He looked horrified.
“And in answer to your other question, my friend … yes. Yes, I do want to give my number out to everyone in the world.”
A split-second later, Ian’s phone beeped. Wag had been bluffing. He’d texted my number to Ian, not to thousands of confused Germans.
But as for me … well, I hadn’t been bluffing.
And I knew what I’d have to do next.
It was another level-five job.
Chapter 10 In Which Daniel Undertakes a Most Unusual Search
Now, don’t get me wrong: I know what I just said.
I know I just said I’d have to give my number out to “everyone in the world.” But that was when I was down at the pub. That was during a macho booze-fuelled face-off, when everything seemed possible and nothing seemed like too much trouble. The problem was, when I got home to consider my next move, I realised that I clearly couldn’t give my number out to everyone in the world. That’d be crazy and would take ages and involve me on the phone to people all over the world, saying, “Hi, you don’t know me, but this is my number in case you ever fancy a chat.” It just wasn’t practical and would take the better part of a lifetime.
No, if I was going to do as Wag said and make my phone number publicly available, I was going to have to do it another way, a cleverer way. I would have to get it out there on the streets, where it could be seen and acted upon and used. There was only one thing for it: a clever word-of-mouth stickering campaign. And the more I thought about it, the more I got to liking the idea. What a great way to make friends. And what a great way to make human connections. They say strangers are just friends you haven’t met yet. And while that can’t be entirely true (statistically some of them are bound to be muggers), I nevertheless clung to that notion as I ordered two thousand stickers bearing the legend:
CALL ME
Let’s have a polite conversation!
07802 *** ***
Now, I had launched a similar campaign once before, and it had worked an absolute treat. I had ended up meeting some brilliant people and having some brilliant experiences—precisely the kind of experiences I’d felt I’d been losing out on as of late. But this was a more careful and considered campaign. I felt the middle line, for example, might put off the muggers and the riffraff, but would leave room for the people like Amsterdam’s Jahn, the open-minded and progressive. The people who could teach me something. And so below those two words and that one sentence was, yes, my mobile number. The number I rely on. The number, thanks to Wag’s inadvertant suggestion, I would be giving out to the public-at-large. Starting now with Ian in the East End.
“When you think about it,” said Ian, walking alongside me, “this is basic psychology.”
“What is?” I said, attaching another sticker to the side of a phonebox.
“This. You feel that there’s a gap. Am I right? A Lizzie-shaped gap. And you’re trying to fill that gap. But instead of filling it with one person, you’re trying to fill it with everyone. You not having Lizzie gives you the perfect excuse to do this.”
“What do you mean, ‘excuse’? I wasn’t looking for an excuse to do this! Do you think I’ve been waiting around for years, hoping desperately that one day someone would say or do something which would allow me to have thousands of stickers printed up, inviting the general public to ring me up for a polite conversation? Is that how you think I live my life?”
“Pretty much, yes.”
We stickered Bow, Mile End, and Bethnal Green that day. I kept a wad of stickers in my pocket, too, for whenever the mood took me.
The day flew by, but no one called.
I guess all I could do was wait.
In a large room on the Old Kent Road the following night, dozens of chairs were lined up in neat rows. A woman in a cardigan fiddled with a video camera pointed at the table, which I assumed the world-renowned Maitreya expert, Elias Brown, would call home for the next couple of hours.
Pete had phoned me urgently that morning and said that he’d checked the relevant Web sites, and Mr. Brown was apparently in town to give one of his lectures. Pete seemed to think that there could be something in all this, and now that the people at Richard & Judy had decided I could well be an authority on matters of the spiritual, I thought it pertinent to attend. That, and I couldn’t exactly say no.
One of the strangest things was, Pete wanted to make sure I knew he didn’t believe it was possible that Maitreya, aka the World Teacher, was walking the streets, looking out for people like me, but he’d begun to talk about him in quite reverential tones. So much so that we were both becoming quietly excited by the prospect of learning more about the man who had apparently chosen me—me!—to guide and direct. Not that I believed it either, of course. No, no.
There were about forty people in the room now, and most had already taken their seats, but others were busy buying Maitreya postcards or books or audio tapes of previous Elias Brown lectures. A few months before I’d never even heard of Maitreya. I was surprised to see such an industry revolving around him.
“I’ve got a few of these books,” said Pete. “And I subscribe to Mr. Brown’s newsletter, which is surprisingly informative.”
“He’s got his own newsletter as well?”
“Oh yes. He’s quite an authority and very nice with it. Genuinely a very nice man. All this is aimed at making the world a better—”
But that was as far as he got. Because just then the man we’d come to see walked into the room. And the room fell silent.
“That’s him!” whispered Pete in my ear. “That’s Brown!”
He took his seat with ease and smiled a wide and happy smile. For a man in his eighties, he was a bit of a looker. And it’s not often you’ll hear me say that.
“Good evening,” he said in a soft and warm voice.
“Good evening,” replied every single person in the room, including Pete, in near-perfect unison. I was a little surprised by the choreography.
“How many of you have been to one of these lectures before?”
Pete and pretty much everyone else put their hands up.
