Entry 5
It had been a long day and I was already teetering on sleep. I hadn’t yet wondered what it would mean for me that I might be the odd man out, or why.
August 7
The dinner proceeded for some time, each guest talking casually while I made mental notes about them and watched. We reveal ourselves through our movements and expressions as much as we do our speech. Observation is a habit, perhaps a discipline, in which you stop cataloguing details and start noticing the spaces between them, the things that don’t quite line up. I want to be honest and tell you I don’t know exactly when that shift happened, only that it had happened by the time Eileen refilled my water glass without my asking.
Phillip suggested early on that we each say something about why we’d come. It wasn’t demanded, exactly. Nothing at the retreat those three days and nights was demanded, only suggested in a tone that made refusal feel like bad manners. Claire went first, unprompted, something about a divorce she hadn’t had yet but could feel coming, like bad weather forecasted with certainty. Harlan mumbled about ‘unfinished business,’ which struck me as deliberately opaque, information that was by design not informative. Benita laughed and said she was there because her therapist suggested a retreat and she’d Googled the wrong kind. Considering the nature of the online posting we’d all responded to it seemed unlikely.
Larry said almost nothing, which was its own kind of answer. Remy offered a single word—’curiosity’—delivered with such flatness that no one asked him to elaborate. We were all curious, were we not? About spiritual matters, about afterlives, about reincarnation and ghosts.
When my turn came, I gave some version of the truth: I was there because of the item on a website we’d all seen and responded to. (At least that was how I assumed they were all there, an assumption that proved incorrect and nearly fatal in the end.)
It was somewhere around the second helping of stew that I noticed the first of what I’d eventually come to call the little synchronies. Small, unremarkable connections on their own, and I want to stress that none of what follows would have struck anyone as strange if you’d been there for only one of them. Claire made a joke about Eileen taking the heel of the bread for herself, ‘like always,’ though the basket hadn’t made it around the table. Nobody questioned how one stranger would know this about another.
Then there was the moment, brief and easy to miss, when Larry made a remark about the drive in from the city, and four of them agreed as if they’d come together, or made the trip before.
Phillip caught my eye across the table just then. He didn’t smile, exactly. He nodded, then he asked Claire a question about the yoga practice she’d described when telling us about herself, and that confirmed my first impression of her—uncanny, but accurate.
I want to say I dismissed all of it. That would be more comfortable to write, and it’s certainly what I told myself as I walked back to the cabin with the other men that night under a sky so full of stars it looked artificial, like something put on display just for us. But I didn’t dismiss it. I lay in my bed and thought: these people already know each other. I didn’t examine it further. It had been a long day and I was already teetering on sleep. I hadn’t yet wondered what it would mean for me that I might be the odd man out, or why.
– Anonymous