Nine Perfect Strangers (36 page)

She refused her husband's forgiveness. Her son called for her and she did not go to him. It was unacceptable.

She let her husband go. She insisted he find another life and he did eventually, although it took much, much longer than Masha wanted. It was such a relief when he was gone, when she no longer had to experience the pain of seeing the face that so resembled that of their beautiful son.

Although she refused to read the emails he sent and wanted to know nothing about him, she accidentally discovered many years ago, when she came across a man in a food court who was still friends with her husband—a man who was there on the day they shot the balls of paint—that her husband was healthy and happy, that he had married an Australian girl and had three sons.

Masha hoped that he still sang when he cooked. She thought that he probably did. In her research, she had read of the hedonic treadmill theory, which said that people returned to a certain pre-set level of happiness regardless of what happened to them, whether it was very good or very bad. Her husband had been a simple happy man whereas Masha was a complex unhappy woman.

Masha's son would have been twenty-eight this August. She probably
would have had a difficult relationship with him if he had lived. They probably would have fought like Masha had once fought with her mother. Instead he would always be her singing, chuckling baby and a beautiful young man wearing a baseball cap walking toward her through a lake of color.

She should have been allowed to stay with him.

Masha looked at the empty bag of Doritos. Her fingertips were stained yellow the way her father's had once been stained by nicotine. She ran the heels of her hands over her mouth and turned the monitor back on to observe her guests.

They were all awake, she saw. They sat in small groups, chatting, in that laid-back Australian way. They were too relaxed. This was no dark night of the soul. It could have been a barbecue. These people did not truly believe they were facing death sentences.

Never once had a member of staff defied her the way these people were defying her.

The screen of her monitor pulsed as if it were alive. Was there some sort of malfunction? She put her finger to it and felt it quiver like a dying fish.

She was momentarily confused before she remembered she had earlier taken seventy-five milligrams of LSD to improve her decision making and mental clarity. This was simply a hallucination. She needed to relax and allow her brain to find all the right connections.

She looked around the room and noticed a vacuum cleaner sitting quietly in the corner of her office. It was not pulsating. It was quite real. She had just not noticed it before. The cleaners must have left it. They had excellent cleaners here. She only recruited and employed the best. It was important to maintain quality standards at all levels of your business.

There was something so familiar about the vacuum cleaner.

“
Oh!
” she said, for her father was picking up the vacuum cleaner, clumsily, with both hands. It was such a cumbersome thing. He walked toward the door with it.

“
No, no, no!
” she screamed. “
Papochka!
Put it down! Do not go!”

But he looked back at her sadly and smiled, and he was gone and no man would ever love her the way her father had loved her.

He was not real. She knew this. It was very easy to see what was real and what was not. Her mind was very sharp, sharp enough to differentiate.

She closed her eyes.

Her baby's voice was calling for her.
No. Not real.

She opened her eyes and he was crawling across her office floor, babbling nonsense to himself.

She closed her eyes quickly.
No. Not real.

She opened her eyes. A cigarette would calm her.

She opened her secret cupboard once more and removed an unopened packet of cigarettes and a lighter. The geometry of the pack enthralled her. Each of its four mathematically aligned angles was so pleasing.

She opened the pack, removed a cigarette, and rolled its cylindrical shape back and forth between her fingertips. The lighter was orange, a color of such depth and beauty it astonished her.

She ran her thumb across the tiny rough-edged wheel of the lighter. A gold flame burst forth, instantly and obediently.

She let it go and did it again.

The lighter was a miniature factory producing perfect flames on demand. There was such beauty in the efficient production of goods and services.

A thought of crystalline clarity: Masha should forget the wellness industry completely and return to the corporate world. Forget pivoting. She should
jump
. It would simply be a matter of reactivating her LinkedIn account and within a very short time she would be headhunted, fielding offers.

The boy in the baseball cap sat on the other side of her desk, dripping puddles of iridescent color all over her floor.

“What do you think?” she asked him. “Should I do that?”

He didn't speak, but she could tell he thought it was a good idea.

