A boy, twelve or thirteen years old, dark eyes and long curly hair, blocked my way. “Let me carry your bag, please.”
“No, thank you.”
“You’ll only have to tip someone else.”
“Thank you, but no.”
“Why not?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t you trust me?”
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
“I won’t run away with your bag.”
“Here,” I said. “Let’s carry it together.” I gave him one strap, I took the other, and we walked to the end of the strip, where the casino flashed its manic lights at us.
I gave him one hundred dollars.
“Thank you,” he said, but he sounded sad, as if my giving him so much money proved just how destitute he was.
“Now you have to give it to someone who needs it more.”
“I don’t know anyone who needs it more.”
“There’s always someone.”
“But what about me?”
“It will come back to you,” I said. “It will double.”
“How do you know?”
“It will if you believe it will.”
“Are you a magician?”
“No.”
“Are you Jesus?”
“No.”
“Is this real money?”
“Yes.”
He stared at me for a moment, then turned and ran. I stood in front of the hotel, waiting to see if he would look back, but he never did.
In the lobby, people fed coins into slot machines, and the machines made their gleefully sad noise. After I checked in at the front desk, I took an elevator to the tenth floor, but there must have been a mistake: the entire floor was water. Gondoliers sang arias while ferrying tourists across indoor canals. I tried the eleventh floor, but there were no rooms; it was a mall. People carried shopping bags from one brightly lit storefront to the next; children sucked on ice pops and chased each other in circles. On the ninth floor, a kind of warehouse space, hundreds of headless mannequins stood in rows, wearing sequined gowns.
I went back down to the lobby. I considered walking past the front desk to the street, where I might find the boy and the giant and buy them dinner, but a pale woman with frizzy red hair recognized me and asked me to sign her copy of my book. She said she was looking forward to my talk the next day. She had read all three of my books; they had changed her life, she told me: she had used the power of intention to cure her arthritis and chronic fatigue, and then she met the love of her life; they were getting married in the spring.
“Congratulations,” I said. “Best of luck.”
“We create our own luck.”
I signed my name and beneath it wrote Best wishes, then gave her the book. “Be well,” I said. “Take care.”
She grabbed my hand, closed her eyes, and bowed. For a moment I thought she might kiss my hand. “Thank you so much,” she said.
I tried to pull away, but she wouldn’t release my hand. I pulled harder, and finally she let go; she opened her eyes as if waking from a dream.
“You’re a living saint,” she said.
She stood there, waiting for me to say thank you, to confirm or deny her claim. “Goodbye,” I said, and walked away.
On my way back to the elevator—my room, I discovered, was on the twelfth floor—I walked past the sales area: dozens of merchants selling books, inspirational calendars, CDs, angel “oracle” cards, crystals, rocks, jewelry, and something called Goddess wear: white and gray medieval dresses trimmed with black velvet ribbon; blue cotton gowns with matching shawls; a red velvet dress with bell sleeves; the kinds of outfits worn in fairy tales.
I continued past the elevator because I heard applause; it was coming from a large lecture room overflowing with people. I joined the others in the doorway. A small Japanese man, behind a dais onstage, was explaining how water molecules respond to human thought and emotion. His assistant changed the slide: what water molecules look like when you say the word Hitler. Click. Water molecules when you say the word love. Click. The words fear, thank you, amen. An asymmetrical pattern of dull colors or a complex and colorful snowflake pattern, depending on the words said or thought. The slides changed too quickly; I couldn’t tell which were good, which were bad. They all looked both beautiful and frightening to me. “The human body is made up of mostly water,” he said. Click. And I left to find my room.
