9. The Room

I knew it had to happen, felt the tables turnin'.

And we’re back! Six weeks ago (six?!), I was tangled up in string maps and updated y’all on Bonesick’s future. I’ll reveal some of that Hermitic journey below, but I want to jump right into the juicy stuff you’ve been waiting for: Real! Bonesick! Content! It’s happening.

This next card/chapter in the series references a few crucial details I’ve added to Act I in the editing process. You’re welcome to revisit the two updated story slices, refresh your memory, and fill in the blanks, but it’s not absolutely necessary. I think you’ll still feel the weight of this next one.

Read Card 2. The Chaplain
Read Card 5. The Counsel

If you’re ready, grab the nearest light, and let’s go dark.

9 | The Room

B’trix emerged, covered head-to-toe in blood and bits of brain matter. Stu, bewildered and silent, followed behind her, surprisingly untouched, save for a spray of burgundy that decorated the arm he instinctively used to shield his eyes. She let the metal portal close behind them and walked to the shiny red phone with no rotary dial. It hung on the wall next to a calendar of a snow-encrusted mountain range, a freebie sent in the mail from some nonprofit conservancy. Slightly discombobulated from the impact, she used one hand on the wall to steady herself and the other to pick up the receiver. She held the phone to her ear and paused before tersely stating the obvious to someone on the other end. “Hi. The Room didn’t go so well today.” She hung up and reached for the file on the desk, thick with paperclipped paperwork, paying no mind to the smeared prints she dispensed on everything she touched. Instead, she noticed how Stu’s gaunt expression smoothed the deep folds in his face. When he deflected his glare downward, she assured the old man. “Oh, they’ll send someone to clean up.”

Though B’trix had prepped Stu on the scope of possible outcomes The Room could produce, no one is ever really prepared. Admittedly, this session wasn’t the worst she’d seen, but up in the top three, for sure. They both simmered in the office vestibule, blank-eyed and slack-jawed, letting the events bubble quietly at their hard edges. Perhaps in time this all would become more digestible. B’Trix made a few mental notes.

The silence was torn apart by the high-pitched trill of the red phone, which B’Trix grabbed before it stopped. The voice on the other end must’ve explained their next move. B’Trix responded in fragments, “...Great. And you mentioned—? ... Did he say—? Well, shit. … No, no, it’s fine. Be right up.”

B’Trix hung up the phone. The clots on her fingertips had transmuted to a gummier consistency. She turned to Stu. “They’re ready for debrief, let’s head up.”

Stu hadn’t uttered a single word since his clichéd retort, ready as I’ll ever be, several hours ago when he’d willingly agreed to this chaos. Prepped for the debrief, B’Trix reached for the office doorknob. Stu reached out to her. His voice low and thin, he mumbled, “B-B’Trix, I’m not sure what happened, s-so maybe I should just…um…stay behind.”

Clutching the chunky file folder in one hand, with the other hand on the doorknob, B’Trix shook her head. There’s no time, she thought, although every fiber of her being ached to plop down together on an old smooshy couch, West Coast cool jazz on the hi-fi, cradling warm mugs of sweet, frothy liquid, and break it all down. Everything. The whole racket. And why she—they—were stuck in this mess, and quite literally, based on the organic bits she could feel wedged into her hair.

She assured him again, “Stu, I know this is a lot. Let’s just get through this debrief, ok? I’ve got the lead, you know that. If they ask you any questions, I’ve got you. You’re in training; none of this is on you, ok? I mean, metaphorically speaking.”

Stu glanced down at his red bespeckled sleeve, then up at B’Trix’s hair and asked, “Shouldn’t we, you know, clean up?”

B’Trix held up a finger as if to gesture, thanks for the reminder. She set the file folder down, returned to the portal door, punched in a code, and pulled the handle once she heard the affirmative chime. Like opening a package of rancid beef left inside a hot, rusty car, a tangy stench billowed from The Room. She scanned the inside and spotted that the tennis ball—now more maroon than chartreuse—had rolled to one corner. As she took a few quick strides to retrieve the toy, she tried to hold her breath, but the odor ransacked her nostrils. When B’Trix returned to the office vestibule, she saw Stu had covered his nose and mouth with his hand.

