Think of a Number

“But…”

Gurney raised his hand like the serious young traffic cop he had been for his first six months in the NYPD. “Sit down. Relax. I’m sure we can figure it out.”

Chapter 5

Unpleasant possibilities

Madeleine brought a pair of iced teas to the two men and returned to the house. The smell of warm grass filled the air. The temperature was close to seventy. A swarm of purple finches descended on the thistle-seed feeders. The sun, the colors, the aromas were intense, but wasted on Mellery, whose anxious thoughts seemed to occupy him completely.

As they sipped their teas, Gurney tried to assess the motives and honesty of his guest. He knew that labeling someone too early in the game could lead to mistakes, but doing so was often irresistible. The main thing was to be aware of the fallibility of the process and be willing to revise the label as new information became available.

His gut feeling was that Mellery was a classic phony, a pretender on many levels, who to some extent believed his own pretenses. His accent, for example, which had been present even in the college days, was an accent from nowhere, from some imaginary place of culture and refinement. Surely it was no longer put on-it was an integral part of him-but its roots lay in imaginary soil. The expensive haircut, the moisturized skin, the flawless teeth, the exercised physique, and the manicured fingernails suggested a top-shelf televangelist. His manner was that of a man eager to appear at ease in the world, a man in cool possession of everything that eludes ordinary humans. Gurney realized all this had been present in a nascent form twenty-six years earlier. Mark Mellery had simply become more of what he’d always been.

“Had it occurred to you to go to the police?” asked Gurney.

“I didn’t think there was any point. I didn’t think they’d do anything. What could they do? There was no specific threat, nothing that couldn’t be explained away, no actual crime. I didn’t have anything concrete to take to them. A couple of nasty little poems? A warped high-school kid could have written them, someone with a weird sense of humor. And since the police wouldn’t really do anything or, worse yet, would treat it as a joke, why would I waste my time going to them?”

Gurney nodded, unconvinced.

“Besides,” Mellery went on, “the idea of the local police grabbing hold of this and launching a full-scale investigation, questioning people, coming up to the institute, badgering present and former guests-some of our guests are sensitive people-stomping around and raising all sorts of hell, poking into things that are none of their business, maybe getting the press involved… Christ! I can just see the headlines-‘Spiritual Author Gets Death Threats’-and the turmoil that would raise…” Mellery’s voice trailed off, and he shook his head as if mere words could not describe the damage the police might cause.

Gurney responded with a look of bafflement.

“What’s wrong?” Mellery asked.

“Your two reasons for not contacting the police contradict each other.”

“How?”

“You didn’t contact the police because you were afraid they wouldn’t do anything. And you didn’t contact them because you were afraid they would do too much.”

“Ah, yes… but both statements are true. The common element is my fear of the matter’s being handled ineptly. Police ineptness might take the form of a lackadaisical approach or a bumbling bulls-in-the-china-shop approach. Inept lassitude or inept aggressiveness-you see what I mean?”

Gurney had the feeling he’d just watched someone stub his toe and turn it into a pirouette. He wasn’t quite buying it. In his experience when a man gave two reasons for a decision, it was likely that a third reason-the real one-had been left unstated.

As if tuned to the wavelength of Gurney’s thought, Mellery said suddenly, “I need to be more honest with you, more open about my concerns. I can’t expect you to help me unless I show you the whole picture. In my forty-seven years, I’ve led two distinctly different lives. For the first two-thirds of my existence on this earth, I was on the wrong path, going nowhere good but getting there fast. It started in college. After college it got worse. The drinking increased, the chaos increased. I got involved in dealing drugs to an upmarket clientele and became friends with my customers. One was so impressed with my ability to spin a line of bullshit that he gave me a job on Wall Street selling bullshit stock deals over the phone to people greedy and stupid enough to believe that doubling their investment in three months was a real possibility. I was good at it, and I made a lot of money, and the money was my rocket fuel into lunacy. I did whatever I felt like doing, and most of it I can’t remember, because most of the time I was blind drunk. For ten years I worked for a succession of brilliant, thieving scumbags. Then my wife died. You wouldn’t have known, but I had gotten married the year after we graduated.”

Mellery reached for his glass. He drank thoughtfully, as though the taste were an idea forming in his mind. When the glass was half empty, he placed it on the arm of the chair, stared at it for a moment, then resumed his story.

“Her death was a monumental event. It had a greater effect on me than all the events of our fifteen years of marriage combined. I hate to admit this, but it was only through her death that my wife’s life had any real impact on me.”

Gurney got the impression that this neat irony, spoken as haltingly as though it had just come to mind, was being delivered for the hundredth time. “How did she die?”

“The whole story is in my first book, but here’s the short ugly version. We were on vacation on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. One evening at sunset, we were sitting on a deserted beach. Erin decided to go for a swim. She’d usually go out about a hundred feet and swim back and forth parallel to the shore, as if she were doing laps in a pool. She was religious about exercise.” He paused, letting his eyes drift shut.

“Is that what she did that night?”

“What?”

“You said that’s what she usually did.”

“Oh, I see. Yes, I think that’s what she did that night. The truth is, I’m really not sure because I was drunk. Erin went in the water; I stayed on the beach with my thermos of martinis.” A tic had appeared at the corner of his left eye.

“Erin drowned. The people who discovered her body, floating in the water fifty feet from shore, also discovered me, passed out on the beach in a drunken stupor.”

After a pause he continued in a strained voice, “I imagine she had a cramp or… I don’t know what… but I imagine… she may have called to me-” He broke off, closed his eyes again, and massaged the tic. When he opened them, he looked around as if taking in his surroundings for the first time.

“This is a lovely place you have,” he said with a sad smile.

“You said her death had a powerful effect on you?”

“Oh, yes, a powerful effect.”

“Right away or later?”

“Right away. It’s a cliche, but I had what is called ‘a moment of clarity.’ It was more painful, more revelatory than anything I’ve experienced before or since. I saw vividly for the first time in my life the path I was on and how insanely destructive it was. I don’t want to liken myself to Paul being knocked off his horse on the way to Damascus, but the fact is, from that moment on I did not want to take another step down that path.” He spoke these words with resounding conviction.

He could teach a sales course called Resounding Conviction, mused Gurney.

“I signed myself in to an alcohol detox because it seemed the right thing to do. After detox I went into therapy. I wanted to be sure I’d found the truth and not lost my mind. The therapist was encouraging. I ended up going back to school and getting two graduate degrees, one in psychology and one in counseling. One of my classmates was the pastor of a Unitarian church, and he asked me to come and talk about my ‘conversion’-that was his word for it, not mine. The talk was a success. It grew into a series of lectures that I gave at a dozen other Unitarian churches,