The Moth Presents All These Wonders

by Catherine Burns

  We stare at each other. No one says, “Cut.” I can hear the camera motor still whirring.

  No words, but I look him a question: What’s happening?

  Hannibal Lecter looks me an answer: I’m gonna eat you.

  Do you have to?

  Oh, yes.

  A great wave of sorrow washes over me, and Hannibal Lecter laps it up.

  I’m acting. With Anthony Hopkins.

  Outside the van, on a small monitor, Jonathan Demme watches with pleasure. For these few moments, we three are the party.

  JOSH BRODER worked as an actor and director for over twenty years. Now he makes his living as a writer and an executive coach. That coaching often focuses on “narrative leadership”—that is, leadership via personal storytelling. He made his New York acting debut at the Public Theater and toured Siberia for two months before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Favorite roles include Abby Hoffman and Pretty Boy Floyd. Josh is the coauthor of two screenplays, one based on his gig in an ill-fated passion-play tour of the Bible Belt, the second a biopic of a great American charlatan. His has written for the Washington Post and Travel + Leisure magazine, among other outlets. Josh lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Karen, and their son, Luca.

  This story was told on August 23, 2012, at the New Hazlett Theater in Pittsburgh. The theme of the evening was What Lies Beneath: Stories of Steely Reserve. Director: Kate Tellers.

  The year is 1992, Ann Arbor, Michigan. I’m curled up in a fetal position on a filthy carpet in a very cluttered apartment. I’m in horrible withdrawal from a drug that I’ve been addicted to for several years now.

  In my hand I have a little piece of paper. It’s dilapidated because I’ve been folding it and unfolding it, to the point that it’s almost falling apart. But you can still make out the phone number on it.

  I am in a state of bald terror. If you’ve ever had an anxiety attack, that’s what this felt like.

  I’d been having a nonstop anxiety attack for the last five years. And I’d never been in a darker or more desperate place than I was that night. My husband was out running the streets, trying to get ahold of some of the stuff that we needed, but I knew if he succeeded, he was not going to share.

  And if I could, I would jump out of my own skin and run screaming into the streets to get what I need. But right behind me, sleeping in the bedroom, is my baby boy.

  Now, I wasn’t going to get a Mother of the Year award in 1992. In fact, at the age of twenty-nine, I was failing at a lot of things.

  I had started out fairly auspiciously. I was raised in comfort and privilege. I was that girl who had the opera lessons, spoke fluent French, and had her expensive undergraduate college paid for. I was that person who, when my checking account ran out, would say something to my parents and two hundred dollars would magically appear.

  I know, when the revolution comes, kill me first, right?

  So I had the year abroad. I had the master’s degree. I was, you know, pedigreed.

  But in my twenties, I ended up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and I started noticing things like poverty and racism and unconscionable injustice. And that people like me were mostly causing it. It was a huge revelation for me.

  I came to the conclusion that the thing I needed to do with my privilege and all the comfort that I’d had all my life was to destroy it.

  Rip it in half. Spit on it. Piss on it. Set it on fire.

  And you know, every time I’ve come to a major faulty conclusion in life, the man comes right after who will help me live it out. And this was no different.

  Man, he was beautiful—a radical revolutionary, fine-ass poet from Detroit.

  I was twenty-four, he’s forty, and I was smitten, in love. It was so exciting—who he was, how he talked, the way he looked at the world. And it was beautiful for a while, until he introduced me to one of his old activist friends, who introduced us to the drug I was now addicted to.

  I had tried to change my affiliations and transform myself. I had wanted to shed my class. I would have shed my race if I could have.

  But instead of transformation, you have me going ninety miles an hour down I-94 with my poet, in a car full of alcohol and illegal drugs. The baby’s in a car seat (it’s probably not a regulation car seat). He’s covered in candy and chocolate, because you have to keep the baby entertained while you’re taking care of your business, getting yourself some relief.

  This particular night it was bad, because if we were to have been pulled over, we were both on parole. So we would’ve both been locked up, and our child would have been taken from us.

  Underneath my withdrawal and terrible anxiety was a sure knowledge that I was leading the life that was going to lead to me losing the most precious thing I’d ever had in my life, which was that baby boy.

  I was so desperate at that moment, that I became willing to punch the numbers into the phone.

  The phone number was something my mother had sent me. Now, mind you, I hadn’t been speaking to my parents or anybody else for three, four, five years.

  But she’d managed to get this number to me by mail, and she said, “Look, this is a Christian counselor, and since you can’t talk to anybody else, maybe sometime you could call this person.”

  Now, I think it goes without saying that I wasn’t hanging real tight with that sort of thing in those days. But I was so anxious and in such a desperate state. I was emaciated, covered in bruises.

  I punched in the numbers. I heard the phone pick up.

  I heard a man say, “Hello.”

  And I said, “Hi, I got this number from my mother. Uh, do you think you could maybe talk to me?”

  I heard him shuffling around in the bed, you know? You could tell he was pulling some sheets around himself and sitting up. I heard a little radio in the background, and he snapped it off, and he became very present.

