Prologue
MY WORDLESS GUIDE was moving quickly ahead of me, as…
Chapter One
IT WAS ONE OF THOSE DAYS you find yourself wishing…
Chapter Two
THE TAXICAB HAD MOVED from the highway onto an extraordinarily…
Chapter Three
JULIAN HAD NOT GIVEN ME a list of the places…
Chapter Four
THERE HAD BEEN MOMENTS WHEN, moving around Istanbul, I felt…
Chapter Five
I HAD TRIED TO REACH JULIAN several times while in…
Chapter Six
THE “ITINERARY” THAT JULIAN had sent me didn’t cover the…
Chapter Seven
WHEN I WAS FIVE, my father took me to my…
Chapter Eight
WHILE I WAS IN SPAIN, Julian had sent me some…
Chapter Nine
AFTER MY TIME with Mary and Angus, I flew from…
Chapter Ten
NOTHING COULD HAVE BEEN more in contrast with Shanghai’s glitzy,…
Chapter Eleven
I WAS STANDING OUTSIDE the most magnificent building I had…
RESOURCES FOR LEADERSHIP AND PERSONAL EXCELLENCE
The Talisman Letters
PROLOGUE
MY WORDLESS GUIDE was moving quickly ahead of me, as if he too disliked being down here. The tunnel was damp, and dimly lit. The bones of six million Parisians were entombed in this place…
Suddenly the young man stopped at the entranceway of a new tunnel. It was separated from the one we had followed by a piece of rusted iron fencing. The tunnel was dark. My guide moved the fence to one side and turned into the blackness. He paused and looked behind at me, making sure I was following. I moved uncertainly out of the anemic light as his back disappeared in front of me. I took a few more steps. Then my foot knocked against something. A wooden rattle filled the air, and I froze. As I did, light flared around me. My guide had snapped on his flashlight. Suddenly I wished he hadn’t. The gruesome orderliness was gone. Bones were everywhere—scattered across the floor around our feet, cascading from loose stacks against the walls. The glare from the flashlight caught on waves of dust and tendrils of cobwebs that hung from the ceiling.
“Ça c’est pour vous,” said my guide. He thrust the flashlight at me. As I took it, he brushed past me.
“What—” I began to call out.
Before I could finish my question, the man snapped, “Il vous rencontrera ici.” And then he was gone, leaving me alone, fifty feet underground, a solitary human being standing in a sea of the dead.
CHAPTER ONE
IT WAS ONE OF THOSE DAYS you find yourself wishing was over before you’ve got even ten minutes into it. It started when my eyes opened and I noticed an alarming amount of sunlight seeping in under the bedroom blinds. You know, an eight-a.m. amount of light—not a seven-a.m. amount of light. My alarm had not gone off. That realization was followed by twenty minutes of panicked cursing and shouting and crying (my six-year-old son did the crying) as I careened around the house, from bathroom to kitchen to front door, trying to gather all the ridiculous bits of stuff Adam and I needed for the rest of our day. As I pulled up in front of his school forty-five minutes later, Adam shot me a reproachful look.
“Mom says if you keep dropping me off late at school on Mondays, I won’t be able to stay over Sunday nights anymore.”
Oh, boy.
“Last time,” I said. “Last time, I promise.”
Adam was sliding out of the car now, a doubtful expression on his face.
“Here,” I said, holding up a bulging plastic bag. “Don’t forget your lunch.”
“Keep it,” Adam said, not looking at me. “I’m not allowed to bring peanut butter to school.”
And then he turned on his heel and raced through the deserted school playground. Poor kid, I thought as I watched his little legs pumping toward the front door. Nothing worse than heading into school late, everyone already in class, the national anthem blaring through the hallways. That and no lunch to boot.
I threw the plastic bag onto the passenger seat and sighed. Another “custodial” weekend had come to an inglorious end. I had, apparently, failed spectacularly as a husband. Now it appeared that I would fail with equal flamboyance as a separated dad. From the moment I picked Adam up, I seemed to provide an unending series of disappointments. Despite the fact that all week I felt Adam’s absence like a missing limb, I invariably arrived late on Fridays. The promised treat of pizza and a movie was dampened by the tuna sandwich that Annisha made Adam eat as his dinner hour came and went. And then there was my phone, which chirped incessantly, like it had a bad case of hiccups. It beeped during the movie, and when I was tucking Adam into bed. It beeped during our breakfast of slightly burned pancakes, and while we walked to the park. It beeped as we picked up takeout burgers, and all through story time. Of course the beeping wasn’t the real problem. The real problem was that I kept picking the thing up. I checked my messages; I sent responses; I talked on the phone. And with each interruption, Adam became a little quieter, a little more distant. It broke my heart, yet the thought of ignoring the thing, or turning it off, made my palms sweat.
As I raced to work, I brooded about the botched weekend. When Annisha had announced that she wanted a trial separation, it felt like someone had backed over me with a truck. She had been complaining for years that I never spent time with her or Adam; that I was too caught up with work, too busy with my own life to be part of theirs.
“But how,” I argued, “does leaving me fix any of that? If you want to see more of me, why are you making sure that you see less?”
She
