5.

Bellagio

Sunday, March 10 - 9:09a.m.

The doctor had told Mike to take it easy the next couple of days, and that’s what he did. He spent most of Saturday reading books and playing on the Internet, but he was crawling the walls with boredom. He desperately wanted to get out of his apartment.

Saturday night, he did the usual gig at the Plaza. He felt self-conscious on stage with his cast, so he sang most of his songs perched on a barstool. Other than that, the gig went as well as could be expected. No one mentioned Friday night and that was just the way he wanted it. There were a couple of strange moments when everyone had first arrived, but as soon as Mike belted out their opening number everything seemed to slip back to normal.

Sunday morning, his left ankle felt much better and he was even more stir-crazy. He was frustrated with the cast and wanted to ride his Harley. I can’t perform like this again. This looks stupid on stage, he thought. He took a taxi back to Mercy hospital to talk with Dr. Elders. “Listen, Doc, I’m a rock singer. I can’t go on stage with my leg in this stupid cast. Can’t you take it off? It feels much better.” He didn’t tell Elders that his next gig wasn’t until Wednesday.

“I understand, Mike, but that ankle won’t heal for at least eight weeks.”

“But it feels fine, Doc. Look.” Mike put his full weight onto the ankle.

Doctor Elders watched his face, not his ankle. He was looking for signs of pain, but there wasn’t even a wince. Maybe he took some drugs to mask the pain, he thought. He had seen addicts high on PCP who couldn’t feel pain. But at Mike’s insistence, he ordered a new set of x-rays and the cast had to be cut off.

An hour later, Dr. Elders stood in front of the light box, comparing the new x-ray to the previous one. “I’ll be a son of a bitch,” he said. Comparing the two x-rays side-by-side, there was no sign of the compound fracture that appeared on Mike’s earlier x-ray. Elders couldn’t explain what had healed Mike’s ankle, but somehow it was as good as new.

“You want to explain this to me?” he asked Mike, pointing at the x-ray.

“Explain what? I don’t see anything, Doc.”

“Precisely. Your ankle is fine. Not even a bruise.”

“That’s all I needed to hear, Doc.” Mike said and bounded out the door, leaving the doctor shaking his head in disbelief at a fracture that had healed in only three days. . . . It was hardly grand and inspiring enough to be called a miracle but it had only been three days.

As Mike rode home in what he hoped would be his last taxi ride for a while, he wondered how he had been healed. He needed time to clear his head, time to be alone and feel this unexpected freedom. The best way to do that–the only way for him–was waiting at home in his garage. After he paid the taxi driver, he went straight to the garage and got on his Harley. He pressed the starter button and it rumbled to life, then he rolled it out of the garage and rode into the desert. Riding always had a way of clearing his mind and bringing him inner peace.

He rode for miles in the desert thinking about nothing, just clearing his mind, purging his soul and soaking in the sunshine.

Sunday, March 10 - 7:30p.m.

When the sun went down it started getting colder, so he rode back into town and sought refuge in the Bellagio. Any casino would have worked equally well, but the Bellagio was warm and inviting, a place where poor people went to fantasize about being rich while having their pockets picked. Poor people like him.

He parked his Harley in the lot and walked to the entrance. His ankle felt fine and he was happy that he could make the long walk. As he walked inside, his mind was hit full force by psychic awareness. His psychic awareness was growing like a faucet that had turned on, or maybe like a dam that had burst. Maybe it was just the huge contrast between the peaceful desert motorcycle ride and the noise of thousands of greedy and desperate minds converging on his inner senses, but he could almost swear that he could hear their thoughts and feel their emotions. Somehow it was hard to tell his own feelings from everyone else’s. He could feel the positive emotions inside some people, but they were overshadowed by the negative feelings he felt in others. He tried to focus on the fact that he was separate from the other people, but the lines were somehow blurring. He felt otherworldly and out of place. The negative emotions put him in a dark mood and it made him receptive to the negative feelings all around him: dissatisfaction, fear, hate, guilt, desperation, loneliness, despair. He struggled not to lose himself in all the negativity. He wanted desperately to rush back to the solitude of his afternoon in the desert, but he also knew that if he didn’t conquer what was happening to him, he would never be able to walk into a casino again, not even for his next gig.

He walked through the casino, past blackjack tables and slot machines with his eyes fixed on the floor, fighting the negative emotions that assaulted his senses. When he stopped and looked up, he saw a scrawny, unkempt old lady with stark white hair sitting in a wheelchair by a slot machine. She had thick glasses and a shabby pink dress with flowers. Attached to the back of her wheelchair was a bottle of oxygen, and she was tethered to it by a rubber tube that ran to her nose. Her face was expressionless, staring at the slot machine with vacant eyes, mindlessly plugging nickels. As he watched, she lifted a cigarette up to her wrinkled lips and sucked the smoke into her lungs, then blew it on the glass screen in front of her.

