The Moth

"Passionate . . . brilliant, and quietly addictive."― The London Guardian "[In this book] the stories not only maintain their oral integrity but also take on new dimensions, allowing you to ponder a turn of events or to swirl the language around in your head without missing the next part of the story."― David Vecsey, NYTimes.com "The 6th Floor" blog "Burns, artistic director of the award-winning The Moth Radio Hour, frees stories whetted for a live audience onto the page, proving the richness of great storytelling: that one can gain as much as a member of an audience communally cringing, laughing and weeping, as a reader privately surrendering to the complicity of human experience."― Publishers Weekly "When I started to read the new collection 'The Moth: 50 True Stories,' [the storytellers'] distinctive voices turned on my audio button. It felt as if they had channeled these stories to me."― Elizabeth Taylor, Chicago Tribune "Editor's Choice" Adam Gopnik is a staff writer at The New Yorker ; he has written for the magazine since 1986. Gopnik has three National Magazine awards, for essays and for criticism, and also a George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting. In March of 2013, Gopnik was awarded the medal of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters. The author of numerous bestselling books, including Paris to the Moon , he lives in New York City. Catherine Burns is The Moth's long-time Artistic Director and a host and producer of the Peabody Award-winning The Moth Radio Hour. She is coauthor of the New York Times bestseller How to Tell a Story: The Essential Guide to Memorable Storytelling from The Moth, and the editor of the bestselling and critically acclaimed All These Wonders and Occasional Magic . Prior to The Moth, she directed the feature film A Pound of Flesh , and produced television and independent films. She attended her first Moth back in 2000, fell in love with the show, and was, in turn, a GrandSLAM contestant and volunteer in the Moth Community Program before joining the staff full time. Born and raised in Alabama, she now lives in Brooklyn with her husband and son. George Dawes Green , founder of The Moth and Unchained, is an internationally celebrated author. His first novel, The Caveman’s Valentine, won the Edgar Award and became a motion picture starring Samuel L. Jackson. The Juror was an international bestseller in more than twenty languages and was the basis for the movie starring Demi Moore and Alec Baldwin. Ravens was chosen as one of the best books of 2009 by the Los Angeles Times , the Wall Street Journal , and the Daily Mail . George grew up in Georgia and now lives in Brooklyn, New York. The Moth is an acclaimed nonprofit organization dedicated to the art and craft of storytelling. Since its launch in 1997, The Moth has presented more than 50,000 stories,xa0told live and without notes to standingxad-room-only crowds worldwide.xa0The Peabody Award-winning The Moth Radio Hour airs on more than 575 stations nationwide, and The Moth podcast is downloaded more than ninety million times annually. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The Moth By Catherine Burns, Adam Gopnik, George Dawes Green Hyperion Copyright © 2013 Catherine Burns Adam Gopnik George Dawes GreenAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4013-1111-7 CHAPTER 1 Innocents Abroad Life on a Möbius Strip JANNA LEVIN Einstein famously said, "Only two things are infinite: the universe and humanstupidity." Then he added, "And I'm not so sure about the universe." And it's true, there's a realistic possibility that the entire universe isfinite; it's mathematically and physically possible. There was a period of timein my research when I was obsessed with this idea. I was fixated on theimplication that you could leave the Earth and travel in a straight line to aplanet in a distant galaxy on the edge of the observable universe and realizethe galaxy was the Milky Way that you had left behind you, and the planet youhad landed on was the Earth. There were also weirder possibilities that theEarth was reconnected like a Möbius strip—if you took a left-handed gloveon that same trip, it would come back right-handed. The hazard for a scientist working on something so esoteric is the possibilitythat it just might not be true or it might not be answerable. I felt myself kindof navigating this precipice between discovery on the one side and obscurity onthe other side. At the time I was working at Berkeley, living in San Francisco.I would spend a lot of time in the coffee shop across the street from myapartment. I was trying to find some kind of tangible connection to a moreearthbound reality. And it was there that I met this guy named Warren. Warren came charging past me the first day I saw him and pinned me with his blueeyes and said, " You're the astrophysicist." Which I knew. And then hehad so much momentum after having built up the nerve to say this