BREATHE, ASSHOLE. A novel about people who are just too tired to be happy

Rain had been sitting over Los Angeles for almost a week, which made people nervous because Los Angeles didn’t know what to do with weather. The city handled earthquakes better than drizzle. Victor woke up on the couch with his mouth tasting metallic and his neck bent at an angle that suggested he had given up sometime around 3:40 a.m. Netflix was still asking if he was watching. It had been asking for hours. Victor respected the persistence.

There were two empty bourbon bottles on the floor, one paper bag from a taco place he didn’t remember ordering from, and a stack of unopened mail on the coffee table. The apartment smelled like old takeout, stale air conditioning, and the quiet death of ambition. Somewhere outside, tires hissed across wet asphalt. Somewhere upstairs, somebody was doing burpees or moving furniture or being happy on purpose.

The doorbell rang.

Victor opened one eye.

“No,” he said.

The doorbell rang again.

He sat up too fast and immediately regretted having a body. For a moment the room leaned left. He waited until it decided to become a room again, then stood, stepped over a sock, kicked a bottle, and walked to the door in yesterday’s T-shirt.

Nobody was there.

Just a thick white envelope on the mat.

No return address. Heavy paper. Expensive paper. The kind of paper used by people who wanted you to know they had funding.

Across the front, in clean black letters:

REWIRE.

Victor stared at it.

“Great,” he said. “A cult with branding.”

He brought the envelope inside and dropped back onto the couch. His phone was dead. The fridge was humming like it had bad news. On the TV, a woman in linen pants was smiling beside a mountain. The caption said: UNLOCK THE LIFE YOU WERE MEANT TO LIVE.

Victor had spent most of his life trying to lock that life back up.

He opened the envelope.

“Congratulations, Victor. You have been selected for a fully sponsored ten-day transformational retreat in Sedona, Arizona.”

He stopped reading.

There were too many words like alignment, embodiment, nervous system, breakthrough. America loved taking normal sadness, putting a clean font on it, and charging four thousand dollars.

Then he saw the line that mattered.

All lodging and meals included.

That was different.

That was almost spiritual.

He read further. Breathwork. Guided silence. Somatic release. Trauma-informed group sessions. Digital detox. Nature immersion. Functional wellness beverages.

He paused.

Functional wellness beverages.

That sounded suspiciously like juice.

Then, lower down:

Signature retreat bar available on-site.

Victor leaned back.

There it was.

The hook.

He went to the kitchen and looked for cigarettes even though he had quit six months ago and started again five months and twenty-nine days ago. No cigarettes. In the freezer he found a bottle of cheap vodka with about two inches left in it. He didn’t remember putting it there, which meant past Victor had done something considerate for once.

He drank it standing in front of the open freezer.

Cold fire went down his throat.

For a second, the world became less personal.

Outside, Los Angeles kept raining badly. Cars whispered through puddles. A siren moved somewhere far away. Upstairs, the burpees continued. Victor imagined a man in perfect gym shorts trying to outrun his father’s disappointment one jump at a time.

He sat at the kitchen table. The table was sticky. At some point, everything in his life had become a little sticky. Tables. Floors. Mornings. Apologies. He looked at the envelope again.

Sedona.

Ten days.

Free room.

Free food.

A bar.

He tried to remember the last thing he had written that wasn’t ad copy for an online casino or a drunk text to his ex-wife.

Nothing came.

That was a bad sign for a writer.

Then again, being a writer was mostly bad signs arranged into paragraphs.

He picked up the brochure. Everyone in the photos looked calm, attractive, and recently forgiven. People sitting around fire pits. People holding mugs with both hands. People hugging in slow motion. People standing in the desert with their eyes closed, as if God had just whispered something expensive into their ear.

Victor hated all of them immediately.

Still.

The fridge was empty. Rent was late. His editor hadn’t answered two emails. His liver had been making small administrative complaints. And some wellness company wanted to fly him to the desert so strangers could tell him to breathe.

There were worse ways to fall apart.

He found a pen under a pile of receipts and signed the confirmation form.

Then he saw the final sentence at the bottom of the page:

“Your transformation begins the moment you say yes.”

Victor looked around the apartment. The dead phone. The bottles. The rain. The TV still waiting for him to prove he was alive.

He signed.

“Fine,” he said. “Let’s make this worse.”