The Book of Why (3 page)

Y
ou know, I always tried to avoid the dark. I sought out light; I created it any chance I had, whether day or night, but especially night, with a push or turn or flick of a switch. I knew where every source of light was. There was a standing lamp beside my bed—still there today, four decades later, used only when I visit my mother in Queens. At night I'd bear the dark until my parents turned on the TV. I hoped the sound would drown out my movements in bed, my reach for the lamp, the click of the switch. But my mother always heard. She would call up for me to turn out the light, and I would, or I would turn the switch twice in rapid succession so that it sounded like one click. Some nights she would come upstairs and turn off the light for me.

In the dark, anything could happen. My eyes never quite adjusted. Some nights I would get up to use the bathroom, or pretend to use the bathroom, and would leave on the night-light above the sink. This small light from down the hall was just enough to allow me to see the paneling that covered my walls. I tried my best to find friendly faces in the wood. You could find any kind of face you wanted, and it took great concentration to ignore the scary faces—wide eyes, mouths open in fear or disbelief. Some nights my mother called up for me to turn off the bathroom light, and I would tell her that I felt sick, and would lie on the bathroom floor, and sometimes in the morning I
was
sick, as if I'd created the illness with my mind.

Desperate, I stole my father's matches and hid them in a pair of purple striped tube socks I never wore. I coughed to cover the sound of the match struck, then counted down the seconds before the flame reached my hand.

There was a light on my bedroom ceiling, controlled by a wall switch by the door. There was a bright hallway light seldom used. There were two lamps in my parents' room set on nightstands on either side of their bed. There was an overhead light, but long ago the bulbs had blown and my father hadn't bothered to replace them. There were three lamps in the living room, and the light from the TV, and the almost constant glow from the embers of my father's cigarettes. Through the small square window in our front door came the moon and, on clear nights, the stars. In the dining room were a chandelier and a row of lights inside the breakfront that held my parents' good china, seldom used. There was a light above the kitchen table beneath which I ate and did homework, and a small stove light, perhaps my favorite, because it was kept on always. No matter how dark my room, I could, as a last resort, imagine that halogen stove light, below it a clock suspended at 2:22, a time to which I attributed special, almost magical meaning, its significance unclear to me until many years later, when I met you on February 22. It was bright the night we met—lightning outside, stage light inside—and it was meant to be, I remember thinking: everything had been leading to that moment.

There was a light in our yard, and a light in each neighbor's yard, a row of lights I could see over the fences dividing our properties, and beyond the farthest yard were the lights of Manhattan, what those of us in Queens called the city, even though we were the city, too.

There was the problem of the basement light. The switch was at the bottom of the stairs; you had to go down into the dark to feel for it (it always seemed to be moving), and when you were finished changing the laundry, you had to turn off the light and run up the stairs before something pulled you back into the dark.

I was often in trouble for turning on lights that didn't need to be on, or for leaving on lights I'd been told how many times to make sure I turned off.

But you already know all this about me. You don't know everything I'm about to tell you in this book, and neither do I, but you know all too well about my complicated relationship with light and dark. Many nights I fell asleep beside you, whether I was reading or not, with a lamp still on. When you complained, and you had every right, I bought an alarm clock whose face glowed just enough for me to see the outline of the chair by the window, the dog stretched on the wood floor near the heating vent, the shape of you beneath the covers. I want to tell you now, and I mean it, this isn't loneliness speaking, that you were light enough. A few nights we lost power and the clock face went dark. If I could have those nights back, I would not check the circuit breaker, I would not look outside to see if the rest of our block had lost power, I would not find a flashlight and leave it on on my nightstand. I wouldn't get out of bed at all, wouldn't leave your side. I would get under the covers with you where it was darkest, where it was brightest despite the dark.

THE WEEK BEFORE
Christmas meant extra light in the house: a small tree in the window, a flashing wreath on the door.

I was seven years old. Lucky seven, my father had told me.

My mother sat with me, rubbing my back until I fell asleep.

Later, I woke alone and blind in the dark. I was floating deep in space, a million light-years from home.

I snuck out of my room, tiptoed across the hallway, testing for creaky parts before committing my full weight, and sat on the stairs. My parents were watching
The Bishop's Wife
,
an old Christmas movie about an angel. My mother liked Cary Grant movies because he and my father, with the exception of my father's mustache, looked alike. Through the banister I saw the angel—he might as well have been my father—help a blind man cross a street, cars braking just before hitting them. Then he saved a baby from getting run over by a truck. He could appear and disappear at will; he could fill a glass with wine using his mind; he could decorate a Christmas tree in a few seconds. I decided then, before falling asleep, that I wanted to be an angel. When I woke, the angel was making a typewriter type without touching it. I fell asleep again.

