Freihaut 34

This Is All There Is

By Chance Freihaut

I didn’t hire Demara, she chose me. Like all rock-bottom dwellers, I found myself seeking emotional guidance on Facebook. Demara was sixty-three, had a great sail of silver hair, and dressed monochromatically in all her photos. Layered in turtlenecks with fleece or corduroy overshirts, ankle-length skirts and osprey feathers slotted between moonstone beads on a silver chain. She promoted herself as a “Happiness Walker” with the slogan I’ll share your shoes, and we’ll walk on the sun. In every photo she posed with a bowl of faultless oranges as if she were making herself into a still life study. Gleaning her profile revealed an ex-husband named Geronimo who had a monopoly on mandarin production in Valencia. She didn’t do appointments or consultations. Each month she held a raffle, something she livestreamed on Facebook. Mini chrome balls that twisted open and tumbled in a sage green drum. She would pull three balls and compare their contents. Prospective patients lived on rolled-up fortune cookie paper. Just a first name and their affliction summed up in a single sentence.

I had to hand-deliver my strip of paper as well as my contact info to her secretary on a bench near the farm in Beacon Hill Park. She was a goth named Anika with a horseshoe septum piercing and heterochromia eyes—raw denim and rusty brown like a Moroccan sand erg. She said Demara chose her to receive the people’s pleas because her eyes represented all light and darkness.

“What do you do with the losers?” I asked as she pulled a chrome ball from a giant Ziploc bag.

“They spin to win next month. Sometimes their pain strikes Demara differently depending on the month, the season. An affair means nothing in the bloom of spring but everything with the first fall of snow.”

The livestream was at midnight and Demara was surgical in her draws. All the balls had to be pulled and read in the space between 12:00 and 12:01. A magic in the moment before night knew day had come. My ball came last.

Evangeline—I think my mother is a monster in a human flesh suit.
Gina—My dreams are plagued with leopards who sing a song I should know.
Henry—I’ve tried drugs and sex and pain but still no good feelings.

Demara read our wants and quickly dismissed the first two.

“Evangeline, you need to share a mirror with your mother and find the face you both hate. And Gina, there is a predator inside you whose call you can’t ignore any longer. It is no coincidence you dreamt the Leopard. The creature inside you is an Indian one, a maneater of old that terrorized villages and gnawed through thatched roofs in order to drag husbands into coconut trees. Please, for the sake of your spirit, indulge and devour. There is a man you can consume without worry. Ladies, I know you have heard me.”

She rubbed her fingers across my paper and closed her eyes.

“I will take Henry. I am guilty in loving those who naively see with just their eyes. Until next month travellers, may you find the heat of the sun in the palms of a stranger.”

The feed cut and before I could close my laptop my phone was ringing. I was on Salt Spring Island the next day, sitting on Demara’s balcony with carrot juice in a pint glass and a warm bag of rice like a collar around my neck.

“How do we begin?” I asked.

She chugged her juice and kicked my shins, urging me to do the same. We were both gasping for air once we finished.

“The canoe,” she said, “everyone begins with the canoe.”

I noticed it on my tenth birthday. I had ice cream cake in the backyard while my parents argued over the assembly instructions for my new bike. All I said was, “Should you feel good on your birthday?”

As a pair of neurosurgeons, they overcorrected and ran me through a gamut of CT scans and MRIs. They wanted to see a mass somewhere in the black-and-white pictures that explained why I didn’t enjoy anything. A growth on the pituitary gland adding undue pressure to my entire hormonal system. Signs of unseen stroke in my basil ganglia. Anything. There wasn’t misery, I reaffirmed, just the absence of joy.

Child therapy specialists hungered for a memory of rated-R TV that left third-degree burns on my frontal lobe, or a scene from school or the street or just a sound in the night that festered into a boogeyman who took my heart and left in its place a titanium pump of raw efficiency.

