The Reclamation - Part I
This might sound strange, but I heard "The Reclamation" being written before I got to read it. Lena Valencia and I were neighbors at the Vermont Studio Center, and for days we tapped keyboards on opposite sides of a thin, beige wall.
Coincidentally, we were two women on a kind-of retreat—much like the characters in this story—away from our daily lives and eager for a change of perspective. Luckily, that's where the similarities end. In "The Reclamation," Pat and Celeste travel to the desert for 5 days of empowerment and self-discovery shepherded by a wellness influencer. They enter as strangers, one somewhat of a cynic and the other a bit of a fanatic; with a subtle hand but clear vision, Lena draws the two women opposite directions as they each search for what they'd call "the truth."
-Marissa
DAY 1
The AC in the van was broken, and Pat was sure she stunk. It was eighty degrees and climbing, hot for a November morning in the Coachella Valley, and even with the windows cracked it felt airless.
There were twenty of them. Twenty female leaders in two passenger vans eastbound to an undisclosed destination in the middle of the Mojave for the Retreat, an entrepreneurial wellness and self-actualization boot camp led by Brooke Lumin, host of the Luminescence podcast and lifestyle brand.
Stepping into the conference hall in the Palm Desert Marriott where her husband Roman had dropped her off for the Welcome Breakfast, the first thing Pat had noticed was how much older she was than most of the women, by at least two decades. She half-expected it. She supposed it was a good thing, networking with younger women. Perhaps she’d find some potential customers. Or perhaps she could call Roman and tell him to turn around pick her up immediately, like an anxious child on her first day of summer camp.
Pat had never considered herself to be someone who gave credence to self-help gurus. Brooke’s podcast had started as a guilty pleasure and turned into a habit. Then Roman surprised her with a pass to The Retreat and here she was. She should’ve spoken up, told Roman that sure, she listened to Brooke’s podcast, but this was just too much. Five days in a cabin in the desert was not Pat’s idea of a good time. Her and Roman’s admittedly rare vacations were to cities: Chicago, New Orleans, New York, one glorious week in Paris. A childhood spent on miserable, ill-conceived camping trips all over California with hippie parents had soured her to the outdoors. Not to mention the price tag. It wasn’t like they couldn’t afford it, it also wasn’t like Roman—the obsessive budgeter who’d wooed her in their late twenties with the fact that he had a savings account with money in it—to make that kind of purchase without spending weeks agonizing over it. And perhaps he had, silently, sparing her his grief. Oh god. This was all her fault. She closed her eyes and leaned her head back on the seat as the van lurched onto a dirt road.
“You okay?” It was her seatmate speaking, a tattoo-sleeved millennial in silly knockoff Nina Ricci sunglasses that covered half her face. “I have some Dramamine in my bag if you need it.”
She began digging through an ancient canvas messenger bag festooned with enamel pins and buttons. She moved in shifts and twitches, a manic energy that set Pat on edge.
“No thank you,” said Pat. “Just tired is all.”
“I’m Celeste,” she said, holding out a hand glinting with silver rings.
“Pat,” said Pat, taking Celeste’s clammy hand in her own.
“You sell vintage clothes,” said Celeste, and noticing Pat’s look of surprise at her knowledge, “the Welcome Circle.” She tapped her head and grinned at Pat with a mouth of bleached white teeth. “I run an independent fragrance start-up. Heirophant. Here,” and reaching into the pocket of her cutoffs, she produced a tiny glass vial filled with amber liquid.
“I don’t really wear perfume,” said Pat.
“Just give it a try,” she said.
Pat uncapped the bottle and put it up to her nose. It smelled astringent, with a hint of cedar. She frowned.
“No,” said Celeste. “That won’t tell you anything.”
“Excuse me?”
“You need to put it on your skin. That’s how you know what the profile is. Fragrance reacts differently to our unique bodily oils. It’s kind of magic that way. Dab some on your wrists and then rub them together.”
Pat did as she was told, then sniffed her wrist. Aromas of campfire, pine, and saltwater emanated from her skin. She closed her eyes. For a moment she was far from the desert—on a beach, her feet in cold wet sand, aged twelve and back in Big Sur with Judith and Frankie. When she opened them, Celeste was staring straight at her through her ridiculous glasses, an idiotic smile on her face.
