on a rusty axle

Noah grew up near a make-shift Protestant church, once a post office, that was remodeled with linoleum flooring and vinyl siding. The church never resonated with him. He had few thoughts about church, other than a passing desire to be admonished in a booth and given beads or chants or some ritualistic way of riding the churning in his gut. Yet, this would mean nothing to Maya. He needed to say sorry in a way that made a difference. He needed a scientific theory of how people actually behaved. He needed to read what experts said. There must be a healthy body of research devoted to forgiveness and related topics of empathy, anger, resentment, PTSD, personality disorder, trauma, and so on. He searched for variations on “academic forgiveness” and “anatomy of empathy” and soon found a cache of pdf articles from an AlAnon message board:

• Forgivingness, vengeful rumination, and affective traits. Journal of Personality.
• Brain functional connectome-based prediction of individual decision impulsivity. Cortex.
• The entropic brain - revisited. Neuropharmacology.
• Investigating the functional anatomy of empathy and forgiveness. NeuroReport.
• Quantifiable change in functional brain response to empathic and forgivability judgments with resolution of posttraumatic stress disorder. Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging.
• Parsing the components of forgiveness: psychological and neural mechanisms. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews.
• Temporal pole activity during understanding other persons’ mental states correlates with neuroticism trait. Brain Research.
• The neural basis of moral cognition. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

He obsessively read for a week.

He grew a tired from trying to make sense of the tables of data, the diagrams of brain regions, and references to past studies. It truly felt like a circling ivory tower of concurrence. Several studies basically concluded that forgiveness was a complex process that combined several brain regions, and factors that contributed toward forgiveness included moral judgement, cognitive control, social evaluation, and perspective taking.
No shit, he muttered.
The charts and graphs weren’t that helpful. He didn’t see how to apply them. He massaged his temples and tried to recall what regions were being stimulated, but he couldn’t remember the names. He skimmed through the articles again and repeated the names of the brain regions, but after he looked away he forgot.

His main take-away was that forgiveness happens in the brain and comes from morals and perspective taking, whatever that meant beyond the garden-variety books he’d found in the self-help section. Was the field of psychology so underdeveloped? Did they have trouble duplicating results?

Perspective taking. That was a common conclusion. It seemed like something his mom would say in her folksy Canadian accent. She often told him to take a step back and consider what else might be going on. This insight seemed worthy of a faculty position if she could definitively pair it with neurons that could be targeted with medication.

Maybe he should go back to school. The life of a researcher, sharing results, meeting for conferences, long dinners at Denny’s milking free refills of coffee, affairs with lonely post-docs.

His head ached. He pressed the button on his Princess. It seemed like static. He stared at the wall.

A thought emerged of whipping. It was as old as time. Flogging, lashing … from the Old Testament to contemporary S&M clubs, punishing the flesh has a role. Traditions continue for reasons, he didn’t need to know why, it just was so.

What was so complicated? Consider the sin, apply the pain. Suffer. Repeat. Soon the bad feelings would be washed away. Grind the pole. Let it go.

He thought of the pole in his old garage. It hurt. He made a list of alternatives:

whip with electric cord
whip with … chain
whip with
lighter on skin? cable news?
door jam

He stood by the door jam. It was old and crusty and had layers of chipped paint. He counted six maybe seven different shades of cream and green, probably going back to lead paint. At its base was quality wood from a century ago which could’ve been preserved with light sanding and oils, but instead was crusty, bumpy and with sharp edges. He turned his back to it and worked a scab. He rotated back and forth. Blood trickled down his back. He pulled away and closed his eyes. His stomach relaxed. His headache eased. He turned his back to the rough edges on the door jam and started grinding. Shots of pain. Little dots flared and swirled and weakened his knees.

He curled on the floor in a fetal position and drifted into a Pissarro painting, somewhere in a French park with dotted people. As he rowed, Maya smiled at the picnics and children in white bonnets.

He woke and felt better. He still didn’t understand the pathways of forgiveness, but sensed that he’d found a backdoor. The connection of pain and memory when manipulated developed new pathways. This seemed to be what the journal articles indicated in far more sophisticated terms and inscrutable charts. There were neural connections that needed to be rewired and perspective taking was a skillful way to induce forgiveness.