Later, I'm not sure how much later, I woke on the stairs: the front door opened, then closed; a man's low voice, not my father's.

Then my mother crying.

I moved down a few steps to see better.

My father stood facing the door, his arm around my mother. Smoke rose in a thin line from his cigarette. Some nights he'd wake from sleep just to smoke. The smell, especially during the night, soothed me. My mother tried to make him quit; she asked me to help by stealing his cigarettes and running water over them, but I didn't want him to quit. It was difficult to imagine his face without a cigarette between his lips.

When I saw the man, I'm not sure I understood that he was real. Maybe he's an angel, I thought. But then I saw that he was holding a knife. He wore a flannel shirt but no coat. Short red hair, a wide nose, face covered with freckles. I was afraid of freckles; I thought they were contagious. My mother had freckled hands, and when she touched my food I wouldn't eat.

The man wasn't taller than my father, but was much bigger; he was breathing heavily, his chest heaving as if he'd just run up the hill to our house.

My father stepped in front of my mother; he kept smoking his cigarette, but never touched it with his hands. The smoke went in through his mouth and out through his nose. I wasn't sure what he'd do when the cigarette ran out; that was when he always lit another one. He smoked between bites of roast beef; he sipped beer between inhale and exhale.

The man took a step toward my father, who remained calm. He spoke gently, as if to a child. “This is my wife,” he said. “She's scared, as you can imagine.”

The man said nothing; he held the knife at his side, against the leg of his jeans, blade pointing down. He kept squeezing the knife's handle.

“She doesn't know what I know,” my father said, “which is that there's no reason to be afraid. It's just that you walked into the wrong house. It's been a long night, and you're lost.”

My father puffed on his cigarette and said, “What you want to do is put that down.” I knew he meant the knife, and was glad he hadn't said the word. “You won't need that here,” my father said.

The man raised the knife; he looked at it as if unsure how it came to be in his hand. He blinked a few times, then stepped forward and laid the knife on the coffee table.

“Now what you want to do,” my father said, “is go down two blocks to the pay phone and call someone who can pick you up.” He reached into his pocket and gave the man a dime. “Here you go,” he said. “Good luck getting home.”

The man nodded, put the dime in his pocket, opened the door, and left; he didn't bother taking his knife.

My father didn't rush to lock the door; that's what I would have done. He didn't call the police until the next day, and only when my mother insisted.

I came down the stairs and asked them who the man was.

“He was lost,” my father said.

“What did he want?” I said.

“We live in a sick world,” my mother said.

“Everything's fine,” my father said.

“It's a miracle you wake up alive,” she said.

She started shaking. My father tried to hold her, but she pushed him away as if he'd done something wrong, as if he hadn't just saved us.

The next night, at bedtime, my father asked me if I was afraid to go to sleep; I said yes. “Nothing to be ashamed of,” he said. “But I want you to know something.” He turned his head away to breathe out smoke. “When you're afraid of something,” he said, “it tends to find you.”

I waited for him to say more, but he didn't.

“Why did he do what you told him to do?”

“The mind's powerful,” he said. “I saw him put down that knife, then he did. I saw him leave, then he did.”

“How do you know God didn't do it?”

“God did do it,” my father said. “But where do you think God lives?”

“Where?”

He tapped my head with his finger. “Right here,” he said.

WE LIVED SURROUNDED
by the dead: a mausoleum behind our garage, rows of gravestones as far as you could see. Our house backed up against the cemetery where Harry Houdini was buried. Each Halloween, on the anniversary of his death, dozens of people would gather at his grave and wait for him to rise from the dead or contact them from the other side—to give them a sign that he still existed somewhere, in some form. When my father told me this, I was both thrilled and terrified that the dead might rise, that resurrection might not be Jesus' exclusive miracle. My mother, a devout Catholic who believed that magic was sacrilege, told my father to stop filling my head with nonsense.

“Look who's talking,” he said.

My father, with a quiet, childlike wonder, saw the world as a strange, magical place; my mother saw the world as a place to fear. My mother carried her cross while my father pointed out how beautiful the wood was. I've spent most of my life trying to figure out which one of them was right. It's entirely possible, of course, that they both were.

But for a while my father won.