“What do you think?”
“It’s not really for me,” said Pat, rubbing her wrist on the car upholstery. The beach with the cold wet sand was not a place she wanted to return to.
“Well,” said Celeste, “it takes a while to find the right profile. I’m trying to set up a fragrance concierge that matches people to their scents on my website but am having trouble locking down funding. These finance bros don’t like giving that kind of money to girly stuff, even though the gendered idea of fragrance is so antiquated and exclusionary—”
She went on like this. Pat tuned out. She didn’t know if it was the heat or the perfume or the dust coming through the cracked window, but she felt unmoored, woozy, like she’d been drugged. Outside, Joshua Trees blurred past, their branches tipped with small, spiny orbs, their bark black from a recent fire. She leaned back and closed her eyes as the van bounced over rocks and potholes. Soon Celeste’s chirping was drowned out by a roar, the roar of the ocean, the chill of the Pacific water washing over her toes.
She woke as the van rumbled over a cattle grate. In the distance she could make out a cluster of cabins.
The vans parked and the passengers disembarked silently, taking in their surroundings. Small shrubs dotted the land as far as the eye could see. Dark mountains spread across the horizon. It all looked prehistoric, devoid of human life, and if it weren’t for the power lines in the distance a herd of brontosauruses wandering through the landscape wouldn’t have been out of place.
A wiry woman in a teal pashmina greeted them, clutching a clipboard. “I’m Gina,” she said in a quivering voice. “Welcome to the Touchstone Retreat Center, home of the Luminescence Retreat.” A nervous grin stretched across her face. “Ms. Lumin intends this retreat to be a device-free space. Please power off and hand over your devices.” She held open a black Luminescence tote and went from person to person, collecting phones. Pat reluctantly dropped hers in the bag. She hoped Roman wouldn’t worry.
Celeste followed suit, dropping a phone and an iPad into the tote with a flourish of her wrist. “Such a relief, isn’t it?” she said. “I shipped my teenagers off to my sister’s and told her I was off-grid. They’re her problem for the week!”
Underneath her glasses, Pat noticed, Celeste was much closer to Pat’s age than she’d originally thought.
One of the women was making a scene, saying that she needed to be reachable since her husband was alone with the baby for the first time.
“Please,” Gina repeated, panicked, shaking the bag in the woman’s face.
“Hon, it will be fine. I promise!” Celeste called out to the frazzled woman. “You’ve gotta let go sometimes.”
“Miss, I’m going to have to ask you to get back in the van if you won’t surrender your device,” said Gina.
Defeated, the woman slumped her shoulders and walked back to the van. Gina whispered something to the driver and they took off down the road.
“Jesus,” said Pat. “It’s non-refundable.”
“Some people are just so tied to their lives,” said Celeste, shaking her head.
The vans disappeared into a cloud of dust.
*****
Gina gave them a tour of the center, and the group dragged their suitcases and duffel bags through a smattering of picnic tables, protected from the elements with a canopy of tan weatherproof fabric. Radiating out from the tables was a circle of canvas platform tents: their homes for the duration of the retreat. Beyond those, a fire pit, and a shared shower building that had the faint whiff of a truck stop bathroom.
Finally, they were assigned tent numbers and dispersed. Pat entered hers, grateful to be out of the sun, and surveyed the spartan interior. Besides the two cots, the only furniture was a small shelf containing Brooke Lumin’s four bestsellers. On each cot was a beige backpack branded with a line drawing of an eye inside a triangle inside a lightbulb: the Lumin logo, a cheeky riff on the Eye of Providence symbol. Pat set her bags down and unzipped the bag, turning it over and emptying its jewel-toned contents on the bed. A magenta aluminum water bottle (branded), a mustard yellow plastic ballpoint pen (branded), a navy-blue compass (branded), an emerald green spiral-bound notebook (branded), a collapsible metal straw (not branded), and turquoise folder (branded). The eyes stared up at her, expectant. Pat opened the folder, which contained photocopies of talks Brooke had given: her “Wholehearted Living” TED talk and her “Perception, Projection, and Perseverance” keynote she’d given at last year’s LuminescenceFest, which had gone viral.