No more entitled, ungrateful
guests
. She would once again conduct multiple departments of a company like an orchestra: accounting, payroll, sales, and marketing—it was all coming back to her, the glorious unassailable solidity of a documented reporting structure with her name at the top. She would micro-dose daily to optimize her productivity. Ideally her staff would do the same, although the people in HR would have all sorts of objections.

She had begun a new life when she emigrated, when her son died, and again when her heart stopped. She could do it again.

Sell this property and buy an apartment in the city.

Or …

She studied the tiny flickering flame. The answer was right there.

66

 

Ben

“So, Napoleon, I've got you,” said Ben, walking next to the older man as he strode up and down the length of the cellar. “I mean, I'm defending you.”

He felt like he should call him Mr. Marconi or sir. He had that teacher-ish manner. The sort of teacher you still wanted to impress even after you'd left school and bumped into him at the shops looking startlingly short. Not that he could imagine Napoleon ever looking short.

“Thank you, Ben,” said Napoleon, as if Ben had been given a choice.

“So, okay,” said Ben. He rubbed his stomach. He had never been so hungry in his life. “I guess it's pretty simple why you deserve a stay of execution. You're a husband and a father, and, well, I hope it's okay to include this in my speech—but your wife and daughter have already lost enough, haven't they? They couldn't lose you too.”

“You can say that if you like.” Napoleon smiled sadly. “That's true.”

“And you're a teacher,” said Ben. “So kids depend on you.”

“They do. Yep.” Napoleon rapped his knuckles on the brickwork. Ben had seen him do this a hundred times since they'd been down here, as if he were hoping that he'd find a loose brick that would give them a way out. Ben knew it was hopeless. There was no way out of here except that door.

“Anything else I should say?” asked Ben, and his voice cracked. When he had had to deliver the toast at Pete's wedding he thought he might pass out. And now it was his job to defend this man's
life
?

Napoleon turned away from the wall and looked at Ben. “Mate, I don't think it matters what you say. I wouldn't take it too seriously.” He clapped him on the shoulder. “I think we need to take
Masha
seriously, but not the game itself.”

“You've got yourself a dud defense lawyer here,” confessed Ben. “I got lucky. Lars is defending me and he's
appeared
in court.”

When Lars had his “meeting” with Ben, he only asked two or three quick questions before he said, “How about this?” And then he launched into an eloquent speech, like something on
television
, all about how Ben was a morally upstanding young man standing on the very cusp of adulthood, about to become a father, deeply committed to his marriage, with so much to give to his wife, his family, his
community
, and so on and so forth. It all just flowed out, without a single “um” or “ah.”

“Think that will do the trick?” he asked at the end.

“Sure,” marveled Ben.

And then Lars had gone off to the bathroom to fix his hair in preparation for his “appearance.”

“I get so terrified of public speaking, I can't even breathe,” Ben told Napoleon.

“Do you know the only difference between fear and excitement is the exhalation?” asked Napoleon. “When you're afraid, you hold the air in the top part of the lungs. You need to exhale. Like this.
Ahhhhh
.” He put his hand to his chest and demonstrated with a long slow breath out. “Like that sound people make after a firework explodes.
Ahhhhh.
”

Ben did it with him. “
Ahhhhh.
”

“That's it,” said Napoleon. “Tell you what—I'll go first. I'm defending Tony, so I'll bore Masha to death speaking about his football career. I plan to do a rundown of every game he played. That'll show her.” He stopped at the beam near the inscribed brick in the wall. “You saw this?”

“The convict graffiti?” Delilah had shown it to them on their first tour of the house. Ben and Jessica hadn't really been that interested.

Napoleon grinned. “Fascinating, eh? I read up on the history of this place before we came. These brothers eventually got their tickets of leave and ended up becoming very respectable, highly sought-after stonemasons. Far more successful than they would have been back home in England. They've got thousands of descendants in this area. When they were sentenced to be transported to Australia I bet they were devastated. They probably felt like it was the end of the world. But it turned out to be the making of them. The lowest point of your life can lead to the highest. I just find that so …” For a moment he looked profoundly sad. “Interesting.”