His name was Glen Dale Newborn, and we lived in Glendale, Queens, and so I believed that the neighborhood had been named for him. I believed, too, when I was a boy, that Glendale was the entire world, that there was nothing else, so the world had been named for my father.

My mother's name is Rose, and I think now that the world was named for her, too. Pretty petals, but watch out for the thorns. Red hair, pale skin, as short as my father was tall, five feet to his six, yet she seemed taller than him, taller than anyone I knew. I was tall, too—eventually even taller than my father—but I hunched to make myself smaller.

Years later a fellow self-help author got at that. He told me, “On every page of your books there are two things battling for space—faith and doubt. Your faith, as it comes through in your words, must be stronger than your reader's doubt. Your faith must be stronger than your own doubt. Just as long as you never forget that doubt is faith's friend, the very thing that makes faith stronger.”

A motivational speaker motivating a motivational speaker.

“It's always two stories battling for space in your mind, in your heart,” he'd say, as if he knew my parents and my childhood intimately.

The story my mother would have had me believe was that my father, though she loved him, was a little strange. She never used the word
crazy
;
she knew I would have rejected that word. But that he was strange
was
true; I know that now, though I should have known—and probably on some level did know—then.

Even so, I believed every word he said.

My earliest memory, as remembered for me by my mother, was the time my father went away. For how long, I can't be sure, especially since it's not really my memory, only what I've been told. I was four and didn't stop crying when my father was gone except to sleep. So my mother says. My father went fishing and there was a storm and he couldn't get home.

I had never known my father to go fishing. He didn't own a pole, a tackle box; he didn't even
eat
fish.

So the questions left to me now, years later, long after he's gone, questions to which I have no answers: Where did he go if not fishing? Where does one go when one goes away?

Add to this story the story my mother told me about my grandfather, my father's father, dead long before I was born—drowned, as I've been told, and even my father never denied this.

My grandfather was an alternately devout and lapsed Catholic who decided he could walk on water. Whether he made this decision during a period of devotion or not is unknown. He
was
out fishing, so the story goes, and walked off the boat into choppy waters and disappeared into the sea.

Whenever my mother wanted to use the word
crazy
for my father—if she looked out the window and saw him showing me and my friends magic tricks, coins from behind our ears, a dollar bill folded again and again and again, then gone in his palm—she'd use it for my grandfather. She'd tell the story of how he believed he could walk on water, how foolish, and one was to understand—I was—that the same might be said about my father: that he was a good man, a good provider, but had misguided beliefs about how the world works. By which my mother meant: my father didn't care much for church, didn't see the point of grace at table, and meant by the word
God
something entirely different from what my mother, from what most people, meant.

When my mother was upset with my father, her temper heightened by his unwillingness to raise his voice and engage her, she'd say, “They're going to send you away to you know where.” Or, “Careful, you'll end up like your father and the rest of the Newborns.”

I wasn't ever sure what my mother meant. Maybe other Newborns had tried to walk on water and drowned. Maybe they'd all gone crazy, and my father was next and, after him, me.

One is supposed to learn from stories, whether true or not, especially stories about one's forebears, but years later I tried to walk on water.

I was seventeen and trying to save my first girlfriend, who had no intention of being saved. It's likely she didn't need saving; she's probably doing just fine now, whatever that means. She was two years younger, fifteen going on forty. She drank and smoked too much. She would sit on the edge of the subway platform and wait for the train, her legs dangling over the edge.

My father was gone by then, and she saw me as tragic, someone like her—her father was also gone—and that's why she liked me. She thought we were all in this mess of a world together. We'd get high on my father's grave, and I'd find myself telling her that happiness wasn't as much a bunch of B.S. as she liked to believe. She'd laugh and tell me I was funny, then she'd fall asleep in the cemetery grass, and I'd wake her before dark and walk her to the train.

She was perfectly named Gail. She's a passing wind in this story, a gust across the page, here only because she's part of a pattern in my life, a desire to save, and because she was there the day I tried to walk on water. Not the ocean, but the lake in Central Park, beneath the arch of the Bow Bridge. Pretty wimpy, I know—hardly a test of faith—but it
was
cold.

Maybe it's misleading to say that I
tried
to walk on water. I didn't believe I could; in fact, I was certain that I couldn't. The urge rose up in me suddenly. I said nothing to Gail. I didn't jump or dive; I walked out of the rowboat and immediately sank. So, the laws of physics worked; they applied to me. This was good news. I swam to the base of the bridge and waited. I was shivering, jumping in place, shaking my arms to get warm. It was an exhilarating fall.