Almost against his will, his empathic awareness opened up and the feelings came crashing in on his senses. He felt her hopelessness, her desperation. He felt all the loneliness and pain she had ever suffered in her life. He felt the pain she suffered when her husband died thirteen years ago. He even felt the bruise where she banged her knee by turning too quickly in her wheelchair, hitting one of the cold steel video poker machines a half hour earlier. Worst of all, he felt her lack of direction. She was tired of life, but afraid to leave it. She was afraid to die, but even more afraid of getting sick and having to go into a nursing home. She had no ambition, but longed for excitement. She wanted human interaction, human warmth and companionship, yet she just stood there and paid homage to the cold steel machine in front of her. Deus Ex Machina, God in the machine. There was no joy in her life, no purpose, no meaning.

Mike also felt things the old woman didn’t even know herself. He knew that in three months she would have a stroke and lapse into a coma. Her daughter, Joyce, would visit her in the hospital after work, but Joyce’s husband, Tom, would stay at home and watch the basketball game while ignoring the kids. The kids would feel unloved because their mom was gone and their dad ignored them. Tom would feel unloved because his wife was gone and the Suns were losing. Joyce would feel unloved because all Tom seemed to care about was sports. And the lady would die after three days in the hospital. Unloved.

But that’s not all Mike knew. Somehow he knew that at the moment of her death, after she left her body, she would look back on her lifetime and ask herself all the important questions: What have I done with my life? Did I accomplish my goals? What did I learn? What kind of progress did I make in that lifetime? What was it good for? And Mike knew that she wouldn’t be happy with the answers. He wondered why she wasn’t asking herself those questions now, while she was still alive.

She had done nothing with her life. Sure, she got married, raised kids, and did all the things she was “supposed to do.” But he knew that she had planned this lifetime to rid herself of selfishness, and yet she hadn’t learned. She was still just as petty and just as selfish. And she would not learn these lessons, at least not until she was dead, and could look back on this lifetime from beyond the grave. This is what would happen unless something drastic changed the course of her waning life.

Mike was struck numb by all the implications of what he felt the minute his mind touched the old lady’s. The pain was tearing at his mind, and he began to cry. He sobbed to himself, “Why does this have to happen? Why do I have to feel her pain? She’s had seventy-six years to learn her lessons. Oh, please, God, why?” He brought his left hand up to his face to hide his tears. He understood why most people block out their natural psychic abilities; sometimes it’s better not to know. Sometimes it hurts too much.

He wanted to tell the lady the whole story, but what could he say? What good would it do? He wanted to slap her in the face and yell, “Wake up. You’re going to die. You’d better do something with your life. You’re running out of time.” But would it help her to learn her lesson, or would she just think he was some crazy bastard who was trying to get something from her?

He wondered about the moral implications of knowing when someone is going to die. He wondered how many people would want to know the exact day of their death. Not many, he guessed. The lady didn’t need to know when she was going to die: What she needed was a sense of purpose, a sense of direction. She needed to know that her life had a meaning, a set of goals. And she had a finite amount time to accomplish those goals or do it all over again. If she flunked this life, she would have to do it all over with another body, and keep on doing it until she got it right.

Then he realized that we’re all in that situation. We’ve all got a limited number of days to accomplish our goals. We are all in the process of dying, every day. He remembered a Pink Floyd song that went, “The sun is the same in a relative way, but you’re older, shorter of breath and one day closer to death.” But how many people look at life as a playing field with death as the goalpost at the end? Most people don’t see the goalpost, and they don’t have a ball to kick in that direction. Most people don’t look for direction in their lives, because they’re too busy looking for entertainment.

Then he got angry and wondered why wasn’t she doing anything about it? Mike walked up to the old woman and touched her shoulder with his right hand. She turned her wheelchair to face him. Somehow he looked familiar. She thought, Just what the hell was. . . . But before she could finish her thought, he said in a stern voice, “Straighten up.” He didn’t mean it literally. He just wasn’t good with words. What he meant was: Rise above your situation. Get over it. Get on with life. Stop wallowing in self-pity. You’re not dead yet. But those weren’t the words he used. He added, “Can’t you see that you’ve done nothing with your life and now it’s almost gone? Get off your ass and learn what you’re supposed to learn.”

He saw a glimmer of life reenter her vacant eyes, and he felt a change in her soul.

Transfixed, she stood looking at the strange man in the black shirt and gold chain, staring at his thin face. She studied his thin face, the long hair, the beard, the piercing blue eyes. I’ve seen that face before, she thought.

