wall. It was five minutes past ten. “You’ve got forty minutes,” she said. She expected Olivia to protest that her hour shouldn’t include driving and ordering time, but she accepted the warning somberly.

“Okay, then, let me just think where to start.”

She paused, her hand wrapped around the bottom of her face. She really does look a lot better, Jen thought, remembering how the fluorescent lights of the co-op had caught in the dull ends of her bleached blonde hair and sickly, creased skin. The face of the woman sitting across from Jen now glowed with health, framed by her glossy, dark hair, looking at least ten years younger than the woman who had sat ringside, watching Jen get knocked unconscious.

“I’m going to have to start at the beginning,” Olivia said. “Sorry, but it’s important.”

Jen nodded and took a tentative sip of her drink. The first flavors were pleasant, celery and grapefruit. Then the bitterness of the kale struck her, and then, finally, a shocking flash of garlic. It wasn’t altogether unpleasant, just bracing. She took another sip and swished it around in her mouth. At least it will keep me from getting sleepy, she thought.

“I don’t know how I ended up writing for a crappy magazine,” said Olivia. “Or, I suppose I know, but the whole thing was a mistake. Growing up, I always planned to be a ballerina. I was really serious. My parents used to drive me an hour to Milwaukee every day after school. And I would go to study in New York every summer, and I was thinking of moving there when I was sixteen, because you could board at the ballet school there.”

“Why did you stop?” Jen asked.

“Oh, you know,” said Olivia, the healthy glow of her cheeks intensifying by a few shades to a burning crimson. “The same reason everybody does.”

Jen thought of all of her friends who had given up on their dreams of becoming actors. “Because it’s impossible to make a living as a dancer?”

“Oh, no,” said Olivia. “Because I got addicted to diet pills. So, you know, I had to go through treatment and that whole thing, which wasn’t so bad because a bunch of my dancer friends were doing it, too. But I lost half a year of study, and I never really got back to it in the same way.”

Jen was appalled by the image of a Midwestern rehab center flooded with adolescent ballet dancers. “If you were all doing it, somebody should have told the ballet school,” Jen said.

“Oh, they knew,” said Olivia. “They encouraged it.”

“Really?” Jen asked, scandalized.

“Well, they would say things like, ‘You will just need to figure out how to manage your weight in some way, whatever that might be.’ What do they expect in an art form where they want you to be really skinny and really energetic at the same time?”

She looked up at Jen, embarrassed, and added, “Well, you know.”

Truthfully, Jen didn’t know. Of course there was a lot of pressure to be skinny in Hollywood, but she had always dealt with it by just eating very little, as had most of the other actresses she had talked to. The truth was, it didn’t take that much energy to shoot a movie or television show. In fact, she had found it helpful to be a little lightheaded from hunger; it heightened her emotions and made her feel more creative. She tried to imagine what it would be like to eat that way while trying to maintain a rigorous athletic schedule; there was no way she could fast three times a week while training at taekwondo.

“But you’re right,” said Olivia. “It is impossible to make a living. So instead I stayed in Wisconsin for college and got a degree in mass communications and started writing for a newspaper.”

“I was writing for the arts section, reviewing concerts and art exhibits and even the ballet; I liked that job a lot. But the paper got bought out by a bigger company that owned newspapers all across the state. And then they got bought out by an even bigger company that owns a bunch of newspapers all over the country.

“That company cut the arts section from my paper, so I was going to be out of a job. But they said I could do contract work for a couple of magazines they had just bought. They wanted people in the Midwest who could specialize in what they called ‘recluses,’ which basically just meant celebrities who weren’t in New York or L.A.

“And that’s how I ended up writing for Celebrity Gape. I’ve been doing it ever since, for almost ten years. It’s really depressing work, really boring, a lot of waiting around. I was so excited when I got the assignment to cover you in Michigan, because no one knew what you were doing out here. Most of the celebrities in the Midwest just wanted to get out of the spotlight and raise their families, so there’s not really much to say about them. So you just wait and keep an eye on them and hope they get a divorce or have an affair or something.”

“That’s horrible,” said Jen.

“It sounds bad, doesn’t it,” Olivia agreed. “But it hardly ever happens. The recluses are usually really stable. If they get divorced, it’s just like a regular divorce, after the kids are grown and it’s a mutual thing, no drama.”

So you have to invent it, thought Jen, thinking of some of the wilder claims Olivia had made about her.

Olivia looked up at the clock anxiously; ten minutes had already passed. She picked up her untouched drink and took a large gulp. When she spoke again, her eyes were large and earnest with excitement. “But really, the thing I want to talk to you about is your fight. Because that’s the day my whole life changed.”

Your life changed, Jen thought, surprised. She scanned Olivia’s face, looking for some hint of ironic distance, a sign of a trap. But she looked as earnest and absorbed as she had been when Jen showed her the opening of the first taekwondo form and how to do a roundhouse kick. A woman at an adjacent table rose and gave Olivia a friendly pat on the shoulder on her way to the front room, but Olivia was too engrossed with telling Jen the story of her own fight to notice.

“I drove down to Lansing with a photographer. The drive seemed so long, and I was so nervous for you. I kept thinking, I can’t believe Jen is really going to do this. I’d been tracking you for months and months, and I just felt so invested in your progress. When you first got to Michigan, you seemed so fragile. I couldn’t believe how far you’d come since you moved here.

“Like when you first started sparring, I was sure you were going to get your rib broken again, or your nose or your arm. You didn’t know it, but we had a photographer in the parking lot every Sunday just waiting for you to be carried out in a stretcher.”

Jen felt anger begin to rise in her chest; she wasn’t sure whether it angered her more that the reporters had been stalking her without her knowledge or that they had been hoping to see her get injured. But she had decided not to pass any outward judgment until Olivia’s hour was up. Jen looked at the clock. There were twenty-seven minutes left. She took another swallow of her drink and looked down into the cup. Now that it was almost gone, she decided it was actually quite tasty. She wondered how she would distract herself from making horrible grimacing faces at Olivia’s story once she had nothing left to hide her face with.