Eventually I got labelled with acute anhedonia and that was that. My parents made we wait till I was sixteen before we tried antidepressants. Venlafaxine consumed my sprouting libido, turned it into a ghost that didn’t even have the power to haunt me. I switched to sertraline for the hell of it. Nausea, insomnia, flashes of anger, constipation, lack of energy, restlessness, acute dread. All in pill form. I asked my parents what they could do as brain surgeons.

“We try and fix the meat, not what it fails to create,” is how my dad put it.

“Besides, our only role in the history of mental health was the lobotomy,” my mother added.

Around the same time, I stumbled on a dead GoFundMe page called “Help Henry’s Heart,” set up by a cousin of mine in Texas who broke in wild horses. The goal was ten grand with the generic label of “scientific research to help a child of God who can’t feel His light.” She’d raised sixty bucks and shut it down.

We abandoned medication by the time I was eighteen and my parents were about to leave the country. I was going to university in Victoria, and they chose a permanent move to St. Lucia—early retirement. They would fly me down at Christmas, if that seemed appealing or logical to me when the time came. They would pay for everything, as always.

I started the term and ceased investigating the problem and moved onto potential solutions. Meditation was just conscious sleep. Fresh air made me cough less than my dorm room dust. TV and video games just pictures and words without heat. There wasn’t even a source to chase. What I needed was dangerous or illegal or painful. The price of an EKG spike or dopamine surge was a pint of blood, butterflied ribs, compound fractures protruding like deep ocean oil rigs.

In October of my first semester, I hired a Muay Thai fighter off Craigslist to inflict upon me the Art of Eight Limbs. We met at night on a coarse sand beach in Ten Mile Point. We tried the sadist route first and he let me strike him as hard as I could. I broke my hand on his skull and for a moment I thought the searing pain in my mushed knuckles was leading me to bliss, but it was just adrenaline from internal bleeding and shame at my own weakness.

He wanted to make sure I didn’t sue him, so I had to record a video of myself saying, “I am Henry Brooks, and I asked Yuthana to beat me up for science.”

He planted a hook and uppercut on my liver and dropped me to my knees. I puked air and spit. I got up after five minutes still clinging to hope and told him to skip the elbows and knees and jump straight to the roundhouse kick.

“Head or body?” he asked, his lead leg bouncing like a cantil viper.

“Fuck it, dealer’s choice,” I said.

I woke up in his arms, a free hand stroking my jaw. He was singing something in Thai.

“Did it glow in the dark, your heart?” he asked.

All I could feel was a pulse from head to toe, a metronome moving between monumental pressure in my skull and numbness in my pinkies. And a loose tooth. Circling my mouth like a cherry pit. Yuthana drove me to emergency and taped a newspaper over my eyes so the light couldn’t get to me. He shook my good hand and parted with a diagnosis.

“You are brave but misguided.”

Downtown in November I paid a man twirling a butterfly knife $100 to mug me and hold the blade to my throat. He asked what I was on. I peeled off another hundred and told him nothing. In the middle of him screaming for my wallet and waving the Damascus steel I realized this would never work.

By December, when I left the dominatrix’s basement suite with the gymnast pad floors, black lacquered sawhorse, and my hot blood dripping from her walls, I was certain I had exhausted all normative means to pleasure.

She called herself P and did not subscribe to the black latex stereotype. Robed in doctor’s scrubs, she hid herself behind a medical mask. I knew it would hurt and hoped the promise of sex at the end—which wasn’t included but something I had to beg for—would rouse something concrete in me.

I’d set a goal of ten strikes in my head in case the first nine were just priming the pleasure pump. In my query email I told her I wanted to see if intimate pain was my ambrosia, and she said she didn’t care as long as I brought cash and understood what consent was.

I lasted two lashings before crying out our safe word—Bolognese. The sex had an ending, but I just felt guilty for wasting her time. There were clients who would scream with satisfaction at what I plodded through.

“It’s not you,” I said.

She dressed, and I poured aloe water down my back. Then she laughed at me.

“I know. I’m capable and beautiful and not the sick one.”

“What do you think I need?”

She gave the whip a crack to clean it, and polka-dotted the walls with my coward’s blood.

