Life's Golden Ticket (11 page)

“Thunder here was your granddad's favorite. You sure look a lot like him sitting up there.” She paused and fought back the tears. “He sure was proud of you. I don't know if I ever told you that. He loved you so much. He always said you'd go real far. Said you had a good heart, good character.”

She brushed Thunder's neck and wiped away a loose tear. “I know things can be tough at home for you sometimes. Your mom told me what goes on. You call me if you ever need anything. No matter what, I want you to always keep your chin up and your heart open, okay?
You're a good boy. You do what Grandpa always said: keep learnin' and livin'. You just learn as much as you can so you can be smart and happy, and you always live the life you want to live. You hear me?”

I brushed back the tears and nodded.

“Good. Now get those horses in.”

She pulled Thunder toward the barn and gave him a pat on the hindquarters. He leaped into motion, and I almost fell out of the saddle.

“Whoo-hooo!” Grandma screamed excitedly. “Like riding a storm, isn't it!”

I snatched up the reins and gave Thunder a gentle kick with my stirrups. He burst into a gallop toward the barn.

“You're flying now, kiddo! Whoo-hooo! You're flying now!”

I let go of the reins and spread my arms out wide.

Whoosh!
A blinding flash of light.

T
he organ music clued me in to where I was. I opened my eyes and lowered my arms. The merry-go-round was slowing to a stop.

Henry dismounted from the wooden horse and walked around mine. “You look good up there.”

I felt my eyes stinging and tried not to cry. “Thank you, Henry.”

“Anytime,” he said with a grin, and started to walk off the platform.

I called after him. “Henry!”

He turned. “Yeah?”

“No, I really mean it.
Thank you.
”

H
enry handed me a corn dog on a stick, and I tore into it greedily.

“I'd better grab you something more,” he chuckled, turning back toward the hot dog stand. “Hang tight.”

I waited for him outside the entrance to the Hall of Mirrors, where the occasional visitor wandered in or out. The attraction had stiff competition. Across the walkway were the bumper boats and a single-loop roller coaster called the Cyclone.

A few minutes passed, and Henry returned with two enormous puffs of cotton candy, grinning. “You only live once, right?”

We climbed the stairs to the Hall of Mirrors entrance, picking away at our treats.

“How you feeling?” Henry asked.

Strangely, all the pain in my body was gone. “Uhh . . . good. . . . I feel surprisingly good.”

“You look a bit better. Maybe some weight has started to lift off your shoulders?”

“Tons,” I said, cracking a smile.

“Oh, good.”

When we entered the attraction, a musty odor swept away the sweet fragrance of the cotton candy. The Hall's walls were painted in once-garish zigzag patterns that had faded long ago. The well-worn hardwood floors revealed the path taken by most of the visitors. Filling the main room were a dozen or so freestanding walls, from which hung various oddly warped mirrors. Many of the mirrors looked dusty at the top and smudged at the bottom with children's fingerprints.

“A staple of any amusement park: the Hall of Mirrors,” Henry said, looking around. “Everyone expects to see it here. It doesn't do that well, though, so the owners never clean it up or spend anything to update its image.”

We stood in front of a wavy-shaped mirror that made our legs look short and squat and exaggerated the size of our midsections. Eating our cotton candy and looking at the reflection, we had to laugh at ourselves. “Must've been the corn dog,” I joked.

Another mirror made us look gigantically tall, with pinched waists and stretched faces.

“Why the long face?” Henry asked. I groaned.

In another reflection we appeared without midsections, just heads atop two pairs of oversized shoes. Finishing up my last bite of cotton candy, I motioned to Henry's reflection and cracked, “Your ego is really getting out of hand, Henry.”

I approached another mirror and was surprised to see no image of myself at all—just the reflected wall behind me, and a couple walking by in the background, but no me.

I murmured, “Huh . . . ?”

“Look closer,” Henry said.

I looked back to the mirror and still saw nothing.

“Closer,” he said again. “Squint if you have to.”

I squinted into the mirror, and a fuzzy image started to appear. As I squinted harder the image came into focus. It was me, squinting back at me. But it wasn't really a reflection of me. In the image I was shirtless, with a bad case of bed head. The background wasn't the Hall of Mirrors, but my bathroom wall at home.

