The Leftovers

down, your body flattening against the table, your face mashed into the hole, a powerful, if mostly benevolent, force manhandling you from above. This was just the opposite, all the energy surging from below, your body rising and softening, nothing holding you down but air.
    There was a time, not so long ago, when the idea of a ten-thousand-dollar massage chair would have seemed obscene to her, a shameful form of self-indulgence. But really, when you thought about it, it wasn’t that high a price to pay for something so therapeutic, especially if you spread out the cost over ten or twenty years. In the end, a massage chair wasn’t all that different from a hot tub or a Rolex or a sports car, any of the other luxury items people bought to cheer themselves up, many of them more cheerful than Nora to begin with.
    Besides, who would even know? Karen, maybe, but Karen wouldn’t care. She was always encouraging Nora to pamper herself, buy some new shoes or a piece of jewelry, take a cruise, spend a week at Canyon Ranch. Not to mention that Nora would let her sister use the chair anytime she wanted. They could make it a regular thing, a Wednesday-night massage date. And even if the neighbors did find out, what did Nora care? What were they gonna do, say mean things and hurt her feelings?
    Good luck with that, she thought.
    No, the only thing holding her back was the thought of what would happen if she actually owned the chair, if she could feel this good anytime she wanted. What would happen if there were no other customers milling around, no salesman hovering nearby, no Karen to meet in five or ten minutes? What if it were just Nora in an empty house, the whole night ahead of her, and no reason to hit the off switch?
     

THE BALZER METHOD
    ON CHRISTMAS MORNING THEY WATCHED a PowerPoint presentation, the eighteen female residents of Blue House gathered in the chilly basement meeting room. That was how they did it for now, simultaneous showings in each house within the compound, as well as the various outposts scattered throughout town. There had been some talk within the Mapleton Chapter about the necessity of building or acquiring a structure large enough to accommodate the entire membership, but Laurie preferred it this way—more intimate and communal, less like a church. Organized religion had failed; the G.R. had nothing to gain by turning into a new one.
    The lights went out and the first slide appeared on the wall, a photo of a wreath hanging on the door of a generic suburban house.
    TODAY IS “CHRISTMAS.”
    Laurie shot a quick sidelong glance at Meg, who still looked a bit shaky. They’d stayed up late the night before, working through Meg’s conflicted feelings about the holiday season, the way it made her miss her family and friends and question her commitment to her new life. She’d even found herself wishing that she’d waited to join the G.R., so she could have had one last Christmas with her loved ones, just for old times’ sake. Laurie told her it was natural to feel nostalgia at this time of year, that it was similar to the pain amputees felt in a phantom limb. The thing was gone, but it was still somehow a part of you, at least for a little while.
    The second slide showed a shabby Christmas tree festooned with a few meager scraps of tinsel, lying by the curb on a bed of dirty snow, waiting for a garbage truck to cart it away.
    “CHRISTMAS” IS MEANINGLESS.
    Meg sniffled softly, like a child trying to be brave. During last night’s Unburdening, she’d told Laurie about a vision she’d had when she was four or five years old. Unable to sleep on Christmas Eve, she’d tiptoed downstairs and seen a fat bearded man standing in front of her family’s tree, checking items off a list. He wasn’t wearing a red suit—it was more like a blue bus driver’s uniform—but she still recognized him as Santa Claus. She watched him for a while, then snuck back upstairs, her body filled with an ecstatic sense of wonder and confirmation. As a teenager, she convinced herself that the whole thing had been a dream, but it had seemed real at the time, so real that she reported it to her family the next morning as a simple fact. They still jokingly referred to it that way, as though it were a documented historical event—the Night Meg Saw Santa.
    In the slide that followed, a group of young carolers stood in a semicircle, their mouths open, their eyes shining with joy.
    WE WON’T JOIN THE CELEBRATION.
    Laurie