Fake Alaska raised an interesting question. Fake Alaska had drawn the scorn and ridicule of various people in Eli’s chatrooms. What would it take to be forgiven? His crime was misrepresentation and then slithering away. Would sorry do it? Or what?

He wanted to ask Eli. He’d need to get some private time with him and checking out the area may be nice. The Black Mushroom Cafe …. what happened there?

Noah clicked on the contact button at the top of the page and his email app opened. He wrote a message:

Hello. Noah here. I came across your website and am thinking about a fishing tour. Maybe a couple of days at the end of the month. Any info you can pass on?

Best,
Noah

Eli responded an hour later:

Hey there, Noah. I can meet you online for a chat and go through any questions you’ve got about catching rainbow trout, hunting elk, or enjoying five-star dining in our lounge. What’s your schedule like today?

Noah wrote back and said he was free. Eli sent a videoconference invitation.
Noah accepted and Eli filled his laptop screen with his lounge in the background, elk horns on the wall.


He turned his mesh baseball cap backward and smiled with a lump in his lower lip. “Hey there, Noah. How goes the day?”
“I’m fine. I guess.”
“So how did you discover us? The ad in Fly Fishing Now? YouTube?”
“Just searching for someone and I came across your bear video.”
“Bear video? Which one?”
“Fake Alaska.”
He chuckled and shook his head. “That guy. Wow.”
“Exciting video.”
Eli rolled his eyes. “It’s absurd and dangerous. Don’t feed bears. Don’t approach a Grizzly unless you’re saying goodbye. They eat their cubs and if you get in their way, they’ll eat chunks of you while you’re pinned down, screaming into the earth with pine needles sticking in your face. Imagine claws ripping through your flesh. Jaws going through your spine like a knife through a marshmallow,” his eyes widened. He seemed to watch himself on the screen. He paused and picked something from his teeth and flicked it away. “Anyway, sorry, don’t mean to be gross.”
“I get it. I saw on your web site that you have a massage therapy? Ralphing, or something.”
“Rolfing. Right. It’s a kind of deep tissue therapy. Very popular. Gotta introduce ya to our new resident masseuse here in a minute.”
He turned to look at a separate screen and typed something. “So … looking for a guided tour? Fishing? Hunting?”
“Fly fishing maybe.”
“Right. Seen the table with prices and rentals?”
“Yes.”
“Visiting with a wife or a companion?”
“No.”
“How long?”
“Weekend, or a few days.”
“Three-day weekend?”
“Umm. Maybe two weekdays.”
“Cheaper that way.”
“Not as many people I’d imagine.”
“Depends.”
He looked bored and seemed to be watching something on another screen and didn’t say anything for a few minutes.

“You feeling fit? Any medications that we should know about?”
“Well, I’ve been getting these migraines. Humming noises.
Not fun. I’ve got a few prescriptions. Nothing that should get in my way though.”
Eli stared at the screen with raised eyebrows.
“I can move around just fine, though. No problem. Happy to sign away liability or whatever.”
Eli leaned in and his eyebrows came together. Noah became aware of the red lesions circling his eyes. He slowly leaned back.
“You’re not going to die or convulse on us, right?”
“I hope not.”
“Us too. We had guy pass on us last month. Ten miles deep on a mountain trail. Big fella. Big farewell release. Not easy to deal with.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“He was fat.”
“Oh.”
“Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Most of our clients are fat. I could lose twenty or so. But we had to air lift him out.”
Noah stood up to reveal his waist.
“OK. Calm down. I wasn’t insinuating.”
Noah sat down.
“Alright. Well anyway, just in case you’re interested in a slightly different vibe, I should introduce you to Jolene. Mind if I change seats with her? Let her tell you about a few of the alternative this-and-that she’s got going on?”
“Sure.”
Eli stood up and clumped into the other room. Elk horns in the background. A black lab walked by.
“Jolene? Jolene? You in there?”
A muffled voice responded.


Five minutes passed with the black lab roaming back and forth.

