Stripping Corpse: The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey

Part two

This is part two of a two-part post about The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey. Part one is something different.

He was a regular at the bookstore. Or he became one. At first she talked about him like some strange old man who made her curious but she knew she would never take seriously. Even as she did, she gave herself away. He was unlike anyone else she had ever met. He gifted her little trinkets, bombarded her with cryptic but endearing emails, koans and riddles and lists. The targeted romances of a man who mostly hides.

She knew who he was. She had seen his films. Westernized parables about shaolin monks, trying to be Kurosawa. She had heard about his well-publicized extended meditations. He’d spent a year on a ship, living on shrimp and rice. He’d walked across the country. A writer had written a memoir about him, an ex. It did not paint him in a good light, but weren’t there two sides to every story?

A lot was changing in her life at that time. She had finally made a plan to quit her job at the bookstore. She reinvigorated her photography practice with a series documenting a friend’s work as a movement therapist treating bodily trauma through pilates and poledance fitness. They committed to an objective: to open a movement gym for artists, healers, and dabblers, a space that would double as a studio and a wellness center. They wrote up a business plan, contacted prospective investors. She realized what she wanted to do with her life.

He was an active person himself. A competitive Muay Thai fighter. He took her on mountain biking trips in Montana, where he’d grown up. They woke up early to run during the week. His resolve was hard not to admire. He set goals for himself and met them. Something base in her responded to this. He was someone who kept his word. He told her he was going to build her a table low enough to the ground that they could sit there and eat without chairs, and the next week he did.

She knew things were moving quickly. She had made the same mistake before. Someone paid attention to her and she rearranged her life around them. He was not like the others, though. The attention he paid her wasn’t cheap. When he did something, he meant to do it, and she was no exception. She returned the trust he had earned again and again, until she was keeping different hours, adhering to a stricter diet, organizing her personal space with a different set of priorities in mind.

Eventually her friend and future business partner made a comment. They were discussing plans for the gym, but they weren’t getting anywhere. She looked tired, her friend ventured, euphemizing some more marked physical change that was not so easily or delicately described. She winced and waved the comment away. She was waking up earlier, putting more effort into fitness, eating different. Of course she looked tired. What could be more tiring than growth?

Her friend’s words would not have been so hard to hear had they not rung faintly true. She had noticed the change herself. She didn’t look unhealthy, just a measure more severe. Less unsinkable youth, more hard, wooden age. Something was missing from her, some quantum of blood she had let. A favorite sweater that had once clung to her frame now hung from her like burlap.

Finally he sat her down and told her he had made an offer on a plot of land back in Montana, somewhere rural where they would get his money’s worth. They would move there together and open a farm, work the land and then live off the harvest. He was still young enough, they were both plenty strong enough, she had always gone on and on about the beautiful country there. He wasn’t asking.

She didn’t know how to voice or admit to herself that she was shocked. She had made a commitment. Her friend was counting on her. He sighed and smiled. He knew she had wanted to follow through with her plan, but it had been on hold for months. Investors were putting her off, they still hadn’t found a space. Hadn’t she been looking for a reason not to do it the whole time, even if she hadn’t said so?

She wanted to argue, but what he was saying made sense. More sense, she discovered, than whatever she had been telling herself. The sense he made was something she had come to rely on. She would need to, when the unexpected befell her, as he always seemed to know it would. He knew because her life was his now. And he had become her life. We can try to make things happen for ourselves, but in the end life makes our plans for us.