“When we got to the gymnasium, I found a seat in the back, where no one would notice me,” said Olivia. “I sat there for the first set of fights. I was watching those two little skinny guys who went before you in on the same mats. And they were flying in the air, kicking each other. It was the most exciting thing I’d ever seen. You know how that one guy kept jumping up so high?”

Jen nodded, though she hadn’t seen any of the three fights that had occurred simultaneously in the period before hers.

“I thought that was so amazing,” said Olivia. She was speaking very quickly now, either from excitement about her story or nervousness about running out of time.

“Your fight was next, and I was so excited and nervous. I’d been keeping a low profile since that day I saw you at the co-op. But I wanted to sit closer. And I decided, screw it, I’m moving to the front. I figured there was no way you were going to be looking at the crowd, much less recognize me.”

“I saw you,” said Jen, unable to contain this small comment.

Olivia rushed on as though Jen’s statement made her nervous. “Watching you fight up there, I thought, this is amazing. This is more impressive than anything I’ve ever done—than everything I’ve ever done, put together. Here I am, following this woman around, and she is spending her life in such a better way than I am spending mine. Why am I here, sneaking around the corners of this event, when I should be right in the middle of it? Why couldn’t I be the one doing it?”

Jen remembered the awful, queasy sickness of waiting for the fight, waiting in the dressing room with Shane, reading the article that this woman, Lorna Olivia Lee, had written about her. And then the fight itself, the pressure, the public humiliation. It’s not as fun as it seems, she thought, taking one final, silencing sip of her drink.

“When you got knocked out, I screamed. I don’t know if you heard me.”

Jen didn’t bother responding, although she didn’t remember hearing a scream, didn’t remember hearing anything other than the rushing in her own head.

“My photographer was all excited, taking all these pictures. But I was so worried. I thought, if she gets up, I’m going to change my whole life.”

She paused and took a long, melodramatic sip of her drink, licking her lips clean of the green froth.

“And of course you did, and that was it. I stayed and watched all the fights. I had been planning to leave right after yours, but I just sat there, close enough to touch the fighters, and watched until the very end of the tournament. The photographer was complaining that he wanted to leave, but I had the car keys and I wouldn’t move. I saw all the people from your school fight, and your friend Brittany.”

“Shane,” said Jen.

“And when it was over, I walked out, and I felt exhilarated, like I was high or something. I called my job and quit that afternoon. And I decided my goal was to become a fighter like you.”

Olivia looked at her expectantly, as though wanting her to respond. But Jen didn’t want to show her surprise at this unanticipated declaration. She returned Olivia’s gaze blankly.

“How long do I have?” Olivia asked.

“Fourteen minutes,” said Jen.

“Okay,” said Olivia, taking a deep breath and a large gulp of her drink. “I spent the next few days looking for a new place to live. I always stayed at this one hotel in North Middleton, but I took all my stuff out of there and moved into a big house with a bunch of college kids, and one of them got me a job at the juice collective.”

“You work here?” Jen asked. That would explain why everyone here knew her, not to mention the free drinks.

“Yup, since one week after your fight,” said Olivia. “It doesn’t pay much, but I have savings, plus my rent is really cheap. And I get most of my meals here for free.” As though to emphasize this point, she took another large sip of her drink.

“The only problem was that I was in no shape to start taekwondo. I had no stamina at all. I hadn’t exercised at all for years, since I stopped dancing. So I started running every day, and I joined the yoga studio.”

“Right,” said Jen, remembering their conversation during class. “What’s it called again?”

“Pomegranate Yoga Studio,” said Olivia.

“Where is it?” Jen asked.

Olivia looked anxiously at the clock.

“I’ll count this as a time-out,” said Jen.

“Okay, thanks,” said Olivia, sighing in relief. She had been speaking so quickly that she seemed a little out of breath.

More slowly, she said, “It’s just a little further down the street.” She turned to look around the cramped room at the handful of college women hunched over their textbooks, drinking juice and eating vegetable sandwiches. “A lot of the people in here go to Pomegranate. Actually almost all of them.”

“Do you like it?” Jen asked. She couldn’t help but be curious about this potential alternate life; if she hadn’t met Rob, she realized, she likely would have been one of the women attending the yoga school and drinking juice in this collective.

“I love it,” said Olivia, smiling. “It’s a woman-centered practice, so we do more moon salutations instead of sun salutations, and all the teachers are women.”

Jen couldn’t help but note the contrast to the taekwondo school and its attendant tea house, both populated heavily, and at times exclusively, by men. I’ve been hanging out on the wrong side of Main Street, Jen thought.

“So that’s why you look so different?” Jen asked, finally understanding why the woman sitting across from her seemed to have lost ten years off her age during the last three months.

“Yeah, I suppose,” said Olivia, looking down at the table in embarrassment. “I also stopped smoking and eating fast food and bleaching my hair. And I’ve been eating a mostly raw diet, lots of vegetables and nuts and juice of course.”

Olivia took another large swallow of her juice and looked at the clock. “I can finish my story now if you want.”

“You have six minutes,” said Jen.

“Okay,” said Olivia, speeding her pace again. “Now that I’ve spent a few months getting in shape, I felt like it was finally time for me to start studying taekwondo, that I was finally ready. So that brings me to why I need to talk to you now.”

“You want to study with Master Park,” said Jen. She didn’t care anymore. “It’s fine. Go ahead.” If Olivia was really trying to change her whole life, Jen certainly wasn’t spiteful enough to try to stop her. And if this was all some kind of elaborate trap to get into Jen’s school, well, Jen had decided months ago, back at the co-op, that she wasn’t going to bother protesting whatever the reporters did. Jen could ignore Olivia like she usually ignored all the other beginning students. Hell, Rob could teach her; they would be a perfect match.

“No,” said Olivia. “I want to study with you.”

“With me?” said Jen, startled. “I’m not a teacher.” This evening had in fact been her first experience teaching, and clearly it had not ended up well.

“Sure you are. You taught me all that stuff tonight. I thought you were a great teacher.”

“I don’t think Master Park would agree to it,” said Jen, hoping this white lie would distract Olivia long enough for Jen to come up with a more credible excuse.

“I told him tonight outside, after you hit me,” Olivia replied. “He said it’s fine, if you agree.”

