Life's Golden Ticket (4 page)

“What now?” I asked quietly, still choked up.

“Now we see the wizard.”

I
pushed through the tent flap and stopped in my tracks. The outside of the tent couldn't have been more than thirty feet by thirty. Inside, though, a different view made me blink in disbelief. I was standing at the top of an immense underground cavern.

I turned to Henry, and gasped.

He chuckled. “And you thought
Betty
was big.”

The cavern opened out like a large concert hall. I looked down on what looked like a hundred rows of stadium-style seating, squinting to see the stage at the far end. The space was dimly lit, with hundreds of bare lightbulbs along the sidewalls. Limestone formations rose from the ground here and there and hung from the ceiling. The air was musty, but charged with excitement and the clamor of voices.

“Let's hurry up and go down front,” Henry said and began descending the stairway.

How can this be possible?
I turned around and pushed the tent flap back open. Cool air breezed in, and I saw that the lights illuminating the open square had been turned off. The stillness seemed dreamlike. I
took a step outside to examine how a small tent could hold such a massive cavern.

“Believe me,” Henry called from behind, “the show is in here.”

He waved me toward him with a childlike smile. Dropping the flap, I started toward the stage. The stairs seemed larger than normal, and I felt like a kid climbing down boulders. The noise in the cavern grew with anticipation. I passed rows and rows of people. Many of them smiled at me as I worked my way down. Some talked excitedly with one another, while others just sat quietly, in awe at the grandeur of the space.

When we neared the bottom of the cavern, I turned around to see its true expansiveness. I whispered, “There must be
two thousand
people in here.”

“It's something, isn't it?” Henry smiled broadly and gestured to me to sit in one of two open seats next to the aisle, about five rows back from the stage.

As I sat the lights suddenly turned off, and the crowd hushed.

Moments passed, and a soft blue spotlight beam illuminated a stool. I heard murmurs from the front and could just make out the dark outline of two people climbing the stairs at the right of the stage. A small girl and an old man wearing a hooded white cloak came into view as they neared the spotlight. The girl helped him forward, eased him onto the stool, pulled back his hood, and then ran offstage.

I shifted in my seat to get a better look. The old man looked like a stereotypical comic book wizard: long, flowing white hair and a long white beard. His cloak was tied in the middle with a simple gold-colored rope and fell over his feet. The wrinkles on his face said he was old; his hunched posture and inability to get to the stool on his own said he was
really
old.

He sat, eyes closed in silence. An entire minute passed, then another . . . and another. The crowd began to mumble. The blue spotlight gave him an eerie cast, as if he were cold and dead. Another minute. I turned to say something to Henry when the wizard raised one gaunt finger. The crowd fell silent again. Another minute.

Then he opened his startling blue eyes and sat straight up. His face grew animated, as if he had inhaled life itself.

“Friends,” he said, drawing out the word, “welcome. Everything you have ever experienced in your life has served a purpose: it has brought you here, to this exact point. Your struggles and your survival and your tragedies and your triumphs brought you here. To this night. To this hour. To this moment.” The wizard's rich, deep voice resonated throughout the cavern. The slight echo and the silent beginning brought a sense of importance and occasion to his words.

“You have come here because you received an invitation. You are all the same. You all surely felt your mother's embrace as a child. You all played with toys. All saw fireworks. Felt the nervousness of a first date. Heard the sting of criticism. Shrugged off conformity, then embodied it. Took a job. Sought love, gave love, lost love, sought it again. Grew stronger, wiser, more cynical. Cherished the glory days, bewailed the gloomy days, prayed for better days. And now you are here. And
I
am here to guide you through the next moments.”

The wizard seemed to become younger with every word he spoke. His physical frailty was overshadowed by the power of his voice.

“Now, friends, to the question that was in your head when you arrived at this magical place, the question that echoed in your mind as you stood in line outside. The question that flashed across your eyes when you saw this cavern and sat on its cool stone, anticipating what might come next. The question of all humanity . . .”

“
. . . Why . . . am . . . I . . . here?
”

As he spoke the question, I felt myself release a breath that I hadn't even known I was holding. A collective sigh rose from the crowd.

The wizard's eyes sparkled as he heard recognition, and a lively grin stole over his face. “Oh, good. With all the buildup, I was hoping to get that right.”

The crowd erupted into rolling laughter. The wizard practically glowed onstage.

“I have wandered this park for decades,” he continued. “I know that everyone who has ever entered its gates has asked, ‘
Why have I come here?
' And after all this time I have come to realize that the
answer to this question, like all great questions, lies in the question itself.”

He paused and leaned so far forward that he looked as though he might fall off his stool. “Listen closely, for I am but a weak old wizard,” he said, as if about to tell the greatest secret in the world.

I found myself leaning forward too.

“Friends,” he said softly in a voice of occasion and finality, “you have
come
here so that you may
be
come.” He drew in a breath and sat silently surveying the crowd's reaction to his words.

I replayed the line in my head:
You have
come
here so that you may
be
come.
Become what? The line felt a little anticlimactic. I looked to Henry for his reaction and found him still eyeing the wizard. I looked down the row and saw that most people were similarly enthralled—you could hear a pin drop.

