They also clogged up all of the sinks and left the water on so that each overflowed. And they smashed every mirror, dish, and glass we owned. Squirted mustard and ketchup all over the couch. Poured milk onto the carpets. Threw circles of lunch meat at the ceiling so that it was dotted with bologna and ham and salami, which rained down on us later. Dumped our crucifixes into the toilet and pissed on our Lord and Savior.
Why?
I remember coming home from dinner, seeing the edge of the wooden front doorframe splintered, the door slightly ajar, and knowing that something horrible had happened.
It was like looking down and seeing a gaping hole where your stomach used to be and knowing your legs were gone—like Mom and I had somehow each swallowed a live grenade.
Once we saw the damage, Mom simply sighed and called the police, but they didn’t come right away, and asked only a few general questions when they arrived hours later, before saying, “We’ll file an official report.” Father McNamee, however, arrived within minutes of Mom’s calling him, armed with a phone book and several bottles of wine. He organized a dozen members of the church and a cleaning party began. The water was mopped up, the glass was swept away, the beds were washed and sanitized, and the walls were even painted over with paint and brushes someone miraculously found in our basement. Father McNamee washed our crucifixes in holy water, using a Q-tip to get in between Jesus’ spine and the cross, saying, “Lord, I hope you like your back scratched!” I remember the men and women of the church working through the night—drinking wine the whole time, talking, singing even.
It was almost fun.
When the sun came up, Mom cooked breakfast for everyone, and one of the neighbors brought over plates for us to use. Before we ate, as we all held hands in a circle, Father McNamee prayed and thanked God for the chance to prove that people are good and often take care of each other when the right sort of chance arises; he asked God to burn this night into our memory as an example of what true disciples of Christ are and can be when called upon—people who help their neighbors with compassion in their hearts and wine in their bellies, ready and willing to overcome any sort of ugliness (no matter the magnitude of the tragedy)—and then we ate like a family.
Mom and I had never entertained so many people at once.
When everyone left, Mom said, “Wasn’t that a beautiful birthday party!”
How do we know it won’t happen again?” I asked.
Didn’t you enjoy yourself, Bartholomew? I’d love to have another party like that. Such a treat having all those people here to celebrate my sixtieth birthday!”
How do we know horrible thugs won’t break into our home again?”
We don’t!” Mom said, almost like she wouldn’t mind if they did—maybe like she even wanted it to happen again. “We don’t know anything. But we can choose how we respond to whatever comes our way. We have a choice always. Remember that!”
I remember feeling scared—as if I couldn’t be like Mom and never would be. That maybe I was a bad Catholic. A subpar human being, even. That maybe even Jesus thought I was a retard. Because I found it hard to celebrate what had happened to us. I didn’t necessarily believe the clean-up party made up for the violation we were forced to endure.
What have I been telling you since you were a boy? Whenever something bad happens to us,” Mom said as she tucked me into my new bed, insisting that I needed some sleep after staying up all night, “something good happens—often to someone else. And that’s The Good Luck of Right Now. We must believe it. We must. We must. We must.”
She kissed me on the nose, pulled the blinds, and shut my door behind her.
I could smell the paint drying, and I couldn’t sleep because I kept thinking about people breaking into my bedroom and urinating on my pillow.
Why would anyone do that?
How could Mom be so unaffected by it?
Would it happen again, even though Father McNamee promised to install a new door with a heavier deadbolt?
Was it my fault somehow—like maybe because I was in my midtwenties and I still hadn’t managed to do anything with my life except live with Mom, I deserved to have my home raped? If I had a job, maybe we’d live in a better neighborhood. If I were a normal person, maybe I wouldn’t attract negative energy and bad luck.
Was God punishing me?
These sorts of things happen only to morons! the little man in my stomach screamed. Of course it’s your fault! Smarter men don’t have these sorts of problems!
But then I decided to take Mom’s advice, and so I thought about every single bad thing that had happened that night, breaking it down into individual acts.
1. Someone targeted our house.
2. Someone suggested a plan of action.
3. The door was kicked in.
4. Dozens of curse words were profanely spray-painted (each one counted as an individual bad thing).
5. More than a hundred pieces of glass and mirrors were smashed (each counted).
6. People went to the bathroom outside of the bathroom dozens of times (each movement counted).
7. Milk and condiments and lunch meat were wasted (each piece and ounce counted).
8. I’m sure they swore while doing all of the above (each cuss counted).
9. They ashed their cigarettes on the floor and left beer bottles all over the place (each drink and cigarette counted).
10. Pissing on Jesus must have counted as multiple bad acts, maybe one for every ounce of urine? (Also, maybe this counted as nudity?)
When I estimated the number of individual evil acts done by each person who trashed our house, the sum of bad things easily topped two hundred, and so maybe if Mom’s theory was correct, it meant that more than two hundred good things had happened or would soon happen all over the world to strangers, or a few incredibly really lucky things (worth more than multiple bad things) had occurred or would eventually occur to even out the many terrible events that had happened in our home.
And I tried to think of what those good things might be: maybe a sick baby girl in Zimbabwe would receive donated medicine just before she was about to slip into a fatal coma; maybe a hungry beggar in San Francisco would find a warm steak in a trash can behind a five-star restaurant and dine under a full moon; maybe a young woman in Tokyo would meet the love of her life when she jogged into the driver’s-side door of a slow-moving car because she was singing with her eyes closed and her future soul mate would be driving and feel so bad about the bizarre accident, he would ask her to have coffee; maybe an elementary school student in Paris would suddenly remember the mathematical formula he needed to pass a test, and therefore would avoid getting grounded for a bad grade; maybe a Russian woman in a Siberian prison would think of her kindly grandmother taking her sledding just before she was about to kill another prisoner by sticking a fork into a bulging neck vein and would have a change of heart; maybe a man in Argentina would find his lost car keys in the meadow where he was sunbathing and could therefore drive home in time to pick up his six-year-old son from soccer practice as a would-be kidnapper cruised the field for stray children; maybe a sun-sized asteroid headed for Earth would be pushed off course by an exploding star and would no longer end humankind seven thousand light-years from now . . .