Jen couldn’t manage to be polite in her dismissals any longer.

“You wrote those lies about me,” she said, spitefulness darkening her voice as she tried to control her temper. Jen saw several of the women in the room look up from their textbooks in alarm.

“I never wrote any lies,” said Olivia. She did not appear insulted or ruffled by Jen’s attack. “I would never write lies. Everything I wrote was technically true.”

“You said I was obsessed with fighting and I was sleeping with my training partner,” said Jen.

“So you weren’t sleeping with her?” Olivia asked.

“No!” Jen yelled. She expected the students to come to Olivia’s defense, but as soon as she had shown herself to be calm and untroubled, they had resumed their studying.

“Oh, well, I wasn’t sure,” said Olivia. “You sure spent a lot of time at her house.”

“That’s none of your business,” Jen said, trying to lower her volume. She could hear her voice shaking; she looked down and saw that her hands were shaking as well. “Didn’t you just say you only reported facts, not just things you made up?

“I never said you were sleeping with her,” said Olivia, her calm voice suggesting that, unlike Jen, she was accustomed to this sort of confrontation. “I said that there were rumors you were sleeping with her.”

“But there weren’t any rumors like that,” said Jen.

“Sure there were. Me and the reporters had the rumors,” Olivia replied. “We had all kinds of rumors.”

“That’s really crappy journalism,” said Jen. She was tired of yelling; her voice was worn and sullen now.

“I know. And I shouldn’t defend it,” said Olivia, her voice softening. “I have no real way to defend myself, other than to say that I’ve stopped. I’ve stopped for good, and I’m going to do something better with my life, and I’m asking you to help me.”

Jen sighed. She hated rejecting people, even people who had done horrible things to her in the past. And it did seem like Olivia had changed everything about her life in an effort to reject her disgusting, parasitic career. She cursed herself briefly for being so quick to forgive.

“I’ll think about it, said Jen. “I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

“That’s great,” said Olivia, smiling broadly. She stood up and pointed at the clock. “Time’s up; you’re free,” she said, pointing at the clock. She pulled her jacket on and pushed in her chair.

“You might think I’m a bad person,” said Olivia, “and maybe I am. But I never lie, and I always keep a promise.” And before Jen could say anything in response, Olivia had disappeared out the front door, leaving her half-finished drink on the table.

Chapter 35

33. Moved by Hope

“As long as I fight, I am moved by hope; and if I fight with hope, then I can wait.” —Paulo Freire

Step, punch, block, jump, kick.

Jen stopped and rubbed her hands together. They were getting numb already, and she had only been outside for ten minutes. Still too cold, she said to herself, pulling the hood of her sweatshirt up over her head.

There had still been snow on the ground when she returned to Michigan a week ago, but the weather had been unseasonably warm for January since then, above freezing, and the melted snow had made its way down to the lake in little streams. This morning the sky was a bright, enticing blue through the kitchen window, and it had lured Jen out to practice her forms and kicks in the yard.

She wrapped her arms around herself and stared across the lake, which was still covered with a thin layer of floating ice. The houses on the other side had been difficult to see through the thick layers of snow that covered their roofs and balconies and clung to the evergreens surrounding them. Now their full array of earth-tones was visible again: dark, muddy browns, stony tans and grays, a brick red. And there, off to the right, like moss clinging to the rocks, the old grass-green house that had comforted her back during the summer, when she first moved to Michigan and had felt so entirely alone.

Jen was happy now to see it emerge, like the patchy grass of the lake house lawn appearing from beneath the snow. The cheerful color matched the blue sky, and Jen felt suddenly optimistic that life in North Middleton would be tolerable, even without Shane to train with. Look at this beautiful lake, this house, she told herself. And all I have to do is hang around and read and study taekwondo and learn to really play chess; this is a good life.

She had said these words to herself each day since she returned to Michigan, but today, she actually believed them, at least for this moment.

As she looked at the green house, she began to get the feeling that someone was looking back at her. She looked harder, and yes, there it was: at the edge of the balcony, crouched on a short chair or perhaps a stool, was the distant figure she remembered from the summer, staring at her from far across the lake.

She continued staring for a moment, wondering if the person could see her. He moved a little, tightening his arms around his body, she thought, but his gaze did not waver. She realized how uneven their staring contest was; he was barely visible between the sweeping pine branches, while she was unobscured on a flat lawn. She wondered how long he had been watching, whether he had seen her doing such a horrible job on her forms, her feet numb and unstable on the cold earth, her hands too frozen to make proper fists. Embarrassed, she turned and walked back into the house, making a point of not looking behind her as she stepped through the door.

But once she was inside, she still had the feeling that she was being watched. She finished her forms in the living room, imagining what Master Park would say about her cramped movements as she worked within the limitations of the enclosed space, trying not to kick the sofa or the end table. As she ate her usual lunch of toast and peanut butter, she almost went back to make a second helping, but something stopped her, and she decided that one serving was enough.

She was antsy all afternoon, counting the hours until she could train again, even though she had been at the school only fifteen hours before. She had felt this way all week since returning to Michigan; it was like her body was trying to make up all of the exercise she had missed during her nine days in Los Angeles. She wanted to pull on her sneakers and go for a run, but she knew that was a silly idea; it would be better to save her energy for class. She forced herself to sit still and read the final chapters of The Meaningful Endgame.

When she finally arrived early for the intermediate/advanced class that night, she felt like skipping through the front door. Instead she calmly placed her bag and shoes in a cubby by the front window and made her way to the side of the room to stretch. She had half an hour until the class started, plenty of time for a nice, long warm-up.

As she lowered herself into a forward split, she heard Master Park call her name. She looked up, and saw him standing just in front of the screen in the back. He folded his hand twice, beckoning her to follow, then disappeared behind the screen.

“What now?” Jen whispered to herself, although no one had asked anything of her all day. She didn’t want to be interrupted from her stretching; she had just been thinking how wonderful the position felt, how eager she was to use all that range from her stretched-out hamstrings to kick high in the air. She sighed, lifted herself from the floor, and followed Master Park into the back room.