to me that hekept walking; he didn't wait for my response. He went right out of the coffeeshop and down the street. And so it begins. Warren is just everything I would never want in a man. He can't drive, he'snever had his name on a lease, he's by his own confession completely uneducated,he's a self-professed obsessive-compulsive. He comes from a really tough part ofworking-class Manchester. He writes songs like Daddy was a drunk, daddy was a singer,daddy was a drunken singer.Murdered in a flophouse, broke and drunk.... You get the idea. It's not good. So naturally I'm completely smitten. And he ismesmerizing. He has all this intensity, all this energy. He's full of opinions.He was going to start his own music station called Shut the Folk Up. I said, "The gag is going to be that nobody's going to understand his accent.Nobody will understand a word he says! He'll just rant." It was a Manchesteraccent, but it did seem even more tangled than one would expect. It was quite abrogue. He would talk so fast that the words would just slam together—itwas really undecipherable. But when he sang, this big, beautiful, warm tone justlifted out of him; it was like this old-timey crooner, this rare crisp and clearsound. So I used to tell him, "If there's anything that's really urgent that youneed me to understand, just, like, sing it to me, OK?" So, Warren and I started seeing each other, and he never asked me about my work,which was quite a relief from my own sort of mental world. And it's like we wereboth in exile. Warren was in exile from his actual country, and I was in a kindof mental exile. And he would obsess all day about music and melody, and I wouldobsess all day about mathematics and numbers. And it was like we were pulling sohard in such opposite directions that the tension kept both of us from floatingaway. After a few weeks of seeing each other, Warren decides we should live together,and he's going to convince me that I should let him move in. So he gives me thisargument—some fairly inventive logic, which I'm a little suspicious of,and laden with all kinds of Manchester slang I don't really follow. But Warrencan convince me of anything, just anything, so I relent, and he says, "I'll beright back!" He's so excited; he comes back in less than an hour, and he's movedin. He's carrying his guitar and whatever he can carry on his back, because hehas this philosophy, "If you can't carry it, you can't own it." Right? So hemoves in with me. And my parents are thrilled. Their recently Ph.D.-confirmed daughter—Ihave a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from MIT—is living with an illegalimmigrant who can't spell words like "nonviable," "unfeasible." Even our friendsare full of doubt. Our good friend, the musician Sean Hayes, is writing lyricslike We'll just play this one out until it explodesInto a thousand tiny piecesWhat's your story universeYou are melody, you are numbersYou are shapes, and you are rhythms Warren and I hear this, and we're pretty sure it's about us. And I'm filled withdoubt too. I mean, this is a crazy situation; it's totally improbable. And myfellowship's coming to an end, and the only other offers I have are in England.And Warren hates England. He slumps when he describes the low-hanging skies andthe black mark of his accent there, and the inescapability of his class, but hesays, "Baby, you know, I'll follow you anywhere. Even to England," as though I'mbringing him to the acid marshes of hell. But he makes himself feel better by convincing me we have to sell all our stuff,because you can't own what you can't carry. So we're sitting on the steps of ourapartment, and I watch stuff that I've been carting around my entire life justdisappear. People come in and out of the coffee shop and stop to talk to us and say, "Soyou're the astrologer?" And I say, "Well, no, I'm more of an astronomer." And they ask me about how isit possible that the universe is finite. And I explain how Warren and I could goon this trip from San Francisco to London, and if we kept going in as straight aline as possible we'd eventually come back to San Francisco again, where westarted. Because the Earth is compact and connected and finite, and maybe thewhole universe is like that. And Warren and I make this leap, his left hand inmy right hand, and we board a plane to the UK. And it does suck. We have this very difficult wandering path, but finally I landa fantastic fellowship at Cambridge. It's beautiful. But not before we spend afew weeks in a coin-operated bed-sit in Brighton. If you ran out of pound coins,your electricity went off and the lights went out. We often ran out of poundcoins, and towards the end we were so despondent we would just sit in the dark.I could hear though not see Warren say things like "At least I don't have tolook at the wood-chipped wallpaper," which for some reason really depressed him,this very English quality of the wood-chipped wallpaper. But eventually we get to