Part I
Collision
1
Our story opens on Liza, an 18-year-old middle-American sculptor. Her flushed face is framed by bouncy blonde curls as she and her father traverse a rocky trail in a hilly patch of a secluded national forest nestled deep in the Ozark mountains. The air is heavy with the heat of August. They each have backpacks secured to their backs with both chest and hip straps that are slowly becoming saturated with sweat. The packs contain thermoses of soup, granola bars, water, and an apparatus for preparing coffee that they will unpack and enjoy once they have reached the waterfalls for which they are bound.
Liza’s life is brimming with anticipation. In just a few weeks she will leave her home hills to attend Pembroke University in the historic New England city of Waterton. Liza has traveled the United States on great American road trips with her family and on a few adventurous forays to concerts and festivals with friends, but she has never left the country, and she has never been away from her parents for more than two weeks at a time. Her arrival at Pembroke will break the predictable, comfortable pattern of her life thus far. An interesting outing for Liza is one like this hike: time spent challenging her body and mind to walk for longer and to stay present with the feelings of peace and serenity she experiences while in the woods.
Today she finds her father’s presence irritating. He is monologuing about his work, their family, and TV shows with little regard for her attention or interest in these matters. However, she doesn’t mind his mindlessness too much today. Soon she will be without him, and she wants to relish even her annoyance with him.
As they walk, Liza starts to become aware of a peculiar feeling in her body. It feels as if all of the matter that makes up her limbs and trunk is being drawn together, up and out through a small point on the top of her head through which it would like to escape. The strange sensation is accompanied by images as well. At first, it’s colors and lights swirling around in a transparent overlay on her field of vision. Then forms start to appear as the vision dominates her perceptions. The recognizable roundness of a human head starts to emerge out of the halos and hues. For an instant, she sees clearly a human face she has never seen before. It has pale skin, dark hair, and a penetrating blue-eyed gaze. It’s the face of a man about her age. After an instant of seeing this face in abstract although stark relief, it is gone.
Liza thinks there must have been something in the air on the patch of trail she has just trodden. She looks over her shoulder at her dad to see if he has reacted strangely at all, but from what she can tell his monologue has persisted through her moment of absence. She writes off the vision as an instance of overactive imagination due to her state of excitement at her upcoming matriculation. Her father didn’t seem to notice the interruption in her attention, so she walks on without comment. He continues talking away. She knows this trail well and she knows that soon the falls will be within sight.
2
Leo wakes late in the morning in his silk-sheeted bed in his parents' Manhattan apartment. They are away on another European foray to dine at some restaurant or to see some art opening. He did not know which was the primary purpose of this trip and he had long since ceased questioning them in the flurry of packing and preening that preceded their departures. He didn’t mind their being gone because their absence left him alone to do as he pleased, which mostly amounted to writing poems, smoking weed, and drinking his parent’s expensive alcohol with girls from his high school. It was summer now and he hated going outside in the heat of the city. The streets would cook the smells of trash and urine, giving every outing an unpleasant odor he loathed. Luckily his parents kept a maid who would shop and prepare meals for him, so he didn’t have need of much outside of the apartment anyway.
He was, as should be apparent from this description, quite depressed. A year ago his younger brother had died of cancer. The illness had come on slowly, but his departure had been sudden. He loved his brother dearly. He, Lincoln, was the blessed of the brotherly pair. Leo was whip-smart, but at times surly and almost always difficult. Lincoln, on the other hand, had been dopey and soft and sweet. In his younger brother Leo had found salvation from himself. He loved spending time with him soaking up the natural sense of lovability he seemed to radiate. He felt like a better person when he was around Lincoln.
