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?”
The little woman who had cursed Gurney was looking increasingly disconcerted. She raised her hand uncertainly and asked, “Doesn’t it sometimes happen that an evil person does something terrible to an innocent person, breaks in to their house and rob
s them, let’s say? That wouldn’t be the innocent person’s fault, would it?”
Mellery smiled. “Bad things happen to good people. But those good people do not then spend the rest of their lives gnashing their teeth and replaying over and over their resentful mental videotape of the burglary. The personal collisions that upset us the most, the ones we seem powerless to let go of, are those in which we played a role that we are unwilling to acknowledge. That’s why the pain lasts—because we refuse to look at its source. We cannot detach it, because we refuse to look at the point of attachment.”
Mellery closed his eyes, seemingly gathering strength to go on. “The worst pain in our lives comes from the mistakes we refuse to acknowledge—the things we’ve done that are so out of harmony with who we are that we can’t bear to look at them. We become two people in one skin, two people who can’t stand each other. The liar and the person who despises liars. The thief and the person who despises thieves. There is no pain like the pain of that battle, raging below the level of consciousness. We run from it, but it runs with us. Wherever we run, we take the battle with us.”
Mellery paced back and forth in front of the fireplace.
“Do what I said. Make a list of all the people you blame for the troubles in your life. The angrier you are with them, the better. Put down their names. The more convinced you are of your own blamelessness, the better. Write down what they did and how you were hurt. Then ask yourself how you opened the door. If your first thought is that this exercise is nonsense, ask yourself why you are so eager to reject it. Remember, this is not about absolving the other people of whatever blame is theirs. You have no power to absolve them. Absolution is God’s business, not yours. Your business comes down to one question: ‘How did I open the door?’”
He paused and looked around the room, making eye contact with as many of his guests as he could.
“‘How did I open the door?’ Your happiness for the rest of your life will depend on how honestly you answer that question.”
He stopped, seemingly exhausted, and announced a break, “for coffee, tea, fresh air, restrooms, et cetera.” As people rose from their couches and chairs and headed for the various options, Mellery looked inquiringly at Gurney, who’d remained seated.
“Did that help any?” he asked.
“It was impressive.”
“In what way?”
“You’re a hell of a good lecturer.”
Mellery nodded—neither modestly nor immodestly. “Did you see how fragile it all is?”
“You mean the rapport you establish with your guests?”
“I guess rapport is as good a word as any, as long as you mean a combination of trust, identification, connection, openness, faith, hope, and love—and as long as you understand how delicate those flowers are, especially when they first begin to bloom.”
Gurney was having a hard time making up his mind about Mark Mellery. If the man was a charlatan, he was the best he’d ever encountered.
Mellery raised his hand and called to a young woman by the coffeepot. “Ah, Keira, could you do me a huge favor and get Justin for me?”
“Absolutely!” she said without hesitation, pirouetted, and departed on her quest.
“Who’s Justin?” asked Gurney.
“A young man whom I am increasingly unable to do without. He originally came here as a guest when he was twenty-one—that’s the youngest we’ll take anyone. He returned three times, and the third time he never left.”
“What does he do?”
“I guess you could say he does what I do.”
Gurney gave Mellery a quizzical look.
“Justin, from his first visit here, was on the right wavelength—always picked up what I was saying, nuances and all. An acute young man, wonderful contributor to everything we do. The institute’s message was made for him, and he was made for the message. He has a future with us if he wants it.”
“Mark Jr.,” said Gurney, mostly to himself.
“Beg pardon?”
“Sounds like an ideal son. Absorbs and appreciates everything you have to offer.”
A trim, intelligent-looking young man entered the room and came toward them.
“Justin, I’d like you to meet an old friend, Dave Gurney.”
The young man extended his hand with a combination of warmth and shyness.
After they shook hands, Mellery took Justin to the side and spoke to him in a low voice. “I’d like you to take the next half-hour segment, give some examples of internal dichotomies.”
“Love to,” said the young man.
Gurney waited until Justin went to the sideboard for coffee, then said to Mellery, “If you have the time, there’s a call I’d like you to make before I leave.”
“We’ll go back to the house.” It was clear that Mellery wanted to put distance between his guests and anything that might be related to his current difficulties.
