“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.