I don’t remember if these were the exact examples I came up with when I was in my twenties, but you get the idea—and as I sat in bed thinking of the many good things that had to happen all over the world in order to even out and nullify the horrible bad things that had happened to Mom and me, I started to see why Mom believed in The Good Luck of Right Now. Believing—or maybe even pretending—made you feel better about what had happened, regardless of what was true and what wasn’t.
And what is reality, if it isn’t how we feel about things?
What else matters at the end of the day when we lie in bed alone with our thoughts?
And isn’t it true, statistically speaking—regardless of whether we believe in luck or not—that good and bad must happen simultaneously all over the world?
Babies are born at the exact moment as people die; people cheat on their spouses, climaxing in sin, just as brides and grooms gaze lovingly into each other’s eyes and say “I do”; people get hired while others get fired; a father takes his son to a ball game just as another man decides he will never return home to his son again and moves to another state without leaving a forwarding address; a man rescues a cat from certain suffocation, removing it from a plastic trash bag, just as another man halfway around the world tosses a sack of kittens into a river; a surgeon in Texas saves the life of a young boy who was hit by a car while a man in Africa kills a child soldier with a swarm of machine-gun bullets; a Chinese diplomat swims in the cool waters of a tropical sea while a Tibetan monk burns to death in political protest—all of these opposites will happen whether we believe in The Good Luck of Right Now or not.
But after our home had been raped, it was hard for me to believe and pretend happily like Mom—maybe because I have always been a skeptic, maybe because I am not as strong as she was, maybe because I am stupid, retarded, simple-minded, moronic.
The next day I felt very anxious, and so I went to Saint Gabriel’s and found Father McNamee in his office writing personalized birthday cards to every church member born in the upcoming months.
I asked him to promise that no one would ever break into our house again.
You know your mother’s theory, right? The Good Luck of Right Now?” he said.
Yes.”
Do you believe it’s true?”
I tried to pretend I did last night.”
And?”
It helped. I admit it. For a few hours. But I still worry that—”
Pray.”
For what?” I asked. “That our house will never be broken into again?”
No. What happens to things is not important. Pray that your heart will be able to endure whatever happens to you in the future—your heart must continue to believe that the events in this world are not the be-all and end-all but simply transient unimportant variables. Beyond the everyday ins and outs of our lives, there is a greater purpose—a reason. Perhaps we don’t yet see or understand the reason—maybe our human minds are incapable of understanding fully—yet it all leads us to something greater nonetheless.”
What do you mean, Father?”
He laughed in this good way, licked and sealed an envelope, and said, “Wasn’t it nice seeing our flock rise to the occasion last night? They had other things to do, you know. But when they heard what happened to you, their hearts instructed them, and they immediately sprang into action and simply helped.”
So?” I said, wondering how that could protect me from future home invaders.
You wanted to sleep in a urine-soaked bed last night, did you?”
No.”
Well, those people made sure you didn’t.”
I’m not sure I understand how—”
That’s also The Good Luck of Right Now. That’s also part of your mother’s philosophy.”
I don’t get how it will protect us from future vandals,” I said to Father.
You’re missing the point!” Father McNamee said, smiling and chuckling—like I was a young boy, like he was about to tousle my hair, even though I was a grown man.
What is the point?”
You’ll understand it one day, Bartholomew. Without my needing to explain it to you. You will understand. I promise.”
Richard Gere, I’m not sure I understand any better now than I did back then.
Even still, I’ve been wondering what good might have happened when Mom died to balance out the heavy bad of the hungry brain cancer squid ending her life. I’ve been trying to pretend that The Good Luck of Right Now produced something extremely beautiful when she passed, because Mom was full of love—enough to wipe out much, much bad. But I’m finding it hard to believe in her philosophy these days.
Father McNamee said nothing when I asked him about it on the beach the night after the funeral. And lately, given how manic he’s been acting, I’ve been too afraid to ask him again, or even say “The Good Luck of Right Now” to Father McNamee, because I get the sense that he’s having a hard time pretending himself, especially since he never brings up Mom’s philosophy anymore.
And yet, your being born during the same year that China became a threat to Tibet gives me hope, because maybe you were really conceived to equal out the bad the Chinese government would do to Tibet. It seems like proof. Too significant to be coincidental. Jung would agree here.
And if you were a response to China’s planning to invade Tibet, it helps me believe in Mom’s philosophy, which gives me hope for my own postmother future and life in general.
I found this Dalai Lama quote on the library Internet: “Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.” And it seems to agree with Mom’s mantra.
I also found this other Dalai Lama quote: “There is a saying in Tibetan, ‘Tragedy should be utilized as a source of strength.’ No matter what sort of difficulties, how painful experience is, if we lose our hope, that’s our real disaster.”
What do you think?
Can we find some common ground here, Richard Gere?
Maybe our letter correspondence will be the good that comes of Mom’s death?
Maybe you will help me move on to the “next phase of my life,” like Wendy wanted me to do, when she was still around, before we figured out her secret?
Stranger things have happened, I suppose.
And this is the only hopeful outcome I have available to me at the present moment. So it’s important for us to continue the pretending, even if we can’t believe 100 percent.
Your admiring fan,
Bartholomew Neil