“How fast does energy travel?” I asked. “At the speed of sound, or is it
more like a jetliner? Does it fly direct, or will it have to lay over in
Minneapolis?”
Mother laughed and hung up.
I studied most mornings in the college library, near a small window. I was
there on a particular morning when Drew, a friend from BYU, sent me a song
via email. He said it was a classic but I had never heard of it, nor of the
singer. I played the song through my headphones. It gripped me immediately.
I listened to it over and over while staring out at the north cloister.
Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery
None but ourselves can free our mindI scratched those lines into notebooks, into the margins of the essays I was
writing. I wondered about them when I should have been reading. From the
Internet I learned about the cancer that had been discovered on Bob Marley’s
foot. I also learned that Marley had been a Rastafarian, and that Rastafari
believe in a “whole body,” which is why he had refused surgery to amputate
the toe. Four years later, at age thirty-six, he died.
Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery. Marley had written that line a
year before his death, while an operable melanoma was, at that moment,
metastasizing to his lungs, liver, stomach and brain. I imagined a greedy
surgeon with sharp teeth and long, skeletal fingers urging Marley to have the
amputation. I shrank from this frightening image of the doctor and his corrupt
medicine, and only then did I understand, as I had not before, that although I
had renounced my father’s world, I had never quite found the courage to live
in this one.
I flipped through my notebook to the lecture on negative and positive
liberty. In a blank corner I scratched the line, None but ourselves can free our
mind. Then I picked up my phone and dialed.
“I need to get my vaccinations,” I told the nurse.
I attended a seminar on Wednesday afternoons, where I noticed two women,
Katrina and Sophie, who nearly always sat together. I never spoke to them
until one afternoon a few weeks before Christmas, when they asked if I’d like
to get a coffee. I’d never “gotten a coffee” before—I’d never even tasted
coffee, because it is forbidden by the church—but I followed them across the