Think Of a Number (2010) Read Online Free PDF Page A

vacation on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. One evening at sunset, we were sitting on a deserted beach. Erindecided 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 sureI’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