Nine Perfect Strangers - Liane Moriarty Page 0,141

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