The Beggar King and the Secret of Happiness

by Joel ben Izzy

  The servant did as he was told, and the master went off to the marketplace to confront Death.

  “What is the meaning of this?” asked the merchant, when he found Death. “Why did you scare my servant so?”

  “I did not mean to scare him,” Death replied. “But, truth to tell, it was he who shocked me. I was astonished to see him here, in Baghdad, when I knew we had an appointment for this evening, in Samarra.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Appointment

  “THE TWO STORIES ARE THE SAME,” said Lenny when he came to the ending. “And it sounds to me like you have an appointment with your grandmother.”

  It was a sunny day and we had walked through the woods near his cabin, down to a stream nearby. He walked slowly, on account of his limp, leaning heavily on a walking stick. I had told him of my grandmother and the gas men, of the stories I had tried to chase away. My story seemed to upset him, and he had answered it with the tale of death and talk of demons. “Death will get you in the end, and until it does, you’re destined to be chased by demons. They’ll find you, no matter where you go, no matter what you do. Once they get their claws in you they won’t let go, until you turn around and face them. In fact, that’s why Cortez burned his ships—have you heard the story?”

  I wasn’t about to say yes.

  Lenny went on. “Well, they say that the first thing Cortez did when he got to the New World was to burn his ships, every last one of them. And do you know why?”

  I shook my head.

  “I’ll tell you why. So that he and his men would have no choice but to face the demons!” His face broke into a broad grin, and his eyes opened wide. “Demons!” he said again, his fingers clenched like claws. “They haunt us, mocking us as we struggle through life. They chase us, and the faster we run, the harder they laugh!”

  He hunched over and screwed up his face, walking toward me as he screamed in a nasal whine. “‘You’re useless!’ they say. ‘Worthless! A storyteller who can’t even talk!’” He turned aside, his eyes open wide, and screamed at the top of his lungs. “‘You’re unfit for human contact! People can’t stand you—that’s why you live here in the woods, all alone!’”

  He stopped suddenly, and we could both hear the echo of the final word. He looked around, trying to get his bearings. I could see he was embarrassed, and I looked away, toward the stream. When I finally looked back, I realized how frail he looked. He said nothing, but motioned in the direction of the cabin, and we walked back in silence.

  “I KNOW HOW IT’S supposed to work,” he said later, as we sat on the steps before his cabin. “You turn and face the demons, then they go away. But I’ve never been able to do it. Because there’s truth in their words. Young, beautiful truth. I am alone. No one comes to see me, except for you,” he said. “And I suppose you only come because you have demons of your own, the same ones that haunted your parents, the very ones you thought you’d escaped.”

  I nodded; he was right.

  “And what do yours say?”

  Of all his questions, this was the easiest to answer. “Failure.”

  “Ah, failure,” he said. “They do a good business, those demons. And failure is hell. But, for what it’s worth, success is way overrated.”

  I don’t know if he meant this to be some consolation. It wasn’t.

  “People think that success will somehow turn into happiness. If only they get exactly what they want, they’ll be happy. Then they get it and they’re miserable, bellyaching like the monkeys in Morocco.”

  I waited for him to explain.

  “When I was a kid, my family lived in Marrakesh for a year—great place for stories. There were monkeys everywhere and we wanted to catch them, but they were too fast. So this old man showed us what to do. You get a bottle and put a peanut inside. The monkey comes, sees the peanut, reaches his hand in and grabs it. But now his hand is a fist, with the peanut inside, and he can’t get it out of the bottle. He’s too excited to let go of the peanut, so he drags the bottle around. Then he’s easy to catch.

  “There you have it—success. And the world is filled with people, successful people, walking around with their hands stuck in bottles, wondering why they’re not happy. That’s the myth of our age—success will bring you happiness. But along comes the bluebird of happiness and what does it do? Shits on their heads. They don’t know it, but what they really want is what you’ve got—failure.”

  Even from Lenny, this seemed farfetched.

