The Present
Chapter 1
Rachel had always loved the sensation of power and desirability when sweeping through public places.
She considered herself a feminist, but nothing beat that zippy feeling of striding in a tight dress with high heels through a restaurant of well-dressed people, feeling endless eyes stalking her from behind.
Rachel was 27 years old, and a journalist. This was a word she used eagerly – but not too earnestly – when describing her life. She had graduated with a degree in journalism, taught by staunch leather-faced creaky professors, who cornered her for four long years to teach her iron integrity and golden ethics - with the apparent goal of describing every principle she would have to utterly abandon in order to succeed in her slippery field.
Rachel chose journalism because she wanted to be a “change agent” in the world, which was a term she had never been asked to define objectively – much to her hidden relief.
Rachel enjoyed watching the sliding squares of her own reflection in the mirrors over the bar. With her boyfriend’s help, she had achieved the holy grail of the modern silhouette – she had a reasonable bust, a protruding butt – and a flat belly. (Of course, she spent more time on lunges than sit ups, on the entirely reasonable premise that one could suck in one’s belly, but one cannot push out her butt.)
Rachel had always had what she considered a most unfortunate face – though honest male friends rated her at an 8 to 9 out of ten - because each individual component seemed perfect, but somehow together, they produced a kind of late-stage desperation jigsaw, with some of the pieces forced in. Rachel possessed wavy brown hair which drew glances of envy on a good hair day, and glances of pity when it rebelled. Rachel’s body was generally quite disobedient to her will – she gained and lost weight without understanding why, slept deeply one night, and peed like a lawn sprinkler the next; her hair fell neatly into place on a Tuesday, and then twisted on a Saturday like a sycamore tree in a cyclone. Her periods were flat-out abusive in their unpredictability – one month she barely noticed them; next, they horse-kicked her into couch-bound immobility.
Her emotions worked the same way, in that they never worked the same way. She was a Libra – the scales – but she was always striving for balance, but never quite achieving it. (She was far too trained in post-modernism to believe in astrology in the superstitious sense, but she did accept that, in colder climates, being born in the fall gave you significantly different initial experiences of the world than being born in the spring.) Because her life was constantly changing – new boyfriends, new apartments, new friends, new contacts, writing assignments in new fields – her emotions had no more chance to put down than a sapling in a windstorm.
Rachel’s hazel eyes were a constant feature - at least from the outside. Her left eye was stronger than her right, which meant that the world looked both in focus and slightly out of focus at the same time.
As a result of all these characteristics, Rachel was close enough to beautiful to be maddened by it, like a thirsty man clawing for inaccessible water. If she had been less attractive, she would have shrugged and reconciled – more so, and she wouldn’t have worn herself to a thread chasing it. As it was, the hot pursuit of beauty had landed Rachel a very pretty boyfriend, who was kind enough to reach back and try and help her up to his own flawless standard.
Rachel spent her 20s having fun – it was the decade of fun, so she heard – and she had roamed and written travel pieces and interviewed unusual people and been published, for sure – not anywhere mainstream or high profile, but a few low to middle tier websites had been happy to cover the odd expense or two in return for a few thousand words of obvious analogies and undergraduate-level prose complexity.
Rachel had lofty ambitions, of course – having been suckled and weaned on girl-power expectations, she had a vague sense that anything less than a mantelpiece full of shiny prizes would be an insult to her feminine potential.
The secret truth was that Rachel really liked to travel, to splurge the coins of her days as if she sat on an inexhaustible supply – but she couldn’t just say that she was a traveller, because that would seem frivolous and wasteful and – well, not at all carbon friendly. Oh no, Rachel was a change agent whose calling found it regretfully necessary to travel to Guatemala, in order to do worshipful pieces on communities that appear to be full of love and togetherness and oddly-shaped native art made by fellow travellers who weren’t at all natives – communities that always seemed to fall apart shortly after she left – but Rachel explained (mostly to herself, since people – even her boyfriend – rarely asked) the travel was necessary because it brought inclusivity and curiosity and acceptance to the world as a whole.
To her credit, Rachel had good instincts about her audience. Most of her readers were young women addicted to mismanaging their anxiety. To distract them, Rachel held forth a kind of paradise, or Shangri-La – a wonderful place somewhere in the world with the magical power to eliminate anxiety, usually through a stained-glass mosaic of pottery, chanting, meditation, trying to fit together with other broken people, beautiful views and murmuring voices. Women flocked to her articles – and some to these locations – based on a hidden desperate need to avoid any stimuli that might provoke their fears.
Over the years, Rachel had tried doing follow-up articles on these communities, but always found them either embittered or broken, because the anxiety these women tried to flee always followed them and brought them down, like a dog that only attacks if you run. When it turns out there is no magical location that eliminates anxiety, Rachel’s readers would turn on their communities, pick fights, cause problems, provoke hostility, and then run to some other location or occupation or hobby or man – casting venomous backward glances at the betrayal of the universe to free them from their self-inflicted - and self-maintained - wounds...
(story continues below)
