with a mallet, perhaps a little more forcefully than Masha would have done, and within only a few moments Frances and Zoe had returned, their faces apologetic and guilty.
It was clear to Masha that they had been chatting, forming a friendship perhaps, which would need to be monitored. The point of the silence was to prevent this. She smiled benignly at them as they returned to their mats. Zoe’s parents sagged with relief.
“Although I will be your guide today,” she said, “meditation is a personal experience. Please release your expectations and open yourself to all possibilities. This is called a guided sitting meditation but that doesn’t mean you must sit! Please find the most natural, relaxed position for you. Some of you may like to sit cross-legged. Some of you may like to sit on a chair with your feet flat on the floor. Some of you may prefer to lie down. There are no hard-and-fast rules here!”
She watched as they chose their positions with self-conscious faces. Frances lay flat on her back. Tony went and sat on a chair, as did Napoleon. The rest remained cross-legged on their mats.
Masha waited until they were all settled. “Let your eyes drift closed.”
She could sense their fluttering spirits: their anxieties, hopes, dreams, and fears. She was so good at this. It was a pleasure to excel.
Interviewers would one day ask, “Were you nervous when you first introduced the new protocol?” Masha would answer, “Not at all. We’d done our research. We knew from the beginning it would be a success.” It might be better to admit to a little nervousness. People in this country admired humility. The biggest compliment you could give a successful woman was to describe her as “humble.”
She looked at her nine guests, all of whom now had their eyes obediently closed as they awaited her instructions. Their destinies were in her hands. She was going to change them not just temporarily, but forever.
“We will begin.”
14
Frances
It was the end of her first day at Tranquillum House and Frances lay in bed, willfully reading while she drank her “evening smoothie.” No one could be expected to give up wine and books at the same time.
None of the four novels she’d packed to get her through the next ten days had been confiscated, unlike her wine and chocolate—presumably because books weren’t on the “contraband list” (she would never have come here if so)—but a small slip of paper had been placed inside the front cover of each of them: A gentle reminder that we recommend no reading during the noble silence.
What an absolute joke. She didn’t know how to go to sleep without reading. It wasn’t possible.
The book she was reading now was a debut novel that had received rave reviews. There was a lot of “buzz” about it. It was described as “powerful, muscular” and it was written by a man Frances had met at a party last year. The man had been pleasant, shy, and bespectacled (not especially muscular), so Frances was trying to forgive him for his lavish descriptions of beautiful corpses. How many more beautiful young women had to die before they could get on with the job of tracking down their murderer? Frances made little “tch” sounds of disgust.
Now the craggy detective was drunk on single-malt whisky in a smoke-hazed bar and a long-legged girl half his age was whispering into his ear, without quotation marks (this being powerful, literary fiction): I want to fuck you so bad.
Frances, who had reached her limit, threw the book across the room. In your dreams, buddy!
She lay back with her hands clasped across her chest, and reminded herself that her own debut novel featured a piano-playing, poetry-reciting firefighter. It was cute that the bespectacled author imagined twentysomething girls ever whispered “I want to fuck you so bad” into the ears of fiftysomething men. She would give the author a consoling little pat on the shoulder next time she saw him at a festival.
Anyway, what did she know? Maybe twentysomething girls did that all the time. She would ask Zoe.
She certainly would not ask Zoe.
She reached for her phone on the bedside table to check the news and the weather for tomorrow.
No phone.
Of course. Well. Fine.
The bed was a luxurious one: a good mattress, the sheets crisp with a high thread count. Her back hurt, but maybe a little less thanks to Jan’s giant hands.
She attempted to quiet her “monkey brain,” as per the rules.