“Hi,” she said as she walked through the door to the living room in back of the school. Master Park was sitting at the table, staring at the bookshelf.

“I need you to do something,” he said, without looking up at her.

“Okay,” said Jen, trying not to get frustrated by his complete lack of urgency. Time to warm up for class, she thought, trying to project this idea into his mind.

He continued to survey the bookshelf with the passive calm of somebody browsing a bookstore for a fun summer read. Finally he reached into the middle shelf. “You should read this book,” he said, handing her a small red paperback. The New Aggressive Male. She remembered the title. It was the book Rob had been reading, the one that was encouraging him to want to win his fights more, but was also making him cheat on his girlfriend.

Was this what Master Park had called her back here for? Couldn’t this have waited until their post-class chess lesson? She held the book disdainfully in two hands, between her thumbs and index fingers.

“You think this will improve my taekwondo?” she asked.

“Hm, I don’t know,” said Master Park, as though this thought had not occurred to him. “Maybe.”

Jen looked at him expectantly, waiting for further explanation.

“I think it will improve your chess,” he said.

“Chess?” Jen repeatedly dumbly. She knew that Master Park wanted her to be more aggressive in her chess playing—but she had assumed that this was supposed to translate into her taekwondo. It hadn’t ever occurred to her that might be teaching her chess as an ends in itself.

“I think you should start playing chess at the Snail Plant,” Master Park said. “I go Saturday afternoons, in the courtyard. But you’ll need to improve your game a little first. The guys over there are pretty competitive.”

The courtyard, she thought, forgetting her hurry for a moment. She remembered the taekwondo class she had spied on there, how she had brought Rob to watch, how he had introduced her to Master Park. She thought about what the Snail Plant had symbolized to her then—the intrigue of a strange new town that was a cipher to her, a puzzle to solve. She hadn’t been back there since, called off the investigation as soon as she found something better to occupy her time. That place was too unreal, Jen thought, with that fortress-like exterior, those high, pink walls, the men with funny names that seemed to proliferate around it: Nicolai Snail, Ozzy Osterberg, even Vanto Hatch.

She suddenly felt a strong wave of dread at the thought of going back there. After all, hadn’t she left Los Angeles to get away from that sort of unreality, to find something more substantial, tangible, something that meant exactly what it seemed to mean and nothing more? And hadn’t she found it?

Calm down, she told herself; it’s just a place. A place to play chess. She shook her head and looked down at the book in her hands.

“Okay, I’ll read it,” said Jen, turning towards the door. “I just finished the endgame book, so it’s good timing.”

“Wait,” said Master Park, as she tried to leave. She stopped and turned around.

“I still need you to do something,” he said.

“Oh, right,” she said. She had assumed that reading the book and going to the Snail Plant were the somethings he had been referring to when he had called her into the back room.

“I need you to train the new girl.”

Jen tried not show her surprise, but she could feel her eyebrows rise. Only the top students trained the new people—usually Shane and Rob. Jen was still only a green belt. Of course, Shane was gone now, off to Ann Arbor with Brittany in time for their new semester to start at Eastern Michigan University. So maybe Master Park just needed a replacement, a new female trainer to set the female students at ease. Jen was now the most advanced woman in the school, she realized. Shane was gone—and wouldn’t be a woman for much longer at any rate. There were a handful of white and yellow-belted girls, most of whom had been there when Jen started training, but they barely ever came to class, and she had shot quickly past them.

“Okay,” said Jen. “When, tomorrow?” She was feeling anxious to wrap up this conversation so she could get back to her warm-up. She could hear Rob leading the beginners through their final set of push-ups and sit-ups out in the training room, and the advanced class would begin in less than ten minutes.

“No, now,” said Master Park. “She’s waiting by the front desk.”

“But the beginner’s class is almost over,” Jen said. “Do you want me to train her for ten minutes?”

“You can work with her during advanced class. She got confused and came at the wrong time; she got here right before you did. Just give her a first lesson, the beginning of the first form, roundhouse kick.”

“But I’ll have to miss class,” she said. She knew she shouldn’t complain, but she couldn’t help herself.

She knew as soon as she said it that she had made a grave mistake. Master Park looked straight at her, the edges of his mouth drooping grimly. “Some things are more important than class,” he said.

“Yes, I know,” said Jen, believing it in principle.

Out in the classroom, Jen scanned the room for the girl, looking for a college student. Instead she saw a woman close to her own age, perhaps in her early thirties, sitting in one of the folding chairs by the window.

Right, we’re all girls here, Jen thought, remembering how Master Park had so often referred to her and Shane as “you girls,” how Shane had talked about “that girl who knocked you out” to Jen.

Jen walked towards the woman, who rose to her feet. Jen sized her up quickly, comparing her to some of the other new woman she had seen at the school, most of whom had not stayed for more than a few weeks. The woman looked to be in decent if not exceptional shape, with some muscle tone visible in her arms and shoulders. She’s got to be doing some kind of exercise already, Jen said to herself. The woman’s skin shone with the healthy glow of someone well-nourished and hydrated; that was a good sign. Her hair was thick and dark, and Jen noted with approval that the woman had secured it into a plain, practical ponytail; that meant she wasn’t at the school just to meet a boyfriend, like some of the women who had come to class with their hair hanging unbound and well-combed, their faces full of makeup.

“Hi,” said the woman, beaming a large, familiar smile at Jen as she approached. “I’m Olivia.”

“I’m Jen.”

“I know,” said the woman, still smiling as she placed her hand in Jen’s and shook it firmly.

I guess she recognizes me, Jen thought, feeling startled; she hadn’t met any new people in a while, and she had gotten used to feeling anonymous in North Middleton.

But looking into the woman’s eyes, Jen had the feeling that she also recognized the woman, that they had met somewhere, not so long ago. Perhaps she had seen her around town; maybe she worked in the supermarket where Jen had been buying her food ever since she had stopped going to the co-op. She tried to imagine the woman working behind the cashier’s counter; the image didn’t seem to fit. But that’s was the only place she ever went in North Middleton—to the store and the academy. She scanned her memory—could she know the woman from Los Angeles?

