I looked around, inspecting my surroundings further while I waited for my supervisor to arrive. The building bordered the courtyard in a kind of elongated diamond shape. Four enormous weeping willow trees, encased in shrubbery, stood at its corners. In front of me, a swallow swooped down and perched its feet on the wire cage enveloping the jagged purple plant’s nodules. It held a wriggling beetle in its beak and tilted its quizzical head at me. I worried fleetingly for its safety, eyeing the spike glistening with an almost iridescent ooze just centimeters from its breastbone, but it seemed unconcerned. I walked on and reached for a dark pink rose nestled among white orbs of delicate dandelion, but my arm scraped painfully against an invisible thorn. I quickly pulled it back, and the dandelions’ seeds, disturbed, blew into the wind, causing a commotion that made me sneeze. I backed away and turned my attention back to the building itself.
The structure was highly incongruous. Although the front of the edifice had seemed ridiculously modern, the part I faced now looked practically Victorian, all stone and brick and trailing ivy. I noted four entrances into the complex—the one I’d just walked through, two painted wooden doors on either side of me, and a final one at the far end, an imposing gray. Some of the rooms had large glass windows, like the one at reception, that faced into the courtyard. I peered into one and saw a series of square cushions arranged symmetrically on the wooden floor, clearly the meditation space Adam had told me about. Next to it, I saw what looked like a formal dining area, high ceilinged with heavy wooden tables and chairs stained in dark finishes. I couldn’t make out anything else from where I stood, and except for the chirping swallows, it was very quiet.
I was beginning to wonder where everyone was when a woman finally emerged from the large gray door and walked toward me. She was dressed in a pair of trendy suede overalls over a long-sleeved black speckled top. She wore white sneakers, and her hair was draped in a long braid over one shoulder. The intimidation that her beauty aroused in me was mitigated by the warmth she exuded with her bright smile and somehow modest gait. Even before she’d said a word, I felt a strange familiarity.
“Hi,” she said, and shook my hand. She spoke with an Indian accent. “Anisa, right? I’m Shiba. Welcome.”
She gestured for me to follow her and led us toward one of the weeping willows. We sat together on a bench beneath the tree, completely enclosed by the tall, manicured bushes of rosemary and lavender and other things I didn’t know the names of. I felt an uncanny sensation as I entered the space, akin to wearing noise-canceling headphones, and realized as I looked around that embedded within the hedges were tiny sound machines, buzzing together in a steady, filtering hum.
“We keep designated speaking areas on the grounds so as not to disturb the other Learners,” Shiba explained and pointed to the other shrouded corners of the courtyard. “If we want to speak, we’ll meet like this.”
“Oh, okay cool. Got it,” I responded and gave her a ridiculous thumbs-up.
“Tell me, how are you feeling?”
“Oh, fine. I’m … well, I’m kind of nervous to be here,” I admitted. “It’s all been so mysterious. They say fluency in ten days. That sounds … intense. I just hope I’m able to do it right.”
I was blabbering, flustered by this woman’s quiet magnetism.
“Don’t worry. You’ve done the hard part already. Now it’s just a matter of staying.” She smiled and pointed to a timetable hanging on the wall across from us. There were several of these, I would later find, dotted around the complex. “As you can see, your days here are carefully planned. It may seem complicated at first, but you’ll quickly get used to it.”
I scanned the schedule briefly. Five in the morning to six o’clock: meditation. Six o’clock to seven o’clock: breakfast. Other activities followed: breaks, meals, more meditation, but about 80 percent of the timetable was reserved for something called “language booth.”
“Language booth?”
“Yes. In fact, that’s where the other Learners are at the moment, in their respective language booths. This means we can speak freely for now. Come, I’ll show you how it all works. We’ll start with the Process Centre.”
She led me to her right, and we stopped in front of the red wooden door.
“This building is amazing,” I said.
“Isn’t it? This part, you see, is a reclaimed mansion from the eighteen hundreds,” she said and stroked the stone wall to the left of the red door. “And this,” she continued, now touching the smooth plaster to its right, “was recently constructed.”
I looked more carefully at the structure surrounding us and saw that, just as she’d said, it was actually comprised of two conjoined U-shaped buildings, one aged and the other newborn. The connection was so seamless that you could hardly tell at first, but I saw now that the plaster slowly transitioned from smooth to textured so that by the time it merged with the stone, the transition felt continuous. The seam was still there, though, if you looked closely enough. A thin indent running from top to bottom, just next to the door. I touched it, the seam.
“It’s beautifully done,” I said.
“I’m supervising the renovation myself,” she said. “Eventually, the entire thing will look like the modern half.”
“That sounds like a big job,” I said, and tried not to look at her with too much curiosity. I’m not sure I’d ever internalized before that women who looked like us could oversee such important projects.
“Yes.” She nodded. “This will all be very different one day.”
I was struck by her words and found myself wishing I could speak with the same kind of gravitas and self-assuredness. That I could, in fact, say of my own life with such confidence, “This will all be very different one day.”
“Now this wing, as I said, is the Process Centre. You’ll be spending the vast majority of your time in here.”
“Sounds good.”
“You see this?” she asked and pointed to a small screen just by the door. “Here, swipe through.”
I touched the screen and a little bar appeared at the bottom. I swiped upward, and then a dot traced the path of a little circle before the name Ayesha appeared at the top of the screen.
“It’s facial recognition,” Shiba said. “Whenever you need to talk to me, all you have to do is swipe here, and then your name will be added to the screen. I’ll be pinged and come find you. Then, once we’ve met …” she swiped through the name with her finger. It disappeared. “Voilà.”
“But … my name isn’t Ayesha.”
“It’s your grandmother’s name.”
“How did you know that?”
“You told us,” she replied, and I remembered that I had indeed included it in one of the forms I’d filled out. “We prefer to use pseudonyms for our Learners, to protect their anonymity.”
“It’s funny. If you’d asked me to pick a pseudonym, I think that’s the one I would have chosen myself.”
She winked at me, “Read your mind, I guess.”