“All I ask is that when I am speaking you keep an open mind,” said Elias. He had a kind face. “I am not asking you to believe what you don’t want to believe; merely that you keep an open mind. The truly open-minded person is not easy to find. I will give you some statistics later on, if I remember.”
This made me laugh. A woman in a pashmina frowned at me, and I shut up.
“What we will do this evening,” said Elias, “is in a few moments’ time I will be overshadowed by Maitreya himself. He will be here, among us.”
Pete nudged me excitedly.
“We will play for you a tape of some of his messages while this is happening. After that I will talk for a while about Maitreya and his mission here on Earth, and then we will finish with a final overshadowing, which will be far more powerful than the first. It should be quite extraordinary.”
As he said this his microphone stopped working. The woman in the pashmina whispered something to her friend about rogue energies. Elias continued to talk at a much lower level until one very exasperated man in the second row put his hand up and shouted, “I THINK YOUR BATTERY HAS RUN OUT” far louder than he needed to, given that he was only in the second row.
“Oh,” said Elias. “How deeply unprofessional of us. I can promise you that this is the first time this has ever happened. Usually we are very polished.”
He smiled and looked around the room, and everyone laughed. He was certainly a very charming host, and I was enjoying his company. One of his helpers, however, was going bright red as she struggled to pry the microphone open to replace its batteries.
“I’m sorry.” She seemed to be stuttering. “It’s … oh … oh dear …”
A moment later a rather strapping man was by her side with a replacement battery. He took full control of the situation, clicked the battery into place, and put the microphone back on its stand, in front of Elia
s who tapped it and said, “Hello?”
It worked again.
“Magic!” said the man in the second row, and the terrible thing is, I think he actually thought it was.
“Now let us continue …,” said Elias.
Down went the lights.
“I am going to study each of your chakras,” he said. “I will look at each of you in turn. But don’t worry if you are sitting behind someone tall and it appears that I have missed you by accident, because I won’t have.”
At this he closed his eyes, breathed very deeply, and then, suddenly, he made a terribly odd noise with his throat, and his eyes shot wide open again. I guessed that this must have been the moment that the spirit of Maitreya had entered into him. Either that or we’d have to start praying that there was a doctor in the house. I found myself sitting straighter, probably subconsciously trying to make a good impression on Maitreya. Someone somewhere clicked Play on a tape recorder and a fuzzy, buzzy home-recording kicked in.
“Prepare yourself … to see me soon!” said a slow, deep voice, while Elias Brown looked from person to person, a beatific smile on his face and kindness in his eyes.
“Prepare yourself … to hear my message!”
I was. And so, it seemed, was everyone else. I appeared to be the only person in the room without my hands clasped and my eyes closed. Instinctively I clasped my hands together.
“I am the stranger at the door. I am he who knocks. I am your friend.”
Elias continued to smile and look from person to person. Somewhere behind me, someone sighed a sigh of pleasure.
“You will see me soon. Maybe … you have seen me already.” Suddenly it went a bit odd. I shivered. Elias Brown was looking straight at me. Straight at me, while a tape told me that maybe I had met Maitreya already.
“Those who search me out …”
Elias Brown was still looking at me.
“… are those who will find me….”
I fiddled with my watch.
He was still looking at me.
I smiled nervously.
And then he stopped looking at me and looked at the plump woman next to me instead.
“The masters are all around us,” said Elias Brown a little later on. “Now, that’s a huge statement. And one that I can’t in any way prove. But take it from me: It is true.”
I had started to realise some way into this lecture that quite a lot of what I was being told was going to have to be taken on faith.
“Soon you will become aware of their presence and their wisdom. When Maitreya comes, he will appear on television, simultaneously, all around the world. The satellite systems were built purposefully for his coming. You will see a face. A face you will recognise. A face you have seen before. But he will not speak. He will not say a word. But his thoughts will silently take place inside us silently. Each of us will hear him in our own language. Thousands of spontaneous miracles will then take place.”
It was half an hour in, and somewhere in front of me, an old woman took a photo of Elias. Pete had his eyes closed and was nodding slowly.
“All those who have shaped humanity are disciples of the masters. Da Vinci, Einstein, Shakespeare, Newton, Freud, Jung … they have passed on their knowledge and their inspiration. The masters know what is best for each and every one of us, and they work constantly to help us. We are very lucky to have them here.”
From there Elias talked about Maitreya’s thoughts and philosophies on world hunger, the UN, war in the middle east, nuclear power, George W. Bush, the developed nations, the G8 summit, poverty, disease, and destitution. But at no point did he mention how Maitreya gets home at night, and whether on occasion he’s taken the bus rather than the Tube. It was all starting to get a bit disheartening. “Deal with the issues at hand, Brown!” I felt like shouting. “Why cover politics, when we can talk bus routes!”
“One day we will all be immortal,” he said, “I promise you that.”
But even that didn’t help.
Mind you it was hard to disagree with Maitreya’s general principles. To save the world, he says, we need to share. There are more than thirty million people in the world today who are starving to death … and yet the storehouses of the West are overflowing. It was this that I was pondering, when an arm shot up in front of me. It was Pete. What was he doing?
