Lars Lee

Lars Lee is a family lawyer, a regular at health retreats, and a guest at Tranquillum House whose settled decision not to have children complicates his long relationship with Ray. His chapters pair cultivated self-discipline with a comic awareness of his own limits: he seeks time alone, yet memories of Ray keep returning; he can be transported by wine or stars, but cannot simply will away the conflict between them. His experience also places him among the guests caught in Masha’s increasingly coercive program, where a promised process of renewal becomes a test of whether they can escape a locked room without help.

Identity and Arrival

On the drive to Tranquillum House, Lars stops spontaneously at a small Tasting Cellar. A white wine evokes several kinds of memory: an uncertain, almost borrowed image of a warm hand holding his as a child, and a more definite recollection of eating spaghetti on the Amalfi Coast, with photographs to prove the trip. He enjoys the wine, then tells the vineyard manager that he is due at a health resort within the hour and will be abstaining from alcohol for the next ten days. His response, that he is going for his sins, makes the retreat sound at once familiar and faintly penitential.

That familiarity is borne out when Lars introduces himself to the other guests as a health-retreat junkie who indulges and atones. He jokes that his work as a family lawyer leaves him needing plenty of wine after hours, framing retreat-going as a recurring cycle rather than a singular conversion. His professional life gives him daily exposure to the remains of broken marriages, while his own relationship is under strain from a disagreement that cannot be settled by another short period of abstinence.

The Retreat and Its Rituals

Lars arrives among nine guests who are settling into their rooms, reading the information packs, drinking smoothies, and anticipating what the ten-day program will demand. The retreat’s rules make its control over ordinary routines tangible. Guests are instructed to come promptly to the dining room at a warning bell before meals or smoothies, and there is no room service; morning and late-evening smoothies are delivered to their rooms. Fasting and scheduled meals turn even eating into part of the institution’s timetable.

The first retreat Lars attends under Masha’s direction begins with a period of silence. Masha believes it will give the guests clarity and establish the right tone, even though she expects some to resist and others to break the rule. She has learned to anticipate guests’ evasions: after a family-sized meatlovers pizza was once delivered over the back fence, Tranquillum House adopted security cameras, regular monitoring, and bag checks. The silence and the practical surveillance belong to the same system: Masha presents the rules as care for the guests, while also arranging the conditions under which they must undergo her program.

When the noble silence ends, Masha celebrates the guests’ completion of it and asks them to reintroduce conversation and eye contact gradually, taking turns to speak about what brought them there and what they have found difficult. Lars identifies himself in that first return to speech through his familiar pattern of indulgence and atonement. The ritual produces a pause in ordinary interaction, but his account does not suggest that the underlying disagreement with Ray has been resolved by silence.

Ray and the Question of Children

During an exercise under the stars, Lars does not concentrate on the koans Masha has offered. Instead, the night brings him back to Ray and to an early camping trip they took together. They had lain on a beach holding hands and looking at the stars. When a feeling built up in Lars’s chest, he sprang up, ran into the ocean, whooped, and took off his clothes, pretending to be someone untroubled by sharks or the October water. The memory ends in affectionate amusement: Lars knows he could not get away with that performance now because Ray knows about his fear of sharks.

The tender recollection sits beside a present disagreement. Ray had asked to join Lars at the retreat, despite having previously described retreats as hellish and already living a health-conscious life of vegetable juices, smoothies, and protein shakes. Lars cannot work out why Ray suddenly wants to come. When Lars says he would rather go alone, Ray first appears hurt, then shrugs and says he will eat lasagne every night and watch sports while Lars is away. Lars tells himself that he needs time alone, but Ray’s request remains difficult to interpret.

A text from Ray’s sister, Sarah, asks Lars to at least think about it. He suspects she sent it without Ray’s knowledge and wonders whether Ray’s wish to attend is connected to the message. The request touches the couple’s central conflict: Lars believes Ray has accepted that his decision about children is final, because he has never suggested otherwise. He recalls asking Ray whether he ever said otherwise, and nearly raising his voice. Lars finds raised voices crass and undignified, and knows Ray is aware of that aversion. His controlled manner therefore does not make the disagreement less serious; it helps explain why the question returns through a relative’s text rather than being openly reopened between the two men.

Confinement and Collective Release

The retreat’s promise of transformation turns more troubling when the guests become confined in the studio and cannot find their way out. Yao and Delilah begin to think they should release them or give them a clue. Masha refuses: she is convinced that the guests must work it out for themselves, likening their struggle to a baby squeezing through the birth canal and insisting that the ordeal is essential to their rebirthing. Her certainty recasts the guests’ distress as a necessary test, even as her colleagues question whether they should intervene.

After the ordeal, Lars is among the guests at a communal meal where ordinary pleasures return with striking force. Zoe retrieves smuggled wine, Frances finds six bottles of contraband in a small room behind reception, and Ben locates the mobile phones and plays music. Jessica cooks steaks, Tony twirls pizza dough, Frances helps in the kitchen, and Carmel makes a cake. The group drinks and eats; some dance and some cry. Lars, who cannot dance at all, becomes a source of delight to Frances. The scene gives no account of a final resolution with Ray, but it places Lars within a group whose carefully regulated retreat has broken open into unpolished sociability: food, music, laughter, and tears rather than another prescribed exercise.