Think Of a Number (2010) (13 page)

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 robs 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.”

“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.

“I get the impression,” said Gurney, “that you’re talking about a personal source of pain, not just the general human condition.”

Mellery nodded slowly. “There’s no pain worse than having two people living in one body.”

G
urney had an uncomfortable feeling. It had been with him on and off since Mellery’s initial visit to Walnut Crossing. Now he realized with chagrin that the feeling was a longing for the relative clarity of an actual crime; for a crime scene that could be combed and sifted, measured and diagrammed; for fingerprints and footprints, hairs and fibers to be analyzed and identified; for witnesses to be questioned, suspects to be located, alibis to be checked, relationships to be investigated, a weapon to be found, bullets for ballistics. Never before had he been so frustratingly engaged in a problem so legally ambiguous, with so many obstructions to normal procedure.

During the drive down the mountain from the institute to the village, he speculated on Mellery’s competing fears—on one side a malevolent stalker, on the other a client-alienating police intervention. Mellery’s conviction that the cure would be worse than the disease kept the situation in limbo.

He wondered if Mellery knew more than he was saying. Was he aware of something he’d done in the distant past that could be the cause of the current campaign of threat and innuendo? Did Dr. Jekyll know what Mr. Hyde had done?

Mellery’s lecture topic of two minds at war inside one body interested Gurney for other reasons. It resonated with his own perception over the years, reinforced now by his Mug Shot Art efforts, that divisions of the soul are often evident in the face, and most
evident in the eyes. Time and again he had seen faces that were really two faces. The phenomenon was easiest to observe in a photograph. All you had to do was alternately cover each half of the face with a sheet of paper—along the center of the nose, so only one eye was visible each time. Then jot down a character description of the person you see on the left and another of the person you see on the right. It was amazing how different those descriptions could be. A man might appear peaceful, tolerant, wise on one side—and resentful, cold, manipulative on the other. In those faces whose blankness was pierced by a glint of the malice that led to murder, the glint often was present in one eye and absent from the other. Perhaps in real-life encounters our brains were wired to combine and average the disparate characteristics of two eyes, making the differences between them hard to see, but in photographs they were hard to miss.

Gurney remembered the photo of Mellery on the cover of his book. He made a mental note to take a closer look at the eyes when he arrived home. He also remembered that he needed to return the call from Sonya Reynolds—the one Madeleine had mentioned with a touch of ice. A few miles outside Peony, he pulled off onto a patch of weedy gravel separating the road from the Esopus Creek, took out his cell phone, and entered the number for Sonya’s gallery. After four rings her smooth voice invited him to leave as long a message as he wished.

“Sonya, it’s Dave Gurney. I know I promised you a portrait this week, and I hope to bring it to you Saturday, or at least e-mail you a graphics file you can print a sample from. It’s almost finished, but I’m not satisfied yet.” He paused, aware of the fact that his voice had dropped into that softer register triggered by attractive women—a habit Madeleine had once brought to his attention. He cleared his throat and continued, “The essence of this art is character. The face should be consistent with murder, especially the eyes. That’s what I’m working on. That’s what’s taking time.”

There was a click on the line, and Sonya’s voice broke in, breathlessly.

“David, I’m here. I couldn’t make it to the phone, but I heard what you said. And I understand perfectly your need to get it just right. But it would be really great if you could deliver it Saturday. There’s a festival Sunday, lots of gallery traffic.”