“Stu, it’s all about the dramatics.” She stretched out her hand dramatically as if the entire mess would soon play the starring role. “They’ll eat it up. They’ll call for an emergency board meeting. It’ll be a whole thing.” She opened a file drawer, pulled out a plastic bag, dropped the ball inside, and smoothed her damp fingers along the zip leaving a red smear along the top. She gathered the bag and the folder, cleared her throat, and tipped her head toward the hallway with a rousing, “Let’s go!” Repulsed, but too weary to protest, Stu swallowed the bulging rebuttal that clung to his throat and obeyed her order.

As they walked toward the elevator bank, B’Trix recited the Candidate’s biography from memory: name, gender, age, location, occupation, fun facts, and snippets of local gossip. He had been a recluse, only venturing outside to walk his beagle, but at least a dozen times a day. A neighbor had mentioned to one of their agents on recon that perhaps the man walked his dog too much. The curious neighbor had asked the agent: Why so much? Was he a veteran? Was he a recovering addict? Was he writing the Great American Novel in his head? B’Trix sympathized with the recluse. Like every Candidate—well, like everyone, to be honest—the guy was only trying to find his path with his only source of light available.

Light.

The word startled her back to the task at hand, and she turned to Stu before they boarded and asked him, “Remember what I told you in the library a while back? What my mentor shared with me?”

Stu nodded, head still down. “Yes, but I certainly don’t feel like you’re holding my hand in this God-awful darkness.” 

That hurt. But she ignored the twinge in her belly and proceeded, “As Chaplains, we have to know when to hold someone close and when to let them go. It’s a fleeting moment. You’ll see it in time, with practice. But honestly, Stu, the death piles up. If you hold them all, they’ll bury you.”

Their car finally arrived with a ding. They entered and B’Trix pushed the button for the top floor. When the doors closed, she finally felt some semblance of intimacy. She inched closer to Stu and nudged his arm before she conceded, “I’m sorry your first time was so bad.”

“Yes! It was really, really bad, B!” Stu heaved, exasperated.

The smell of moist iron mixed with fermented sweat in the tight space hijacked her senses. The twinge in her belly opened into a bottomless pit she dared not peer into. To calm down, she zoned in on the Muzak version of an old classic rock song drifting in from the panel speaker. She wanted desperately to belt out the lyrics from the top of her lungs, So if you're tired of the same old story! Oh, turn some pages! Stu interrupted her brief attempt at Zen, contempt in his voice, “Where did we go wrong, B?”

Where indeed, B’Trix thought and returned to the smooshy couch, the cool jazz, and the warm drinks, but stifled her sarcastic response and maintained her composure. “Stu, what we experienced in there wasn’t a case of right or wrong. As we’ve discussed in training, The Room is all about nuance. Not every transformation is a clean break.” She looked down at her blood-soaked lab coat and continued, “Some folks just aren’t ready for what’s next. Knowledge is horrifying. They say the truth will set you free—they aren’t wrong. But folks are rarely prepared for the naked vulnerability of freedom. Especially when the role of the imprisoned victim has kept them comfortable.”

B’Trix thought about the recluse as she pulled a piece of him from her hair. The mountain of evidence under her arm held photos of the man’s entire library. It wasn’t unlike their own at the Institute—books about religion, dense sociology and anthropology texts, colorful art history catalogs—perhaps he was writing a novel in his head on those long walks with his beagle. So enthralled by the world around him, but so frightened by it. So much knowledge met with so much ignorance. No one to hold hands with in the dark.

Another ding pulled her back to the present. The elevator door opened, and she rhetorically asked Stu for the second time that day, “Ready?” She caught herself and added with a small chortle, “Jeez, ignore me.”

She exited the elevator, took a few steps forward, and noticed the old man’s absence by her side. She turned back. Stu remained inside the car, one hand on the elevator’s frame to keep the door from closing.

