Viral (18 page)

But then again, perhaps it is a complete stranger, someone who doesn't seem quite right when you look at him. Maybe he's shaped strangely, as if his limbs had been stapled to one another after they were manufactured separately rather than growing altogether the way normal people do. When he moves, it might be in a disjointed, marionette way, one muscle at a time, so when he turns to look at you, he moves only his head, not his neck or body. You see his face in the dim, watery light of the single bulb stuck in the low ceiling and it looks like a cloth bag full of flour, white and ponderous; his eyes are nearly swallowed up by it. He is tall and broad and he is wearing an old leather jacket that is too small for him and that looks like he found it in the trash. His white T-shirt and jeans are covered with the dark blotches of grease stains the size of fingerprints. His hair is like the stubble after a field has burned.

Have the elevator doors slid closed yet? If they have not, you could wait for the next car, although who knows how long that will take, or you could just get in and ignore the person standing in the corner. It could be that he won't do anything, that he is just an unfortunately unattractive man with dirty clothes, someone who's had a hard time for reasons that you can't know. Your forebodings could very well be just your own shallow judgment based on his appearance. You'll have to make up your mind and get in the elevator to find out. Whatever you decide, could you consider doing it soon? It is time to go on to the next part of the exercise.

Have you stepped inside? Press the button to go down to the lowest floor. Watch the doors slide closed. Is there a man beside you in the car? Is the man watching you? Look over. Don't be too obvious about it, because if he does turn out to be a threat of some kind, you don't want to provoke him. The doors have just slid shut and now you are inside the elevator, trapped there until it gets to the bottom of the shaft and that could be a long time, depending on whether the elevator is fast or slow. If you imagined a corridor in a municipal government building or something like it, this is probably a slow elevator that takes whole minutes to go through each floor. I wish you had followed my advice and that you are in an elevator in a Ritz-Carlton somewhere, but we'll just have to make the best of what you've created here.

It's descending now, you can feel that wobbly, lifted feeling you always feel when you ride in elevators. There are numbers on a panel by the door and you watch the lights blink as you pass each floor. The man beside you, if there is one, makes a noise that is somewhere between a grumble and a snort. It's possible he smells. Only you can know what the ingredients of that odor are and whether it is mild or strong, a faint whiff or a stench so powerful it starts to make your eyes water.

Don't blame me if that is happening. I didn't put the man into the elevator with you, you did. In fact, I told you to imagine the elevator was empty and then warned you not to get in the elevator if it was occupied. So this is not my fault. However, although it is not my fault, I will nevertheless try to help you deal with this problem you've created. Don't thank me; it's my job.

So, if you can, try to visualize him disappearing, winking out, the way the picture on the television used to become a white dot in the middle of the screen before it vanished. Close the eyes inside your head, the ones you are using to see the corridor and the elevator and the man, and concentrate hard. Be warned that it is easier to imagine something into being than it is to make it go away, particularly if it is something unpleasant that you don't want to think about. Unwanted, looming things have a tendency to hang around more insistently the more you try to get rid of them. So don't be disappointed if you open your eyes again (inside your head) and find that he's still there.

Open one of your mind's eyes cautiously. Is he gone? He is? Thank god for that. Now we can get back on track and work on relaxing without such a powerful distraction.

Finally you feel the elevator come to rest. After a moment, the doors are going to slide open and you will look outside. But before they do that, wait a moment. Don't let the doors open yet. Listen to me first. Only if you want to of course, nothing is mandatory. But this is important and if you've bothered to come this far, you might as well hear what I have to say, don't you think? Because I want to warn you about something.

Beyond the open elevator doors is the place that you have been longing to go but didn't even know it. What is it like? I can't tell you that. It is whatever place makes you feel like you belong there. That will be different for each of you. Once I tried this exercise with a man who, when the doors opened, saw his own office with its desk and chair and telephone. He was a lawyer and it turned out that what he really liked most in the world was to be at work, with the clock of his billable hours ticking by nicely while he prepared divorce papers or personal injury suits or last wills and testaments. At home, with his beautiful wife and three small children, he was always slightly on edge; he felt like he was an actor playing a father and flubbing almost half his lines and most of his entrances and exits. He would come into his office on Monday and experience a great surge of relief, but it was not until he opened those elevator doors and saw his favorite place—as he had always in his heart of hearts known it to be—that he could admit this to himself. He was happier after that; it changed his life but only because he was honest.

What I'm telling you is this, and I hope you'll listen to me because I am after all the one guiding this meditation: be honest. It might be that your favorite place is a lovely, bosky forest glen with the smell of pine trees and a crystal-clear blue lake beyond with a waterfall emptying into it in the distance, blah, blah, blah. There might be deer grazing amid the shafts of sunlight and a breeze ruffling the leaves. But really, the number of times I've gone around the “sharing circle” after a class and someone has talked about a place just like that, or about being on a beach with golden sand, or about a garden full of blooming flowers like one they saw when they were a child, well, please, if I got paid for each time that occurred, I would not have bothered to make this recording because I'd be too busy shopping. And for at least half of those people, I knew that they were not telling the truth, that they were telling me about a place they thought they were supposed to like, what they'd seen in advertisements on television and on color-enhanced postcards from the 1970s. Not the place that really, deep down in their hearts, they truly longed for.

You can make up something like that if you want. There's nothing I can do to stop you because it's your mind and your desire and only you can know if you have really told yourself the truth. You may not even know you are lying to yourself when you look out of those elevator doors and see a Disney-style castle with white spires and banners waving and liveried footmen and a red carpet leading you inside. Or a boat the shape of a swan filled with silken cushions and all the chocolate you can eat. You might really believe that is the place you long to be. And perhaps you will be right. But I don't think so.

