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“Nothing, why?”
We knew each other a little, Tim and I, so he felt he could talk to me.
“You’re acting a little off, I have to tell you. The guys have told me they don’t like it.”
“They don’t like it?!” I was getting worked up and he tried to calm me down.
“You’re acting like a loose cannon, they worry about giving someone like that a million pounds! You should be able to understand that!”
But I wasn’t in a very understanding mood. Ever since Evie had quit and Felix had ended our friendship, I’d gone into a kind of emotional shutdown. I didn’t talk to people unless I had to and kept interactions at a minimum. My patience was lowand I seemed to snap and spit at people like a desert snake.
“Brits don’t like this kind of attitude,” he said to me, as politely as he could.
“What attitude is that?” I pretended not to know.
“Aggressive, direct, rude,” Tim said.
I had another drink, felt the alcohol relaxing me. I’d taken my fasting to the next level too, sometimes fasting whole days. I thought it increased my mental energy, made my brain work twice as fast and well, but perhaps I was becoming a little wound too tight. I’d always been able to get along with people, especially in the tech sphere. It was the first time that a deal seemed to be in danger because of my personality.
On the third day, during a meeting about our future collaboration, the UK team proposed that a part of the project be developed in the UK. I saw this as a sign that they didn’t trust us and was ready to call off the whole deal there and then. Tim managed to smooth things over and in the end, the agreement was signed.
On the flight back, I thought about how I’d almost wrecked the entire partnership because of what was going on in my life. It was becoming clear to me that denying my problems wasn’t working. It was beginning to affect work and I couldn’t allow that.
The desert retreat was supposed to fix everything.
But as I lay on my grass mat, listening to sound of drumming somewhere far away, I felt that being alone with my thoughts only made things worse. I kept thinking about Evie and how she wouldn’t take my calls, wouldn’t even respond to my text messages.
I’d gone to her place again to look for her, again encountering the room-mate who told me Evie had gone on some horse expedition.
“Horse riding?”
“That’s right.”
“But Evie doesn’t like horses,” I said, surprised.
“Lot of things about her you didn’t know, I think,” she said. Man, the girl hated me.
“Why won’t she return my calls?” I asked her.
“I don’t know. But my guess is, she don’t wanna talk to you.”
But why not, I wanted to ask her.
It made no sense to me that she didn’t even want to talk to me? She’d said all along that I never talked to her, and here I was calling her every day and she couldn’t pick up the phone?
I spoke to Summer one evening and she told me that Evie had called her.
That threw me. She’d speak to Summer but not to me?
“She says it’s complicated.”
I didn’t think it was.
But it was clear to me that Evie didn’t want to talk to me, so I decided to stop bothering her. I went to London and came back, trying to spend my time in the desert thinking not about work but about relaxing. Being mindful, whatever that was. My mind was full but not with the things I think it was supposed to be filled with. I kept thinking about Evie and thought a lot about LA when the two of us were together. It wasn’t even supposed to be real, but it had felt that way at the time. We had talked about so many things, stuff I hadn’t told anyone before. I didn’t have to pretend at all. I did care about her. I do. Admitting it was a completely different thing altogether.
At the end of the silent retreat, there was a session with a kind of shaman-therapist person. The idea was to see if I had come up with insights and conclusions, if I’d had any strange dreams I wanted interpreting, that sort of thing.
All I wanted to know was, “Is there a vending machine around here? I need a Coke.”