With renewed gusto, Stu confessed, “I can’t do this, B.” An obnoxious alarm began to toll from inside the elevator. He looked up into her eyes for the first time since before The Room and continued, “Sorry. I’m going home. I have to be alone.” He released his hand and let the door close on what could only be described as the harrowing expression of an animal knowingly doomed for slaughter.

His last two words—be alone—ricocheted from corner to corner, inside the corridor, inside her head. The phrase mutated into a question the recluse had asked them immediately before liberating himself from his biological trappings:

Does being alone mean leaving or being left?

She wondered if these words chewed away at Stu too. She wondered if he thought about this a lot, even before The Room, maybe even before he landed here. They’d both arrived in this place having been released from very different prisons (or was it an exile?), but their warden was the same. Either way, she knew they both had to acknowledge the vulnerability of their own stark truths. She prided herself on handling it, but did she really have it handled? Was Stu just much more resolved and candid about their reality here? In his craving for normalcy and structure, perhaps he’d created more room to move while she’d confined herself to the arcane adage, the rules are there are no rules.

To steady her frantic thoughts, she flashed back to her wise old friend Sulaiman, just before he’d quit the SkinFree program. She could see him amongst his cohort, arranged in their circle of folding chairs, down in that musty church basement. It was their final meeting, so each Candidate brought their postpartum alleviation memento to share with the group. Sully presented an antique camping lantern, a family heirloom, and explained how much he cherished his annual backpacking trips with his father to a remote area, a couple hundred miles from their home. It was a stark, almost brutal landscape, but his father explained that all the men in their lineage cherished this land. He assured his son that the high elevation and lack of distractions would silence innocuous mental chatter, but Sully’s heart raptured under the shimmer of the inky night. The gaudy spectacle above filled his head with captivating fantasies and mystical places he might go—if only he could admit the truth. And thus, on one of their treks, when he was in his late teens, Sully came out to his father. And as he feared it would, their relationship collapsed from a burden they’d both unknowingly carried to this moment. The silence on the remainder of that trip was far from medicinal. When they returned home, his father unable to understand or acknowledge Sully’s truth, finally mustered a single word: leave. 

B’Trix squeezed the plump folder to her chest to compress the sour grief, turned toward the long corridor, and began her voyage toward the head offices to plead her case. When she increased her pace, each step made a light smacking sound as sticky prints of blood from her shoes clung to the tile. Like a pop-song earworm, she repeated the recluse’s phrase to the rhythm of her footsteps.

Leaving or being left.

Leaving or being left.

Leaving or being left.

9 | The Hermit

In Rider-Waite tradition, the Hermit card features the archetype of a bearded old man in robes, holding a staff and a lantern. Surrounded by rocky hills or snowy mountains or occasionally the sea, he’s clearly on a journey, but stands still, lantern outstretched, pausing to assess his next move.

The rest of the card is rather stark compared to others in the Major Arcana, more like an open wilderness or even a blanket of snow than a lush landscape. The Hermit is far from home in a land that might feel lonesome but also acts like a blank slate, free from disturbance that would cloud his focus. The Hermit is a foil to The Fool, the first card and archetype in the deck. While The Fool is young, naive, and carefree, paying no mind to the warning “look before you leap,” The Hermit taps into his many years of wisdom—symbolized by the glow of the lantern and the stabilizing staff—to self-reflect before he moves forward.

In some card designs, the lantern holds another hidden symbol: a six-pointed star—the Seal or Ring of Solomon. Per Jewish tradition and Islamic mysticism, the ring inscribed with this magical pentagram sigil—crafted by God and delivered to King Solomon by an angel—gave the King and Prophet immense power over demons and the ability to speak to animals. The kind, wise, and wealthy Solomon became a heavy influence on both Jewish and Islamic teachings as well as non-religious esoteric practices.

