John Verdon: Think of a Number

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 cliché, 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, and the lectures turned into my first book. The book became the basis of a three-part series for PBS. Then that was distributed as a set of videotapes.

“A lot of stuff like that happened-a stream of coincidences that carried me from one good thing to another. I was invited to do a series of private seminars for some extraordinary people-who also happened to be extraordinarily wealthy. That led to the founding of the Mellery Institute for Spiritual Renewal. The people who come there love what I do. I know how egomaniacal that sounds, but it’s true. I have people who come back year after year to hear essentially the same lectures, to go through the same spiritual exercises. I hesitate to say this, because it sounds so pretentious, but as a result of Erin’s death I was reborn into an amazing new life.”

His eyes moved restlessly, giving the impression of being focused on a private landscape. Madeleine came out, removed their empty glasses, and asked if they wanted refills, which they declined. Mellery mentioned again what a lovely place they had.

“You said that you wanted to be more honest with me about your concerns,” prompted Gurney.

“Yes. It has to do with my drinking years. I was a blackout drinker. I had serious memory blackouts-some lasting an hour or two, some longer. In the final years, I had them every time I drank. That’s a lot of time, a lot of things I’ve done, that I have no recollection of. When I was drunk, I wasn’t choosy about who I was with or what I did. Frankly, the alcohol references in those nasty little notes I showed you are the reason I’m so upset. My emotions the past few days have been bouncing back and forth between upset and terrified.”

Despite his skepticism, Gurney was struck by something authentic in Mellery’s tone. “Tell me more,” he said.

During the ensuing half hour, it became clear that there was not a lot more Mellery was willing or able to tell. He did, however, return to one point that obsessed him.

“How in the name of God could he have known what number I would think of? I have gone over in my mind people I’ve known, places I’ve been, addresses, zip codes, phone numbers, dates, birthdays, license plates, even prices of things-anything with numbers-and there’s nothing I associate with six fifty-eight. It’s driving me crazy!”

“It might be more useful to focus on simpler questions. For instance…”

But Mellery wasn’t listening. “I have no sense that six fifty-eight means anything at all. But it must mean something. And whatever it means, someone else knows about it. Someone else knows that six fifty-eight is significant enough to me that it would be the first number I would think of. I can’t get my mind around that. It’s a nightmare!”