The wizard wiggled back to the center of the stool. “I suspect that my answer, friends, has only brought you more questions. Maybe this is a good answer, then. It lets me speak a little longer before they put me back in the dungeon.”

The crowd laughed once again.

He continued. “Now, the problem with my statement is that you can't help but ask the question: ‘Become what?'”

I nodded.

“‘Become
what?
' has become ingrained in your brains. You've been raised with the question ‘
What
should I
do
with my life?' That question, of course, is secondary. The primary question is, ‘
Who
should I
be
in my life?'

“You are here because you are restless over who you have
be
come. It is not your dissatisfaction with your job or what you
do
that has brought you to this park. It is not dissatisfaction with your family. Or your relationship. Or your finances. Or your neighborhood or your home or your car. It is a quiet dissatisfaction with
yourself,
with
who
you have become. You feel there is something
more
inside you, and you have come here searching for ways to dig it up and unleash it into the world. Deep down, you
know
you are more than what society has said you are or told you to be, and you are here to begin the great quest of proving it to the world and to yourself.

“I am here for one reason: to help you break a sinister spell that has held you in its thrall most of your adult lives. Yes, a spell. You have been hexed. You have been cursed. You have been hypnotized into believing something so insidious that it has jeopardized your ability to live the life you
deserve.
You have been lured into a lie that has controlled your mind and contaminated your life, a lie that has prevented you from being your best, from taking risks, from having the confidence and strength needed to seize the life that you've always wanted.”

The wizard's voice had been building in passion, and he nearly fell off the stool at the end of his sentence.

“Friends,” he said moments later, scooting back again to the center of the stool, “forgive my passion. But this spell is powerful, and you must be made aware of it. Though you cannot recall it ever happening, a spell has been cast upon you, and it has mesmerized you into believing that
you are not good enough
and that
there is something wrong with you.
This spell is Society's Spell, and it has made you secretly feel inadequate, ugly, weak, slow, small, useless, and helpless for far too long. Tonight
we break that spell.
”

The wizard paused and examined the crowd once more. Everyone was pressed to the backs of their seats; the force of the wizard's words had rolled over us like a great wave.

The wizard took a deep breath and eyed the ground. He spoke in an apologetic tone. “Unfortunately, I lack the power to break this spell on you. I don't have the time or the skills to completely break Society's Spell—you have unwittingly allowed it to control your life for too long, and my time is almost up. But there is good news,” he said, his voice lifting. “
You
can begin to break the spell tonight, with this journey. Since you are the only one who can truly control your mind, you can defeat the spell. How do you break it?”

Now he slowly shifted to the edge of the stool.

“First, you must recognize that a spell exists. This one is easy. Look to little children. Watch them play and crawl and be. Does any child believe there is something wrong with himself or herself? No. Do small children routinely, if ever, experience the onslaught of negative emotions like insecurity, doubt, sadness, or depression? No. You see,
you weren't
born
feeling badly about yourself, you were taught to feel that way. Here's more fundamental evidence. If, when I say to you, ‘You are not good enough,' you do not have a
strong
reaction, a need to fight and argue with me or at least to scoff at me and brush me aside, then there is a spell on you. And it is neutralizing your innate desire to stand up for yourself and become the person you were destined to be.

“If you can believe this, then you have taken the first step . . . and you will be able to take the second and third. The second step is to interrupt the spell—to question or tune out society's messages, as well as those in your mind, that make you question your strength. The third step is to start living your life by conscious control. In your adventure here, you will take these steps and we will help you.”

The wizard slowly tottered to his feet and shuffled to the front of the stage.

“Clearly, there is much ahead of you tonight. But now I simply want to impart an old magician's secret: to break a spell, you must override it with a more powerful magic. If you want to break Society's Spell, you must mix a magic within you that can overpower it. That magic, which I am sure you have long forgotten to stir within your soul, is
hope.
You must flood your entire being with the hope that you
can
start anew, that there
is
more out there for you, that you
will
become the powerful person you were destined to become.”

He moved to the very edge of the stage and leaned out toward us.

“Of course, to many of you all this might sound like nonsense, this idea of a dark spell and a potion of hope. That's okay. It won't be until the end of your journey that you will understand how far away you are now from where you could be. Hindsight, they say . . .”

Two light, quick taps to my left shoulder diverted my attention from the wizard. I looked left and saw the small girl who had accompanied him onto the stage. She motioned for Henry and me to stand and follow her. “Hurry,” she said, “you're not supposed to be here.”

T
he girl led Henry and me down a long, dark hallway carved from the limestone bedrock behind the stage. We arrived at an oversize wooden door, and she motioned for me to open it. Inside, a damp, dark room sat unfilled except for a wooden bench.

“Sit,” she said. “I'll fetch the wizard.”

A few minutes later the wooden door opened with a crash, and the wizard entered out of breath.

“Henry,” he asked, seemingly upset, “where is this man's invitation?”

Henry instructed me to give the wizard Mary's envelope, and I obliged, confused.

The old man peered at it closely, gave Henry a quick, startled look, then returned his attention to the envelope. He began nodding knowingly and looked up at me with tears in his eyes.

“Young man,” he said, “are you ready to hear Mary's story?”