Think Of a Number (2010) (12 page)

“Better go,” he said. “Need to be on time for this thing.”

Blindly, almost staggering, he kissed her on the cheek and went out to the car, forgetting his jacket.

T
he landscape was different that morning, more like winter, with virtually all of autumn’s color gone from the trees. But he
sensed this only dimly. He was driving automatically, almost unseeingly, consumed by the image of the box, his recollection of its contents, the significance of its presence on the table.

Why? Why now, after all these years? To what purpose? What was she thinking? He had driven through Dillweed, driven past Abelard’s without even noticing. He felt sick to his stomach. He had to focus on something else, had to get a grip.

Focus on where you’re going, why you’re going there
. He tried to force his mind in the direction of the messages, the poems, the number nineteen. Mellery thinking of the number nineteen. Then finding it in the letter. How could that have been done? This was the second time Arybdis or Charybdis—or whatever his name was—had performed this impossible feat. There were certain differences between the two instances, but the second was as baffling as the first.

The image of the box on the coffee table pressed relentlessly against the edges of his concentration—and then the contents of the box, as he remembered them being packed away so long ago. Danny’s crayon scribbles. Oh, God. The sheet of little orange things that Madeleine had insisted were marigolds. And that funny little drawing that might have been a green balloon or maybe a tree, maybe a lollipop. Oh, Jesus.

Before he knew it, he was pulling in to the neatly graveled parking area at the institute, the drive hardly registering in his consciousness. He looked around at his surroundings, trying to center himself, trying to wrestle his mind into the same location as his body.

Gradually he relaxed, felt almost drowsy, the emptiness that so often followed intense emotion. He looked at his watch. Somehow he’d arrived exactly on time. Apparently that part of him operated without conscious intervention, like his autonomic nervous system. Wondering if the chill had driven the role players indoors, he locked the car and took the winding path to the house. The front door, as on his previous visit, was opened by Mellery before he knocked.

Gurney stepped in out of the wind. “Any new developments?”

Mellery shook his head and closed the heavy antique door, but not before half a dozen dead leaves skittered over the threshold.

“Come back to the den,” he said. “There’s coffee, juice …”

“Coffee would be fine,” said Gurney.

Again they chose the wing chairs by the fire. On the low table between them was a large manila envelope. Gesturing toward it, Mellery said, “Xeroxes of the written messages and a recording of the call. It’s all there for you.”

Gurney took the envelope and placed it on his lap.

Mellery eyed him expectantly.

“You should go to the police,” said Gurney.

“We’ve been through that already.”

“We need to go through it again.”

Mellery closed his eyes and massaged his forehead as though it ached. When he opened his eyes, he appeared to have made a decision.

“Come to my lecture this morning. It’s the only way you’ll understand.” He spoke quickly, as if to forestall objection. “What goes on here is very subtle, very fragile. We teach our guests about conscience, peace, clarity. Earning their trust is critical. We’re exposing them to something that can change their lives. But it’s like skywriting. In a calm sky, it’s legible. A few gusts and it’s all gibberish. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“I’m not sure I do.”

“Just come to the lecture,” pleaded Mellery.

I
t was exactly 10:00
A.M.
when Gurney followed him into a large room on the ground floor of the main building. It resembled the sitting room of an expensive country inn. A dozen armchairs and half a dozen sofas were oriented in the general direction of a grand fireplace. Most of the twenty attendees were already seated. A few lingered at a sideboard on which stood a silver coffee urn and a tray of croissants.

Mellery walked casually to a spot in front of the fireplace and faced his audience. Those at the sideboard hurried to their seats, and all fell expectantly silent. Mellery motioned Gurney to an armchair by the fireplace.

“This is David,” announced Mellery with a smile in Gurney’s direction. “He wants to know more about what we do, so I’ve invited him to sit in on our morning meeting.”

Several voices offered pleasant greetings, and all the faces offered smiles, most of which looked genuine. He caught the eye of the birdlike woman who’d accosted him obscenely the day before. She looked demure, even blushed a little.