I was watching myself watch myself in a mirror.

“This . . . is weird,” I said, staring at the image.

The “mirror me” scratched his head and peered into the mirror. Turning on the faucet, he splashed water on his face, then stared back. He looked at the bags under his eyes and the wrinkles on his face. He stood sideways and let his stomach fall out, then sucked it back in, flexed his chest and arms, then let them go. He leaned in closer to the mirror and stared into his eyes, and with head hung low whispered, “God, you've become pathetic.”

I watched him hop into the shower, get dressed, then sit silently over a bowl of cold cereal.

“How does he look?” Henry asked.

I couldn't stand the sight. “I look—
he
looks—tired, awful. Like he's half awake, and half . . . dead.”

My mirror self walked back to the bathroom and brushed his teeth. In the bedroom, Mary was still asleep. He let out a despairing sigh.

He went out the door and got in his car, where he listened to some trash-talk radio. At work, he walked by dozens of desks to his corner office without saying a word to anyone. His assistant came in and handed him a printout of the day's schedule. She was bubbly and bright-eyed. “Should be a big day, huh? You excited for the meeting?”

He didn't look up at her. “Not really.” He didn't see her frown and shake her head sadly.

He sat quietly in his office, answering e-mail and gazing absently out the window. After looking over a sheaf of papers, he gathered them up and walked to a conference room at the end of the hall. As he entered, several people stood and shook his hand. He flashed a fake smile and joked around a few minutes about the weather and last night's NBA game.

“Hey!” I said, watching the scene in the mirror. “I recognize this meeting. This was about a month ago. It was a big meeting. We were reviewing sales and brainstorming how to improve.”

Henry looked into the mirror and pointed to me as I listened to two men deliver a long-winded slide show. “He doesn't look like
he
thinks it's a big meeting. He's just sitting there doodling.”

“No,” I said, “I'm not—
he's
not—doodling. He's sketching out a better product.”

The meeting went on, and the guy who was me offered a few critical comments about the sales numbers. He also made some complaints about the current product in the review session, but during the brainstorming session he didn't share any ideas on how to improve it. In fact, the only thing he did was sit there, apparently frustrated or bored, throughout the meeting.

After work he picked up a few things at the grocery store. When the bagger at the checkout stand smiled, handed him his bags, and said, “Have a good night,” he made a half-smile and walked to his car.

When he got home, Mary ran up to him and gave him a loving hug. “Hey, there! How was your day, hon? Did you tell them about your idea?”

“Nah,” he replied. “They wouldn't have listened to me anyway. Bunch of morons.”

She looked at him sadly and took his coat. He walked to the kitchen and grabbed a beer. Mary followed him in and said, “So you didn't even
tell
them about it? I thought you were really excited about that idea.”

“Just let it go, Mary. They'd just shoot it down anyway.”

“But—”

“
Let it go
,
Mary!
” he barked.

He walked into the den, turned on the television, and didn't speak to her the rest of the evening.

The scene looped back to its beginning and froze on the image of me in my bathroom, staring disappointedly at myself in the mirror.

Henry motioned to the image. “Is that who you really are?”

I shook my head sadly. “No.”

“Well, then, who is it?”

“I don't know. It's . . . it's not really me.”

Henry turned to me. “You know what, sonny? It
is
you. That
was
you we saw, wasn't it? That
was
a real day in your life, wasn't it?”

“Yes,” I said. “But it's not the
real
me.”

Henry scoffed. “Oh, c'mon! That's a bunch of psychobabble, and you know it.
That
was you. That was
who
you have become. That was who you are now, right?”

I looked at Henry's eyes in surprise. Gone was the cheery cotton-candy man.

He continued. “Hey, listen, sometimes you got to call it like it is. There is no
real
you versus
fake
you. No real self versus false self. You are who you are, wholly and completely. All your emotions and behaviors are a part of who you are now. Unless you accept every aspect of that, you're lying to yourself. You're avoiding yourself. Maybe you don't like parts of who you are, portions of what you just saw, but those are portions and parts of you until you change them. You've got to admit that even the bad parts are parts of you. Otherwise, you'll never change. That
was
you we just saw, right?”

I nodded.