Jolene sat down and waved hello, her head tilting to the left with a country lilt, “Noah? Is that right? Hello, I’m Jolene. Eli says you’re thinking of joining us for a short stay.”
“Yea.”
She adjusted her seat and arched her back.
“Are you coming here alone?”
“Yes.”
“Oh? Single?”
“Yes.”
“Are you feeling any pain?”
“Migraines. Humming noises.”
“Interesting. We have a new friend who was suffering from humming noises. But then she did a kind of massage course and it helped her.”
Noah leaned forward. “What kind?”
“Well, we have a menu of options. She’s found great relief and happiness through our Rolfing therapy. Are you familiar with this?”
“Sounds familiar.”
“Did you know that we are a seamless body of tissues?”
“I’ve heard that,” he said with a flashback of Maya asking him if he wanted to go with her one time.
“When we think of ourselves in this way, we can think of structural integration as a starting point,” she said, nodding as though he may need some time to digest.
“Makes sense.”
“Rolfing helps by releasing built-up tension in these tissue structures.”
“Sounds nice."
“Some say it hurts, just saying.”
"I can handle it.”
She smiled and revealed her uneven teeth. “You like that?”
“I do.”
“You can take it?”

“Yes.”

“So, would you like to make reservation?”
“Do I need to schedule?”
“We could probably do last-minute scheduling on the day of, maybe we can offer one hour a night, but then again, sometimes a group comes in and books everything out for like months.”
“Umm,” he thought of how to formulate the question as he looked at his face and flattened his expression, “I heard that you have ballet classes.”

“Ballet? Here?”

“No?”

“Not that I’m aware of. Where did you see that?”
“On your chat rooms.”
“Oh. I see,” she turned to another screen and typed. “Could be someone posted a new thread and then erased it,” she looked into the camera and smiled. “Sorry. I don’t know how to explain it. I mean, I can explain it. We have a chat room, as you know. And it really took off a few years ago. I don’t know why exactly, I guess because we have people all over the globe, and you’d be surprised at how many active users we have in far-flung places like Hong Kong, Perth, Cape Town, Hanoi, Sapporo, Vegas, Bangkok, and on and on. I guess that many are sitting at home or in a cubicle or on a commute and the idea of a clean mountain resort with healing hot springs sounds divine. They like to chat and make little communities. Word spreads quickly. And, while 98% are good and decent people, even if a little vulgar or inappropriate in various ways, we get a few shit-posters, if I have the expression right. They post shit. BS that we have to chase around and debunk. It’s a pain, to be sure, but on the whole, it doesn’t reflect,” she caught the eye of someone on the other side of her camera. She nodded and turned back to the camera. “I think that I might know a few things about what you’re saying though. That is,” she turned to her other screen. “OK. I realize it might be your second or third choice after fishing or whatever beastly activities Eli gets you into, and never forget that he’s going through a mid-life crisis,” she looked at someone and stuck out her tongue, “and hangs onto whatever new trend that’s advertised in those corny adventure magazines, just another excuse to buy gear, turn an outdoor experience into a meditation on shopping,” sound of boots stomping away. “I’m sorry to digress, but have you considered the healing properties of hot springs?”
“I like hot springs.”
“Some of the hot springs are a mix of men and women. Most people are fully nude. Does that bother you?”
“No problem.”
Her eyebrows came together. “Are you eating a lot of sugar?”