  He said, “Yes, yes, yes. What’s going on?”

  I hadn’t told anybody, including myself, the truth, for a long, long time. And I told him I wasn’t feeling so good, and that I was scared, and that things had gotten pretty bad in my marriage.

  Before long I started telling him other truths, like I might have a drug problem, and I really, really love my husband, and I wouldn’t want you to say anything bad about him, but he has hit me a few times. And there was a time when he pushed my child and me out into the cold and slammed the door behind us.

  And then there was a time when we were going sixty miles an hour down the highway, and he tried to push us out of the moving vehicle.

  I started telling those truths. And this man didn’t judge me. He just sat with me, and was present, and listened, and had such a kindness and such a gentleness.

  “Tell me more….Oh, that must hurt….Oh.”

  And do you know, I’d made that call at two in the morning. And he stayed up with me the whole night, just talking, just listening, just being there until the sun rose.

  By then I was feeling calm. The raw panic had passed. I was feeling okay.

  I was feeling like, I can splash my face with water today, and I can probably do this day.

  I wouldn’t have cared if the guy was like a Hare Krishna or a Buddhist—it didn’t matter to me what his faith was.

  I was very grateful to him, and so I said, “Hey, you know, I really appreciate you and what you’ve done for me tonight. Aren’t you supposed to be telling me to read some Bible verses or something? Because that’d be cool, I’ll do it, you know. It’s all right.”

  He laughed and said, “Well, I’m glad this was helpful to you.”

  And we talked some more, and I brought it up again.

  I said, “No, really. You’re very, very good at this. I mean, you’ve seriously done a big thing for me. How long have you been a Christian counselor?”

  There’s a long pause. I hear him shifting. “Auburn, please don’t hang up,” he says. “I’ve been trying not to bring this up.”

  “What?” I ask.

  “You won’t hang up?”
<
br />   “No.”

  “I’m so afraid to tell you this. But the number you called…” He pauses again. “You got the wrong number.”

  Well, I didn’t hang up on him, and we did talk a little longer. I never would get his name or call him back.

  But the next day I felt this kind of joy, like I was shining. I think I’ve heard them call it “the peace that passes understanding.” I had gotten to see that there was this completely random love in the universe. That it could be unconditional. And that some of it was for me.

  And I can’t tell you that I got my life totally together that day. But it became possible to get some help and get the hell out. And it also became possible as a teetotaling, semi-sane, single parent to raise up that precious, chocolate-covered baby boy into a magnificent young scholar and athlete, who graduated from Princeton University in 2013 with honors.

  This is what I know. In the deepest, blackest night of despair, if you can get just one pinhole of light…all of grace rushes in.

  AUBURN SANDSTROM is a senior lecturer (part-time) in college writing at the University of Akron. She won the Ohio Arts Council Award for fiction, a Citation for Teaching Excellence in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan, and a Cowden Award for fiction. She is a career college writing instructor with a master’s in fine arts (fiction), and she has an Ohio Language Arts Grades 7–12 Teaching Certification and an Ohio principal’s license grades 5–12. A longtime advocate for urban students, she is currently pursuing a PhD in urban education policy at Cleveland State University.

  This story was told on November 21, 2015, at the Academy of Music Theatre in Northampton, Massachusetts. The theme of the evening was Lost and Found. Director: Jenifer Hixson.

  The week of April Fools’ Day of 1981 began badly. That Sunday night my husband told me he was leaving me. He had fallen in love with one of his graduate students, and they were headed back to the tropics the next day.

  I was completely devastated. It was totally unexpected. Thirty-three years later, I still don’t know what to say about it. I was just beside myself.

  He gave me a new vacuum cleaner to soften the blow.

  It was the middle of spring quarter at Berkeley, so the next morning I had my class, as usual. And I had to either teach it or explain why not.

  It was far easier to teach it, so I dropped off our daughter, Emily—who was five and three-quarters at the time—at kindergarten, along with her faithful Aussie, her Australian shepherd, who went everywhere with her. I headed down to school and taught my class.

  As I was leaving, my department chairman caught up with me.

  He said, “Come into my office.”

  I said, “Fine.” (I had hoped to escape.)

  I went into his office, and he said, “I wanted to tell you, I’ve just learned you’ve been awarded tenure.”

  And of course I burst into tears.

  Now, this department chairman, bless him, was a gentleman a full generation older than me. He had three grown sons. He had no daughters. He had certainly never had a young woman assistant professor in his charge before.

  And he took my shoulders, and he stepped back, and he said, “No one’s ever reacted like that before.”

  He said, “Sit down, sit down. What’s the matter?”

  I said, “It’s not the tenure. It’s that my husband told me last night he was leaving me.”

  He looked at me, opened the drawer of his desk, pulled out a huge bottle of Jack Daniel’s, poured me a half a glass of it, and said, “Drink this. You’ll feel better.” It was nine thirty Monday morning.

  So I did—and I did. I made it through the day, got sober, and around three thirty headed back up the hill to pick up Emily from school. She hopped in the car with Ernie, her dog, and we drove home.