Then life poisoned Lincoln and ripped him away from the world. With Lincoln’s departure Leo felt the light drain from his life. As he watched Lincoln die in the hospital he collapsed on the floor in grief stricken heaves and sobs. He wanted so badly to be seen in his pain and to be held by his parents, but in their state of emotional derangement they were unable to give him what he needed. Soon his mother’s emotional outbursts began to take up all the emotional space in the family. Her grief was loudest and so she won the attention from outsider observers and his father. Leo felt that someone in their family had to maintain the illusion of functionality and grace that his parents had worked so hard to uphold during his brother’s illness, so he made himself seem fine. His mind was powerful and he knew how to turn off his emotions in order to achieve his goals. That is exactly what he did when he shoved his pain deep down into his body where it would wrestle with his gut and his heart but could not affect his conscious experience.
Since he seemed fine, everyone in his life assumed that he was. Soon, maybe a month or so after Lincoln’s death, the well-meaning check-in texts stopped coming. Family friends asked him about his mother’s state, but not about his own. He began to be convinced that Lincoln’s death had happened to his parents, but not to him. They are the ones who had lost a child. They were the ones who owned the pain. His own friends did not know what to do either. They helped him procure all of the benzodiazepiness and ketamine he asked for and called this emotional support. The drugs contributed even more so to the illusion of his emotionlessness over the loss. So, his parents, assuming he was fine and knowing that they really did not have any way to help him if he wasn’t, resumed their usual schedule of travel leaving Leo to get high in peace.
He preferred things this way.
That morning, he lay in bed for several minutes after waking for he had nothing for which to rise. As he lay there, the images of the dream from which he had just awoken played in his mind. There had been a woman’s body that seemed to be made of light. The body was dancing an improvised waltz of one, but it was not rigidly stepped. Its arms moved and flailed and it kept time with the ethereal tune to which it was set. As he watched this body dancing he felt a sense of acceptance. He felt that he could be wrong before this body and that it would be okay. That morning he was moved to tears, a rarity given the emotional numbing that came with his current regimen of drug use. He wanted to be with that body and to dance that dance. He was so overwhelmed by this longing that he became aroused. He masturbated thinking about the soft, flowing body of light and then rolled over and sunk back into a dreamless sleep.
3
Liza’s arrival on Brown’s campus was accompanied by an incredible amount of self-consciousnesses. She and her parents had flown to Providence on basic economy tickets, checking IKEA tote bags full of her belongings for which they were chastised by the TSA agents because they were not “flight grade.” This experience was new for both her and her parents. Liza’s older sister had gone to a college within driving distance and had come home to see them most weekends. The 20 hours it would take to get from the Ozarks to Waterton by car felt like a chasmic distance and seeing as the airport in her hometown had only 2 gates, frequent flights home were prohibitively expensive.
She attended orientation events the day before her move-in and was so jarred by the mannerisms and social expectations of her fellow students that her face broke out in bright red pimples in response to the stress. The other students talked about their Los Angeles, New York, and Washington DC prep schools as if they had recognizable characters of which they were all aware. When Liza had offered the name of the public school she had attended in rural Missouri, she was given a funny look and shut out of a conversation. The morning of her move-in, she stood before the mirror in the hotel bathroom in tears, picking at her face. Her mother tried to comfort her, but she knew there was nothing she could say to alleviate the discomfort her daughter was bound to experience. Besides, she was disconcerted herself. She feared what would become of her daughter in this environment that reeked of inauthenticity. Of course, she knew that receiving a degree from a school like this would do good things for her daughter’s future, so she encouraged her regardless.
The family arrived at Liza’s room, arranged her furniture, made up her bed, and hung her posters on the wall. That afternoon Liza’s father found a local nature preserve only 20 minutes away and made sure that Liza knew how to get on a bus that would take her there. He told her that if she needed to take a car he would pay for it as many times as she needed. She appreciated the gesture, but she knew that her family could not afford for her to do so.
That night they had one last dinner together. Liza’s parents told her how proud of her they were for attending a school like this and how brave she was for going so far away. Her parents were both well-educated, but they had attended state schools close to their homes. They thought of themselves as humble, American country people, the kind of people who made deep impacts on their small communities, not the kind of people who attended Ivy League schools and struck out on the world’s stage. No one from Liza’s high school had ever been admitted to Pembroke and very few students from their community went far away for college. Liza’s parents knew she was a remarkably gifted artist and thinker and that she needed things from a place like Pembroke that she could not get in the Ozarks, but the idea of separation from their daughter was as challenging for them as it seemed to be for her.
