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her body, and a shrunken-apple face that betrayed, like Patricia and Katya before her, Eastern European origins. Mystery greeted her, grabbed her bags, and brought her to the limo. Outside of a meek "hello," Ania didn't say a word during the entire trip home. Instead, she sat passively and listened to Mystery. She was just his type. She may not have been a party girl like Katya, but Ania came with her own baggage, which arrived unexpectedly at the airport the next day. His name was Shaun. On Saturday we discovered Shaun standing outside the house, dialing Ania's cell phone every five minutes. Ania had never told Mystery she was engaged. And, clearly, she had never told her fiance she was flying to Los Angeles to visit a pickup artist she had met at work. Shaun had evidently checked her voice mail, discovered messages from Mystery, and decided to fly to L.A. to confront his rival. The irony wasn't lost on Mystery. "I understand what Shaun's going through," he said. "I'm like Herbal to him. He wants to kill me and take his woman back." He paused for a moment and adjusted his posture into what would have been an alpha male pose if he had any pectorals. "I'm going out there to talk to him." As Mystery swaggered outside, I waited in the living room with his sister and mother. We sat on the upholstery—so filthy now even the stains were stained—that was the backdrop to the tears, girls' bottoms, and house meetings that had been consuming my life for months. I felt a need to escape this trap I had set for myself; this trap Mystery kept setting for himself; the traps we all constantly set for ourselves, over and over, and never seem to learn from. "You realize," I told them, "that Mystery is just building himself up for another fall with this girl." "Yes," his mom said. "He thinks it's all about the girls, but it's not. It's about his low self-esteem." Only a mother could reduce a person's entire ambition and raison d'etre to the one basic insecurity fueling it all. "What worries me is the violence," I said. "He's starting to think that violence is a solution to these problems, and it's a dangerous way of thinking." "Butting heads with someone never works," his mom said. "I always say that you don't have to do the direct approach. You can just go around because there's always a back way." "Now I know where he got Mystery Method from." In three sentences.
his mother had unintentionally summarized Mystery's entire approach to meeting women: the indirect method. Martina knitted her eyebrows and shifted her weight on the couch. "His depressions get worse every time," she sighed. "He was never violent before." "Well, I remember one time when he was angry, he slammed a door and killed his pet rat," his mother said. "But I never saw him get mad about anything else. Even when the cat died, he just said, 'That's life.'" "What I think is happening," Martina said, "is that with our father gone, he's starting to realize that Dad was never as bad as he remembered. So now he's allowing himself to be more like Dad." I reflected back on my conversation with Mystery at the Trans-Dniester border. He'd made his dad out to be a monster. "So your dad wasn't as bad as Mystery always said?" "The problem is that they were too similar," Martina explained. "Dad could take over any room he walked into. He was very charismatic but also very stubborn. They never got along. Mystery would always do things to antagonize Dad. And Dad, instead of acting like an adult, would blow up at him." "We'd have to put them on opposites sides of the table," Mystery's mom cut in, "and if one so much as looked at the other wrong, a fight would break out." "And now that Dad's gone," Martina said, "Mystery needs someone to take all his anger out on. So Katya has taken the place of his father. She's become the villain responsible for all the messed-up emotions he's feeling." Now was my chance to bring up the question I'd wanted to ask ever since Mystery's breakdown in Toronto, the question that would free me of the inexplicable obligation I felt to save him from himself. "So what do we do?" We talked it through for a half hour. The answer, Martina finally decided, was to let him run free; to give him a chance to make something of his talent and genius; to give him time to quest after two 10s who will love him as much as they love each other. And to hope that he made some progress toward his life goals before the next crash, or the crash after that, or whichever crash would be so destructive he'd have to return home for good. He was walking on quicksand with helium balloons in his hands. In that respect, he was like all of us, except the air in his balloons was escaping faster.