Cambridge, and my work takes a beautiful turn. I startworking on black holes, these massive dead stars tens of kilometers acrossspinning hundreds of times a second ripping through space at the speed of light.This is very concrete compared to my previous research. So I'm excited about thedirection my work's turning in. I'm in Hawking's group in Cambridge, which isvery exciting, but he doesn't pay me any attention at all. But I'm invited byNobel laureates to Trinity College for dinner, and I get to watch this ceremonyof dinner at this old, beautiful college from the privileged perch of hightable. Meanwhile Warren's down the road in another college washing the dishes becauseit was the only job he could get. And as things go on, we both start to retreatinto our mental worlds, me in my math and Warren in his melody, but it's likewe're not really keeping each other from floating away so much anymore. Eventually it starts to rain, and it rains forever. Woody Allen said, "Forever'sa very long time, especially the bit towards the end." And a rainy winter inCambridge is a very long time. Warren picks up a mandolin; he startsplaying these Americana bluegrass tunes over and over again, you know, na nana na na na na . And it's this manic soundtrack to our mounting insanity, andeventually we explode. It takes about six months of that relentless rain, but weexplode, and it's over. And all we see is how improbable we are; we see thatwe're nonviable and unfeasible. Which are words, by the way, that Warren canspell by then. We both leave. We pack up everything we have, each of us just what we can carry.We end up in a bus terminal in London, clutching each other. I'm waiting forWarren to convince me, because he can always convince me, that we can do theimpossible. But it's like the light's gone out in his eyes, and I disappear intoLondon and he just ... disappears. And the silence is total. A graduate student of mine recently said to me, "The emotional dimension is theleast interesting part of the human experience." And I know scientists are odd,but I agree. I was like, "Yeah, I know what you mean." So it's difficult for meto recount how dark those nights were. Even in my worst moments I knew that mydespair was just sort of not interesting. I needed to get back to mathematicsand the universe and this connection because in its sheer magnitude it woulddiminish the importance of my personal trials. I searched all over London until I found a perfect warehouse to move into,because I wanted to connect with a more earthbound reality while I was doing myresearch. I found the perfect place. It had broken windows and shutters. It wasdead empty—no bathroom, nothing. I had the windows replaced, and I had abathroom installed, and my unit became a part of this artists' communitybuilding on the east end of London, along the canals. So I had a great community around me, and I started a new life there, and Istarted to write. I got a book deal. It was a book about whether or not theuniverse was finite, and it was a diary about the terror of a scientist workingon that really frightening divide between discovery and total oblivion. And itbecame a parallel story about Warren, about the unraveling of an obsessive-compulsive mind. I think if I'm honest it was also a way of still hanging on tohim. This book kind of came out of me fully formed; it took one year. When the book was finished, I delivered it to my publisher, and in part fueledby the London gloom and in part fueled by nostalgia, I decided I wanted to goback to San Francisco just to recuperate. To go back to where the book actuallystarts, when we sell all of our stuff on the steps in San Francisco. I go back to California, and I take these beautiful walks in the city. SanFrancisco is so beautiful. And I find myself, despite myself—because Itell myself not to do it—walking past my old neighborhood. I end up goingpast my old coffee shop, and I'm going like three miles an hour, you know, thereare like five thousand feet in a mile, and there's like three thousand, sixhundred seconds in an hour, so I'm going about four and a half feet, I figure,per second. It takes me about two seconds to go past this coffee shop window. In that time, because I'm looking at my building, my old apartment, full ofsentiment, what I don't realize is that on the other side of that window, insidethe coffee shop, is Warren, who, after I left him in the London bus terminal,went back to California, came back to London, went to France, came back toLondon, and just recently returned to San Francisco, and got a job in the coffeeshop, where he regaled the patrons with stories about his travels. He was souprooted. But the light was back on in his eyes. And as he's turning around todeliver a coffee, he lifts his head to see me, in those two seconds, walk pastthe frame of the window. And he shouts, "It's self-service!" He stumbles out of the coffee shop. People are grabbing muffins and coffees,they're