Liza spent one more night in her parents’ hotel room to stay with them for as long as she could. The next morning the three of them shared a deep, loving embrace before her parents left for the airport leaving Liza alone on a hot, clear Waterton morning in September.
4
Leo was, as you might suspect, also bound for Pembroke. He had attended one of New York’s finest high schools and his admission to an elite university was more a matter of inevitability than one of accomplishment. In high school his poetry had won numerous awards for young poets and had already earned him attention from publishing houses (run by his parents’ friends) that encouraged him to focus his work and to eventually compile a volume. His résumé included internships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, research assistant positions for several successful authors, and a slew of published pieces in respectable journals and magazines. One of his admissions essays had offered an alternative reading to the accepted solution to the mystery of the narrator in Nabokov’s Pale Fire. His argument was convincing and had unfurled in under 1000 words.
His parents, although shaken by their grief, were not bad parents. They insisted that they come to help Leo move into his room. He did not want them there but he could not refuse their obligatory kindness. They paid movers to haul his belongings out of the city up to Waterton. His mother insisted that the campus issued bed would not do, so Leo was equipped by her with furniture that was to replace the drab dorm stuffs she had spied in online forums for Pembroke parents.
The movers placed Leo’s belongings in his room while his mother directed them to be placed in an elegant arrangement. The old bed was disposed of in the dorm basement with no regard for the fine they would face when its absence was discovered. In the view of the Lovemore family, fines could be paid, but discomfort could not be unfelt.
The family dined at Waterton’s most culinarily innovative restaurant and talked about art, how Leo could see shows at the nearby art school, and about how he was bound to grow as a writer and a thinker. His parents nurtured his gifts as a poet, knowing that their child was remarkable and that he was that way because of who they were and because of the ideas to which they had exposed him. They felt that Leo was a product of their own excellence, so they cherished him as they did their own work. Leo had never known another kind of love and so he accepted their approbations gracefully.
Several students from his high school joined him in his class at Pembroke, so that night he met up with them and other members of the New York cohort he already knew. He drank heavily and woke up late the next morning to an encouraging parting text singed by both of his parents.
5
During Liza’s first few weeks on campus, an unprecedented feeling of tension developed in her body. She embarrassed herself more times than she could count, and she was unable to accept the instances of red-hot shame. They were recorded in her muscles and in her stomach as an ever-mounting feeling of self-consciousness that prevented her from moving freely in the world.
The first night spent in her dorm she had gone out to various frat and sport-specific parties with students she had met on her floor. She was unaware at the time that the small group to whom she had bravely introduced herself included the niece of one of the world’s richest men, a boy whose family had a wing of the Whitney in their name, and an Olympic equestrian competitor. She had found the group strange but, not knowing what she didn’t know, had no way to assign their strangeness to their wealth or status in society. She simply thought they were different from her. The members of the group, however, immediately clocked Liza as middle-class, middle-American and, although they secretly found her naïveté charming, they mocked her when she left them that night. Liza could sense that she was an outsider amongst them and afterwards she did not try to befriend them but offered only sheepish hellos when she passed them in the dormitory halls.
The tension she carried in her body was making her feel sick and for the first time in her life she was having trouble sleeping. She quickly started to remedy this problem by hanging out with a group of friendly stoners who were the only people around whom she felt she could be herself. Some of them were, like her, middle class, and even the ones who had come from money had not been at the most prestigious boarding schools and so had more experience with the lower castes of society. They would all gather in someone’s dorm and get high and talk about their classes and this felt safe for Liza. She had enjoyed smoking weed on camping trips with her friends in high school. She had never smoked this much or this often, but the drug started to soften her body and, paradoxically, allowed her to focus on her classes.
