Chapter 29
SHAY
It felt like the first days of autumn. It felt like swimming in a shimmering school of fish.
In the weeks after her first session of the Game, Shay spent her mornings traversing the boroughs in Cleo’s Ford Courier, seeking donations.
Bakeries gave them bagels and loaves of bread, butchers whole beef shanks, but it went beyond ensuring everyone was clothed and fed.
They were gifted new stereos, pallets of paper, copper pans.
Even the printing press that allowed them to manufacture their branded pens had been a gift, and then there was the money.
An heiress had pledged her fortune. Members signed away their salaries, sold their homes.
It was exhilarating, this sense of importance, being connected to something worth more than the roof over your head.
“A tunnel back into the human race,” Time magazine had written about Synanon, and that’s how it felt.
Like Shay knew something no one else did, discarding the small talk and posturing, the envy and petty insecurities, and was making her way back to who she was meant to be.
To who she’d been before her father died.
It shocked her a little, how easily the yelling came to her during the Game.
Just as it had been freeing to hear someone say her worst fears aloud, it was freeing to say the worst things she could think of to someone else, the snap judgments and accusations.
It was like she was back in class at Cornell, never hesitating to raise her hand.
And afterward, everyone was forgiven. The anger miraculously dissolved.
Not like in the apartment where she grew up, where so much was withheld, the resentments dividing and multiplying like a cancer.
Shay was not an addict, but like many addicts, she had nothing to give, so she found purpose in scrubbing Riverside’s toilets and floors, in driving with Cleo through New York before the sun rose so they could load cartons of eggs into the truck bed from a dock in Queens.
She was shy at first, a silent partner. For as long as she could remember, she’d been painfully conscious of how little she had in comparison to her friends, so it seemed counterintuitive to not only admit she was in need, but to ask for help.
It made her feel like a turtle without its shell.
“Why would I be embarrassed?” Cleo asked on their third trip, a light flurry of snow winding through the city alongside them, each flake dissolving once it kissed the truck’s window.
Cleo came to Riverside as an addict, spending her first week sweating through couch cushions and vomiting into a plastic bucket. That had been three years ago.
“Well, you’re saying you don’t have something they have, that you need something. Like a charity case,” Shay said.
“We don’t need anything from them. We have money. We’re just giving them the opportunity to be a part of something incredible. That’s really different.”
“I guess I never thought of it like that.”
“I guess I never thought of it like that,” Cleo imitated, teasing like a sister, and Shay backhanded her upper arm and laughed.
There was a radio network set up between the centers, and some evenings, they would all collect in the living room at Riverside and listen to the founder—the old man, as many affectionally called him—over the airwaves.
From California, he would proselytize on love and evolution, on faith and the collective, and Shay would remember how her father held court during dinner when he was immersed in a story, able to make the power struggles of aldermen seem Shakespearean.
He seemed to hold the whole world in the palm of his hand, and she never doubted anything he said.
They only went to church for holidays and funerals, the Bible nothing more than a collection of stories, and so he had more authority than any priest. She had once been proud to be his daughter, to have strangers say she looked like him at the mayor’s office, at the corner store.
The old man did not speak like her father—his cadence was slower, almost like he was turning something over in his mouth—but there was that same clarity that made even the simplest of phrases seem profound.
The trick is to live until you die. It is better to love than be loved.
Learned people are dead, learning people are alive.
He said that everyone needed to be able to saw a straight board, to play an instrument, to give a speech.
She read every book Simon gave her, Skinner and Emerson, telling Andrew she was going to class, to study, when all she did was go to Riverside.
At her fourth session of the Game, she’d wept, and it felt like a release.
There were people there to hear her, Cleo gently brushing her back, Jim—a veteran of Vietnam who had seemed so intimidating at first, his chest wide as a tree trunk—walking out to the back garden with her afterward to get some fresh air.
She’d asked whether it hurt when he got the tattoo on his hand, and he said of course it had, and they’d both laughed.
At night, beside Andrew, she slept deeply.
He continued to plan their wedding. She said yes to whatever he suggested, all of it seeming inconsequential, like make-believe.
When she told him about Synanon, the broad strokes, he seemed confused.
I don’t really get why you need therapy when you could just talk to me, he said, and she felt for him.
How much he did not understand. Riverside was a haven, but Synanon made the world outside of it brighter as well.
She saw her mother more clearly. When one of her law school classmates commented on her legs, she no longer felt rage, only pity.
After failing an exam, she did not see herself as a failure.
She gave up smoking because the old man had told everyone to give up smoking, and when she breathed in the city’s brisk November air, she felt her lungs open like the wings of a bird.
Often, she thought of William. Of how, perhaps, if she could just figure out how to bring him to Riverside, they would be who they were as children again.