like, "Warren! What's up?!" And he's trying to get out of the coffeeshop, trying to grab on to the handle of the door. He keeps banging his head.It's like a bird trying to get out the window. And all of the sudden, the doorswings open and deposits Warren in front of me. You often think, What am I going to say when I bump into my ex? But,it's just this electric moment between us. There's this swell of warmth, and welaugh that we're back where we started on this very spot in San Francisco. I try to give him the essential data. I'm living in London Fields, and he tellsme I've moved onto the block he lived on when he was nineteen and squatting inLondon. Out of the whole city of London. And he recognizes the names of all thelocals I can rattle off. And by the end of the conversation he's saying, "I'mcoming with you back to London aren't I?" And I'm thinking, Are you out of your mind? I mean, what woman in herright mind is going to let this lunatic come back to London with her? There isno way. About a year later, we're married. Our rings, which were made by a friend ofours, are stamped with the lyrics "Melody and Number, Shapes and Rhythms" withno small dose of irony and defiance. About a year after that, we're having ababy, and we're laughing at how improbable this kid is. We have no idea. When this kid is born, he is so beautiful, and afterwards ayoung medical resident comes charging into my hospital room, and he's so excitedhe's beaming. And I'm thinking, He sees how beautiful this boy is. Buthe's carrying an X-ray, which he slaps on the window of my hospital room so thelight can come through, and I can see it better. But I still don't know what I'mlooking at. He says, "Your son's heart is on the right side." And he doesn't mean thecorrect side, he doesn't mean the left side. He means my son's heart is on the right side. And all I can think in this terrifying moment is Get Warren . And the resident says, "Your son has dextrocardia with situs inversus; all hisorgans are on the opposite side." And I say, "Get Warren." And the resident tells me he's so excited, because he never thought he'd eversee anything like this. To his knowledge, nobody else in the hospital's seen itin real life. And he's describing studies for me that are made up of only twelvecases because the numbers are so rare. And then Warren's there, and he's saying in that rough, raw, beautiful accentwhat only he can convince me of, the totally impossible. He's saying, "He'sperfect." And our now eight-year-old son is a perfectly formed mirror image of the moreconventional human anatomy, a very rare and unlikely alignment. It's as thoughWarren and I took our left-handed code on a Möbius strip around the universe andbrought back this right-handed boy. And that boy, as intense and spirited as hisfather, is like a living testament to the incredibly improbable trip that we'reon. Janna Levin is an astrophysicist and writer. She has contributed to anunderstanding of black holes, the cosmology of extra dimensions, and chaoticspacetimes. Her second book, a novel, A Madman Dreams of TuringMachines , won the PEN/Bingham prize and was runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway.She is the author of the popular science book How the Universe Got ItsSpots . Janna is a professor at Barnard College of Columbia University andwas recently named a Guggenheim Fellow (2012). Mission to India DR. GEORGE LOMBARDI It was a Saturday afternoon in September 1989, and I was home alone unpackingboxes when the phone rang, and a woman that I did not know started tointerrogate me. "Are you Dr. Lombardi? Are you Dr. George Lombardi? Are you an infectiousdisease specialist? Did you live and work and do research in East Africa? Areyou considered to be an expert in tropical infections? Would you consideryourself to be an expert in viral hemorrhagic fevers?" At this point I paused, gathered myself, and asked the obvious question, "Whoare you?" She introduced herself and said she was the representative of a world figure andNobel laureate, someone who was suspected of having a viral hemorrhagic fever,and she was calling to ask if I would consult on the case. Now I found this highly improbable. I was thirty-two years old. I had justopened my office. The phone never rang. I had no patients. In fact I rememberstaring at the phone trying to will it to ring. But she persisted, and shementioned that she had gotten my name from a colleague of mine who had told herto "call Dr. Lombardi. He knows a lot about very weird things." She arranged aconference call, and in ten minutes I was transported through the telephonewires to a small hospital in Calcutta, India, where I found out for the firsttime that the patient was Mother Teresa. (Continues...) Excerpted from The Moth by Catherine Burns, Adam Gopnik, George Dawes Green . Copyright © 2013 Catherine Burns Adam Gopnik George Dawes Green. Excerpted by permission of Hyperion. 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