Pills and Starships by Lydia Millet

pretty.
    We went into the hearing room feeling low—not Mom and Dad whose pharma is already giving them a lift, but Sam and I. The hearing room is where you do the listening . Our service corp is really into its jargon—all the corps pretty much are, they call the trademarked words their “language technology” because they’re into owning every detail of the styles that they’ve branded—so rather than therapy they like to use these words that end with -ing . They say that makes the process more about being and nowness .
    Right before we left, Jean said to me and Sam: “Life is a gift that’s wonderful and yet oh so fleeting. Does a butterfly complain about having to pass into nothing?”
    “A butterfly doesn’t say squat,” interrupted Sam. “A butterfly’s a retard.”
    Jean patted his shoulder. “A butterfly spends all its time living —flitting between the fragrant and colorful flowers. Experience your parents’ time with you not as an automatic entitlement that everyone has, oh my no. That’s really obsolete thinking. Think of it as an act of bountiful giving, leading to a bountiful letting go.”
    Our service corps can’t get enough of “bountiful.”
    So there we are, in the hearing room in our nubbly beige hotel robes, all sitting on these tatami mats around a burbling water feature full of rounded rocks, with wave lightforms rippling on the fabric draperies and some kind of quiet hippie flute music tinkling from invisible speakers.
    Tall bamboo plants in water, liberally placed.
    In comes the therapist, a/k/a the Vessel for Receiving.
    I swear, that’s what they call them. Vessels for Receiving .
    Sounds like a toilet, huh.
    So then our personal VR, a whiter-than-white lady with flowing blond hair and a long, light-blue robe that gives her a kind of princess aspect, sits herself down in our circle, smiles serenely, and purrs, “Welcome, all. Let us hold hands. Be in the gathering .”
    The water burbled, the flute warbled.
    But Sam has a knee-jerk reaction to corp jargon. “I’m not even doing this for five minutes if you’re going to use those full-of-shit, empty expressions,” he said. “We’re not sheep and we’re not brainwashed. At least, not all of us are.”
    “An angriness,” said the VR, and smiled again in a saintly way as though the “angriness” was a special treat. “Sam is your name, I know. Sam, please allow me to be your vessel for feeling-receiving. My name is LaTessa. You may offer your angriness to me. That’s what I’m here for, Sam. I will receive the anger you’re so abundantly giving.”
    She had him for a minute with that one. His jaw unhinged and his mouth hung open, à la moron.
    “Please, honey,” added my mother, who had a decent tranquility vibe going due to her Day One pharma regime. “An open mind, okay? Remember what we discussed. Anger is fine, anger is absolutely what happens. But also—try openness. Try being open, if you can.”
    “Open yourself to possibility,” said LaTessa.
    That snapped him out of his gape-mouth deal. “There’s open, and there’s gullible.”
    “All the expressing is welcome,” said LaTessa, lilting and silvery. “The angriness is so natural , Sam. And we are not here for a judging; we are here for a listening and a loving . Offer the angriness to me and I will be happy to hold it for you. Nestling the angriness next to me, Sam, I will take care of it.”
    So this went on for a while, with Sam saying the whole thing was crap and LaTessa saying nothing except that she welcomed his angriness and she was there for receiving .
    Personally, I was wondering when she would get tired of all the gerunds they were making her use and call someone in to give Sam a quick shot of trankpharms and keep the session moving.
    But she never did.
    I won’t say that she wore Sam down—that would be a definite exaggeration. Still, after a few minutes of acting out he settled into a kind of slump and stopped looking at her when she