Ben didn't know why he suddenly felt in danger of crying. It must be hunger. It occurred to him that when he got home he owed his dad a visit. Just because his dad had given up on Lucy didn't mean Ben should give up on him.

Ben put his fingers to the inscription. He thought about how everyone said it was such fantastic luck that he and Jessica won the lottery, but sometimes it didn't feel that way.

He looked over at Jessica. Was he really going to be a dad himself? How could he advise a kid on how to live his life when he hadn't yet worked it out himself?

“Remember the exhale, mate,” said Napoleon. “Just breathe out the fear.”

67

 

Heather

“I'm quite a good friend,” said Frances to Heather. “You could mention that.” She chewed a fingernail. “I remember birthdays.”

“I'm hopeless at birthdays,” said Heather. In reality she was hopeless at friends, and after Zach died she could see no point to them at all. Friends were an indulgence.

Frances winced. “I did totally forget a good friend's birthday this year, but that was because I was caught up in this internet scam and I was so distracted that day, and then it got to midnight, and I thought, Oh my God,
Monica
! but it was too late to text, so—”

“What about your family?” Heather interrupted, before she heard this Monica's life story. She found Frances to be quite flaky. “Do you have family?”

Heather looked over Frances's shoulder at her own family. Zoe was sitting with Jessica, their heads bowed close, as if they were two friends sharing secrets. Napoleon and Ben walked as they talked, Ben listening intently and nodding respectfully like he was one of Napoleon's
best students. She didn't know what was going on with Napoleon right now. It was like an imposter was doing an excellent job performing the role of Napoleon. He was saying and doing all the right things and nearly getting away with it, but there was something just not quite right.

“Yes,” said Frances. “I have family.” She looked uncertain. “I guess I'm not that close to my immediate family. My father died and my mother remarried and moved overseas. The South of France. I have a sister, but she has a lot on her plate. Their day-to-day lives wouldn't be impacted that much if I was gone.”

“Of course their lives would be impacted,” said Heather.

“Well …” Frances gave the blank screen a nervous look. “I'm not saying they'd dance on my grave.”

Heather looked at her, surprised. The woman looked genuinely frightened. “You do know you're not really on death row, don't you? This is just a stupid power game for that maniac.”

“Shhh,” hissed Frances. “She could be listening.”

“I don't care,” said Heather recklessly. “I'm not scared of her.”

“I kind of think you
should
be.” Frances shot another uneasy look at the screen.

“It's fine, I'm going to play along,” said Heather, to comfort the poor woman. “I don't think you should be executed.”

“Thanks so much,” said Frances.

“So what else should I say?”

“Appeal to her ego,” said Frances. “Start out by saying that it's true that Frances's life didn't mean all that much until this point, but now she has done this retreat, she has been rehabilitated.”

“Rehabilitated,” said Heather.

“That's right.” Frances was as jittery as a junkie. “Make sure you use the word ‘rehabilitated.' I think she'll like that. Make it clear that I've seen the error of my self-indulgent ways. I'm going to exercise. Eat clean. No more preservatives. I'm going to
set goals
.”

“
Good morning, my sweetie pies!
”

Masha's voice boomed through the room as her image flickered to life once more on the screen.

Frances gasped and swore, clutching Heather's arm.

“It is time!” cried Masha. She took a long deep drag of a cigarette and blew the smoke out the side of her mouth. “It is time to play Death Sentence. Wait. We're not calling it that, are we? It is time to play Death Row. A much better name! Who thought of that name?”

“But it's not time yet!” Napoleon looked at his watch.

Heather stared at the screen. Masha was
smoking
. She didn't know why she was so surprised after everything else that had happened, but it was shocking and distressing, like seeing a nun lifting her habit to reveal suspenders.

“You're smoking!” accused Jessica.

Masha laughed and took another deep drag. “I am smoking, Jessica. Occasionally, in times of stress, I smoke.”

“You're high,” said Ben tiredly, sadly, and Heather could hear in his voice the years of resigned disappointment suffered by an addict's relative. Ben was right. Masha's eyes were glassy, and her posture was strange and stiff, as if her head wasn't attached to her body and she was worried it would roll off.