She considered asking the woman if they had met before, but, thinking of how she had already gotten in trouble for not wanting to teach the student, she decided it was better to restrain herself from extraneous conversation that would distract from the lesson she was about to give.

Over by the mirrors where Shane—then Brittany—had given Jen her first lessons, Jen led Olivia through the opening of the first form.

“Good,” said Jen, meaning it, as Olivia confidently repeated her movements back to her. Watching her stomp and block and punch, Jen was impressed; there was no way Jen had looked half that good during her first lesson.

Likewise, Olivia’s first roundhouse kick felt surprisingly powerful on the pad that Jen held for her. Her hips pivoted well and her leg snapped out with a nice whipping motion.

“Have you done martial arts before?” Jen asked, realizing she should have asked this at the beginning of the lesson. I bet she did taekwondo as a kid, Jen told herself, or maybe kungfu or something. It was probably one of those things that never left your muscle memory, like running after a cab in high heels, which Jen had been pleased to discover she could still do during her visit to Los Angeles.

“No, never,” said the woman.

“You’re getting it very quickly,” said Jen. “Your form looks good and your kick is strong.”

“Well, I used to be a dancer when I was a teenager,” the woman said, slurring her words and looking towards the ground as she said it, as though wanting to avoid talking about herself. “So I guess it’s not too hard for me to copy your movements.”

Jen wanted to laugh from her surprise. It had never occurred to her that a dancer would have an advantage in learning to throw a roundhouse kick. The two arts seem diametrically opposed: dance was all about appearance and superficial things, whereas taekwondo was about power and fighting, and it didn’t matter how one looked.

But in the end, I suppose it’s all just movements, Jen thought. If you can do the movements, then you can throw a good kick. She imagined an army of ballerinas throwing round after round of perfect, pirouette-like roundhouse kicks.

“That’s amazing,” said Jen. “And you haven’t danced since you were a teenager?

“No, not at all,” said Olivia. “I’ve been too busy with,” she paused, interrupting herself. “Well, a lot of stupid things, really.”

“You look like you’re in good shape,” said Jen, noting again the definition of Olivia’s upper arms, more noticeable now that her muscles had been working. We should stop chatting, Jen thought, cursing herself for starting and continuing this conversation. She glanced around the room, hoping Master Park wasn’t watching them.

“Well, I’ve been doing a lot of yoga just recently,” Olivia said. “For the last couple of months.”

“Yoga?” Jen repeated, forgetting all about ending the conversation. “Where?”

“Pomegranate Yoga Studio,” said Olivia. “Have you heard of it?”

“No, I don’t know any yoga schools around here,” Jen said, a little embarrassed that she had given up her search so quickly after meeting Rob and Master Park. After that first taekwondo class, she had never bothered to even find out the names of any local schools. She marveled to think of her earlier yoga practice, how she used to go every day, even twice a day. She hadn’t done so much as a single sun salutation since she had arrived in North Middleton.

“So, let’s see that roundhouse kick again,” said Jen.

As the advanced students finished the isometric stretches that signaled the end of the class, Jen walked Olivia to the door. Seeing her in street clothes, a sweatshirt and puffy jacket, Jen was struck once again with how familiar she looked.

“Do I know you from somewhere?” Jen finally asked.

“Yeah, we’ve met a few times,” Olivia said, looking down at her feet again, as she had done when she talked about dancing.

How could that be, Jen thought? She hadn’t met anyone in Michigan, at least not any women. The only people she had met were taekwondo students and people who worked in stores, and none of them had been named Olivia—she would remember a name like that.

“In Los Angeles?” Jen asked. That would make sense. It seemed like she had been introduced to thousands of people there, more of them forgotten than remembered.

“No,” said Olivia. “In Michigan.” She was still looking shyly at the floor.

“I’m sorry,” said Jen. “I don’t remember meeting an Olivia here.”

“Well, I don’t think we were formally introduced,” she woman said. “And Olivia is actually my middle name.”

“But where did we meet?” Jen asked, puzzled. The more Olivia talked, the more Jen was certain that they had met before, many times, that this woman had played some significant role in her life.

“At the food co-op,” said Olivia. “And then I saw you again at your tournament.”

“At the food co-op,” Jen repeated, the center of her consciousness now racing to catch up to something lingering around the edges.

A voice rang in her head, and it wasn’t Olivia’s. It was a man’s voice, a man with a funny accent, Australian, perhaps, or maybe from some very isolated part of the Bronx. And the voice was saying, “Bradley’s baby.” Yes, she could hear it clearly now: “Do you have any comment on Bradley’s baby?”

Jen gasped.

“Um…um…” Jen stuttered, dredging for the woman’s name. That reporter, the one who wrote that horrible tabloid article about her. What was her name?

“Lorna O. Lee?” she finally sputtered, unable to hide the disgust in her voice.

“Yes!” said Olivia, smiling in pleasant surprise. “I didn’t know you knew my name.”

“Oh, yes, I do,” said Jen, confused now. Why was this woman beaming at her, this woman who had written all manner of ridiculous lies about her, who was making her own wealth by slandering Jen’s name? Here she was, allowing Jen to make a fool of herself, showing her the opening of the first form, teaching her to throw a roundhouse kick. Here was this woman pretending to be a student, accepting this precious knowledge from Jen, the most important things that Jen knew. And for what—another story? Another insider exposé of Jen’s secret life?

The woman fell to the floor, and Jen looked down at her fist. It stung a little. She had just punched the reporter in the face.

Never hit a reporter, Jen thought dully, watching her clutch both hands over her right eye.

Chapter 34

32. The Intent to Be Lost

“The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.”

—Elizabeth Bishop

“Oh my God,” Becky exclaimed, as Paula handed her the book across the table. “I didn’t know this was out yet.”

They were out at brunch a few days after the baby shower—Becky, Jen, Paula, and Paula’s mysterious new non-sexual romantic partner, whose name was Ex. Chase and Eduardo were supposed to be there, too, but Eduardo had caught a cold at the last minute and needed Chase to stay home and nurse him: “He hates being sick. He gets too lonely in bed all day by himself,” Chase had said to Jen on the phone as he apologized for missing brunch.

“It’s not out,” said Paula. “Ex had some connections so we got an advanced copy.”

