Deathcoaching

Renard paces about, his carving knife still bleeding. “Quantum jumping. You all know it, you’ve all taught it.”

Shivan tries to scream through a muslin gag, but it’s lost among the muffled cries of her retreatmates. Those still alive.

“But have you used it? I mean, really used it?” Renard taps his iPhone, continuing his diatribe against the soothing melody of a new age shakuhachi. “Imagine the version of yourself that’s not tied up. A version of yourself that has already achieved his—” he smirks at Shivan with hesitant feminism, “—or her goals. A version that is out there collecting likes and reeling in clients. Now, manifest it.” Patting the edge of the blade on his temple and against his chest, “in your mind, and in your heart.”

Shivan shifts her weight to either side, rattling the zero-gravity heated lounger. Shawnathan, strapped into the infinity chair beside her, is slumped and still and sobbing with defeat. 

Renard relieves him of his muzzle. “Have you manifested?”

“Please, I have a dog at home. I don’t want to die,” Shawnathan confesses between sniffles.

“So, is ‘future you’ with your dog?”

“Yes,” he blurts with hope and discovery.

“And how did ‘future you’ get out of this chair?”

Words deflate as his tears reemerge. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

Renard manifests the gag back into his student’s mouth, then slices off a deep strip of Shawnathan’s skin from above the wrist to below the elbow. He places it in a bedazzled urn in the center of the room and waits for the Spotify ad to give way to the atmospheric sounds of a zen garden. “This is where we are headed. Little by little. So, why do we so often decide to spoil the time we have? If ‘future you’ is ‘lazy you,’ then the you in that ash-stash is ‘now you.’ So why wait?” He covers the vile vase with an ornate porcelain crane skull painted in Persian Pink and Seafoam Green. “Now, I’ll ask again. Who has manifested?”

Shivan flashes wide eyes and hums in an octave that indicates an eagerness to answer. The air that greets her lips is sweeter than kombucha and fresher than a plant-based vegan cheese platter. “I bite your nose,” she asserts. “You lean in to hear my answer, and I bite your nose so hard that you drop the knife. Then I use it to cut the rope and free myself. And I smash that urn over your head.”

Renard smiles and retrieves a large mirror from an electric lift table. “You have the plan, my pretty pupil. But do you have the emotional vigor to execute it?” Kneeling next to Shivan, he reintroduces her to her reflection. “Eye Gazing and Mirror Time. I hope you emphasize the importance of this to your clients. It’s so simple, yet so effective. Okay, Shivan, talk to the stranger in the mirror, prove to her you are worthy of love and success.”

Shivan begins to shake as Renard retrieves a splitting maul from behind the Fiddle Leaf Fig tree, which is blessing the sauna door with its large, glossy leaves. “I am accountable—”

Renard lays the axe across his palms, exalting it in a religious practice all his own.

“—I am…I am someone people want to be around.” She allows herself a brief scream as Renard hacks at Shawnathan’s heart and neck, showering the other dead coaches with fresh blood.

“Good, Shivan. Accountability is key in our industry,” he says as he engages his hips and core to hoist his student’s corpse onto the ever-growing pile.

“I am strong.” Shivan’s mind is bombarded with the memories that lead her here. A decade of fruitless auditions, a body that zatfigged her out of her Bottle Service days, a concerning lump, and an alarming lack of health insurance. But I’m good with people. I’m good at giving advice, her inner voice said when she pawned inherited jewelry for an almost-respectable-sounding certification.

“How, Shivan? How are you strong?” Her teacher asks as he slits the throat of the only other living student, a retiree who so desperately wanted to reinvent herself.

“I stood up to them. To everyone. My parents. My friends. When they laughed at my motivational Instagram videos, when they offered to lend me money because I had no lives to coach. When they disowned me for selling the few eggs I had left to pay for this retreat.”

Shivan lets the cold tears run down her cheek, but doesn’t give them the satisfaction of reddened eyes or pointless wimpers. She headbuts the mirror, its tiny pieces landing in her hair, and in her skin, and some…in her hands.

“Yes. The only way to take control of one’s life is to ignore what everyone else thinks.” He adds bits of toes, fingers, and severed love handles to the urn. “It’s like I always say, peer pressure is fear pressure.”

Shivan feverishly saws the rope with the sharp shard, grating her palm as much as the hemp shackles.

“‘Hope’ has a five-year plan.” Renard approaches Shivan with a powder-coated aluminum dust pan and broom. “But fear, fear walks into the airport and says, ‘Give me a one-way ticket to anywhere.’ Because all fear cares about is distracting you.”

Shivan feels the tension of the rope release. 

Renard kneels next to her, sweeping the broken glass with meticulous precision.

“I disagree,” Shivan says confidently. “Sometimes, we distract ourselves.” She thrusts the jagged mirror’s edge into Renard’s eye, then grabs the back of his head and burrows it deep into his skull. “Remember, Mirror Time is important.”

Renard flings his arms around, alternating between soothing his own pain and trying to inflict more on her.

Shivan runs to the urn, leaping over the lotus-shaped arrangements of everyone else who paid two thousand nine hundred seventy-nine dollars to be there, and manifests her plan to smash it against the guru’s head.

Deathcoaching, she reflected. Maybe he was on to something.