determination to hold off that unruly second for as long as it took. Max was alongside me-his expression said he hadn’t expected this, but that wasn’t the same as saying he looked surprised.
“So,” Avery emoted into the spotlights, dragging out the word to comic effect, “So-you know this-I have a standard talk I give. I start with notes and wing it-in Trieste and Bucharest. By the time I’ve gotten to Tokyo and Paris, I know what I mean to say and it doesn’t change much after that. ”
Avery took a pause, a theatrical moment of taking in the audience from one end of to the other.
“But every year, this one is different. Because this is not your average audience. When this audience gets mad, you call the Vice President at his undisclosed location-and he takes the call!”
(Laughter from the audience)
“Most people dream of hitting the jackpot. You people own the casino. Which is the only role worth having in a casino, by the way. So-if you’re so powerful, so accomplished: Why spend money to watch me talk? Not even sing.”
More laughter. This time, though, Avery’s smile was harder, tougher, his eyes piercing.
“This year, we know why you’re here. Because the world’s gotten shaky for everyone. Even you guys. Fabled businesses have got the heaves, basic systems-water, power, investing-all look questionable. The best information money can buy is full of half-truths and gossip. Nothing’s a sure thing anymore. And you guys have gotten used to the sure thing.”
The gaping hall was dead silent. No polite conversation, no jokes, no competition for attention. He had them and, as close as we were to him, it was clear he knew it. Now the ease slipped out of his voice-the tone got sharper, more challenging.
“Which is the problem. You’ve forgotten where you come from. Chaos, turmoil-they’re opportunities! Those are just the conditions that made you. I always talk about Hope but you know Hope isn’t Kumbaya, why can’t we be friends? Hope is how you get knocked down ten times and get up eleven. No hope means the best idea in history doesn’t get built. Hope is what told you, years ago, that you could conquer the world.
“ Hope’s come easy for you guys for quite a while now,” Avery said, holding his laser smile with a satisfaction that had to be the dead opposite of the way his audience felt. “Well-guess what? You’re going to have to dig a little deeper for it now.”
“So say it with me:” Avery called. “ I have hope ” and the audience responded in unison, once and again, a second, third and fourth time, volume rising, the words ringing through the hall. “ I have hope. And this one: It’s MY World. Again: It’s MY World.” They chanted every phrase he prompted, over and over, several thousand voices including mine.
How many times had I heard Avery give this speech on TV? When I couldn’t sleep at night-when I was afraid to try-I’d sit in the living room of Dave’s house and watch him stalk back and forth across some stage somewhere in the world talking like this. But, this close, I felt the raw power he had to lift a person’s spirit. The thought that kept turning over in my head was: I have every reason to feel good about myself. There I was, at the edge of the stage, in plastic handcuffs, surrounded by Pietr Volkov and ten guards, feeling buoyant somehow, thrilled, transported. I felt the power of Avery’s message filling me up.
“Funny how it works, isn’t it?” Avery said, flashing that famous smile (The Billion Dollar Smile — Newsweek) as the chants died away. “They’re just words and I can’t pretend they’re all that articulate either-yet just saying them lifts our spirits. What vision do you carry inside you today? What World are you creating right now? Tonight? Tomorrow? When hope fuels our visions, we start making them real.”
“We should move on,” Volkov said and the guard led us to the back of the stage and opened a door-in-a- door-a normal-sized door set into a huge unload-the-tractor-trailer door. On the other side, where you would have expected scenery or at least machinery-or, since Avery worked alone on a bare stage, a wide expanse of empty space-we found a room filled with people, mostly young people in the lotus position, eyes closed and breathing deeply.