I knew they were in my bag, but kept checking—twice in my room, again in the elevator, once again in the bathroom, a few minutes before the radio show was to begin. The pills had expired years earlier, the words on the label long ago worn away. A shrink had prescribed them when I was in my twenties. When he asked why I’d been feeling anxious, I told him the truth: that I believed I could make things happen with my mind; that I had to be careful what I thought; that I couldn’t stop seeing the world in shades of dark and light, positive and negative; that my apartment was filled with junk it was my responsibility to salvage; that certain objects belonged with other objects; that there were too many rules, there were signs everywhere, everything meant something. He wore cardigans and round glasses that hooked behind his ears. He was eager to save me, we were alike that way, so I did my best to make him believe that he was helping me. He suggested that I was made up of many parts, some of which were trying to protect me, to prevent me from feeling pain. “It’s an impossible job,” he said. I nodded and agreed, but never quite believed him. Then one day, after a year, I didn’t show up for a session, and never went back.
The pills, even with refills, would eventually run out. I had to wean myself off them. Four a day, then three every other day, then three a day, then two every other day, and so on. But even after I’d stopped, I carried the bottle with me everywhere. Wallet, keys, pills. My pants pockets faded in the shape of the bottle. Years later, after my first book was published, I decided to leave them at home. Unless I was able to take a cab to the airport, and a plane to Chicago, and another cab to the hotel where I was speaking, without the pills, I would be a fraud, and nothing I could say to the people who had paid to hear me speak would mean much.
True bravery would have been to flush the pills down the toilet. That I kept them in the back of my desk drawer was a sign of my belief that one day I would need them again. I might have said, then, that I had created my own reality: a man standing in a bathroom stall in a casino hotel in Las Vegas, opening, then closing, then opening a pill bottle, trying to decide if he could get through a radio show without being tranquilized. That I didn’t take one—not then—wasn’t bravery as much as fear: that someone would know, that the pills no longer worked, that I’d be letting down every person who’d read my books.
So, instead, I sat in a chair beside Mona Lisa Mercer—the woman who had organized the Change Your Life! conference, a best-selling author herself, the grande dame of self-help, nearing eighty but looking closer to sixty, with her smooth skin and long gray hair—and kept my hand in my pocket. Anxious, I could pinch my skin through the lining of my pants. We were in a small room near the lobby, maybe one hundred people in the audience. Angela Payne, a woman from the radio station, also an author, was going to interview us and screen calls. She was my age. Dark hair, dark eyes, long blue skirt, black boots. I’d noticed a flyer in the elevator advertising her book, Stress to Success in Thirty Days.
Mona Lisa Mercer reached over and held my arm; she looked at me with her blue eyes and said, “You’re not nervous, are you, sweetie?”
“No,” I said. “Of course not.”
“Because I can tell when someone’s nervous.” She leaned in closer, narrowed her eyes, lowered her gaze to my chest. “Shows up as a yellow light in the area of the heart.”
“Well, maybe I’m a little nervous.”
“Be careful—you have a nice head of hair. Fear can cause baldness.” She looked up at my face again, released my arm. “I’m joking,” she said. “Fear can cause baldness, it’s true, but not from just a lit
tle yellow near the heart.”
Angela Payne turned away from us to cough. “I hope I get through this without a hacking fit.”
“Listen to me,” Mona Lisa said. “Touch your throat.”
I touched mine, and she said, “No, I’m talking to Angela, but you can do this, too, if you want. Angela, touch your throat and repeat after me.”
Angela put her hand on her throat.
“I am willing to change,” Mona Lisa said.
“I am willing to change,” Angela said.
“A cough means stubbornness,” Mona Lisa said. “Every time a person in one of my workshops coughs, I stop what we’re doing and have that person touch the throat and say, ‘I am willing to change.’ If she coughs again, I have her say it again.”
I touched the bottle in my pocket. As soon as I did, Mona Lisa said, “Give me your hand.”
I released the bottle and removed my hand from my pocket. She held my hand tightly, looked at me, and said, “Eric, I’m grateful that you’re here today. I bless you and your work.”
“Thank you,” I said.
When the show began, Angela introduced me and Mona Lisa, then interviewed us briefly. She asked Mona Lisa to tell her listeners how she came to believe in the power of the mind to create as well as heal illness.