“Yes?” said Elias Brown.
“Is the Maitreya still here tonight?” he said, and I bristled with embarrassment. “In this room?”
Elias smiled and looked around the room for a few moments. He seemed to catch an invisible eye, and then looked back at Pete and nodded.
“Yes. He is here.”
Pete nudged me in the ribs and smiled a very wide smile.
“Probably because of you,” he whispered.
I was starting to think that Pete did believe in all this after all.
“Where does Maitreya live?” asked a man on the other side of the room, and I felt rather smug, because I already knew this.
“He lives among the Asian community in Brick Lane. He doesn’t sleep, he doesn’t eat, he doesn’t have a bed. He works twenty-four hours a day, tirelessly, for the benefit of the planet Earth. For the benefit of each and every one of you.”
And Elias Brown once again looked me right in the eye.
“I’m telling you, Ian, he looked straight at me,” I said as we walked down Mile End Road. “It was a little bit spooky.”
“An old man in a cream suit looked straight at you, and you think that’s spooky. It’s not spooky. It’s just an old man in a cream suit looking straight at you.”
“But it was like he knew something. He kind of changed my mind, when I saw the look on his face. It was like Maitreya was sitting next to him and pointing me out and saying, ‘That’s the one … that’s the one I’m helping!’”
“Do you realise how arrogant that sounds?” said Ian as I paused to stick a CALL ME sticker to a phonebox. “Do you think you’re the bloody Golden Child or something? Do you think that any minute now, Eddie Murphy’s going to burst into the room looking for you.”
“Is it really so far-fetched? Why do you automatically assume I can’t be some kind of Golden Child? This is precisely the kind of negative feedback that Jesus will get when he makes his Second Coming.”
My phone rang. I answered it. They hung up. In the past twenty-four hours, my CALL ME stickers seemed to have permeated London’s consciousness, and this had started to happen quite a bit.
“Look, Dan,” said Ian. “I honestly don’t think the man on the bus was Jesus or Maitreya or any of those fellas. I was drunk when I suggested that. And I think it is highly unlikely that you, my friend, are the Golden Child, or the Copper Child, or a child made of virtually any metallic substance or element.”
“The Starburst Group think it might be possible.”
“The Starburst Group think that aliens built the pyramids,” he said, and I saw his point.
The only way you’re going to get over this, Dan,” he continued, pausing only for dramatic effect, “is if you find the man on the bus.”
Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever walked down Brick Lane, attempting to track down and meet an enlightened being from another dimension, but it’s really not as easy as it sounds.
Ian had been right, of course: Finding the man on the bus was the only way to confirm once and for all that he wasn’t the Maitreya. That said, he hadn’t been too keen to join me on the journey. I’d already tired him out with our sticker exertions. No, this time I’d had to persuade him with the promise of a free meal.
“So, what’s the plan?” he said as we stepped off the Tube at Aldgate.
I smiled and opened my rucksack.
“This is …”
I pulled out a thick wodge of photocopied A4 posters, headed with the controversial and attention-grabbing question: IS THIS YOU?
It was the second great Yes-Man campaign in just one week! I was deeply excited…. Here I was, reaching out to the world, exposing m
yself not just once but twice! This was just what I’d promised myself I would do. Not only did I have my CALL ME stickers out there, circulating in society and spreading my number far and wide, but here were my Man On The Bus posters, proudly displaying the face of the bloke who’d brought me out of the depths of my depression. The only problem was, I’m not very good at drawing, and all I really remembered about my subject was that he was an Asian man with a beard. That, on its own, wouldn’t be enough. So I wrote a more detailed explanation of the poster’s existence underneath the picture:
Are you a teacher who lives in the Aldgate area of East London? Were you travelling on the bus-replacement service out of Oxford Circus, heading toward the East End on Friday the 6? If so, I’m the man you were talking to on the bus! Please get in touch—there’s a story I need to tell you! Either e-mail me at [email protected] or call me on 07802 *** ***. This isn’t a joke! Please call me! Danny
I felt sure that this would peak the man’s interest, and he would call—if he saw it. The best thing I could do was plaster Brick Lane—the centre of the local community—with my elaborate posters and just hope …
And so, for the second time that week, we began to stick things up. We stuck posters on lampposts, over club posters, in phone boxes, and more while also whacking the odd CALL ME sticker up alongside it. I’ll be honest: We got a few strange looks that day. Perhaps it was the quality of my artwork that was causing concern; perhaps it was the fact that we were being so very thorough with our campaigning. Whatever it was, I knew that at the very least, we’d caused a stir. Someone would recognise this man. They had to. Even if the only defining characteristic of my drawing was a beard.
And then a bell went off, and out of the mosque opposite poured hundreds of bearded men, and I realised that perhaps this was going to be a little trickier than I thought.
As we ate our meal, Ian and I pondered the magical possibilities of what we’d just done. Well, I thought they were magical. Ian still thought they were bollocks.
“It’s crazy when you think about it, isn’t it?” I said. “You know … about the man on the bus possibly being a god.”
Yes Man Page 20