She used to go to church every Sunday, but lately she had stopped going because of her poor health, and yet she somehow managed to get to the Bellagio when it suited her. She constantly worried about dying, but was afraid of what would happen when she did. She used to have faith in God, but lately doubts had clouded her mind. Suddenly her doubts left her and she recognized his face. She thought, It’s Jesus coming to take me home. She believed that Christ would someday come to take her to heaven, but she never expected it to happen in a casino. She suddenly understood that she was not alone, and that there was still love in the world. Her faith was restored. More important, she thought she had been given a command by her savior. Get off your ass. She rose from her fifteen-year rolling prison, turned to face him, and stared at him with her mouth open. Then she bowed her head, turned her eyes to the ground and said, “Lord Jesus, forgive me for ever doubting you.” She had been healed.

Of course, Mike didn’t see it that way. Not only was he embarrassed by his own forwardness, he was frightened by her reaction. She must really be confused, he thought. He said, “Sorry” then turned and booked back toward the casino entrance.

When he finally stopped running, he found himself at the south end of the casino where there was an atrium area, a beautiful flower garden where weddings were often performed. There were fewer people there, so his psychic senses were not bombarded quite as much. He sat down to reflect and could think more clearly. He felt less frustrated now because he had given the woman a message and she had heard it, even if it was obscure. Plus, even though she had seemed confused, she had stood up, so there was hope for her; maybe she could finally learn what she had been born to learn. Maybe all she needed was a good scare.

He realized that people are the same today as they were back in Jesus’ day. The disciple Peter was ‘Joe Ordinary’ in his younger days. Day after day, he caught fish and lived a mundane fisherman’s life. He had no direction or meaning to his life, until Jesus showed up and offered to make him a “fisher of men.” Then all of a sudden his life had a purpose. Without that purpose, he would have been forgotten and buried beneath two thousand years of history.

Mike knew what the problem was. People were asleep and they needed to be roused. He didn’t know how to rouse people from their perpetual slumber, blindness and materialism, but Jesus had. That was the key. Mike could see the answer as plain as day: People on this Earth don’t feel their purpose. They don’t have a sense of direction. They don’t have a leader. If they had a leader, maybe they would wake up to their life’s purpose. Maybe all they needed was for someone to tell them, “You all have a purpose, and you better go find out what it is and do it.”

Jesus wasn't the only example of a leader changing everything. He thought about the 1930s when the tiny country of Germany sprung out of the depths of despair and depression to become the strongest nation on Earth. All it took was a little guidance from a charismatic leader: Adolph Hitler. Hitler rallied the people’s belief in themselves and gave them a sense of direction and pride. They damn near took over the world with that twisted sense of direction. He wondered what might have happened if Hitler had been a good, spiritual man instead of the evil, sinister man he was. If Hitler had been a spiritual person, he could have become a great religious figure and ruled the world with love instead of hate.

Mike thought about the great spiritual leaders of the world. Throughout history, spiritual leaders have popped up on Earth to shake people out of their ordinary lives. People like Zoroaster, Lao Tzu, Moses, Buddha, Christ, and Mohammad are born every so often to turn people’s heads back to what’s important in life, to grow spiritually. These religious figureheads all started out preaching that message, and ended up as cult leaders. The cults spread and turned into religions. Eventually the religions turned into institutions that “relieved” the people of their responsibilities toward God. Sooner or later, the meaning of the message got lost, until the next leader stirred it up again.

Mike knew that people need direction, but most of the great spiritual leaders were gone. Gandhi, Yogananda, even Mother Theresa was dead. People needed a leader with a message. A living, in-your-face kind of leader. As crazy as it seemed, he wondered if he could be that leader. After his recent brush with death, he was concerned about dying before he had a chance to change the world. How can anyone make the world a better place unless they assume some kind of responsibility for spiritual awareness? Somebody’s got to do it, and I suppose it could be me, he told himself. After all, I made a difference with that woman back there. The idea of delivering a spiritual message brightened his mood, and he set aside the pain he had felt earlier.

He asked himself, What if people thought he was crazy? That’s what people thought about Jesus at first, but Jesus didn’t care what people thought, and neither did he. Another thought: what if Jesus was crazy? Maybe he was just some lunatic cult leader with a dozen or so followers. Even if Jesus had been crazy as a loony bird, he still delivered his message, and people still believed in him, so his time on Earth wasn’t wasted.

He walked back through the casino, toward the parking lot to his beloved Harley, but this time his head was up. His eyes darted from face to face, gathering psychic impressions, but the lives he touched now gave him hope.

Excerpt from The Gospel According to Mike

He said, “God cannot be hoarded or hidden away by priests, ministers, rabbis, clerics or gurus. The Creator is available to all people of all faiths at all times. The Truth is not limited to the Bible, the Talmud, the Koran, the Avesta, the Tao Te Ching or other books. It is in the giggle of a child and the wag of a dog’s tail. It is in the wind that rustles the leaves of a tree and the sun that warms the rocks. It is in the Wall Street Journal and the Sunday comics. Seek and ye shall find.”