“I believe it because I’ve lived it,” she said.
“I wonder if you might tell a bit of your story,” Angela said. “For those listeners who might not be familiar with it.”
“My story is the story of the universe,” she said. “You’d have to go back to the Big Bang. It’s all related, sweetie.”
Her story was well known: raped when she was ten; abused by her stepfather; pregnant at fifteen, the child given up for adoption; two failed marriages before she was forty; cancer at forty-five; her miraculous self-healing through nutrition, forgiveness, and enemas; a series of mega-bestsellers listing every ailment in the human body and its emotional cause. If you had a problem with your eyes, you were in denial—there was something in your life you didn’t want to see. When I see a child wearing glasses, I think: Something’s going on in that child’s home that she doesn’t want to see. Bladder problems came from anger. From being pissed off, sweetie—this stuff isn’t rocket science. Migraines were created by people who wanted to be perfect, who were angry at being imperfect. It’s almost always alleviated by masturbation—the sexual release dissolves the anger and pain. Sexually transmitted diseases were caused by sexual shame. The anus is as beautiful as the eyes; you need to begin to relate to your rectum!
“Everyone suffers from self-hatred and guilt,” she said now. “This creates illness, which is a form of self-punishment. The good news is that releasing these emotions will dissolve even cancer.”
“Do you agree, Eric Newborn?”
“It can’t be denied that the mind is powerful,” I said. “Everywhere you go in the world you meet yourself—your own thoughts manifest.”
I looked out at the audience. A man missing both legs held himself up with bodybuilder arms, his stumps not even touching the floor. A woman with a nervous twitch shook her hands incessantly, as if about to roll dice. A boy sitting beside his obese mother kept squeezing his penis. I fingered the pill bottle in my pocket, looked for the positive. I went back to the amputee’s arms—how powerful they were. But then he must have grown tired; he lay in the aisle and stared at the ceiling.
“When you’re angry,” Mona Lisa said, “hold your middle finger tightly and watch what happens—the anger dissolves. Right middle finger for a man, left for a woman—works every time.”
The first caller wanted to know about nutrition.
“Easy,” Mona Lisa said. “If it grows, eat it. If it doesn’t grow, don’t eat it.”
The next caller wanted to know about a typical day in our lives, so I talked about segmenting, which I’d written about in my second book, It’s On Its Way. You break your day into segments, one moment at a time: brushing your teeth, taking a shower, going for a hike, reading a book, eating a peach. You focus on the positive, the wondrous, and if you do this, you’ll attract more of the same in your next segment.
“What if you happen to notice something negative?” the caller said. “Say, you’re on a hike and you see a dead bird.”
“You always have a choice,” I said. “You can bless the bird’s life, give gratitude that the bird ever existed.”
“We live in a ‘yes’ universe,” Mona Lisa added. “Whatever you send out into the universe, it sends right back to you. That’s why I’m filled with gratitude every day. Actually, I’m not filled with gratitude. I am gratitude. I bless my home, knowing that only good comes into it. I bless my telephone and mailbox, knowing that only good news comes to me. I’m pre-grateful. I sit for at least an hour every day with my arms open. I begin every day by looking into the mirror and saying, ‘You are wonderful and I love you. This is one of the best days of your life.’ Sometimes I sing this to myself.”
The caller was gone. Angela said, “What if that doesn’t work?”
“Impossible,” Mona Lisa said. “It always works—what you give out, you receive.”
“Does it ever not work for you?” Angela asked me.
“Depends what you mean,” I said. “Does good always come to me? No. Does what I send out always come back? Yes, I believe so.”
“Bullshit!”
We looked into the crowd; it had been a man’s voice.
Then we heard the voice again: “I hope you all get cancer.”