She had moved on to inspecting the shelf when Celeste walked in, trailing a cloud of the church-like odor which Pat recognized as frankincense.
“Hey there, roomie,” Celeste said, with a hysterical laugh, as if the fact that they’d been placed in a cabin together after randomly sitting next to one another on the van was some hilarious joke.
“Hello again,” said Pat, trying to sound friendly.
Celeste took off her sunglasses and Pat couldn’t help staring at her face as she let her bags fall from her hands and sprawled on the cot. How did someone her own age carry herself with such youthful abandon? She sat up and grabbed hold of the backpack. “Is this our swag bag?” she said. “Far out!”
Pat grunted in assent.
“First Retreat?” asked Celeste from the bed, inspecting each object she pulled from the bag and laying them carefully on the cot.
“A gift from my husband,” Pat said. Roman was concerned about her well-being, she knew by the way he’d been treading so softly lately, constantly asking her how she was feeling and surprising her with candy, trinkets, and finally a pass to the Retreat. She wasn’t okay, not really, not since she’d lost her lease on the consignment shop that had been her life for the past thirteen years. She missed the scraping of the hangers on the racks, the feel of the furs and satins, brocades and velvets, the way the garments hung expectantly, waiting for someone to take them home again. And though she did sell an evening gown, some costume jewelry from time to time on her Etsy storefront, it wasn’t the same. “I’m not like a Brooke super-fan or anything. Just listen to the podcast on occasion.”
“That’s sweet,” said Celeste. “I’m sure you’ll be by the time you leave. Brooke’s got a rare wisdom about her. She changes people. She changed me, at least.”
“So you’ve done this before?”
“No,” said Celeste, dreamily. “This was a fiftieth birthday gift to myself. I’m die-hard. One of the original Brookies.” Pat had seen the term on various Facebook groups to describe fans of Brooke Lumin, but had never heard it used in conversation. “You’re going to love it,” said Celeste. “You and I are going to have the best time.”
*****
The women had been waiting for nearly an hour for the Inspo Session with Brooke that was supposed to begin at 2:30, fanning themselves with their branded notebooks. The shade provided little respite from the afternoon heat. Gina hovered, reassuring the group that Ms. Lumin would be here any second now. Finally, the one they’d all traveled so far to see glided into the Dining Tent. Brooke’s face was smaller, softer than it was on her Instagram posts. She brought her hands together at her heart center and smiled. She was ageless. At times she looked no older than seventeen, and then the light would hit differently and she’d look seventy, some sort of desert crone-goddess. “Thank you for giving yourself this time,” she said. “I’m so excited to guide you on your journey to entrepreneurial wellness and success. Let’s all give ourselves a round of applause for being present.” The crowd clapped, and Pat along with them. It was strange to see her in the flesh, this being who had lived in her ears and on her phone for the past year.
“Our work begins today. But first, a story.” She took a seat on the stool. “Every so often, I bring potential Luminescence investors out here. It gives me a chance to test their mettle. The weak, I’ve learned, tend to be problematic shareholders. I try to avoid them.” She took a sip form her own magenta water bottle. “This one was a young man from old East Coast money. Private jet. Driver. Boarding school. He was used to luxury.” The way she phrased the word conjured images of palm-shaded cabanas and silk robes. “As you know, I’ve been living out of a backpack in my campervan for the past two years. That’s why you all got the same backpack, a reminder that this place is not about luxury, but rather about finding space within yourself to feel luxurious.” She went on, describing the walk she’d taken him on, how he kept commenting on how barren, how desolate the landscape was, how he’d never understood the appeal of the desert. He didn’t get why she made it so hard on herself, running a successful career wellness startup like Luminescence from an ancient campervan in the middle of nowhere. “These investors,” she continued, “they think because they have money you want, you’ll agree with them. But I didn’t agree with this man. Instead, I told him to lie down on his stomach. Just right there, on the dirt. He was uncertain at first, but he did it, and I did the same. And as we lay there—very slowly—things came alive. First we saw the ants, scurrying along in their beautiful lines. Then a stinkbug or two, leaving tiny footprints in the sand. And then came a rattlesnake, and he almost jumped up, but I told him to be still. To just be still. And you know what? That rattlesnake slithered right by us. And soon the place was positively teeming with life!” She was pacing with excitement now, and Pat found herself getting excited with her. “After about twenty minutes or so I stood up. And slowly, he joined me. ‘I get it now,’ he said. That night, he wrote me a check for about four times as much as I’d anticipated.” A wide grin spread across her face as the crowd applauded.
