I stepped up to what I hoped was a yoga studio. I wasn’t really into this kind of thing beyond an occasional fascination with the people who do it, and with a truth that seemed to lurk just out of reach behind all the bullshit.

I had met a rare girl at the bar up the street from my apartment a couple days before. She and I were the only two people in the place drinking straight soda water. Our conversation was as you’d expect. About five minutes in, she casually mentioned a crystal she had bought up by mount shasta.

“It’s a smokey quartz…”

“Oh nice one,” I interjected. I felt eager for something.

“Yeah and it’s got iron inclusions, or maybe it’s rutilated or something, I don’t know”

“My mother loves that word, rutilated…”

I was talking about my mother again. But if I wanted to keep any semblance of a two way conversation going here, I needed to get my mother out of the picture asap.

“Oh yeah, it’s a funny word, I know. Maybe not so funny in other languages, but in English yes.”

She grinned at me. She looked like some kind of fanatic. A few minutes ago she had mentioned growing up in Norway, or maybe Finland. She appeared, however, to be Asian, head to toe.

Presently, outside the studio, a thin man stood twisting his grey curls into a tight bob at the back of his neck. The sidewalk was spotted with ancient patches of bubblegum, spat on the ground by gutter punks and call girls who had moved on. The city was always changing.

“You’re lost in thought.”

Suddenly, he was speaking to me.

“I… yeah, I guess I was.”

“If you are here for the workshop, step inside. My assistant will take your donation. Namaste.”

His stare returned to just above the horizon, and his lower ribs became visible under his shirt as he fussed with the rubber band in his hair. He appeared generally dark, a little threadbare, smiling slightly.

Once inside, the program appeared pretty straightforward–shoes off, cooler and dixie cups, a couple loose rows of people in yoga pants. The foyer smelled slightly of mildew, but there was a large fan spinning slowly out on the floor, and the door was cracked open with a smashed roll of chinese newspaper. It all looked pretty manageable.

I exhaled audibly and picked at tight knot in my shoelace. Two younger women out on the floor had just met.

“I think it’s part of a whole modality, you know? I’ve been working a lot with orange.”

“Oh, that’s funny, orange is my favorite color!”

“Na na na na…” She cheerfully produced the theme from twilight zone as I reached for my iPhone to look that word up.

Interesting. These people appeared to have come for healing. Was one of the afflicted? My eyes naturally began scanning the room with keener discrimination. Just how damaged was the present company? Of course, I knew what I was getting into something weird when I decided to check this place out, but still. There’s healing, and then there’s Healing. Experience has shown: it’s a good idea to get a whiff of the medicine before you let the spoon in.

Across the padded floor, there was what I could readily identify as a quartz singing bowl. To its right was a sort of shamble of wires and audio equipment, and a laptop computer on a cart. Following a bundle of long black cables, my gaze eventually rested on a white data projector and a row of black stage lights resting on the floor. The lights were not facing me, but in the mirror that covered the front wall, their phosphors were faintly glowing orange. Now my eyes drifted up and deeper into the mirror. The asymmetry of people’s faces often makes them look wrong in reflection if you know them. But she wasn’t there.