On the way, Gurney explained that he wanted him to call Gregory Dermott and ask for more details about the history and security of his post-office box and any additional recollections he might have concerning his receipt of the $289.87 check, made out to X. Arybdis, which he had returned to Mellery. Specifically, was there anyone else in Dermott’s company authorized to open the box? Was the key always in Dermott’s possession? Was there a second key? How long had he been the renter of that box? Had he ever before received mail misaddressed to that box? Had he ever received an unexplained check? Did the names Arybdis or Charybdis or Mark Mellery mean anything to him? Had anyone ever said anything to him about the Institute for Spiritual Renewal?
Just as Mellery was beginning to look overloaded, Gurney pulled an index card from his pocket and handed it to him. “The questions are all here. Mr. Dermott may not feel like answering them all, but it’s worth a try.”
As they walked on, amid beds of dead and dying flowers, Mellery seemed to be sinking deeper into his worries. When they reached the patio behind the elegant house, he stopped and spoke in the low tone of one fearful of prying ears.
“I didn’t sleep at all last night. That ‘nineteen’ business has been driving me completely out of my mind.”
“No connection occurred to you? No meaning it might have?”
“Nothing. Silly things. A therapist once gave me a twenty-question test to find out if I had a drinking problem, and I scored nineteen. My first wife was nineteen when we married. Stuff like that—random associations, nothing anyone could predict I’d think of, no matter how well they knew me.”
“Yet they did.”
“That’s what’s driving me crazy! Look at the facts. A sealed envelope is left in my mailbox. I get a phone call telling me it’s there and asking me to think of any number I wish. I think of nineteen. I go to the mailbox and get the envelope, and the letter in the envelope mentions the number nineteen. Exactly the number I thought of. I could have thought of seventy-two thousand nine hundred and fifty-one. But I thought of nineteen, and that was the number in the letter. You say ESP is bullshit, but how can you explain it any other way?”
Gurney replied in a tone as calm as Mellery’s was agitated. “Something is missing in our concept of what happened. We’re looking at the problem in a way that’s making us ask the wrong question.”
“What’s the right question?”
“When I figure it out, you’ll be the first to know. But I guarantee you it won’t have anything to do with ESP.”
Mellery shook his head, the gesture resembling a tremor more than a form of expression. Then he glanced up at the back of his house and down at the patio on which he was standing. His blank look said he wasn’t sure how he had gotten there.
“Shall we go inside?” Gurney suggested.
Mellery refocused himself and seemed to have a sudden recollection. “I forgot—I’m sorry—Caddy’s home this afternoon. I can’t … I mean, it might be better if … what I mean is, I won’t be able to make the call to Dermott right away. I’ll have to play it by ear.”
&nbs
p; “But you will do it today?”
“Yes, yes, of course. I’ll just have to work out the right time. I’ll call you as soon as I speak to him.”
Gurney nodded, gazing into his companion’s eyes, seeing in them the fear of a collapsing life.
“One question before I leave. I heard you ask Justin to talk about ‘internal dichotomies.’ I was wondering what that referred to.”
“You don’t miss much,” said Mellery with a small frown. “‘Dichotomy’ refers to a division, a duality within something. I use it to describe the conflicts within us.”
“You mean Jekyll-and-Hyde stuff?”
“Yes, but it goes beyond that. Human beings are loaded with inner conflicts. They shape our relationships, create our frustrations, ruin our lives.”
“Give me an example.”
“I could give you a hundred. The simplest conflict is the one between the way we view ourselves and the way we view others. For example, if we were arguing and you screamed at me, I would see the cause as your inability to control your temper. However, if I screamed at you, I would see the cause not as my temper but your provocation—something in you to which my scream is an appropriate response.”
“Interesting.”
“We each seem to be wired to believe my situation causes my problems but your personality causes yours. This creates trouble. My desire to have everything my way seems to make sense, while your desire to have everything your way seems infantile. A better day would be a day during which I felt better and you behaved better. The way I see things is the way they are. The way you see things is warped by your agenda.”
“I get the point.”
“That’s just the beginning, hardly scratches the surface. The mind is a mass of contradictions and conflicts. We lie to make others trust us. We hide our true selves in the pursuit of intimacy. We chase happiness in ways that drive happiness away. When we’re wrong we fight the hardest to prove we’re right.”
Caught up in the content of his program, Mellery spoke with verve and eloquence. Even in the midst of his current stress, it had the power to focus his mind.