“But this isn’t a story about winning over the investors. Materialism will get you nowhere. No—I shared my vision with him. I taught him to use his mind to alter his perception of the situation. And that’s what I’d like to teach you all to do in this next exercise which I call, simply, The Quieting. I want you to follow me outside.”
Brooke led them out of the Dining Tent, past the cabins, and into the raw desert beyond.
“As you may have guessed, I’d like for all of you to get down on your stomachs. Your task is to lie still and observe. And when I say still, I mean absolutely no movement. With mindfulness this is possible. Each time you move you’ll be marked by Gina. At the end of 90 minutes, the person with the fewest marks wins.”
Celeste was the first one down on the ground. The rest of the women joined her, their faces solemn masks. Pat followed, envisioning herself rising an hour and a half later covered in marks.
Gina marched through the rows, a drill sergeant wielding a paint pen, the kind used by used car salesmen to write prices on the windowsills of their vehicles. The women around her squealed as Gina dabbed them with the paint, but Pat stared straight ahead, a sphinx, trying to focus on the mountains in the distance. She wondered what the climate was like up there, if it was as hot, if there were houses, if there was someone gazing out the window towards her.
Her father was always waxing on about the beauty of the desert, trying to get her interested in the plants and constellations, the rocks and bones, but for Pat all it meant was sunburn and fatigue, snakes and angry cacti, or screaming in terror as her father dangled her—aged 3—over the edge of a canyon while her mother laughed. Her parents insisted this had never happened and she was misremembering, but it came back to her each time she stood at any sort of precipice, that tingling in her feet.
She needed to use the bathroom. She should just get up, she thought. Just forget it all, head back home to Burbank and the familiar comforts it held: Roman, her garden, her cat.
“If you get distracted, focus on what’s in front of you,” Brooke called out. So Pat did. There was a small rock about arm’s distance from her face. She trained her focus on the rock. A fly landed on it, cleaned its little hands, and flew off. Then an ant inspected the rock before scuttling away. There was a serenity that came from focusing on these simple objects, so calming, in fact, that Pat became drowsy.
She was startled awake by Brooke announcing that the challenge was over, and asking everyone to stand. Shakily, Pat rose and dusted herself. She looked around at the other women. Some had one or two red dots on their skin, others had more. Celeste, standing next to her, had maybe a dozen speckling her tattooed arms and back like a rash. There were even a couple on her forehead. “I guess I was just wiggly today,” Celeste said with a shrug and a laugh, though Pat could sense her aura of disappointment. Pat scanned her own body, checking for dots in case she’d moved while sleeping but found none. “You, Queen,” said Brooke. Pat realized she was talking to her. “Tell me your name?”
“Pat.”
“Pat,” Brooke repeated. How strange to hear her name in Brooke Lumin’s mouth. “Pat is our winner of this challenge. Congratulations, Pat. Your focus and fortitude will serve as an inspiration for us all this week.” Brooke clapped, and the rest of the women followed hesitantly. The back of Pat’s neck stung with sunburn, her lumbar ached, but despite the pain, she smiled.
To be continued…
Lena Valencia’s debut short story collection, Mystery Lights, is forthcoming from Tin House Books in 2024. Her fiction has appeared in Ninth Letter, Epiphany, Electric Literature, the anthology Tiny Nightmares, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2019 Elizabeth George Foundation grant and holds an MFA in fiction from The New School. Originally from Los Angeles, she lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she is the managing editor and director of educational programming at One Story and the co-host of the reading series Ditmas Lit
Follow her on Instagram, Twitter, and check out more of her work here.