Mollify

Soothe (v.)

Molly was hands down the best masseuse in Miami. Trained by Hindu gurus in their ancient anatomies, superstitions, and religious mythology, she gave massages according to a great pantheon of deific connections, each muscle in the human body representing a different avatar of Siva and kneaded according to its story of transformation. She had been a medical student at Harvard but abandoned the pursuit of competitive, mechanical, and blind Western medicine. She jumped ship to Juwalalumpur and enlisted as a kind of monk in a Hindu monastery whose history and traditions were said to have originated before recorded history.
Molly worked at the Mandarin Oriental, the most expensive and respected resort in a town of resorts. She smoothed the kinked backs of businessman, heads of state, and all those whose troubles and burdens in this world tightened and rolled and folded into the muscles around their necks and backs.
It was normal for Molly to recieve a fax or email dossier that provided her with a brief summary about her clientele. This was originally Molly's idea. If she knew the habits and pursuits of her customers, she would know better how to unwind them.

Out of all her customers, Matthew Gordian stands out as Molly's most memorable case. Gordian's dossier called him "the greatest living guru of convergence culture." It said he funded, researched, and developed new horizons in technological media. The summary was a list of connections he had made in this new field of gadgets and entertainment: blogs on TV, TV on cellphones, radios on blackberries, movies on iPods, iPods in movies, cars that parallel park for you, cars that you can talk to, cars whose speakers are connected to your iPod, cellphone, and radio. Advertising. Internet. Communication. Information. Most of this was familiar gibberish to Molly, and she wasn't especially nervous about him. Gordian seemed like the usual mogul and she readied her oils and table for his arrival. But when his interns brought Gordian to her parlor, she froze with confusion. He was the strangest, most gruesome and helpless creature she had ever seen.
His body was barely recognizable as human. Gordian's torso was twisted and folded up to the left, his hips meeting his shoulders and forming a straight line. His legs were atrophied around each other so the crook of one leg was wrapped around his neck, forcing his chin to fit near the end of his hipbone. The other leg somehow stuck straight up like a periscope, its toes facing forward. These toes wiggled every two or three minutes like a kind of facial tic. His arms were bent across what was left of his chest so his right hand was on the left side of his body and his left hand was on the right side of his body. The fingers of one hand snapped during the moments when the periscope-foot's toes were not wiggling.
But perhaps the most frightening part of Gordian was his face, which was almost fully covered by his own ropey and confused muscles. Only his nose and one hazel eye showed through a window made by what seemed to be a thigh and a wrist. The eye blinked and the nose took deep, silent breathes in and exhaled its air forcefully. These exhalations usually occurred in an eerie rhythm with the finger snaps and toe wiggles.
Gordian was wheeled around in a wheelchair by two interns who watched him expectantly, as if his appearance was just an unfortunate side effect of the pursuit of success. The chair was a kind of hammock with two bicycle wheels and many wires running from a basket on the bottom into the folded person it cradled. A small computer rested in the basket and gently blinked from constant activity. There was a blackberry duct taped to the top of the PC, and an iPod duct-taped next to it. When Gordian was brought to her, Molly saw the familiar white iPod headphones winding their way up the sides of the wheels and into the facial part of this strange being. Gordian spoke through his computer, and his words were projected from a speaker near the periscope foot.
Out of all this, Molly noticed one thing in particular that gave her goosebumps. There was an IV bag that dangled from one of the handles that the interns pushed. It contained a yellow-orange soup, some kind of nutrient, running through a tube that got lost in the wires around Gordian's eyes and nose.
The interns lifted Gordian onto her massage table. He moved his tangled limbs in an alien way, positioning himself, and finally propping his body upright with the hand that didn't snap. His wires and tube led back to his chair, which was left at a comfortable distance from the table.
Molly's eyes were those of an old master, her experience that of an ascetic. They began immediately to roam the lines of Gordian's unfortunate body. They searched the paths of his confused limbs, traced the origins of their underlying tendons and muscles, found the basically impossible arrangement of his bones. Her ancient mind so knowledgeable in the human physique was able to reconstruct him, and after that it was only a matter of time before her fingers would do the work of soothing him back to the humanity that he had so inadvertantly abandoned.
She ran her fingers along the lines of his appendages.
"What are you doing?" his electronic voice asked. Molly was startled, his eye was looking at her.
"I'm trying to figure out what to do," she said.
"What do you mean?" his toes wiggled, and he let a breath out from his nose.
"Well," Molly looked at the eye, "you're a little complicated."
"I know," he responded, snapping the fingers of one of his hands, "I do not know how this happened."
"You don't?" she asked.
"One thing led to another, I suppose," he said.
"Well," she said, dragging a finger across one of his arms, "just try to relax."
"I have heard that one before," he said.
Molly chuckled, somehow detecting a sense of humor in the computer's voice.
"Do your best," she encouraged him.
And she began to grasp and pull at his limbs, starting with his legs, pulling them down and turning them around one another, bringing the periscope foot to its rightful place. She untwisted, unraveled, unkinked, relieved, smoothed, kneaded the knotted tissue. Bones popped, cracking after long neglect. She rolled his spine straight very slowly, bringing his lower half so it laid relatively flat on her table. This revealed a mouth with a tube, lips light blue from pressure, but a profoundly human face. His cheeks and face and forehead were blank and open and honest like a child's. Molly found Gordian's other eye, strangely blackened from lack of oxygen. It blinked in the new light.
When she was finished, he was laying on his back. His arms and legs had not fully straightened and remained mangled, bent at odd angles against his frame. But his head was at the top of him and his feet were at the bottom of him. He turned his head to her, tears staining the patterned cloth draped over her table, his wires lying unconnected on the ground.
"Thank you," he said in a scatchy voice that had not spoken in years.