  We got home, walked up the stairs, opened the house…and it was absolute chaos.

  Someone had broken in. Everything was completely trashed. In retrospect what must have happened was that my then husband had often worked at home, and whoever had been casing the neighborhood must have left our house aside because he was often there. But that day, of course, he hadn’t been there, so we were vulnerable, and we were robbed.

  So I called 911, and a young Berkeley police officer came up and went through the house. Of course, I had no idea what had been taken and what hadn’t, because my husband had taken many things with him Sunday night. I wasn’t sure what should still be there or not.

  I explained that to Officer Rodriguez, and he said, “As you figure it out, make a list.”

  Then he went upstairs with Emily. They opened the door of her room, and it was eighteen inches deep of just chaos. The bed had been pulled apart, curtains pulled down, drawers all dumped out.

  Emily—five and three-quarters—looked at Officer Rodriguez and said, “I can’t tell if the burglars were in here or not.”

  And Officer Rodriguez, to his eternal credit, did not crack a smile. He handed her his card and said, “Young lady, if you discover that anything is missing, please give me a call.”

  So now it’s Monday night. I was scheduled later that week to give a presentation in Washington, DC, to the National Institutes of Health. The way this worked in those days was, if you were a young professor, applying for the first time for a large grant, you were quite frequently asked to come to the NIH and give what was called a “reverse site visit.” You’d explain what you planned to do, and then it would be decided if you were going to be granted quite a substantial amount of money over five years.

  It was terribly important. I had not done this before. It was brand-new. It was going to be my first large grant on my own.

  The plan had been for Emily to stay with her dad and for my mom to come out, arriving the next day—Tuesday—to help out. That had seemed, at the time, like a great plan.

  My mom, who was living in Chicago, obviously didn’t know anything about the events of the previous twenty-four hours, so I thought, I’ll just wait and explain it to her when she gets here.

  It seemed far better than calling her at what, by now, was quite late in Chicago because of all the business with the burglary and the police and all that.

  So the next day, we picked up my mom at San Francisco Airport, and driving back to Berkeley, I explained to her what happened on Sunday.

  She was very, very upset.

  She said, “I can’t believe you’ve let this family come apart. I can’t believe this child will grow up without a father” (which was never true and has never been true since).

  “How could you do this? How could you not put your family first?” Emily was sitting there in the car.

  And, “I just cannot imagine,” she said. “I’m going to go talk to Rob.”

  I said, “He’s back in Costa Rica.”

  “This just can’t be,” and she became more and more upset. By the time we got home to Berkeley, she was extremely agitated. Emily was terrified. It was clearly not going to work for her to care for Emily.

  After a couple of hours, my mom said, “I’m going home. I just can’t imagine that this has happened. You must stay here and take care of your child. How can you even think of running off to the East Coast at a time like this?”

  To put it into context now, years later, my father had died not long before, after my mom had nursed him for more than twenty years. Just two months after this visit, my mother was diagnosed with epilepsy. So, in context, her reaction was not as irrational as it seemed in that moment, but at the time, of course, it was devastating.

  So I said, “Okay. You’re right. I’ll arrange for you to have a ticket to go home tomorrow. We’ll take you out to the airport, and I’ll cancel the trip.”

  I called my mentor, who had been my postdoc adviser at UC San Francisco until just a couple of years before.

  He was already in Washington, DC, by happenstance at an oncology meeting, and I said, “I’m not going to be able to come,” and I explained briefly what had happened.

  Of course, he knew
me well. And he just listened to all this.

  He had grown daughters and said, “Look, come.”

  I said, “I can’t.”

  He said, “Bring Emily. Emily and I know each other. I’ll sit with her while you’re giving your presentation.” He had grandchildren of his own.

  He said, “It will be fine.”

  I said, “She doesn’t have a ticket.”

  He said, “As soon as we hang up the phone, I’m going to call the airline and get her a ticket. Pick up the ticket at the airport tomorrow when you take your mom back. It’ll be on the same flight as yours. Everything will be fine.”

  I said, “You sure?”

  And he said, “Yes. I have to call the airline now. Good night,” and he hung up.

  (In those days it was very easy to rearrange tickets.)

  I arranged for my mother to have a ticket to go back to Chicago. Her flight was at ten o’clock in the morning. So we left Berkeley in plenty of time, in principle, to get to San Francisco Airport. But it was one of those days where the Bay Bridge was just totally jammed up. It was a horrible drive across. What should have been a drive of forty-five minutes took an hour and forty-five minutes.

  When we finally arrived, my mom’s flight was about to leave in fifteen minutes, Emily’s and my flight was going to leave in forty-five minutes, and in front of the counter to pick up tickets was a long, long line. And, of course, we had our suitcases. My mom was carrying hers, and she was already fairly frail.

  So Emily and my mother and I were standing in the line, and I said, “Mom, can you make it down to your plane on your own?” Bear in mind, there were no checkpoints in those days, but there were, of course, very long corridors.

  She said, “No.”

  So I said to Emily, “I’m going to need to go with Grandmom down to her plane.”