“Then own it. That's how your life is. That's how it's going. That's who you are now. Decide if that's who you really want to be tomorrow.”

Henry walked away, leaving me staring at the image in the mirror.

A
fter a few moments I stalked away, disgusted, and started looking for Henry. I passed a few of the mirrors Henry and I had stood in front of earlier. The reflections of me quickly contorted and blurred as I passed. At one mirror, though, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that the reflection wasn't too distorted. I turned and saw a young boy looking back at me. The backdrop behind him was the reflection of the room I was standing in. The boy had long, wavy hair and plump cheeks. He wore a simple white shirt, khaki shorts, white ankle socks, and blue sneakers.

Me when I was six.

Looking at him, I smiled, remembering the innocence of childhood.

He smiled back at me.

I cocked my neck, surprised. He mimicked me. I raised my hand and waved. He waved back.

“I like this game,” he said.

Suddenly the background behind him changed. A tall picket fence was a few yards behind him now. And some grass. And a trampoline.

He turned, ran into the yard, climbed onto the trampoline, and started jumping. He giggled and laughed unabashedly. He jumped higher and higher and screeched happily at each new height, “Wheeeee!”

A little girl walked up to the trampoline. It was his neighbor. “Can I jump with you?” she asked.

He stopped jumping. “Yeah. C'mon up.”

“I can't get up,” she said.

His mother emerged from the back door of the house, but he didn't see her.

“Sure you can,” he said, and hopped off. “I'll help you.”

He boosted the little girl up; then he taught her how to stagger their jumping so that they could spike each other higher. They laughed and played together for an hour.

Soon the girl's parents called her home and she had to leave. The boy helped her down and said good-bye. “Thanks for jumping with me,” he said.

His mom walked over and gave him a tremendous hug, lifting him off the ground and twirling him around. “You're such a good boy!”

“We were jumping,” he said.

“I know! I saw you. You were so good!” She put him back onto the trampoline, kicked her shoes off, and climbed up. She grabbed hold of him once more and started jumping with him. “You have such a good heart, my boy. Always make sure you have fun and help others jump higher, and you'll do all right.”

I watched them jump together for another ten minutes or so, and I started to tear up. Then the mother said she had to go get dinner ready and got down off the trampoline. Before she turned to go inside, the little boy asked her to wait and started jumping higher and higher. “Look, Mommy, I can go higher than anyone. I can go as high as I want!”

She clapped proudly for him and then went inside.

He played on the trampoline for a few more minutes and then climbed off to go inside. As he walked across the yard he stopped abruptly, as if forgetting something, and headed back toward where I had seen him standing at the beginning of the scene. He looked at me again through the mirror and waved.

I waved back.

Then he took a step through the mirror and stood right in front of me.

“Hi, mister,” he said.

My mouth opened, and the tears dropped. “Oh . . . hi . . . hi, little boy.”

He looked up at me with bright eyes. “Maybe someday you can come over, and we can jump.”

I smiled and tried to hold back the tears. “Sure, sure, you bet we can.”

“Okay,” he said happily. He stepped forward, hugged my leg, then turned and stepped back into the mirror. He waved at me and started across the lawn.

I reached toward him and hit the surface of the mirror. The image immediately changed, and I stepped back in surprise.

A gunshot.

A slew of sprinters bolted out of their starting blocks.

The scene in the mirror showed me sprinting, coming closer and closer to the finish line, closer and closer to the mirror. I saw myself cross the finish line, and suddenly a seventeen-year-old me stepped out of the mirror. He bent at the waist, trying to catch his breath. He was sweating and wearing a broad smile. He looked up at me.

“That was fast, huh?”

“Fast,” I repeated, looking at him with amazement.

He raised his hand, gave me a high-five, and stepped back through the mirror.

The image changed immediately.

The man walked confidently out of his boss's office. It was me again. He shook hands with a longtime co-worker and friend. They had both been given a promotion after a gutsy proposal. He and his
friend bumped chests like football players. Then he moved away from his friend and walked through the mirror to stand in front of me. He grabbed me and put me in a headlock and scraped his knuckles across my head. “Smarter than the average bear, ain't we?” he said with a charismatic tone. Then he jumped back into the mirror.