Broken People Read online

  Sam unlocked his car, watching the headlights illuminate the darkened street. At night you couldn’t see the scuffs and scrapes on the rear bumper and driver-side door of the car, a black Audi sedan that he had leased the week he had come to California, still buzzing from the high of having picked up his entire life and left New York. He hadn’t even considered whether or not he could actually afford it on his modest salary, hadn’t researched whether it was a good car, even. He had lived in New York since he was a teenager and had never had a car of his own before, though he did know how to drive, sort of, and the Audi, with its sleek contours and luxury finishes, looked like the kind of car that would be driven by someone who had made it, someone who really had their life together.

  The car was a big long boat of a thing that barely fit into the cramped parking spot in the garage of his West Hollywood apartment complex, and it was nearly impossible to wedge into the compact spaces that filled most lots in Los Angeles. Within the first month Sam had already crashed it twice, backing carelessly into medians and scraping it against a wall trying to park at Whole Foods when he urgently needed to pee. And then driving down Melrose, a woman had rear-ended him, and when they pulled over around the block she got out of her car crying, waving her phone around with Instagram still open on the screen, begging him not to go through insurance because if she got in one more accident she’d get her license revoked, and Sam felt so bad for her that he just took down her phone number and never called her or bothered getting it fixed, since the damage was all cosmetic and the car was already beat-up enough anyway. He had grown to hate the car, this expensive symbol of his impracticality.

  Never mind that after a few weeks driving it around Los Angeles, on streets clotted with Range Rovers and Bentleys, it no longer seemed like that nice of a car. An Audi sedan came in the West Hollywood gay guy starter pack, along with an Equinox membership and those Gucci mules everyone seemed to be wearing. (Neither of which Sam could really afford after his lease payments.) Sometimes it felt as though everyone in Los Angeles was rich and yet nobody ever seemed to work.

  Sam did work and he was not rich. He was the entertainment editor at a magazine in the twilight years of old media, in an economy where the internet was threatening jobs like his into obsolescence; all it would take, he thought, was one pivot to video and he’d be out of a job. He had failed to recoup the advance on the book he’d released a year earlier, about his troubled adolescence spent strung out on drugs and in rehab, although its underperformance was a secret, or so he told himself, something only he and his publisher really had to know. His whole life looked good on paper, but it didn’t actually net out to much.

  Privately Sam wondered when he was included in things like this, the dinner party at Buck’s house, how much his résumé was responsible for the invitation, because it made him seem interesting by default, especially because he was still relatively young. So few people in Los Angeles even read books that to write one seemed to strike people as very special, though of course, Sam reasoned, there was a time when writing a book was only a wild dream to him, too, but then, most things become unremarkable as soon as you have done them.

  On some level he remained certain that he had stumbled into this career through sheer dumb luck and someday, unavoidably, he would be exposed for the fraud he was and the whole house of cards he’d built from these accomplishments would come tumbling down, leaving him with nothing. People talked so casually about “imposter syndrome,” like it was just a nagging occasional anxiety to be rationalized away. But Sam found that each morning the constriction around his throat had grown a little bit tighter, even while he continued to try to project an image of confidence and success, meeting friends at SoulCycle and picking up the tab for dinners out—“No, no, I got this,” he’d say as he swiftly grabbed the check, trying to ignore the guilt that clawed at his throat about how unaffordable it all really was, to stay in the warm bright swell of beautiful spaces and beautiful things for one more moment until reality kicked back in.

  Where did that come from, he wondered? Was that a gay thing? An upwardly mobile middle-class thing? Was it a mental health thing? Or maybe it was just a symptom of modern life, when there were so many different ways for Sam to have his own inadequacy reflected back to him, every time he opened Instagram, where, it seemed, everyone was always in Mykonos or Tulum in their designer clothes and white teeth and abs, always the abs.

  Yet the thing that depressed him the most was that he had no traction on the second book. The book was his albatross. Once he finished it, he imagined, things would get easier—an influx of cash, even a modest one; a sense of forward momentum, something to point to as proof that he wasn’t actually that much of a flop; and maybe when it came out, he would finally be content. But contentment—every time he thought he was approaching it, the finish line jumped to just beyond his grasp. That wouldn’t happen after this book was done, he told himself as he got into the Audi. This sense of unbelonging would actually leave him, for good.

  It must have been his résumé, Sam thought as he made switchbacks down Laurel Canyon—the reason Buck had asked him to dinner in the first place, to fill a vacancy in the cast. Surely Buck didn’t see Sam as a romantic prospect. He probably just wanted Sam around as a new and interesting thing to show off, like the Aston Martin parked in Buck’s driveway—which, Sam noticed, did not have a single scuff.

  * * *

  At the base of the canyon, Sam called his best friend, Kat.

  “How are you?” he said.

  “Emotionally exhausted,” Kat said. “Just leaving therapy.” She said something to this effect every time they spoke, which they did nearly every day, and this was comforting to Sam, both the predictability of it and the intimacy that came with having known someone for so long you could completely drop the veil and say exactly what was on your mind without fear of being misunderstood. They had become friends when they were in high school and had somehow managed to remain close through all the turns of early adulthood, and were so connected now that when they spoke, Sam could intuit the meaning behind the slightest modulations in the tone of her voice, knew exactly what she was about to say before she said it.