“Not so much.”
“Good. Good to hear. Eli is turning into a fat ass though he’s always featuring himself with what seems to be a nice body, or a sturdy body. I think he used photo editing software of some kind. He’s rotund and none of his pants fit anymore. That’s why you’ll always see him in an elastic waist,” she nodded and looked around. “You know what? I should give you a little tour of the place. Do you have a few minutes?”
“Sure.”
She picked up the laptop and walked through the lodge, pointing the camera so he could see the pool table, the bar with bottles of Scotch, wines, and shelves with bottles touching the ceiling. She turned the camera to face her. She had a natural smile. Her brown eyes were bloodshot, wrinkles extended to her brownish-gray hair. She had a space between her front teeth and silver-capped molars. “Wanna see outside?”
“Sure.”
She walked out the back, panning her camera around the surrounding mountains before turning the camera back on her. Her voice went down a level, “So, I want to show you the other side of our lodge, more of the vision that we originally had, much more about healing and nature, but this was before Eli changed tone and started appealing to, or turning up the testosterone and sense of, oh, I don’t know. I don’t want to be critical, because we love our customers, no matter what their motives are. And many guys want to come for the hunting and backwoods adventures and whiskey, steaks, and cigars and so on. All that is good. But we also have people who want more of a spiritual connection with nature. And they, like me, have turned to vegan diets and meditation and don’t want to feel pressured into shooting or killing or falling down drunk or putting out the vibe to anyone with a pulse, if you know what I mean.”
“Makes sense.”

“We have people coming and going and now that Eli and I are getting a divorce, I’m setting up the B-side of this operation, which is based on wholistic living, organic foods, vegan principals, non-violence, equity, diversity, fermented beans and grains and more. Not that there’s any tension. We get along fine in front of the guests, but it’s just better if he has his side and I have mine. Of course, he gets all the expensive amenities, but we make good with what we have and some of us locals here are working out a new set of guiding principals.”
Noah nodded.
“Let me show you the garden.”
She walked around a grove of cedar trees to a sprawling acre of garden.
“Here are the eggplants,” she ran her fingertips along the edges of a thick purple eggplant. “We love these. I just learned a new recipe for eggplant humus, thanks to our new hummus expert.”
“Hummus?”
“Do you know it? Eggplant, I mean.”
“Sounds nice.”
“Yea,” she sighed. "I caught him fucking a guest. She was a tax attorney from Denver. They were getting chatty about some loophole and I got bored and left them alone. Anyway. Sesame oil and a pinch of cayenne makes it memorable. And here are the purple potatoes. They are a part of the nightshade family of vegetables. We put them next to the eggplants because they are country cousins. And, you can eat as much from this garden, and,” she squatted down and put her finger in the hole of a potato, “you’ll notice that our vegetables have portals. That’s because we don’t use chemicals. They are natural. They grow in rich humus, the dark earth. The nutrients are off the charts. We regularly have people come and visit who’ve been on medications, sitting in a cubicle for decades, fat hanging from their body, depressed, dried up, no sex drive—but all of that reverses in a month of eating from this garden, taking simple walks, yoga, massage, hot springs, and so on.” She stood and pointed toward the foothills. We are growing a community through this garden. Flocks are coming to Lake Missoula.”

She walked through the garden, moving her camera from peas to tomatoes to overgrown sections that she needed to weed. She pointed the camera to a greenhouse. We’ve got an impressive collection of flowers and behind the greenhouse, there is a bluff by a river. Some of us meet at six every morning for yoga. Do you practice?”

“Yes.”
“You seem familiar somehow.”
“Oh?”
“So what kind of schedule are you thinking about?”
“I’d said a day or two.”
“Maybe you’re thinking of buying a second home?”
“Not really.”
“We could take you for a little tour of the area. Give you some ideas. I basically have a real estate license.”
“Sounds nice.”
“We can take you around a little, maybe introduce you to some of the locals. They don’t all like Eli. There are many options around here.”
Noah leans forward, “I’d love that.”
“Well, let’s fix your headaches first. How does that sound?”
“Great.”
“So I’m thinking of my schedule and after the holidays things quiet down here and gives you the best shot at everything. Two weeks up here could really change your life. You might even fall in love and want to stay here under the stars. Have you seen the sky at night?"
“Yes.”
“Out away from the city light pollution?”
“Yes.”
“So, why don’t I schedule you for two weeks? We can give you a 40% discount. How’s that sound?”
“Umm. Two weeks is beyond what I’d planned. I’ve got to check my schedule.”
“Of course you do. So how about I pencil you in and send a follow-up email?”
“Umm. Two weeks?”
“It will change your life.”

An hour later and an email arrived from Jolene with an attached invoice. 14,367 for two weeks. He didn’t have the money but had seen credit card ads in the mail—one of them needed to work, or, he could pawn her ring.