Sacred

“It sure is,” Manny said as several brightly grief-stricken people looked up from their couches at us.

I had to assume some were clients and some were counselors, but I couldn’t tell which, and I had a feeling ol’ Manny wouldn’t do much to help me differentiate.

“Everyone,” Manny said as we passed through the maze of couches, “this is Deforest.”

“Hello, Deforest!” twenty voices cried in unison.

“Hi,” I managed and started looking around for their pods.

“Deforest is suffering a bit of late-twentieth-century malaise,” Manny said, leading me farther back into the room. “Something we all know about.”

Several voices cried, “Yes. Oh yes,” like we were at a Pentecostal revival meeting and the gospel singers were due on the floor any minute.

Manny led me to a desk in the rear corner and motioned for me to sit in an armchair across from it. The armchair was so plush I had a feeling I’d drown in it, but I took a seat anyway and Manny grew another foot as I sank and he took a high-backed chair behind the desk.

“So, Deforest,” Manny said, pulling a blank notepad from his desk drawer and tossing it on top, “how can we help you?

“I’m not sure you can.”

He leaned back in his chair, opened his arms wide, and smiled. “Try me.”

I shrugged. “Maybe it was a dumb idea. I just was walking past the building, I saw the sign…” Another shrug.

“And you felt a tug.”

“A what?”

“A tug.” He leaned forward again. “You feel displaced, am I right?”

“A little,” I said and looked at my shoes.

“Maybe a little, maybe a lot. We’ll see. But displaced. And then you’re out walking, carrying that weight in your chest that you’ve been carrying so long you barely notice it anymore. And you see this sign. Grief Release. And you feel it tug you. Because that’s what you’d like. A release. From your confusion. Your loneliness. Your displacement.” He raised an eyebrow. “Sound about right?”

I cleared my throat, skipped my glance across his steady gaze as if I were too embarrassed to meet his eyes. “Maybe.”

“No ‘maybe,’” he said. “Yes. You’re in pain, Deforest. And we can help you.”

“Can you?” I said, working the slightest crack into my voice. “Can you?” I said again.

“We can. If”—he held up a finger—“you trust us.”

“Trust isn’t easy,” I said.

“I agree. But trust is going to have to be the foundation of our relationship if it’s going to work. You have to trust me.” He clapped his chest. “And I have to trust you. In that way, we can work toward a connection.”

“What sort of connection?”

“A human one.” His kind voice had grown even softer. “The only kind that matters. That’s what grief stems from, what pain stems from, Deforest—a lack of connection with other human beings. You’ve mislaid your trust in the past, had your faith in people broken, shattered even. You’ve been betrayed. Lied to. So you’ve chosen not to trust. And this protects you to some extent, I’m sure. But it also isolates you from the rest of humanity. You are disconnected. You are displaced. And the only way to find your way back to a place, to a connection, is to trust again.”

“And you want me to trust you.”

He nodded. “You have to take a chance sometime.”

“And why should I trust you?”

“Well, I’ll earn your trust. Believe me. But it’s a two-way street, Deforest.”

I narrowed my eyes.

“I need to trust you,” he said.

“And how can I prove I’m worthy of your trust, Manny?”

He crossed his hands over his belly. “You can start by telling me why you’re carrying a gun.”

He was good. My gun was in a holster clipped to the waistband at the small of my back. I’d worn a loose, European-cut suit under a black topcoat as part of my ad exec look, and none of the clothing hugged the gun. Manny was very good.

“Fear,” I said, trying to look sheepish.

“Ah! I see.” He leaned forward and wrote “fear” on a piece of lined paper on the desk. In the margin above it, he wrote “Deforest Doohan.”

“You do?”

His face was noncommittal, flat. “Any specific fear?”

“No,” I said. “Just a general sense that the world is a very dangerous place and I feel lost in it sometimes.”

He nodded. “Of course. That’s a common affliction these days. People often sense that even the smallest things in such a large, modern world are beyond their control. They feel isolated, small, afraid they’ve become lost in the bowels of a technocracy, an industrialized world that has sprawled well beyond its own capacity to keep its worst impulses in check.”

“Something like that,” I said.

“As you said, it’s a feeling of fin de siècle common to the end of every century.”

“Yes.”

I hadn’t said fin de siècle in Manny’s presence.

Which meant the accounting offices were bugged.

I tried to keep that realization from flickering in my eyes, but I must have failed, because Manny’s brow darkened and the heat of sudden recognition rose between us.

The plan had been to get Angie inside before the alarm system was engaged. She’d trip it on her way out, of course, but by the time anyone official arrived on the scene, she’d be long gone. That had been the theory, but neither of us considered the possibility of an internal bugging system.

Manny stared at me, his dark eyebrows arched, his lips pursed against the tent he’d made of his hands. He didn’t look much like a sweet, big man anymore, nor like a counselor in grief. He looked like one mean motherfucker who shouldn’t be messed with.

“Who are you, Mr. Doohan? Really?”

“I’m an advertising executive with deep fears about modern culture.”

He removed his hands from his face, looked at them.

“Yet, your hands aren’t soft,” he said. “And a few of your knuckles look like they’ve been broken over the years. And your face—”

“My face?” I sensed the room going deeply quiet behind me.

Manny glanced at something or someone over my shoulder. “Yes, your face. In the right light, I can see scars along your cheeks under your beard. They look like knife scars, Mr. Doohan. Or maybe from a straight razor?”