  Kat lived in Portland, their hometown, so they only saw each other a few times a year now, but in his mind’s eye he could see her as vividly as if he were watching her on a closed circuit camera—driving across a bridge through the rain, windshield wipers working furiously, a curvy blonde in yoga pants and a hoodie, forever running late to a workout class, sucking six-dollar cold brew through a straw. People underestimated Kat because she was pretty and voluble, but she was flintier, and more perceptive, than she seemed.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Oh, the usual,” she said. “Existential dread and environmental despair. Did you see this new report out today about the sea level rising? I spent all afternoon spiraling.”

  “No. What did it say?”

  “Sam,” she said emphatically. “We have, like, twenty years left before we’re all basically underwater.” Kat talked about the end of the world like it was an inevitability. Maybe it was.

  “I don’t know if I can take that in,” Sam said. “My anxiety is already so bad just scraping through my life as it is. If I truly engage the possibility that the planet is dying, it will incapacitate me and I’ll end up just completely withdrawing from the world and never leaving my apartment again. You know?”

  “But isn’t that exact attitude how we ended up here?” Kat said. “None of us can accept how fucked the earth is so we just keep, like, busying ourselves with work and life, pretending like it’s going to be fine! I just keep thinking, like, why is my boss sending me 9:00 p.m. emails about this new business pitch tomorrow when we’re in the middle of a mass extinction event? And when can I tell him to fuck off and just move to a commune in Southeast Asia or something to live in peace until the Big One hits?”

  “I’ll meet you there,�
� Sam said. “I’m ready to go analog.” He thought about it. “Although you know they won’t have pressed juices or a spin studio on the commune.”

  “But I only need those things in the first place to distract myself from the fact that the world is ending,” Kat said. “Which is probably why my credit card is maxed out. And did I tell you two new stretch marks on my thigh popped overnight? Literally overnight, Sam.”

  “Having a body is the worst.”

  “The worst,” she echoed, like it was a chant. “My New Year’s resolution was to be more gentle with mine, so I’ve been following all these body-positivity activists on Instagram, right? And I’m dying to believe that they’ve found a way to truly accept themselves and embrace their curves and find health at every size, but I just don’t understand how it’s possible.” Her voice dropped. “Like, am I really just supposed to look at some pictures of bigger-bodied women and read a Rupi Kaur poem and undo a literal fucking lifetime of having it messaged to me by society that my value as a woman is contingent on the size and shape of my body?”

  “I don’t know,” Sam said. “I don’t think gay men are told that by society so much as we’re told that by each other. Which is fucking harrowing, too.” He sighed. “And part of me just wants to pull the rip cord and stop habitually undereating to maintain a body weight that’s within the bounds of gay-acceptable, but if I do that, will I ever find a husband? But will I ever find a husband anyway? So wouldn’t it be better to just be fat and happy?”

  “More important,” Kat said, “does any of this even matter when everything is on fire all the time?”

  “I wish I had never been born into a body,” Sam said. “My soul should have been born into a haunted painting, or a cursed pendant that torments a family for generations.”

  “A haunted painting!” Kat said, like it was a bright idea. “I’d be so much better at that than I am at being a human woman.”

  Sam paused. “I went to this fancy dinner party tonight and this guy was talking about some shaman who fixes all of your emotional problems in three days.”

  “Dude,” Kat said. “How do we get in to see him?”

  “It gets spookier,” Sam said. “He lives in Portland.”

  “No shit. Do you think I’ve seen him at my barre class?”

  Sam laughed. “But do you think it’s possible? To just, like, fix people?”

  “Of course not. If it was, rich people would just, like, hire a shaman and be happy,” Kat said. “And all the rich people I know are miserable.” A horn honked in the background. “Learn to drive!” she yelled. “Sorry. Not you.”

  Sam pulled into his garage. “The guy invited me to go up to Portland and meet the shaman. Should I do it?”

  “Absolutely,” Kat said. “Like, what if you do it and you’re just, like, one of those people who floats through life on a cloud? What if he makes you, like, not neurotic and self-destructive and body-image-dysmorphic and burdened and you just, like, love your body and feel good about yourself and shit?”

  “I think if my anxiety and depression were going anywhere, they would have gone there by now, right?” Sam said. “Like, I’m pretty sure this is just how I am.” He drummed his fingers on the dashboard. “You know. That sweet spot between normal and completely fucking losing it all the time.”

  “‘Normal’ is bullshit,” Kat said. “It’s, like, something Big Pharma invented in the ’60s to make consumers feel bad about themselves. You sound exactly like everybody else who’s at least semiconscious as we collectively speed toward the cliff with our brakes cut—Fuck, there’s never anywhere to park.” He could hear the murmur of rain splashing on the windows, her car pulling to a stop. “I’m late for my yin class. Let me call you back.”