  “I’m serious,” he said. “Failing is an art. Learn to do it well and you’ll be happy as Larry.” He stopped, with a grin. “Do you know Larry?”

  I thought about it. The phrase “happy as Larry” was one I’d often heard when traveling through Ireland, but I had no idea who Larry was.

  “Saint Lawrence, the Patron Saint of Happiness,” Lenny explained. “Always smiling, always laughing. He was so damn happy that the Romans got sick of him. They tied him to a stake and left him to burn over a fire. A few minutes later they heard laughter and went back to see why. There was Larry, a big grin on his face. ‘I’m done on this side,’ he said. ‘You’d better turn me over!’

  “Tell me, have you ever known anyone like that? Always smiling, every time you see them? And are they really happy?”

  I mulled his question over. The story of Larry had reminded me of my father, who spent his life laughing through his pain, and I knew he was far from happy. I thought of my mother, and how her smile grew bigger as things got harder. The smile came through in her voice and in all the phone messages that had been piling up, unanswered, on my machine. No matter how fine she said things were, I know she was not really happy. I was about to give up my search when I remembered someone.

  “Maybe the boy . . . on the bike.”

  “Who’s that?”

  I told Lenny about Ricky. He lived on the cul-de-sac down the street from us, when I was growing up. We all called him “the boy on the bike.” He was developmentally disabled—retarded, we said in those days. He always wore a red sweater and rode his bike around in circles, sometimes clockwise, sometimes counterclockwise. We passed him every time we drove to the freeway, and each time he would stop and wave at us, a huge smile on his face. I suppose he waved at everyone. We would wave back, and he would go on riding. I thought about all the times I’d seen him; he was always happy. Whether he was really happy, I had no idea.

  “Good,” said Lenny. “One smiling kid, in a red sweater, on a bike. And what made him so happy?”

  I had no idea.

  “Seems to me he rode around in circles, never thinking he should be doing something else or being someone else. He may not have been a genius, but it sounds like he was happier than many brilliant people, who walk around the world burdened by the ridiculous notion that their life should be different than it is. ‘I should be rich,’ they say. ‘I should be famous.’ ‘I should be better looking.’ Everyone has their ‘shoulds’; I know a guy who walks around saying to himself, ‘I should be able to talk.’”

  It was getting cold, so we went inside. Lenny began to build a fire, but I motioned for him to sit, while I arranged the wood in the stove, crumbled a piece of newspaper, and lit a match.

  “I’ll tell you, nothing screws up life like our expectations. We like to pretend we can outsmart God, the great storyteller in the sky. So what happens? God looks down and sees some fool who thinks he’s got life figured out, then sneaks up from behind and kicks him in the butt. Or, in your case, steps on his foot. Right on the big toe. Wham!”

  He’d lost me again.

  “Gout. That was God getting your attention. Same thing happened to me.”

  “Gout?”

  “Nah. It happened when I was surfing.” I thought I’d misheard him. Whatever Lenny was, he did not look like a surfer. “That’s why I came to Santa Cruz in the first place.”

  “Surfing?”

  “Sure. For the waves.” I tried to picture him on a surfboard, but couldn’t. “This was long b
efore you ever met me, before I went to grad school or ever thought about telling stories. I hitched out here from New Jersey and spent every day riding the waves and every night partying on the boardwalk.

  “Have you ever surfed?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “You should try it. There’s nothing better—like flying on water.” He shook his head, a sad smile on his face. “I was good, too, as good as anyone on the beach. And you know why? Because I had no fear. I knew that nothing could harm me. In rough weather, others guys would chicken out. But I’d go out in storms, fifteen foot swells.” He paused for a time, thinking about it. “One morning, I met the most magnificent wave I’d ever seen. A rogue, it must have been twenty-five feet, perfectly formed. I got on my board, ready to ride, and you know what happened?” He paused and picked out a cigar. I waited.