Liza was deeply religious. Back home the community at her family’s Presbyterian church had nurtured her as she grew. In her adolescence Liza had briefly rejected Christianity for the way that it made her feel that her body was evil and that her desires were sinful. In place of prayer Liza began to meditate. She embraced Buddhism and found in the hills of the Ozarks a community of eccentric practitioners who welcomed the bright young girl to their multi-day meditation retreats. By the time she had made up with her Christian faith (and with her parents who had pushed it on her), she was mediating for over an hour every day. She did not feel that her faiths conflicted with one another and so practiced both. At Brown, her Christianity felt out of fashion, but her Buddhism was socially rewarded. The stoners and contemplatively curious aesthetes would admire her sitting silently for hours at time in the grassy quad of their dorm. She was unphased by conversations around her and when finished would gently pick up her mat in and carefully carry on with her day.
Liza was a talented sculptor with a remarkable knack for crafting graceful forms. Her mother owned a small pottery shop back home and Liza’s delicate dining room sets commanded prices far beyond anything else in the store. Her father had made a point of taking her to museums in St. Louis, Kansas City, and once on a trip to New York in order to expose his gifted daughter to art beyond what was available in their area, but there was no market for her abstract renderings of female forms and scenes from classic literature. Those pieces populated the sunroom in her parent’s backyard but never saw the cultural light of day. Now at Pembroke she had an opportunity to be pushed by real artists, people who had had gallery exhibitions and who had sold fine pieces for thousands of dollars. In her studio courses Liza had already started to come alive. Although she felt socially tense, her hands did not seem to be aware of the stiffness and moved as freely as ever. Already she had started work on a piece of far greater scale than anything she had worked on before. It included new materials, vibrant colors, but its formal aim was undecided. She liked to let the materials decide what shape they would take.
Liza was struggling, yes, but she was determined to find her way. She was aware of an emotional numbing that was starting to occur due to the heavy weed use, but she saw no other way out of the tension produced by the constant social checking she experienced everywhere outside of her small circle of stoners. She felt foggy in the mornings and heavy in the evenings, but it was better than the sickness not belonging.
6
Leo had hoped that his matriculation to Pembroke might be a sort of new beginning for him. He thought he might curb his drug use, start seeing a therapist, and be more honest with people about how he felt concerning Lincoln’s loss. He thought that outside of his parents’ milieu of emotional overwhelm there might finally be room for him to feel his feelings. Unfortunately for our young poet, momentum was not on his side. He had grown so accustomed to suppressing his feelings that he had no idea how he might start sharing them.
Leo was already fluent in French because his parents kept an apartment in Paris, but at Pembroke he began to take Russian in order to acquire the linguistic triplet that would allow him appreciate his personal literary heroes (Dostoevsky, Proust, Joyce) in their originals. His first oral exam in Russian took place about a month into the semester. In it he was expected to answer basic questions about his family. When the instructor asked, “сколько у вас братьев и сестер?” Leo fumbled around for a tense he had not yet acquired and, through tears, replied in English, “My brother is dead,” before gathering his belongings and hurriedly leaving the instructor’s office. He immediately contacted an NYC pill pusher whose parents had donated his way into Pembroke and got his hands on the largest amount of Klonopin he had ever had at one time. He spent the next two days numbed in his room with the curtains drawn, hardly eating but justifying himself by telling his roommate that he was reading Proust in the French and that it required all of himself.
Emotionally, Leo was not getting anywhere. In his classes he was impressive but withdrawn. He made pleasantries with the New York cohort of first-years and went out to enough parties so that no one would phone their parents who would then phone his parents who would then phone Leo to say something like, “I heard you’ve been a bit reclusive honey. Are you doing okay?” To which he would have to lie. Besides, it was better to go out and meet people to sleep with anyway. Sex, like the drugs, offered at least a temporary relief from his own experience of suffering.