“The roles that dominate our lives,” Mellery began without preamble, “are the ones we’re unaware of. The needs that drive us most relentlessly are the ones we’re least conscious of. To be happy and free, we must see the roles we play for what they are, and bring our hidden needs into the light of day.”

He was speaking calmly and straightforwardly and had the complete attention of his audience.

“The first stumbling block in our search will be the assumption that we already know ourselves, that we understand our own motives, that we know why we feel the way we do about our circumstances and the people around us. In order to make progress, we will need to be more open-minded. To find out the truth about myself, I must stop insisting that I already know it. I’ll never remove the boulder from my path if I fail to see it for what it is.”

Just as Gurney was thinking that this last observation was expanding the envelope of New Age fog, Mellery’s voice rose sharply.

“You know what that boulder is? That boulder is your image of yourself, who you think you are. The person you think you are is keeping the person you really are locked up without light or food or friends. The person you think you are has been trying to murder the person you really are for as long as you both have lived.”

Mellery paused, seemingly overtaken by some desperate emotion. He stared at his audience, and they seemed hardly to breathe. When he resumed speaking, his voice had dropped to a conversational volume but was still full of feeling.

“The person I think I am is terrified of the person I really am, terrified of what others would think of that person. What would
they do to me if they knew the person I really was? Better to be safe! Better to hide the real person, starve the real person, bury the real person!”

Again he paused, letting the erratic fire in his eyes subside.

“When does it all start? When do we become this set of dysfunctional twins—the invented person in our head and the real person locked up and dying? It starts, I believe, very early. I know in my own case the twins were well established, each in his own uneasy place, by the time I was nine. I’ll tell you a story. My apologies to those who’ve heard me tell it before.”

Gurney glanced around the room, noting among the attentive faces a few with smiles of recognition. The prospect of hearing one of Mellery’s stories for a second or third time, far from boring or annoying anyone, seemed only to increase their anticipation. It was like the response of a small child to the promised retelling of a favorite fairy tale.

“One day as I was leaving for school, my mother gave me a twenty-dollar bill to pick up some groceries on my way home that afternoon—a quart of milk and a loaf of bread. When I got out of school at three o’clock, I stopped at a little luncheonette next to the school yard to buy a Coke before I went to the grocery store. It was a place where some of the kids hung out after class. I put the twenty-dollar bill on the counter to pay for the Coke, but before the counterman took the bill to make change, one of the other kids came over and saw it. ‘Hey, Mellery,’ he said, ‘where’d you get the twenty bucks?’ Now, this kid happened to be the toughest kid in the fourth grade, which is the grade I was in. I was nine, and he was eleven. He’d been left back twice, and he was a scary kid—not someone I was supposed to be hanging around with, or even speaking to. He got in a lot of fights, and there were stories that he used to break in to people’s houses and steal things. When he asked me where I got the money, I was going to say that my mother gave it to me to buy milk and bread, but I was afraid he’d make fun of me, call me a mama’s boy, and I wanted to say something that would impress him, so I said that I stole it. He looked interested, which made me feel good. Then
he asked me who I stole it from, and I said the first thing that came into my mind. I said that I stole it from my mother. He nodded and smiled and walked away. Well, I was sort of relieved and uncomfortable at the same time. By the next day, I’d forgotten about it. But a week later he came up to me in the school yard and said, ‘Hey, Mellery, you steal any more money from your mother?’ I said no, I hadn’t. And he said, ‘Why don’t you steal another twenty bucks?’ I didn’t know what to say. I just stared at him. Then he smiled a creepy little smile and said, ‘You steal another twenty bucks and give it to me, or I’ll tell your mother about the twenty you stole last week.’ I felt the blood drain out of me.”

“My God,” said a horse-faced woman in a burgundy armchair on the far side of the fireplace, as other murmurings of empathic anger rippled across the room.

“What a prick!” growled a thickly built man with murder in his eyes.