“Thanks so much,” said Becky, a little more reserved as she addressed Paula’s androgynous lover. Ex nodded politely; so far, he or she didn’t seem to be much of a talker. Jen had met Ex briefly at the shower and now again today, but she still had no idea whether Ex was a man or a woman. Becky didn’t know, either: “When I asked Paula, she just said, ‘Ex doesn’t have a gender,’” Becky had said. “I tried to bug her about it, but she wouldn’t tell me anything more.”

Becky held the book up for Jen to see. Jen read the title as it floated between Becky’s bulging stomach and her beaming face.

The Deliberate Family.

“What is it?” Jen asked.

“It’s the new Groundbreakers book on parenting,” Becky said, with an enthusiasm that she hadn’t shown for any of the organic cotton blankets, designer baby clothes and fancy diapering gadgets she had received at the shower. “It’s supposed to be all about making conscious choices about your interaction with your child, instead of just doing whatever comes into your head.”

“So they think you should avoid being relaxed and acting naturally?” Jen asked. Becky scrunched her face up in rejection of this critique, then put the book down on the table so she could focus her attention back on the enormous plate of scrambled eggs in front of her.

“You might actually like this one,” Paula said to Jen. “It uses a lot of chess metaphors.”

“Chess?” Jen asked. “I thought Groundbreakers was all about construction and mining.”

“They’ve been switching up a lot lately,” Becky said. “They’ve been emphasizing competition as a theme.”

“Yeah, actually I had trouble understanding all the chess stuff,” Paula said, picking up the book and handing it to Jen. “I mean, I only skimmed through it; it probably explains more if you read the whole thing.”

Jen let the book fall open to a page in the middle. Her eyes landed on a familiar word, and she read aloud: “Zwischenzug.”

“What?” said Becky.

“It’s a chess strategy,” said Jen, trying to remember when she had seen it used. “I can’t exactly remember what the strategy is, though.”

“Does the book explain it?” Paula asked.

Jen scanned the page until she found a definition. She read the passage aloud. “In a zwischenzug, a player is in the position to capture a piece, but he delays capturing it. Instead, he makes other moves that strengthen his position and require his opponent’s immediate attention. He then goes on to capture the piece.”

Jen stopped, puzzled. She had seen that kind of strategy a number of times, but she couldn’t remember Master Park using that word; he never taught her technical chess terms. “When did I hear that?” she asked herself aloud. She remembered somebody inflecting it with the nasal diphthongs of the Midwest.

“I do something like that in tic-tac-toe,” Becky said. “No, I really do,” she added, when everyone ignored her comment except Paula, who laughed dismissively.

Jen shook her head, looked down at the page, and continued reading. “Psychologically, this maneuver is a show of force meant to frustrate and intimidate one’s opponent. It is like punching a man in the face, and then, as he lifts his arms to defend against further punches, kneeing him in the stomach. Then, as he doubles over, you punch him in the face once more.”

Jen looked up from the book again. “I’m curious how this will relate to parenting,” she said skeptically.

“Me too,” said Becky, her eyes widening with excitement. “This is great.”

“Experiment with this strategy in your own household,” Jen read. “When your child has violated your rules, do not punish him right away. Use the leverage of the situation to get him to do things that you want him to do.

“For example, imagine your child breaks something in the house—perhaps a lamp. You find the broken pieces that he has hidden in his room. Don’t play your move right away; hold on to the evidence for later. Now, you can begin to make suggestions: Why don’t you clean the bathroom? How about you take your little sister to the park? I think if we sold your video game consul, you could get a lot more homework done, don’t you?”

“Wow,” said Becky, clearly impressed. She had put down her fork so she could give her full attention to the passage Jen was reading.

“You can deploy these intermediate moves for several days, potentially up to a week,” Jen read. “When you sense that your child’s feelings of guilt and fear are beginning to subside, that is the moment to produce your evidence: show him the broken lamp, tell him that he will need to do chores to earn the money to buy a new lamp, along with extra chores as an interest payment for all the days that he did not tell you about his crime.”

“Brilliant,” said Becky.

“It’s good stuff, isn’t it?” Paula asked, pleased that her present was being received so well. Even Ex was smiling in peaceful approval as he or she nibbled his or her toast.

“I’ve been doing these Groundbreakers parenting meetings,” said Becky to Jen. “They’ve been talking about this kind of stuff, but no one can get the book yet.”

Jen closed the book and put it down on the table. Something had been bothering her about the analogy of chess to parenting. It had taken her a moment to figure out what it was; suddenly, it came to her. “Isn’t it kind of weird to think of your child as an opponent?” she asked.

“No, it’s not,” said Becky, her tone conveying that she had anticipated this counterargument, or, more probably, that her Groundbreakers advisors had. “But that’s what we’re taught to think as mothers, that it’s weird. That our child’s interests are identical to our own. It’s not true. Groundbreakers has been teaching me to recognize that I will have needs and desires that run counter to those of my child, and that our interaction will always be a negotiation of needs, goals, and interests.”

Jen had already tuned Becky out, as she always had whenever the Groundbreakers rhetoric got too heavy. She tried again to remember where she had heard the term “zwischenzug.”

“Oh, I remember who taught me that word,” said Jen. “It was Brittany.” She remembered the first time she had met Shane’s girlfriend, how she had seen the intermediate move that Jen had missed, the move that, it turned out, would force Master Park to move his pawn, creating an opening to set up a game-ending attack. Master Park had explained it to her later, and they had reviewed the strategy a number of times, though never again using that funny name.

“That’s the woman who was teaching you taekwondo, right?” asked Becky. “She plays chess, too?”

“No,” said Jen. “Actually it was her girlfriend.”

“They’re both named Brittany?” Becky asked. “Brittany and Brittany?”

“Well, they would have been,” Jen said, wondering how much to explain. “The first Brittany changed her name to Shane. I mean, his name.” The moment she corrected herself, she had the urge to cover her mouth with her hand, but it was too late; it was out. Jen had been working on referring to Shane by masculine pronouns during the last few weeks since she—he—had told Jen of his plan to change his gender. But she wished she had restrained her self-editing right now, so she wouldn’t have to explain.