He could listen to a young woman, who was really deep down a nice person, talk shit about her friends and not think about Lincoln and not think about his body withered in the hospital bed and focus on the girl’s body or the way her hair smelled and not on the way that his mom had thrown herself on Lincoln’s coffin screaming and crying at the visitation in front of everyone they’d ever known and focus on the pleasure that he felt in his body when he thrusted in to the girl and not think about the last thing Lincoln had ever said to him or the way he looked at him right before the light went out of his eyes and focus on the guilt that overcame him when he finished on some tight Pilates stomach and not on the deep, penetrating feeling of loneliness that followed him everywhere he went. He felt terrible every time he had to tell some girl that, no, he would not like to go on a date, and that no, he did not feel like telling her why he was so sad.
Leo’s family was Jewish but had only been to temple a handful of times in his life. Now as he was beginning to understand the depths into which he was sinking, he thought he might find some buoyancy in faith. Many of the writers he admired had kept vibrant spiritual practices. He did not feel like attending the reformed Jewish service hosted by the rabbi at Pembroke because she knew who he was and that his parents had money, so she had already pestered him in the early weeks of the semester. He told her that she was not, as a Jew, allowed to proselytize and brushed her off. Instead, he signed up for The Religious Education Seminar series, a ten-week program in which he could sit in on lectures from professors and practitioners of five of the world’s major religious traditions. He was hopeful that somewhere within the information imparted he might find a practice or prayer that could bring him some lightness.
7
As you might have already guessed, the ever-devout Liza was drawn to this same program. Here, our two characters find a convenient intersection between their disparate yet destined lives. Often what brings people together for relationships that last years is little more than a chance alignment of interests on a convenient occasion: a curiosity is pursued, a fleeting pair of eyes is sought and found, and then children are brought into being.
Liza’s weed use was beginning to stall her out. She was spending too much time getting high on the main green soaking up the warmth of her first New England autumn and admiring the mix of architectural styles that made up Pembroke’s campus: the grandiosity of the towering Main Hall, the humble splendor of the Manning Chapel, and the austere iconicism of the bell tower; but not enough time was being spent working on her art. Sure, her eyes were learning, but her hands were motionless. She was forgetting the tension in her body but doing nothing to work through it and she had become quite complacent in the group of stoners. She had never watched this much television in her life but now she spent nearly every evening taking in the latest fashions of adult animation. She knew she was on the wrong track but she was struggling to find the escape velocity to free herself from this downward spiral.
She found the flyer for the program one day when she was walking around campus worrying that she was not making the most of this expensive experience. Although she already knew quite a bit about Christianity and Buddhism, two of the traditions that would be covered, she knew almost nothing of Judaism or Islam as there were, as you might guess, not many Jewish or Muslim people in the admittedly somewhat racist hills of the Ozarks. She scanned the QR code on the flyer, put her name on the form, and in doing so set in motion the unfurling of her fate.
This small act invigorated Liza and she spent the next few weeks looking forward to the first meeting. In the meantime, she began to work through the social stiffness that had plagued her arrival on campus. She chanced to meet a few gentler members of the upper caste and began to make sense of some of the code they all seemed to have in common. She finally felt comfortable asking what a fellow student had meant when she had said “He’s such a Choate boy” or what it meant to “summer” somewhere, although she could’ve figured that one out on her own. Better still, she started to understand that her own experience could be enlightening for the bicoastal children of America’s elite. Most of them had never been to the middle of the country save Chicago and maybe a college tour at some midwestern safety school. They had no idea what it was like to grow up immersed in the simple, rural beauty that is plentiful when one is hours from any major American city. The first time that a New Yorker expressed genuine interest in these experiences, Liza came alive as if she were a child who had been queried about her favorite toy.
Before long she found herself sat upright and relaxed at dining hall tables teasing Hollywood babies and trust fund tots about their ignorance of so much of American life. She began to feel, little by little, that she was not lower than these lucky few, only different, and that her matriculation at Pembroke was not only an occasion for embarrassment, but an opportunity to play in a league into which she would have never otherwise been drafted.