It is much more likely that the place you really want to be above all others is not like that at all. It is likely to be a place that no one else could possibly guess, that other people may not find beautiful or even remotely appealing. To give you an example: my place is a supermarket parking lot. There, I've told you. When I was a child, my mother always bought me an ice-cream cone after she was finished with the groceries, and when I think about my happiest memories, they are of walking across the asphalt to the car after my mother and her rattling cart, taking the first cold bite. It meant that all was right with the world and that week my father wouldn't open the cupboard door in the kitchen and say, “Why the hell isn't there any food in this house?” and my mother wouldn't throw something or storm upstairs to cry. When I think about that parking lot I feel one thing: safe. And for that reason it is beautiful to me, the way the parking spaces make their golden grid on the black asphalt, the way the cars slide in and out of their spaces fitting in like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, like they were meant to be there.

So now you know. That's all I have to say. You can go ahead, when you are ready, and let the doors slide open. Look at what is outside. Step through the doors. Walk forward and explore this place that you have come so far to find. Look around and listen and touch things and, above all, do not be afraid.

Oh, one more thing. There may be some of you who, when you tried to make the weird man inside the elevator disappear, did not succeed. When you looked again, he was still there, waiting in the corner, not speaking, looking at his shoes, which you had just noticed were unnaturally large even for so tall a person. The shoes were thick-soled and looked like they might have steel toes. Also, there was a bit of spittle at the corner of his mouth, whitish and congealed. This unnerved you even more and you felt your heart beating and you could not wait for the elevator doors to open so you could get out of there and run away from this weird, rumbling, ugly creature.

As I said before, I don't know what you should do about the man. Now that the elevator doors are open, you could, as you planned, run away from him, into the place you've dreamed up and perhaps you'll lose him among the giant ferns or bookshelves or whatever might be out there. But you might not. He could come after you and find you. He might be able to run fast in spite of all appearances to the contrary.

So I suggest that you don't run away. I don't think you have too many other options at this point. If you can't make him vanish from a fantasy that you yourself created, then there is really only one thing left for you to do. Obviously, you don't have to follow my advice; you are in charge, you are the one that this is all about, the important one, the person that we are doing all of this to try to help. This is only a suggestion, nothing more.

Turn to face the weird man in the corner. Try looking at his face if you can stand it. Then try holding out your hand to him. Open, palm up. Go on. He might take it in his own hand, which turns out to be enormous, oddly shaped, maybe with the wrong number of fingers, but warm and dry and strangely comforting. Then, without letting go, try stepping forward, leading him gently out of that back corner of the elevator into the light and space. What does he do? Will he follow?

Good. See, he's not so terrifying after all, just ugly and a little sad. But even though he's not the companion you might aspire to have, he's the one you created for yourself, so don't let go of his hand. Keep leading him forward. Now you are not alone anymore. Now you have a friend. Now you can go out and look around together.

Viral

N
one
of the parents had any idea what was coming. All of them said the same thing. Sondra Patel from Boston told me:
He was not an unhappy boy as far as I could tell. He played soccer on the school team. He had friends. And he was a DJ, too, you know. People came to hear him play.

Lorraine and Kenneth Mueller from Burke, Virginia, insisted that their daughter Kelly had not been depressed.
We had her tested many times,
Mrs. Mueller told me.
We kept an eye on her. Any sign of something wrong or different, we'd make sure that she went to a psychiatristright away.
Mr. Mueller added:
That's right. We had her thoroughly checked out. Not one of them ever told us there was anything wrong with her. In fact, a couple of them told us we should stop bringing her in at all.

One man even suggested that we should consider seeing a counselor ourselves, if you can believe that,
Mrs. Mueller said. She snorted at the absurdity of it. Then she began to cry.

Sarah Weinberg and Clifford Jackson from Brooklyn, New York, held a photo of their son Damian up for me to see. In the picture he was grinning broadly, proudly showing the camera a new electric guitar and making a peace sign with this left hand.
A birthday present?
I asked; Ms. Weinberg nodded. She looked around the room at the other parents.

I don't know
, she said.
I don't feel like we have anything in common with these other people. We're not really part of the mainstream of American culture and we don't buy into its capitalist consumerist ideals. Of course, there are stresses associated with being a biracial family but we were conscientious about discussing those openly with Damian, helping him to process his experiences. I just keep asking: why us?

Although most of the conference attendees were Americans, there were some parents who had made the trip from abroad: a couple from London, another from Istanbul. Some Australians and some Germans. A Japanese man told me through a translator that when he went into his daughter's bedroom to wake her for school in the morning and found her gone, his heart plunged into his stomach.
My life ended that day,
he said.

I told him, as I'd told the others, how sorry I was for his loss. He nodded and said something to the translator.
What about you? Why are you here?
the translator relayed. I told him I was covering the conference for a newspaper and showed him my press card. He looked at me, doubtfully.
Is that all?

Well,
I said,
I had a niece . . . Her mother isn't here.

Ahh, so desu . . .
he said. He nodded again, like I'd confirmed something he'd guessed already.

The story was the same all over the big, brightly lit, fabric-lined hotel ballroom. All the men and women who were attending the conference told me in their own way that they had been caught completely by surprise by what had happened to their children. By what their children had done.

They insisted that they were good people, that they were or (here several of them corrected themselves, sadly)
had been
good parents. They'd tried their best to be vigilant against threats to their children's well-being. They had warned them about strangers and predators and drug pushers. They had encouraged regular exercise. They had been attentive to signs of unchecked mental distress. They had kept up on the latest dangers that loomed up, out there, in the world ready to blight and blast young lives before they had a chance to grow. . . . Mrs. Mueller began to hyperventilate and had to be escorted from the room by her husband. They had done their best.