“It threw me into a panic. I could picture him going to my mother, telling her I had stolen twenty dollars from her. The absurdity of that—the unlikelihood of this little gangster going to my mother about anything—never occurred to me. My mind was too overloaded with fear—fear that he would tell her and she would believe him. I had no confidence whatever in the truth. So, in this state of mindless panic, I made the worst possible decision. I stole twenty dollars from my mother’s purse that night and gave it to him the next day. Of course, the next week he made the same demand. And the week after that. And so on, for six weeks, until I was finally caught in the act by my father—caught closing the top drawer of my mother’s bureau, with a twenty-dollar bill clutched in my hand. I confessed. I told my parents the whole horrible, shameful story. But it only got worse. They called our pastor, Monsignor Reardon, and took me to the church rectory to tell the story all over again. The next night the monsignor had us come back and sit down with the little blackmailer and his mother and father, and again I had to tell the story. Even that wasn’t the end of it. My parents cut off my allowance for a year to pay them back for the money I stole. It
changed the way they looked at me. The blackmailer concocted a version of events to tell everyone in school that painted him as some kind of Robin Hood and me as a rat that snitched. And every once in a while, he’d give me an icy little smirk that suggested that someday soon I might get pushed off an apartment-house roof.”

Mellery paused in the recounting of his tale and massaged his face with the palms of his hands, as though easing muscles that had been tightened by his recollections.

The burly man shook his head grimly and said again, “What a prick!”

“That’s exactly what I thought,” said Mellery. “What a manipulative little prick! Whenever that mess came to mind, the next thought in my head was always, ‘What a prick!’ That’s all I could think.”

“You were right,” said the burly man in a voice that sounded used to being listened to. “That’s exactly what he was.”

“That’s exactly what he was,” Mellery agreed with rising intensity, “exactly what
he
was. But I never got past what
he
was, to ask myself what
I
was. It was so obvious what he was, I never asked myself what
I
was. Who on earth was this nine-year-old kid, and why did he do what he did? It’s not enough to say he was afraid. Afraid of what, exactly? And who did he think he was?”

Gurney found himself surprisingly caught up in this. Mellery had captured his attention as completely as anyone else’s in the room. Gurney had slipped from being an observer into being a participant in this sudden search for meaning, motive, identity. Mellery had begun pacing back and forth in front of the giant hearth as he spoke, as though driven by memories and questions that would not let him stand still. The words tumbled out of him.

“Whenever I thought of that boy—myself, at the age of nine—I thought of him as a victim, a victim of blackmail, a victim of his own innocent desire for love, admiration, acceptance. All he wanted was for the big kid to like him. He was a victim of a cruel world. Poor little kid, poor little sheep in the jaws of a tiger.”

Mellery stopped his pacing and spun around to face his audience.
Now he spoke softly. “But that little boy was something else, as well. He was a liar and a thief.”

The audience was divided between those who looked like they wanted to object and those who nodded.

“He lied when he was asked where he got the twenty dollars. He claimed to be a thief to impress someone he assumed was a thief. Then, faced with the threat of his mother’s being told he was a thief, he actually became a thief rather than have her think he was one. What he cared about most was controlling what people thought of him. Compared to what they
thought
, it didn’t matter much to him whether he actually
was
a liar or a thief, or what effect his behavior had on the people he lied to and stole from. Let me put it this way: It didn’t matter enough to keep him from lying and stealing. It only mattered enough to eat away like acid at his self-esteem when he did lie and steal. It mattered just enough to make him hate himself and wish he was dead.”

Mellery fell silent for several seconds, letting his comments sink in, then continued, “Here’s what I want you to do. Make a list of people you can’t stand, people you’re angry at, people who’ve done you wrong—and ask yourself, ‘How did I get into that situation? How did I get into that relationship? What were my motives? What would my actions in the situation have looked like to an objective observer?’ Do not—I repeat, do not—focus on the terrible things the other person did. We are not searching for someone to blame. We did that all our lives, and it got us nowhere. All we got was a long, useless list of people to blame for everything that ever went wrong! A long, useless list! The real question, the only question that matters is
‘Where was I in all of this?
How did I open the door that led into the room?’ When I was nine, I opened the door by lying to win admiration. How did you open the door?”