8
The first meeting of The Religious Education Seminar took place at 7 pm on cool autumn evening on the fourth floor of an academic building that housed Pembroke’s offices of religious life. The program was hosted by the university’s Chaplin, a small, energetic woman who radiated a sense of peace and joy that can only be cultivated through years of spiritual practice. She had taken care to create a space cozier and more comfortable than any of the other spaces on campus. There were plush chairs, patterned rugs on the floor, and dark bookshelves on the walls. Leo had been in this room twice before when he had attended meetings of the bereavement group hosted by the Chaplin amidst his efforts to free up and express his feelings.
Leo felt uncomfortable in those meetings. He had conditioned himself so severely to restrain the expression of his emotions that although he had tears welling up in his eyes as he described the circumstances of his brother’s death, he could not let himself express them openly in a way that might let him be seen or recognized or held in his pain. He spoke purposefully, scanning the eyes of those present as he had been trained to do in order to illicit a sense of connection, but otherwise looked at the ground. He could not chime in in response to the shares of others and could not participate freely in the discussion of the challenges surrounding the loss of a sibling or parent. When one of the members of the group who seemed to be socially challenged launched into a vivid description of the medical details surrounding his mother’s death, Leo doubled over with anxiety. He did not want to hear those details, and he did not want to feel his peer’s pain.
He tried once more to attend the group but could not move past his own sense of resistance and so slunk out before the end of his second meeting. He sat on the steps outside the building smoking cigarettes until he felt that he had his fill of moping and decided to go back to his room. He felt shame about having walked out on the meeting and hesitated before leaving his dorm to attend the first seminar on religioin, but then, he thought that of course the chaplain would understand that a young man might struggle in his grief and so got himself ready to go.
He put on a faux-suede western shirt, brown slacks, black boots and looked in the mirror to fix his short cropped, messy dark hair. The dark circles under his eyes had been growing and deepening in color this semester. He had not had a sleep that did not come from a drug-induced drowsiness in months. He had long since forgotten the dream of the dancing body of light because he had long since stopped dreaming. He had chosen to obliterate his subconscious experience because of its pesky proclivity to revive images of Lincoln which he would then lose upon waking. Always he was bright and radiant and loving, but never could he give Leo what he asked for when he would beg him to please stay this time, only for Leo to wake up feeling utterly dejected and in tears. For now, he would take the chemical coldness of the drug-induced sleep.
9
Liza primped and preened in preparation for the meeting. Two months into her time at Brown she was starting to find herself, becoming comfortable in the loneliness that came from being thousands of miles away from home. She had started to receive romantic attention from members of the boarding school class who were quite attractive. This affirmed the lesson she had already started learning: she possessed something that they wanted just as they possessed something she wanted herself. The rich kids admired her natural beauty, her simple world view, and even her ignorance of trends for it came off as an inability to be swayed by them. She admired their worldliness, status, and intellectual repertoires. Perhaps, she started to think, there is something to be gained from pushing through the initial awkwardness that is produced when the classes collide.
Liza had been taken on several expensive dinner dates by wealthy sons and had once or twice found herself tangled up at parties with the daughters of Hollywood royalty. These were the experiences she had dreamed of, the kinds of experiences that had so excited her that her mind had stirred up hallucinatory images like the one she glimpsed on that hike with her father. Liza was living a life she had thus far only witnessed in movies and read about in books. She, a simple and in her own mind plain midwestern girl, was desired by beautiful, wealthy people. This realization became a catalyst for change. Desirability was where she could derive the necessary energy to escape her downward spiral. She still spent some nights watching cartoons with those stoners, but for the first time in her life she was untethered to any particular social groups and she found herself moving freely amongst friends, not feeling like she owed anyone anything.