“His name?” Becky asked, raising her eyebrows.

“Yeah, she’s going to become a guy,” Jen said, trying to sound nonchalant about it. She had remembered, mid-sentence, that she still had no idea of Ex’s gender status.

“Seriously?” asked Becky, her unconcealed surprise making Jen cringe as she thought of what Ex’s reaction might be. “She’s switching from a woman to a man? Why would you ever want to do that? I’ve never met anyone who went that direction before.”

“You’ve met people who went the other direction?” Jen asked. Until recently, she had been pretty familiar with all of Becky’s friends and acquaintances, at least by description. She hadn’t heard anything about a transgendered woman; it was the sort of thing she thought Becky would have mentioned.

“No,” Becky said. “I guess I haven’t.”

Jen tried to find Ex in her peripheral vision, hoping to gage his or her reaction to this line of conversation. As far as Jen could tell from this sidelong glance, Ex’s face appeared as calm and removed as ever, without any sign of tension in the pointed chin, large dark eyes, or prominent cheekbones.

“At least I’d heard of men becoming women, though,” Becky continued, apparently oblivious or unconcerned about Ex’s presence. “You always hear about men who used to be women; they’re all over the talk shows. I haven’t heard too much about the other way around. Well, unless,” she said, turning to look at Ex.

Oh, don’t ask him, or her, Jen commanded silently. Just let it go.

“Did you used to be…” Becky continued, waiting for Ex to finish the question for her.

Ex just looked at her expectantly, a small, polite smile on his or her face.

“I mean, are you…”

“Are you asking about Ex’s gender?” Paula asked, grabbing her lover’s arm protectively. “Ex doesn’t have a gender.”

“I have been both genders,” Ex said, in a voice that was both melodious and gruff. Jen could imagine it belonging to a surprisingly sensitive truck driver, or the singer in an all-female punk band, or a teenaged boy trying to sound older than he was. “I spent many years projected into the world through the prisms of both ‘male’ and ‘female.’”

Now Paula was surprised. “Really?” she asked. That’s love, Jen thought. Up until now, Jen had found it a bit annoying that Paula refused to explain Ex’s gender. But suddenly it seemed charming that Paula had taken Ex’s explanation at face value. Paula really believed that Ex was neither male nor female, without any further questioning of this impossible proposition, Jen realized.

“Of course,” said Ex. “I wasn’t always this neutral figure you see before you. In fact, if you had met me then, back in the days when I was a man or when I was a woman, you never would have recognized me as the person you see today.”

Looking at Ex, Jen believed this; she could not quite imagine the face as belonging to either a woman or a man. It blended both elements so perfectly that when Jen tried to imagine it as one gender, contradictory features popped up that made it appear more strongly the other. But if she imagined it as the other gender, then suddenly it reverted to the first one. It was like one of those drawings in which it is impossible to tell if a box is facing up or down, projecting out at the viewer or retreating backwards into the world of the drawing.

“I was very, very good at each gender,” said Ex. “Too good. People expected things of me, certain behaviors, attitudes. I felt that I was not fully myself; yet people were completely fooled. They used to fall in love with me, throw themselves at me, take off their clothes. People like when you are the paragon of what they expect you to be; it attracts them.”

Jen looked across the table to see how Becky was reacting to this arrogance; she appeared to be completely engrossed in Ex’s narrative and not at all resistant or skeptical. Remembering Becky’s friendly façade around Eduardo, Jen wondered if Becky liked Ex or simply tolerated him or her because of Paula.

“When I was a man, I was a brick wall,” Ex said. “People expected me to be rigid, unbending. Men puffed themselves up for battle when I stated a simple viewpoint or observation; women deferred to me, deftly reorganizing their opinions to mirror mine. It was disgusting to me, this unearned power. It made me nauseated.”

As Ex spoke about being a man, he seemed to grow into one before Jen’s eyes. The jaw solidified into squareness, the voice hit deep notes that were definitely more tenor than alto.

“The worst part of it was my job,” Ex said. “I worked in commodities trading.”

Paula looked over at him in surprise. “You never told me you knew about finance,” she said.

“I didn’t,” Ex said. “I still don’t, really.”

“But don’t you need to go to school for that kind of thing?” Becky asked. She herself had gotten a business degree in hopes, at the time, of getting a fancy financial job, though things hadn’t worked out that way.

“You would think so,” said Ex. “But no, I didn’t need to. I was living in Chicago, and I got a job filing papers in an office. All the traders liked me, thought I was ‘one of the guys.’ They were always inviting me out to drinks, complaining about their jobs, and I would chime in with my thoughts and ideas. And when one of them had a nervous breakdown and quit—they were always having nervous breakdowns at that office—they offered me his job.”

“That’s horrible!” Becky exclaimed. She had worked as an administrative assistant for several years after she completed her business degree, hoping to move up in the company, and though they interviewed her for several openings, she always lost out to someone with more experience, or a more advanced degree—and always a man.

“No offense,” she added. “I’m glad it worked out for you.”

“No, you’re right. It was horrible,” Ex said. “And yet, part of me liked it, craved the approval, puffing itself up to become all that people saw me as. My body was rigid, and my shoulders stiff in their broadness. I grew strong as an oak and stiff as one. I grew to see why the men at the office were so psychologically fragile. I felt that if I were pushed too hard, I would crack through my very core.”

A look of suffering crossed Ex’s face, as though something was piercing his stomach. He frowned for a moment, pushed his shaggy hair back from his forehead, his mouth conveying strength and anger and pain all at once.

If Jen had doubted Ex’s claim about attracting people, taken it as boastful pride, she believed it now. Even as Ex spoke about his discomfort with his masculinity, Jen felt the overwhelming desire to embrace him, to throw herself against his chest and be wrapped in his arms, to offer herself as a comfort in the face of the pain he described. She had to remind herself that this was Paula’s lover, and a person that Jen barely knew, to restrain herself from leaning in to kiss his unhappy mouth.

