“Ack!” I say when she tries to lap at one of the puddles. She looks back at me as if to ask why I’m being so cruel. “It’s gross, that’s why.”
Talking to my dog is one of the things Jena and Arden didn’t seem to understand when I used to tell them stories about my life. What else am I supposed to talk about when we’re sitting around the lunch table? Children? I have none. Dating? Hard pass. The deterioration of the nation and the growing wealth gap? Hell no.
Jena finds a way to link whatever I say to Ascent. As far as I can tell, Ascent is 30 percent bootstraps and pulling yourself up by them; 30 percent the soul-deep fear of never making back the cost you’ve sunk into classes and retreats and seminars; and 40 percent telling people the reason the world has not been saved is because you (specificallyyou) have not yet devoted yourself to becoming as rich as humanly possible and donating your excess wealth to charities doing maximally efficient work—also known as effective altruism; and until you (specificallyyou) decide to commit every second of every day to hustling, the world and everyone in it will continue to suffer and die.
It is just so extremely convenient and purely a coincidence that the quickest way to amass wealth is by becoming your own small business owner by selling Ascent classes to the people who need it most: your friends and family!
The Ascent Discovery Weekend left me feeling jangled and raw. Three days, Friday to Sunday, 8AMto 8PM. Workshop after class after breakout session—all about you, your faults, the power of your own brain. They crack you open just to empty you out, and then fill you up again.
“It’s going to peel back all that armor, babe,” Jena told me on the very first morning. “But we’ll both be here for you.”
And they were.
Either Jena or Arden met me in the conference hall for breakfast with a latte or Americano each morning. They sat with me while I sipped my drink and ate a bagel, and they asked questions about how I was feeling, what I thought about the workshops. All three of us met for lunch. Every day. Their focus was entirely on me. It felt like being held.
And then it was over. I got home, took a shower, and the magic of the hot water on my skin brought me right back down to earth.
“It’s a thousand bucks,” my mom had said the day before the weekend.
She was sitting at her usual spot at the kitchen table. A thin line of smoke drifted from the end of her cigarette. It was quickly swept out the window by a cool spring breeze.
“You know what we could do with a thousand bucks? Used to be you could get a Tony Robbins book for fifteen dollars in the eighties. Same junk in that book as this three-day bullshit.”
“I know,” I said, stirring sugar into my coffee a little more aggressively than strictly necessary. “It’s just whatyou’re supposed to do. Like, networking or something. It’s all part of my corporate-ladder-climbing plan.”
“I don’t understand any of that. You shouldn’t do things you don’t like just ’cause you think you need to take care of me. I can take care of myself. I’ve been doing it my whole life.”
She flicked her cigarette on the edge of her ashtray too hard. She was angry—the sort of angry that could only be defined by the few things at which itwasn’taimed. That was almost exclusively me and Ripley.
We’d had this conversation before. Just like all those other times, I didn’t know what to say. After all she’d told me—about being kicked out of the house at sixteen by her alcoholic parents, about dropping out of high school, how much it hurt that sometimes patients told her she was stupid for beingjustan STNA—I didn’t understand how she could expect I’d want to do anything else other than take care of her.
I leaned down to hug her one-armed. She leaned into it, then away.
So, yeah, I agreed the whole personal development, self-help thing was woo-woo bullshit. But if it put me in their good graces? I’d grit my teeth and do it.
I focus on walking and throwing an increasingly slobbery stick for Ripley instead of work thoughts.
The concept of these hills being older than bones makes sense when you’re walking through them. Trees in this area are tall. Some are so thick a person could wrap their arms around them and their fingertips wouldn’t touch.
It’s less the growth that gives the feeling of age. It’s more the smell. Age in these hills smells like ozone and earth; it smells like pulped green matter and trickling streams hidden under fallen leaves; it feels like the vibrating pulse of thousands of cicadas in the trees.
At the end of the road sits the charred skeleton of a house. Grass as tall as a person and other flowering plants have reclaimed the space. There’s a sweet smell in the air, mixed with the metal tang of nutrient-rich soil. It’s all kind of beautiful actually—the blackened bones of a former home rising out of new growth.
A big oak tree, felled by some storm, lies to the left. I climb up onto it to get a better vantage for the pictures. I line up the shot, shoot from a few angles, and wish I had something to draw the scene with.
Ripley tears through the grass in erratic shapes, doing her best impersonation of a jumping gazelle. I watch her, feeling light and airy andhappybecause I get to inhabit such a beautiful place with my ridiculous dog.
That’s when I see the small mound of hair and skin that used to be an animal.
The air is so pregnant with the constant drone of cicadas that the buzz of flies didn’t even register. Up on this log, the crushed circle of grass and the corpse sprawled through the center is perfectly visible.
The raccoon’s chest is split open. White rib bones and yellow fat dot the red expanse of fresh, glistening blood. Strips of skin and tufts of hair litter the ground. Its front leglies a few feet away. The flesh is ragged where the limb was ripped from its body.
Beyond the raccoon is another patch of crushed grass. What lies within is darker and smaller but similarly mangled. A third circle of flattened grass sits halfway between the log and the house. It’s far enough away to be mostly obscured by the wildflowers and grass.
Whatever’s in it is larger than the two decimated bodies.
A gust of wind moves through the meadow. The grass around the larger body sways and separates enough to offer a two-second glimpse inside.