At this point it must be made perfectly, explicitly clear that our Leo and Liza are both quite attractive young people. They are both ferociously intelligent, Leo in his combinatorially linguistic way, Liza in terms of her body, forms, and the materiality of the world. They are also both quite physically beautiful. Leo, in his current state, emanates a kind of heroin-chic intimidation that some find repulsive, but others find irresistible. Liza, conversely, seems to be full of all of the life in the universe. Her face and chest seem to radiate with a warm flush. Leo is tall and slender. Liza, small and slight, with a pleasant plumpness. Leo has the self-possession of someone who has been excellent at nearly everything he has ever tried and who has had his excellence repeatedly explained to him. Liza has the confidence of someone who sees the world not as a game to be won but as an experiment to be carried out repeatedly. Her self-possession comes from the infallibility of her view of her place in the world.
I hope the reader will forgive this rather informal digression, but it must be made clear who we are talking about here: these are beautiful people who live beautiful lives. It is not this narrator’s place to try to explain these kinds of blessings or to understand what separates these two from the others sat in the room they are both about to enter. I can only comment on the alignment of qualities that brought these two together. This is not a judgement of value but a plain observation to help you understand why, later, these two beings will be so tied to one another. Of course, the mysteries of fate might play a roll, but the plain circumstance of material compatibility should not be discounted. They are, in a sense, made for each other. Anyway, it's time for the meeting.
10
Liza took the stairs up to the fourth floor. Her doc marten’s squeaked on the steps and her baggy blue jeans swayed above them as she climbed. She entered the room a bit too quickly, as she often did when she was nervous. She made her way to the first open chair without fully scanning the room. As she sat down her eyes went down to her lap before coming up to assess the other students seated before her. First she found the older face of the chaplain. It smiled and bid her welcome. Then she saw the faces of other students, a few she recognized from classes. Next she noticed the monk dressed in robes sat at the apex of the ellipse formed by the chairs. His head was shaved. She understood that tonight’s lecture would be from a practitioner’s perspective and on Buddhism. This was a comfort to her as she would likely be able to contribute to the conversation that would follow the monk’s lecture.
Then, when she thought she had taken in the room completely, just before she was about to reach into her tote bag to pull out pen and notebook, she was arrested. Sat atop a body slumped in a chair in such a way that its back formed a 45-degree angle with the seat and backrest, a body with its arms crossed, a body attempting to shut itself off from the room, was that face, the one she seen in her vision clearly yet briefly on that hike only a few months ago back in her home hills. She started to question herself, how could she have seen the face of this reticent stranger in a hallucinatory vision? But she recognized, as one recognizes with certainty the subtle movements of a familiar friend from afar, that face and she knew that it was the one she had seen. For a brief moment she stared at Leo whose head was slumped forward with his eyes to the ground. He noticed her and for a brief moment he looked up, returned her gaze, and offered a subtle nod in her direction.
Leo was stoned out of his mind. On his way to the meeting he smoked a joint that had been stronger than he expected and now he felt rather paranoid as he sat directly across from the monk and surrounded on all sides by new faces. He did, however, start to relax when Liza came into the room. He could not recognize it at the time, but he felt again that feeling of acceptance that he had felt in that dream with that glowing body of light, although this time its clarity was obscured by the strength of the weed. When he caught Liza looking at him he was sad that she looked away so quickly, for briefly while she beheld him the feeling had gotten stronger.
During the monk’s lecture, Liza was completely distracted by Leo’s presence. She could not stop glancing in his direction. Leo noticed some of the looks and throughout the hour began to feel more comfortable and at peace, which he mistakenly attributed to the monk’s calming presence and not to the nearby presence of his long-fated friend.
At the end of the lecture as the students shuffled out, Leo held the door for Liza and smiled at her. Her shoulder brushed his upper arm as she passed him, but Leo, feeling more open than he had in a long time and wanting to demonstrate to the chaplain his graciousness, remained holding the door open for others. Being so arrested by the strength of her feeling of recognition, Liza did not know what to say to him.
She went home that night and got high with her stoner friends and did not mention to them her strange experience. Leo stayed behind, chatted with the Chaplain, and for the first time in months fell asleep without any chemical assistance.