A man walked forward from the back: glasses, thinning hair, shirt and tie, barefoot. “What about the Holocaust?” he said. “Did those people have too many negative thoughts?” He came closer, stopped where we were sitting. His hands were crossed in front of him as if he were praying; he blinked behind his glasses. His voice grew louder: “What about September? Did every person in the Towers have too many negative thoughts?”
The crowd behind the man backed away, all except the amputee, who remained where he was, though now he was standing on his hands again.
Security approached the man from all sides; he put his hands behind his back. “I know the routine,” he said. He was handcuffed and taken away, but even as he was leaving he yelled to us, “This is not how the universe works! This is not how it works! We are not responsible for our own suffering!”
Angela tried to make a decent recovery by saying, “Our listeners might have been able to hear that. There was a disturbance here—a man with some difficult questions. I wonder if either of you would like to respond.”
With one hand I managed to remove the cap and reach into the bottle. Under the guise of scratching my beard, I put a pill into my mouth. I decided not to swallow, but the pill began to dissolve on my tongue, a bitter taste I remembered immediately.
“God bless him,” Mona Lisa said. “That’s cancer waiting to happen. I can only hope he lets go of his anger.”
“I wonder about his question, though,” Angela said. “How does human suffering on a grand scale—something like the Holocaust or genocide or a terrorist attack—fit into your spirituality?”
“I’m sorry,” Mona Lisa said, “but I have to be honest and say—Listen,” she said, “this isn’t a time for condemnation. The past is the past. Now is a time for healing.”
“Eric Newborn,” Angela said, “any response?”
“Everywhere you go in the world,” I said, “you meet yourself.”
Children went room to room that night, singing carols.
I lay in bed, shaken by what the man had said. But the pill, years after having expired, was working. Maybe it was just the placebo effect. Either way, the anxiety moved from my chest to my arms and legs, then floated up from my fingers and toes to the ceiling, a yellow shadow waiting for the drug to wear off so it could begin its descent back into my body while I was sleeping, or in the morning, or during my talk the next day, or when I returned home to Cary and what was growing inside her, the thing I had feared all along. It didn�
��t matter when; it would hover above me patiently, and then it would descend.
The drug sang to my blood: an old song, but I knew the lyrics. Sad, but sung sweetly, that was all that mattered. The music moved outside me, then a knock on my door: children singing about a babe in a manger, stars brightly shining, our dear Savior’s birth. The carolers wanted me to join them; they handed me the words, but I didn’t need them: some things you never forget. I would like to say that I sang—it’s true that my mouth moved and made sounds—but it wasn’t my voice; it was the drugs swimming through my blood and nestling in my brain.
She’d been following me for years.
Always the same yellow dress; that was how I knew her. It had been two years since the last time—a talk in Chicago, I think. Dark skin, dark hair going gray, tinted glasses behind which I couldn’t see her eyes. She had gained weight—at least fifty pounds, it looked like. She must have bought the same dress in a larger size.
She sat in the front row, as always. She had come to a half dozen of my talks over the years. Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Portland. I forget where else. It doesn’t matter; even when she wasn’t there, she was there.
It might have been easier had she been someone to fear, like the man who had interrupted the radio taping the previous evening. Then security could have escorted her out of the conference room. But she was polite and soft-spoken and never took up much of my time; she was always considerate of the people in line behind her. The first time she approached me—I think it was in New York, because I remember that I didn’t stay in a hotel that night—she asked me her question.
Why?
That was the short version.
The slightly longer version: Why was her son—a bright, optimistic young man, first in the family to be admitted to college, scholarship to Princeton—why was her son shot while driving to pick up his grandmother for Thanksgiving dinner? If our thoughts manifest, if that’s how the universe works—she was willing to grant me this possibility—then why was her son shot in the head, why was he now unable to move, to smile, to blink yes or no, to respond in any way; why did his mother have to shave him, change him, prop him in bed in a position that at least created an illusion that he was still a sentient being? If there were no such things as accidents, then what were we to call what happened to her son?
The Book of Why Page 12