  “It beat the holy hell out of me. Bent me over backward, wrapped me around my board, chewed me up, and spit me out on the beach. Almost killed me. Five cracked vertebrae, two broken ribs, and this”—he reached with his right hand to pick up his left hand by the wrist—“no feeling from the elbow down.”

  He looked at it and laughed. “You know, I used to be left-handed?

  “I went through four operations before they gave up. Not just on my hand, which was hopeless from the start, but on my back. Said my vertebrae looked like a handful of teeth. I’ve had shooting pains in my left leg, every day since. Even now, if I sit for more than twenty minutes my body feels like it’s being whacked with a baseball bat. And you know the worst part?”

  “What?”

  “I had to give up surfing.” He laughed. “I spent all those months in and out of hospitals, asking myself one question—Why? Why had this happened to me?” He stopped pacing and sat down in his chair. “Well, apparently, it’s the same thing everyone wonders; I wonder about my accident, you wonder about your voice. And that’s just the point—everyone wonders. So maybe we should be asking ‘Why us?’ instead. And the answer is, that’s life. It’s filled with misery and suffering and loss after loss until, in the end, you lose everything.”

  “Are you . . . trying to . . . cheer me up?”

  “Why would I do that? I’ve done everything I can to chase away the unicorns and dry up the rainbows, so you can face your demons and see life for what it is: the sum total of all we’ve lost, divided by what we learn from it. And you’ll go on suffering until you’ve learned your lesson. The future has slipped through your fingers, the past is gone, and you’re left with nothing but this very moment, right here, right now.”

  “Where?”

  In answer, he stood up from his chair and walked around the cabin, his able hand motioning in a circle around him. “Looks to me like you’re right in the middle of a story. Your story.”

  I shook my head, and he responded with a shrug.

  “Sounds like a story to me. Think about it. You’ve got all the elements. The main character—you—loses something precious—your voice—and so, goes off on an adventure. In fact, there’s only one difference between this story and one you would tell.”

  “What?”

  “You can’t tell it!” He beamed. “Because you can’t talk! And you know where that leaves you?”

  “Screwed?”

  He shook his head. “Would you knock off the self-pity?” He snubbed out his cigar. “All that you’re seeing, your feelings, your confusion—that’s how a story looks from the inside.”

  “But I’m real!” I insisted.

  “And that’s what makes it a good story. It all makes sense. You walked out of my door twenty years ago and set off to seek adventure. And now, here you are, back again, in the middle of a grand adventure. What more do you want?”

  “Out.”

  “It doesn’t work that way. What would happen if a character tried to escape from a story you were telling?”

  I thought about it. I had no idea. None of my characters had ever tried to escape from their stories.

  “They stay put, right?” said Lenny. “Because if they didn’t, they’d ruin the story. And that’s your problem. For months now, you’ve been trying to scrape and claw your way out of your own story.” He shook his head. “But that’s not the way it works. You’re in a story. I’m in a story. Everyone is inside a story, whether they like it or not.”

  His words brought to mind an old episode of Star Trek, where Captain Kirk and the crew came to a strange planet, filled with characters from the distant corners of their imaginations, whom they battle to within inches of their lives—before they finally figure out that the whole place is actually an intergalactic amusement park, meant for their pleasure.

  “Now, tell me, what story do you think you’re in?”

  I thought back over the months since I’d lost my voice. “Job?” I joked.

  His eyes lit up. “Maybe.”

  “Terrible story. Cruel.”

  “No, Job is a great story. Did you know that it’s the only place in the whole Bible where God laughs?” I didn’t. “What’s more, Job is one of only two words in English that change their pronunciation when you capitalize them.” Job—job. I tried to ask what the other was, but he was on to the next point. “And it has a great moral; simply put—‘there are things in this life we just don’t understand.’

  “Islam teaches the same lesson. In the Koran, God takes Moses to the Red Sea, where he sees a little sparrow dive down for a mouthful of water. ‘You see how much water is in the sea?’ asks God. ‘That is how much knowledge there is. And the water the sparrow drinks? That is how much humans know.’”