If you receive The Hermit card in a reading, consider the fact that a lantern can only illuminate your next step, not the entire journey. Put away the distractions, take a slow walkabout, but pause for a moment, and let your gut instinct and intuition be your guide as you consider your next step.

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References and Synchronicity

1. The recluse in this story may or may not be someone real, and I hope he’s just a big fan of walking.

2. The West Coast / cool jazz reference could be Chet Baker or any of these scrumptiously soothing musicians.

3. If you’re not a classic rock buff, the Muzak song playing in the elevator is “Roll with the Changes” by REO Speedwagon. The Room is an homage to the film, Cabin in the Woods and one of my all-time favorite horror movie scenes. You can watch the scene here (BUT! major spoiler alert if you haven’t seen it yet). Watching it now still gives me goosebumps. It’s hilarious too because I haven’t seen the film in several years, but one of the key props in the scene undeniably lodged itself into my cerebral cortex. I didn’t even realize it ‘til I found the clip just now.

4. Another neat factoid is that REO’s lead singer Kevin Cronin wrote the lyrics while moving from his home in the midwest out to California, classic American road trip-style, towing a U-Haul with his Ford Pinto. As Cronin explains in this interview, he got so distracted trying to transcribe the lyrics while driving, “Finally, for the sake of highway safety and more legible penmanship, I decided to pull off the side of the road and I finished the lyric right there in New Mexico.”

5. Sulaiman was the full name I gave to Toby’s bartender friend Sully (a detail I added to The Counsel story in my editing process this year). In Arabic, Sulaiman is written سليمان and references the Islamic prophet and Quranic King, also known as “Solomon” in the King James Bible. The name means peace.

6. And I suppose the thickest helping of synchronicity is that I had experienced my own Hermit moment while letting this story simmer inside my mental crockpot. So here’s a little insight into that journey:

Yadda yadda, I’ve been trying to make sense of this story as a whole. The more I struggled, the more I drained my creative mojo. So I gave up the ghost. I stopped trying to outline my next move. I allowed Bonesick to sit on the shelf for a while, no longer staring at me like a rabid wildebeest lurking in the shadows of my every waking moment. Unfortunately, this all happened to coincide with the fact that I had signed up for the April Foster Cohort. Who signs up for a writer’s workshop during Mercury Retrograde anyway? Though I had nothing to submit to my Cohort last week, I read through my fellow Foster writers’ final submissions. With each essay and short story, I could feel the effervescent sparkler of inspiration crackle in my brain. Their words were the lantern I needed to see my next move. I opened my Act II Google Doc and typed nonstop for two hours, interrupted only by the fact that I had to go to work.

And then…

Ok, so everyone on planet Earth has recommended The Creative Act by Rick Rubin. I’ve picked it up off the shelf at the bookstore so many times. I’ve read snippets. And yet, I always put it back. I think I’ve been in this weird, cynical state about it. It’s the same way I feel about The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron (I’m so sorry, stans). But then a good pal I trust mentioned it last week, and my favorite yoga gal, Adriene, read a passage from it in her May vlog. The passage spoke directly to my lived experience these past few months. Here it is, and I’ll leave you here.

For some artists, being surprised is a rare experience. But it’s possible to cultivate this gift through invitation.

One way is through letting go of control. Release all expectations about what the work will be. Approach the process with humility and the unexpected will visit more often. Many of us are taught to create through sheer will. If we choose surrender, the ideas that want to come through us will not be blocked.

It’s similar to writing a book by following a detailed outline. Set aside the outline, write with no map, and see what happens. The premise you start with could develop into something more. Something you couldn’t have planned and would never have arisen if you were locked into following a particular script.

With your intention set, and the destination unknown, you are free to surrender your conscious mind, dive into the raging stream of creative energy, and watch the unexpected appear, again and again. As each small surprise leads to another, you’ll soon find the biggest surprise:

You learn to trust yourself—in the universe, with the universe, as a unique channel to a higher wisdom.

— Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

As it turns out, Bonesick was innocent this whole time, and I was the rabid wildebeest lurking in the shadows. Until next time, my friends, keep on rollin’.