Then his face softened, so abruptly that Jen couldn’t place when it changed, though it had changed radically. She looked at Ex’s eyes; they appeared now to be clearly women’s eyes, Jen thought, shy and dark and secretive. Ex’s brow was too delicate, her eyelashes too graceful to belong to a man, it seemed now. So odd, Jen thought, when a moment ago she was a man, and I was so attracted to him.

“When I was a woman, I was soft like butter,” Ex said. “I was tasteful. I was polite. Nothing made me so uncomfortable as someone else’s discomfort, so I did all I could to comfort and appease those around me. I felt that I was melting, changing my shape all the time, molding myself to the expectations of other people.”

Ex cleared her throat and looked around the table, checking to see that everyone was still paying attention. Becky nodded encouragingly at her. “Go on,” she said.

“Men were always asking me on dates,” she said. “And I wasn’t interested in them, but I would go, because I didn’t want to hurt their feelings. I sat through endless insufferable dinners, picking at my food because I didn’t like for the men to see me eating. I stopped answering my phone so that I wouldn’t have to refuse a second date.”

“What was your job when you were a woman?” Paula asked.

“Oh, nothing too notable,” said Ex. “I worked at a day care for a bit, and at an after-school program. Those jobs were only part-time; I did a little modeling, too, when I could get work. I lived in L.A. then. I never had any money. I bought everything with coupons, like an old lady, and I sometimes let men buy me clothes, but I hated doing that.”

Ex seemed to fold into herself as she recalled these difficult times; she pulled her knees up to her chest and shivered, despite the warm temperature in the restaurant. Her long bangs fell over her forehead, shading one eye, which only enhanced the brilliant green of the other eye, which Jen could swear was bordered in dark eyeliner.

Again, Jen felt the powerful desire to embrace Ex—to pull her close, to touch her hair, her face, to rip open the buttons of her shirt so she could touch the soft skin below them. A confusing set of conflicting emotions tore at her chest; she wanted to protect this fragile woman—but also to devour her.

What is wrong with me? Jen asked herself, rubbing her eyes to try to straighten out her vision. Paula’s lover, Jen said to herself, several times over, as a mantra, her eyes closed against the apparition.

“Did that explain everything?” Ex asked. Jen opened her eyes, and Ex had returned to his or her previous state of optical illusion; the man and the woman were both gone.

“I have a question!” exclaimed Jen, with the poor manners of one who has just awakened from a trance. Then, realizing that the question she wanted to ask might very likely be perceived as rude, she added, “I mean, if you don’t mind.”

A look of fatigue, or annoyance even, passed over Ex’s eyes, and he sounded irritated when he spoke. “No, go ahead,” he said.

Oh no, Jen thought, horrified that she might have broken the fragile spell, that Ex would be angry with her. “Oh,” said Jen, feeling her face grow warm with embarrassment, “it was nothing.”

Ex’s face softened, and her voice grew softer, more patient. “No, it’s okay,” she said. “Really, that’s why I asked.”

“Oh, well,” said Jen, stumbling over her words in embarrassment. “Were you…I mean, which were you first, a man or a woman? I mean, a boy or a girl? Which one were you born as?”

She heard Paula breathe in sharply. Jen knew it was rude to ask, but she felt that she needed to know, that it would help her understand who this mysterious person sitting in front of her was.

“That is an interesting question,” Ex said.

“Really?” Jen asked, surprised. “I would think people asked you that all the time.”

“They do,” said Ex. “That’s what is interesting about it. I suppose people think that it means something.”

Now Jen really wished she hadn’t asked the question. But since she had, she decided to commit to it; after all, there was nothing wrong with being curious. Ex had told her a story, and she wanted more information about it.

“Well, doesn’t it mean something?” Jen asked.

“What do you think it means?” Ex replied.

Jen wanted to say, It means who you really are. But she knew that was the wrong answer. Growing up, her next-door-neighbors had been Mormons. The children, who were born into Mormonism, weren’t any more Mormon than their parents, who had converted. In fact, some might say that the parents were all the more Mormon because they had made a conscious choice to be so.

“Maybe you’re right,” said Jen. “Maybe it doesn’t mean anything.”

“I didn’t say that,” said Ex. “I just asked a question.” It was true, Jen thought; she had just assumed, for some reason.

“Which do you think I was born as?” Ex asked Jen.

Jen studied the lines of Ex’s face, the sharpness of the chin and soft curve of the cheekbones, the glowing brown skin showing no sign of an evening shadow.

“I have no idea,” Jen said.

“I sometimes forget, myself,” said Ex. “A girly boy, a boyish girl. Years pass, and it all begins to run together.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Paula, grabbing Ex’s arm and twining her own around it. “I bet you were adorable, either way.”

“I have a question,” said Becky. “Which way is sex better? As a man or a woman?”

“Becky!” said Paula sharply. Jen looked over at Becky, who, unlike herself, did not seem the least bit self-conscious about asking personal questions. It wasn’t in Becky’s nature to be shy, Jen thought, but this was pushing the boundaries of politeness even for her. It’s the pregnant-lady prerogative, Jen thought—they are allowed to be brutally honest, what with their own private business so publically on display for all to see.

Still, Jen thought, it seemed a particularly inappropriate question to ask an avowed celibate.

Ex didn’t seem annoyed at the question. “I didn’t like it either way,” Ex said. “It never made any sense to me.”

“You didn’t like sex?” Becky asked, incredulous. “I didn’t know that was possible.”

“Of course I didn’t like it,” Ex replied. “Why do you think I gave it up?”

“I thought it was some kind of spiritual thing,” said Becky.

“It is,” said Ex. “You know, perhaps I enjoyed sex at the time. All I remember now is that it made me crazy. It made me have connections to other people that were…” Ex paused to choose a word: “unhealthy.”

Becky nodded. “That makes sense,” she said. Jen noticed her absently rubbing her hand across her belly as she spoke.

“When I was unhappy with my gender, I thought another gender would make me happier, would be truer to myself,” Ex continued. “I was wrong.”

Ex turned and looked straight at Jen across the table.

“Remember that,” said Ex. “Tell your friend: if you don’t like your car, you could get a different one, but someday you will not like that one either. It is an endless cycle of neediness. I think you are better off to get rid of your car and just walk on your own plain feet.”

Chapter 33