  I LEFT LENNY’S, thinking back to a film I had seen in high school physiology, about a man who was given a special pair of glasses that made the world appear to be upside-down and backward. Mr. Clarkson showed it to us to demonstrate how marvelously adaptive the human brain can be. As scientists strap the glasses on the man’s head, a warning flashes across the screen: “DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!” He wears the glasses every day and night for six weeks. At first he is a wreck, falling down, bumping into things, and throwing up. Then, suddenly, after about five weeks, his brain flips the picture over, so the world appears normal. He is able to go about his daily life, ride a bicycle, drive a car, and so on. So complete is his transformation, in fact, that once the glasses are removed, the world appears to him to be upside-down and backward once again, and it takes another five weeks for him to get it straight.

  Visiting Lenny was like strapping on those glasses. To hear him tell it, everything was the opposite of how it looked; right was left and up was down. All the bad things that had happened to me—they were good. The way to find the answer to a question was to stop looking, and the reason I couldn’t see it was because it was right in front of my face.

  Though seeing things upside down was strange, seeing them backward was scary. After visiting Lenny, I would find that my future had moved behind me and my past suddenly stood before me, getting closer all the time.

  I had long ago mined my past for stories, but the ones that came to me now were the stories I had tried to forget. I could see my father again, though he was not laughing. It was a hot night and I had awoken, unable to sleep. I went to the kitchen for water but stopped when I came upon him, hunched over the Formica table, as he tried to assemble a black box, filled with electronics and held together by masking tape—the same invention he had been working on for years. I watched from the doorway as he reached to pick up a small screw, but his knobby fingers could not grasp it. He tried again and again, and once almost had it, but it slipped out, and onto the floor. This time, he put his head in his hands. I did not want to see his tears so, without a word, I slipped off back to bed.

  I heard my grandmother again, the echoes of her screams, and the long strings of Yiddish curses she hurled at my mother. I tried to push her picture out of my mind, but I could not. She came back, screaming more loudly, just as frightening as she had been when I was a child. Reminding myself of Lenny’s advice about demons,
I stood my ground, turned to face her, and found myself staring into her dark eyes. When I turned from her, it was to see the face of my mother, frozen in fear. A moment later, I saw my mother’s hand reach up to her hearing aid and switch it off. The terror drained from her face, and in its place she forced a smile. That smile was the hardest thing to watch.

  AS FAR AS I CAN RECALL, the movie about the guy with the glasses showed nothing about the effect they had on his family. But I’m sure it wasn’t easy for them. I know it wasn’t easy for mine; they had no idea what to make of my mood swings, from sullenness to occasional euphoria and back. Nor did I know how to explain what was happening to me, because I didn’t understand it myself.

  Taly had begun to move on without me. Rather than obsess about her health, she had begun to do something about it, eating mindfully and exercising often. She felt great and looked great, but seemed far away; we were on parallel tracks, with her miles ahead of me. It was at night that I felt the distance. Until now, even in the midst of fights, we’d always slept like spoons; now we slept like knives, each in our own world. And I could not imagine—let alone say—words that might rebuild the bridge between us.

  It seemed my whole life had become a series of magic words I could not say. Among them was that word Lenny had mentioned, the answer to a riddle I could only solve by not thinking about it. I thought about it constantly.

  “Relax,” Lenny would say in response to my frustration. “In time, the muddy waters will settle. And when you look into them, do you know what you’ll see?”

  I waited.

  “Signs and wonders, my friend. Signs and wonders.”

  That’s just what happened several days later, on a day when Taly was at work, the kids were in school, and the rain had stopped, so there was not a sound to be heard. I sat very still in my office, trying not to think of the answer to the question, putting every thought out of my brain, trying not to think of anything at all, making my mind a pool of simple stillness. Show me a sign.