Masha held up an empty smoothie glass. “I have taken steps to reach a higher level of consciousness.”

“Is Yao okay?” asked Heather. She tried to keep her tone respectful, even though her throat burned with hatred. “Could we please see Yao?”

The screen of the camera seemed to be angled differently from the previous time. Masha stood in front of a window in what looked like her office, although it was dark outside, so it was impossible to tell for sure.

“He is not your concern right now,” said Masha. “It is time for you to present your cases for your clients. Will they live? Will they die? This is such a stimulating and thought-provoking exercise, I think.”

“It's only three
A.M.
, Masha!” Napoleon tapped the face of his watch. “It's not dawn. You said we'd do this at dawn.”

Masha lunged at the screen and pointed her cigarette at him. “Guests should not wear watches during retreats!”

Napoleon reeled back. He held up his wrist. “I've been wearing it the whole time. Nobody said I couldn't wear a watch.”

“The watch should have been handed in with the other devices! Who was your wellness consultant?”

“It's my fault, Masha. I take responsibility for this.” He unbuckled his watch.

“It was Yao, wasn't it?” screamed Masha. She looked demonic. Her scream reverberated through the room. Flecks of her saliva dotted the screen.

“Jesus Christ,” said Tony quietly.

Zoe came to stand next to Heather and took her hand, something she hadn't done since she was a very little girl. It felt like no one breathed.

Heather squeezed Zoe's hand and, for the first time since they'd been trapped down here, she experienced true dread.

She thought of those times throughout her working life when the atmosphere in a labor ward went from focused to hyper-focused, because a mother's or a baby's life hung in the balance and every member of staff in that room knew the next decision made had to be the right one. Except in this case she had no training or experience to fall back upon. She longed to
act
, but she was impotent, and the overwhelming powerlessness reminded her of that nightmarish moment when she found Zach, her fingers looking for a pulse she already knew she wouldn't find.

“I am
very
disappointed in Yao!” raged Masha. “That was an unacceptable mistake! I shall make sure HR knows! A note will go in his file. He will receive a formal letter of warning.”

Napoleon held up his watch by the strap and showed it to Masha. “I'm taking it off.”

Zoe squeezed Heather's hand convulsively.

“I'm sorry. It was my fault,” said Napoleon in the slow careful tone
of someone placating a crazed gunman. “I'm going to destroy it.” He dropped the watch to the ground and went to put his foot over it.

Masha switched tone. “Oh, stop being so dramatic, Napoleon, you could cut your foot!” She waved her cigarette about gaily, as if she were in animated conversation at a party, a glass of wine in the other hand.

Heather heard Zoe take a shaky breath and the thought of her daughter's fear made her want to hurt this madwoman.

“I am not the sort to become too obsessive about bureaucratic rules. I am flexible! I am big picture!” Masha took a long drag of her cigarette. “On the Myers-Briggs personality test I am the Commander! I think you will not be surprised to hear that.”

“This is not good.” Lars peered up at the screen through splayed fingertips.

“She's off with the fairies,” murmured Tony.

“Nothing is forever,” said Masha irrelevantly. “Remember that. It's important. Now, who will be presenting first?” She looked around as if searching for something. “Does everyone have coffee? Not yet? Don't worry. Delilah will have it all under control.”

She smiled and held out her arms as if she were sitting at the head of a conference table.

Heather shuddered with a sudden sense of overwhelming fear.
She's hallucinating.

At that moment Masha's attention was caught by the cigarette between her fingers. Minutes passed and she continued to stare at the cigarette.

“What's she
doing
?” whispered Carmel.

“It's the LSD,” said Lars in a low voice. “She can't believe she's never noticed the innate beauty of the cigarette.”

Finally, Masha looked up. “Who is presenting first?” she asked again calmly. She flicked the ash from her cigarette onto a windowsill.

“I will,” said Tony.

“Tony! Excellent,” said Masha. “Who are you defending?”

“Carmel,” said Tony. He gestured at Carmel, who made a strange,
awkward movement as if she couldn't decide whether to curtsey or hide behind Lars.

“Go ahead, Tony.”

