"So, go on then," Nina prompted. "Tell me about how disconnected I am and what I'm meant to do to fix it."
Cody made no immediate reply. He sat opposite her for a long time, legs crossed, hands folded in his lap, scrutinizing her. She tried not to give him the satisfaction of squirming in discomfort but stared straight back at him. He sported the beginnings of a wispy beard across his thin face, and for some reason this annoyed Nina. He reminded her of many of her students — arrogant, aggressively liberal, with all the assurance that came with a life of privilege.
She wondered if she was reading Cody correctly. Was he one of those trust-fund brats who had decided to make a career out of the buzzwords he had learned as a "bohemian" undergrad? She had always hated his type. The ones who had grown up in large cities and gone to fancy schools, where they had learned that the world belonged to them; the ones who had never doubted a damn thing in their lives. She disliked him all the more for passing his carefully cultivated certainty off as a spiritual journey.
All of a sudden she felt homesick — not for Edinburgh, but for the West Highlands where she had grown up. There had been few people like Cody there. Perhaps if I'd known that there were so many of them in the world, I wouldn't have been so keen to work my way out of Oban, she thought. Perhaps I should just have stayed there. That way I wouldn't be sitting here today, in this tent with this idiot.
"Nina," Cody drew a long, deep breath and slowly blew it out. "I'm getting the sense that you are… how should I put this? That you're not entirely cooperative, you know? I'm getting the impression that you don't take all this entirely seriously."
"It's not really my cup of tea," Nina admitted, "but I'm doing the best I can. I'm joining in. I shared when you asked me to, and I sat all night on the hill. I haven't refused to do anything."
"You don't eat our food. You smuggled in cigarettes." The tone of Cody's voice was not one of accusation, but of pitying disappointment. It was perfectly calculated to push Nina's buttons.
"Yes, that's right," she said, forcing herself to smile. "I don't eat your food. It's not to my taste, so I'm eating supplies that we brought instead. It's not intended as a slight. And I was never informed that cigarettes were banned, or phones, for that matter. I'd have thought twice about coming here if I'd known."
Cody held up his hands in a placatory gesture. "It's true," he conceded. "We never made it explicit that you can't bring cigarettes here. I guess we should! We just kind of expect people to have done this kind of thing before and to know that it's not the kind of place where we welcome toxins. Although, if you need an alternative… " he turned away and picked up an ornately carved box.
Nina expected him to open it and offer her twigs to chew on or some kind of calming herb or homeopathic nonsense that she would have to accept politely and pretend to use. Instead, he lifted the lid to reveal a fat plastic pouch filled with high-quality marijuana. A small box of matches and rolling papers lay next to the bag. "This stuff doesn't have any of that tar and nicotine and all the other crap that makes normal cigs so bad for you. And it's just great for expanding your mind! Do you want one?"
Nina wanted to say no. She had always been too much of a control freak — and frankly, too much of a small-town good girl — to experiment with even the mildest of drugs. Cigarettes and alcohol were as far as she went. Yet as she looked at the rolling papers, her fingers twitched involuntarily. She could feel the headache beginning to ease off as she imagined the sweet swirls of smoke filling her mouth and her nostrils, circling around her tongue as she prepared to blow a smoke ring. She knew her hand would only feel complete again when the thin stick was poised between her fingers…
Before she could complete the thought, her hand was out and she was accepting the packet of papers. Cody passed her a tiny bag of filters and watched approvingly as she constructed a joint. I don't know if this is meant to be just the same as making an ordinary roll-up, she thought. Oh, you know what — I don't care. Just as long as it takes the edge off of this bloody headache, it'll do.
"I'll join you," Cody offered, beginning to roll one for himself. "Technically I'm not supposed to, seeing as how I'm working, but nobody likes to smoke alone, right? It can be our peace pipe. We can hail a new beginning!"
Yeah, yeah, whatever you say, Nina thought, as long as it gets me a cigarette.
She lifted the joint to her lips, struck a match, and then took a long, luxurious drag as it caught light. Nothing in her life, she was sure, had ever felt quite so good.
"True story," Cody said solemnly. He was lying stretched out on his blanket, drawing lazy smoke circles in the air as he talked. For the past half an hour he had been telling Nina exactly how he came to be involved with FireStorm. She had heard about his youth in Seattle, his studies in Vermont, and the life he had begun to build after college. He had set up a marketing company with his girlfriend, and within two years of graduation they had expanded and were both pulling in six-figure incomes. Two years after that, the girlfriend had left. Cody had been screwed out of his share of the company and left a brokenhearted wreck, embittered and discompassionate, until he attended a motivational talk given by Sara. His life had been changed, his attitude completely altered, and now he was barely recognizable as the same person. How orthodox, Nina thought. I wonder if they had a training montage.
"So you see," Cody insisted, "I know what it's like to be disconnected. I know. I was compartmentalized. There was Cody, the business man; Cody, the team leader; Cody, the boyfriend; Cody, the son — I thought they were all separate things and I tried to live that way. It was so stupid! People don't work that way. I couldn't see then that I was just one Cody, one complete, complex person. We only struggle with the boundaries of our various personalities because we create boundaries. And we don't have to! But we do — everyone does, Nina, at least until they learn not to. Look at you — how many Ninas are there?"
She thought about it. I don't know. Half a dozen? A dozen? The failed academic. The daughter who doesn't see her mum often. The secret romantic. The clichéd thirty-something fucking up her love life. The girl who got amazing exam results and was meant to go on to do great things. The over-qualified woman who doesn't have any kind of sensible future. But all of these things seem to fit together just fine. I can't say that I feel any kind of disconnect among them. They're just… me. She shrugged. "Several and just the one," she said. "Simultaneously, which is fine."
"Ok, let's try a different approach," said Cody. Nina thought she saw him suppressing a sigh. Under the slight buzz of the weed she had smoked, it made her want to giggle. "What are the qualities you prize most in yourself?"
This was much easier. She knew how to answer this one. "Intelligence," she said decisively. "Definitely intelligence and hard work, and tenacity. Loyalty, too — I stick by the people I care about."
"Great," Cody rewarded her with a wide smile. She rewarded herself with another puff. "That's really great, Nina. So you're intelligent, hardworking, tenacious, and loyal. But those aren't all that you are, right?"
"I suppose."
"When we find our strongest positive qualities, we can flip them over and find our strongest negative ones. For instance, you're highly intelligent but you're also capable of making some really stupid decisions — no, don't look at me like that. This isn't a judgment, it's an analysis. Stick with it. I promise you'll see where this is going. You're hardworking, but that makes you resentful toward anyone who hasn't worked as hard, and it means that when you decide not to work hard at something, you slack off completely. You're tenacious, but when you break, you really break. And you're loyal, but when someone does something to lose your loyalty, you cut yourself off from them completely, as you did with Steven."