  * * *

  Sam sat in the car for a long moment after the call ended, staring ahead, lost in thought. It wasn’t possible, this idea that you could completely change in a single weekend.

  He knew that.

  2

  Hummingbird

  The second sign came the very next morning, when Sam awakened to find something unusual in his bedroom.

  The window by his bed, slatted and casement-style, with a rusty old crank that groaned when he turned it, had been open all through the mild Los Angeles winter, which had allowed the bougainvillea that crept up the facade of his apartment building to wrap its tendrils around the narrow glass panes. This produced the illusion of waking up each morning in a garden, the floor littered with a few pale pink petals. Some months earlier he’d opened the window to let a little fresh air in and had just never closed it. He liked feeling both outdoors and in, liked the smells of lavender and smoke that drifted into the room.

  But now there was something in his room, a form furiously beating its wings and slapping against his window from the inside. When Sam first stirred, disoriented and still half asleep, he wasn’t sure what it was, but he could see its frantic motions. Was it an enormous flying cockroach? Were those a thing in California?

  Yet when he sat up, reaching for his glasses, he realized it wasn’t an insect at all. It was a hummingbird, iridescent blue with a long pincerlike beak. She was frightened, insensibly smacking against the glass and bougainvillea with startling force. It would not have shocked Sam if the window frame had cracked from the thrust of her movements. She was just an inch or so from the opening in the window, but the spiny fingers of the bougainvillea’s vines and leaves had obscured her exit route, leaving her trapped.

  Sam moved closer to her and her movements grew more panicked. He reached out with one hand as if to whisk her outside, but she flew out into the room, circling frantically over his bed, then making a run for the other window, which was closed. She whipped against the glass helplessly, urgently, as if possessed.

  Him being there was probably just stressing her out more, Sam thought. Maybe if he left the room, she would find her way outside. This was how he preferred to deal with most problems—ignore it and hope it goes away on its own.

  He backed out into the hallway, closing the door so he could no longer hear that frenzied slapping noise. In his living room, Sam caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. His close-cropped brown hair was pushed to one side from sleeping with his head buried in the pillow, and his face was ruddy. He walked closer to the mirror and studied his reflection as he did so many times a day, pushing out his belly and sucking it back in again so his rib cage protruded over his stomach, pulling at the flesh around his midsection, as if the motion might shrink it.

  He was tall and broad, with a frame that could carry a deceptive heaviness, but after a lifetime of losing and gaining weight, he’d reached a sort of equilibrium where, he thought, he was neither objectionably fat nor did he have the kind of body that he ever wanted anyone to see. In a preening, health-conscious place like Los Angeles where everyone talked about their bodies constantly, he spoke of his hardly ever, only to Kat, who understood the way he felt; it was as if he hoped by not mentioning his body, people might not notice that he had one. He fantasized about having the sort of physique where he could post thirst-trap selfies and have his inbox fill up with fawning messages, the kind of body that would make men cruise him at the gym, but he had settled here instead, and as he looked at himself for a long moment he felt silly for caring so much about the way he looked.

  Noah had liked his body, Sam thought, and some distant loss pinched him in the form of a memory; he wished he had a partner still, someone to provide backup in the fight against quotidian challenges like a hummingbird invasion.

  How would Noah have handled it, Sam wondered, if they were still seeing each other—or, rather, if they were still spending every night together, as they had done until fairly recently? It had never been a real relationship, exactly—more like a fling that had spiraled out of control. They had decided to see other people, but Sam knew that was the beginning of the end: a phasing out of one another, as hourly tex
ts turned to daily check-ins, and soon weeks would pass without them speaking at all.

  It wasn’t surprising that it had flamed out. They were both addicts in recovery, which had given the beginning the texture of something laced with a speedy euphoria, all crackling electricity and empty promises about tomorrows that felt so real in the whirl and spill of the moment. But after they had built up a tolerance to one another, they stopped making each other high; they had seen too much of one another’s darkness, in ways Sam was loath to relive now, the way last night’s hangover can poison tonight’s revelry. Addicts, even sober ones, are always using something. If you are lucky, you will realize it when the thing they are using is you.

  But Noah would have been handy here. He would have taken charge of the situation with the hummingbird, found some way to fix it, like that’s just a thing that you reflexively know when you are a certain type of man. A basic life skill, like changing a tire or catching a football: evacuating a bird from a bedroom.

  As with all the guys Sam dated, Noah was half man and half boy; in his late thirties, he wavered between the infectious excitability of a little kid and a very grown-up seriousness—which was earned, Sam knew, since his life had been hard. Sam had been spared many of the graver consequences of his own using years, scraping by with no lasting material repercussions, although whether that was the product of dumb luck or good hustle or divine intervention he couldn’t say; he’d even gotten a book out of it. Noah had paid a heavier price. Like Sam, he had been an intravenous drug user before getting clean, but unlike Sam, Noah had spent time homeless, living on the streets of London until a nasty overdose brought him to his knees. Now five years sober, he was an advertising executive who had come to Los Angeles to work on a project for a client. Looking at him now, so polished, you would never have guessed that his history had been so tortured.