Tony cleared his throat. He stood with his hands clasped and looked respectfully up at the screen. “I'm representing Carmel Schneider today. Carmel is thirty-nine years old, divorced, with four young daughters. She is their primary caregiver. She is also very close to her older sister, Vanessa, and her parents, Mary and Raymond.”

Masha looked bored. She sniffed.

Tony's voice trembled. “Carmel's mother Mary is not in good health and Carmel normally takes her to her doctors' appointments. Carmel says that she's just an ordinary person, doing the best she can, but I think anyone bringing up four little girls on her own is pretty special.” He pulled nervously at the collar of his T-shirt as if he were adjusting a tie. “Carmel also volunteers at her local library teaching English to refugees. She does this once a week. She's been doing this since she was eighteen, which I think is very impressive.” He clasped his hands in front of him. “Thank you.”

Masha yawned theatrically. “Is that it?”

Tony lost his temper. “For Christ's sake, she's a young mother! What else do you want to hear? Obviously she doesn't deserve to die.”

“But where is your USP?” said Masha.

“USP?” asked Tony blankly.

“You've forgotten the basics, Tony! What is your unique selling proposition? What makes Carmel unique and special?”

“Well,” said Tony desperately, “she is very special because …”

“I also wonder why you did not begin with a basic analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats? It's not rocket science, people! And visual aids! I see no visual aids! A simple PowerPoint slideshow would have helped support your arguments.”

Heather made eye contact with Napoleon:
What do we do?
She saw the confusion and fear on his face and that made her panic grow, because if Napoleon had no answers they were in trouble. She thought
of those times in hospital emergency waiting rooms with Zach when they realized they were dealing with a numbskull of a triage nurse, how they would exchange looks over Zach's head, and how they both knew exactly what to do and say to act as advocates for their child. But they had never dealt with this dizzying lack of logic.

“I'm sorry,” said Tony humbly. “Obviously, PowerPoint would have helped support my argument. Yes.”

“Sorry doesn't cut it!” snarled Masha.

“Could I go next?” A loud voice cut unexpectedly through Masha's.

Heather saw with a start that it was Carmel, her chin lifted, her eyes unflinching.

“I've prepared a
strategic analysis
on behalf of Zoe Marconi, and what we should be doing, ah, going forward, and I'd really like your buy-in on this, Masha.”

Masha's face smoothed. She lifted a hand. “Go ahead, Carmel.”

Carmel strode to the center of the room and straightened an imaginary suit jacket, even though she was wearing leggings and a pink singlet top emblazoned with the sequined word
HAWAII
. “I know you wanted me to really drill down on this, Masha, and think outside the box
.
”

It was hard to reconcile this woman of such confidence with the Carmel who had just a few hours earlier begged so pathetically to go home. Now you could practically see her power suit. Was she an
actress
? Or was she calling on the memory of a previous profession? Whatever it was, it was impressive.

“Absolutely.” Masha made a brisk chopping motion with the side of her hand. “
This
is more like it. We need to push the envelope. This is very impressive, Carmel.”

It could almost be amusing if it wasn't so terrifying.

“The way I see it, we've got a real window of opportunity here to leverage Zoe's core competencies,” said Carmel, “and achieve, ah … best-practice solutions.”

“Oh well
done
,” whispered Frances.

“That's right.” Masha nodded
.
“We should always be aiming for best practice.”

It was bizarre to see how well she responded to this meaningless corporate-speak, like a baby responds to the sound of its mother's voice.

“The question is this,” said Masha shrewdly. “Does it align with our corporate values?”

“Exactly,” said Carmel. “And once we have all our ducks in a row, we need to ask this: Is it scalable?”

“Is it?” said Masha.

“
Exactly
,” said Carmel. “So what we're looking for is …” She faltered.

“Synergies,” murmured Lars.

“Synergies!” said Carmel with relief.

“Synergies,” repeated Masha dreamily, as if she were saying, “Paris in spring.”

“So to sum up, we need a synergistic solution that dovetails—”

“I've heard all I need to hear,” said Masha briskly. “Action that please, Carmel.”