As we passed a whiteboard in the front of the room, I read:
Here. Now. Your Assigned Seats
The World Crushes the Average Person But I Am NOT Average
The Rules Don’t Apply To Me-I Can Accomplish Anything
I Have Every Reason To Feel Good About Myself
We funneled through a side door to a row of dressing rooms-the guard showed us into the second. It looked like the ones I’d seen in the movies-a small table set against a mirrored wall, a love seat, several chairs and a bathroom door. I would have taken the room for a spare except for the opened basket of fruit and two trays of organic cookies, each individually wrapped in plastic with hippyish hand-lettered labels. The guards let us sit and even removed Max’s goggles but not our hand ties. I certainly wasn’t comfortable but nobody had waved a Glock under my nose in a while and I took that as an good sign. Improvement’s where you find it.
And then, all at once, Max straightened up and looked around like a shot, startled. I looked around too in reaction, wondering what I’d missed. Max turned to Volkov and said, “It’s quiet.” His eyes were wide as though something miraculous had happened. “No voices. I can’t hear anything.”
“Yes,” Volkov breathed. “It’s peaceful, isn’t it?”
“How do you do it?”
“White noise generators,” Volkov explained. “Like the ones that suppress noise in headphones-whatever noise they detect, they send out the opposite waveform and nullify it. We’ve retuned ours to work on brainwaves. Just like the goggles we gave you on the way over. We knew you’d show up eventually, Maximka-we prepared.”
So, I thought, we’re disarmed. Then again, so are they, except for the guns.
And then the door opened and Jim Avery walked in. “Max!” he said, holding out his hand. When he saw the plastic ties, he glanced at Volkov and then upward-I thought immediately of the white noise machines. “Are those necessary?” he said sharply.
“Not here,” Volkov shrugged.
“Then let’s get them off,” Avery said pleasantly, as though they’d forced us to wear clown hats or something. He held out his hand to shake, saying ‘Jim Avery’ as though I wouldn’t know who he was. He was as tall in person as he looked on TV and shiny, like his cheeks had that wax they put on apples. But he didn’t wait for my name.
“I’ll eventually find a way around your machine,” Max said, nodding toward the ceiling. “You won’t hold me long.”
“Max,” Avery cooed, the TV smile appearing like a flare over a battlefield, “you seriously think we planned to hold you with plastic ties? And an anti-noise machine? Give us a little credit.” He sat opposite us, the back of his head appearing in twenty mirrors, like salt-‘n-pepper tulips. “The machines keep us from interfering with our kids in the back room. They’re busy ‘influencing’ our guests for another few minutes while they file into the parking lot. If you’re paying for a seminar on Hope, you’d better leave feeling hopeful, don’t you think?”
He gestured at Max’s wrists. “As to the ties, I simply knew you wouldn’t come any other way. Miriam shouldn’t have made such a fuss in Raleigh-I was very stern with her about that. My plan is for us to have a good talk. I’m not going to hold anything back with you-I think you’ll be very impressed with what we’re doing. You’ll listen to what I have to say, won’t you? Without trying to escape?” Max thought about it for a moment and then nodded. Avery glanced at Volkov. “We should go,” he said and a moment later, we were out in the hall, surrounded by bodyguards and hustling toward the back of the building.
It occurred to me to run-I’d made no promises-but the guards were still all around us and, as soon as we stepped outside, there was Marat, Old Leatherface with his flickering fingertips. I saw Max look him up and down while we piled back into the big black SUV; it quickly rolled down the driveway past the few remaining cars and out toward the same bridge we came in over.
“I can’t tell you the impression you made on me, those years ago,” Avery told Max, watching his reaction like the performer he was. “I remember you lamenting there was nothing positive you could do with your gifts,” he continued, pointing out the tinted windows at the last stragglers leaving his lecture. “This is just a tiny part of what we do, Max, but I think we help. People come to me in distress and anxiety. Whether their anxiety is real or imagined, it can be crippling. And they leave feeling good about themselves. They can’t help it.”
“You might even say they have no choice,” Max replied, smiling as loosely as he knew how. I’d seen all his smiles by that point. “Where’d all this come from, Jim? You certainly weren’t so chipper as the Senator’s Chief of Staff.” Avery’s smile vanished suddenly; the words came out of his mouth clenched, struggling for air.