“Maybe a natural disaster? I had a client from Oklahoma once say that watching a tornado rip through a herd of red angus cows was more divine than his newborn son.”

The next six months were a blur. I sat indoors layered in weighted blankets that I soaked in ice water. I ate raw tuna on chocolate rice cakes while watching videos of cartel rats being forced to play Russian roulette. I even googled the history of flagellation, charting the pendulum swing from religious discipline to sexual gratification. And still nothing. Not a smile or laugh or flutter or whatever else there was to feel when the world unfurled its best and worst to me. That’s when I found her.

Demara made me drive her truck with the canoe on top to a place near Beaver Point. The plan was to paddle out to Russell Island and begin there. When we got to the parking lot she didn’t make a move to leave. She was wearing a black linen dress with the same moonstone and feather necklace from her pictures. Her face was a polished egg with drawn-on eyebrows. Everything she said was a mystery.

“You need deep time; you need the heart of the Iberian pig.”

“What?”

“The black pigs in Spain. My old love, Geronimo, took me to them. They eat the acorns that fall from the holm oaks. A whole life in fields and hills. They don’t see the fence, don’t feel the butcher’s knife when it comes. Tell me the last time you cried.”

High school drama class. Macbeth, Act 4, Scene 3. I was playing Macduff when Ross told me that my family was slaughtered. I wanted to be proud of my suffering, a satisfaction at one side of my drowning scale, and cried harder when it remained pure tear duct chemistry.

“You read,” she said, “that’s good. Have you read Dōgen?”

“Who?”

“It’s time to listen with your eyes and see with your ears. How can you feel if you never hear the stones or grasses, or wind-kissed waters? Have you read Zarathustra? You must go up the mountain to hear the message to bring back down to yourself. If this doesn’t make sense, good. That means it’s beginning.”

I paddled for forty-five minutes straight while Demara talked. It was all bullshit, I thought, but I’ve never heard someone speak it so well.

There is a God of all things. The Sitka spruce have one. Look, look. Why do you think the boughs always curve upwards?

You need to read and eat the words then burn the books to move your feet to stir your soul.

You asked me how to let the trees inside and I will tell you that they don’t need permission.

When you gave me your hands I felt an empty seat at the dinner table, the signature missing from the card. Could I be any clearer?

“What do your parents do?”

“Retired neurosurgeons.”

“Interesting. Have you ever seen a falcon stoop? That’s nature’s lobotomy. Why can’t you feel good?”

“That’s why you chose me, isn’t it?”

“You’ve been trying?”

“Yes.”

“Enough of that. Take off your clothes, we’re going swimming.”

Demara was not shy in her nudity. I didn’t stare but saw enough. A scar across her back from kidney to kidney. Her breasts and stomach and right thigh housed continental freckles.

“There’s no use grieving a living thing,” she said before diving into the water.

I hesitated at my boxers and Demara splashed me.

“The ocean knows no material; it touches everything the same.”

I gave in, jumped, and couldn’t understand how cold I was. Demara circled me with a lazy backstroke.

“What next?” I asked.

“This is it. This is all there is.”

She dove down and I tried to be an acolyte.

Follow her with my ears, listen with my eyes. There’s a silver salmon splashing. An arrowhead cutting glass. The space behind her feet a thrust wake. Demara birthing invisible, ephemeral hurricanes. Anika’s eyes containing all the colours on earth. Yuthana was a good man with an iron leg. My parents didn’t make a mistake and that’s what’s killing them. The dominatrix is the most patient empath. You don’t need to think to tread water. This is it. This is all there is. It’s not so cold now.

Chance Freihaut holds a BA in writing and philosophy from the University of Victoria. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in This Side of West, The Imagist, The Letter Review, L'Esprit Literary Review, and PRISM international as the winner of the 2024 Grouse Grind Lit Prize for V. Short Forms. His work has also been shortlisted for awards including The Writer’s Union of Canada Short Prose Competition, Exile Quarterly’s Best Canadian Short Story, and the Malahat Review Open Season award for creative nonfiction. He lives on Vancouver Island.