The Book of Why (4 page)

Saturday morning had a feeling;
was
a feeling. The feeling when I heard the truck, trash can lids crashing onto the ground, the roar of the compactor, the sight of my father pulling up, smoking a cigarette without ever touching it with his hands.

Spray-painted in red on the side of the truck was an angel smoking a joint. Most of the tags were illegible, but I could make out a few—Curious Feet, Atom Bones, Iz the Wiz.

My father waved to me on the stoop, and the men he worked with said,
Hey, kid
, and I ran to the curb and watched the compactor crush trash—bottles and boxes, rotting food and old shoes, a vase, a rug, a broken vacuum cleaner—all of it gone.

Every day my father brought me something he'd found in the trash: a blue button that must have fallen off a sweater, a beekeeper's mask, a white clown shoe, a transistor radio, rubber balls, beer caps, matchbooks. Whatever he brought home I saved in a trunk. The tongue from a baby shoe, the felt headband from a fedora, a blue tassel from a red fez. Birthday cards and breakup letters. Magic wands and handcuffs. A holy card of Christ on the Cross.

One day my father brought home a silver watch he found at the bottom of a trash can. “A gift for you,” he said.

I wound the watch, but the second hand didn't move.

“It's broken,” I said.

“Well,” he said, “we'll have to fix it.”

He laid the watch in my palm and told me to close my hand carefully, as if the watch were an egg.

“Close your eyes,” he said, “and see the watch working. See the second hand moving.”

I felt him put his hand over mine. He tapped my hand a few times, then said, “Move. Come on—move!”

He had me say it with him. “Tell the second hand to move,” he said.

“Move,” I said.

“Say it like you mean it.”

“Move,” I said.

“Like you really believe.”

“Move!”

“That's more like it,” he said.

“Move, move, move,” I said, and each time he tapped my hand.

“Okay,” he said. “Let's take a look.”

I opened my eyes, then my hand: not only was the second hand moving, but it was bent up toward the glass.

“Sometimes that happens,” my father said.

He told me it was probably a good idea not to tell my mother, given how she felt about such things.

My father brought home other dead watches, and together we brought them back to life, but the first one was always my favorite. The watchband was too big, so I carried it around in my pocket.

The games we played—magic, my mother said—became a kind of religion, which is to say they brought me joy cloaked in a mystery I couldn't quite put into words. If given the choice of discovering God or my father as a fraud, I would have been better able to handle the debunking of God. If God were exposed as a figment of humanity's imagination, no more than wishful thinking, a coping mechanism, then at least I wouldn't be the only fool. But my belief in my father was mine alone, and I alone would have borne the disappointment should his powers have turned out to be mere tricks.

The day after Halloween, my father took me to the cemetery. I was ten. He had wanted to take me to Houdini's grave the night before, at midnight, but my mother had said no.

Now, after a late-morning storm, trees dripped with rainwater; the grass soaked my sneakers and the tips of my father's brown work boots.

We removed dead flowers from gravesites and propped up others, still alive, that had fallen. We passed a stone so old its name and date were unreadable; the stone had turned black. My father touched it; I was afraid he might catch death.

The stained glass of a mausoleum had blown in. We stopped, and my father looked inside. I was tall but not tall enough to see, so he lifted me.

Inside was a chair made of stone, nothing else. I imagined someone sitting in the chair, alone, forever watching over the dead. Then I thought: No one will ever sit in the chair. The names of the dead were engraved on plaques on the walls.

We continued through mud puddles until we reached a large monument with three steps leading to a statue of a weeping woman. I thought at first that she was Mary mourning Christ, but then I saw the bust: it wasn't Jesus but a man wearing a bow tie, his hair parted down the middle.

“You were named for him,” my father said. “But don't tell your mother—she doesn't know.”

My mother had wanted to name me Cary, after Cary Grant. My father said kids would make fun of me for having a girl's name, and besides, Cary Grant's real name was Archie. My mother said Archie would remind people of the comic book. My father suggested Harry, but my mother knew it was for Houdini, so my father said what about Eric, and my mother liked it.

“She still doesn't know it was his real name,” he said.

We sat on the steps, and my father showed me a trick. He never would have called it a trick; that's the word most people would use.

He told me to empty my mind, close my eyes, and stare into the darkness beneath my eyelids. Then he told me to think of a number between one and ten, and to concentrate on the number, to visualize it, to tell him the number with my mind, to want him to know.

“Ready?” he said.

I tried to think of nothing but the number. I wrote it over and over on the blackboard in my mind. “Ready,” I said.

He closed his eyes, touched my head with his, took a few deep breaths.

“Got it,” he said. “Seven.”

“How did you do that?”

“I didn't—
you
did.”

“Try again,” I said. “This time,
any
number.”

“Easy,” he said. “Just do the same thing. See the number. Want
me
to see it. Really concentrate.”

I closed my eyes tightly and in the dark saw three 2's blink brightly in white and red lights.

Then my father said the number.

I liked numbers, equations, problems. I believed—and was comforted by the belief—that every problem was solvable, that every question had an answer. I spent much of my time solving math problems, then checking my answers in an answer key. It was satisfying to be able to make a check next to the questions I'd answered correctly, and to see how many I could get right in a row, and to see by how many right outnumbered wrong, and to be able to understand, when I'd erred, where my thinking had gone wrong, and to remember my mistakes so that I wouldn't make them again.

When I ran out of math problems—when I'd finished all the workbooks in the house, even those for grades I was years away from reaching, I'd grow restless; my mind would form, in the absence of answerable questions, unanswerable ones.
Why
questions, my mother called them. Why would a good person go to hell if he missed Mass and was struck by a bus on his way to Confession? If God was God, why did He need to send His only Son to earth to suffer a painful death just to save the rest of us from our sins? Why not an easier way? She'd answer up to a point—the point at which she couldn't, or had grown weary of my asking—and then she'd give me chores to do—fold the laundry, sweep the yard. My father would indulge me as long as I wanted, but rarely gave me answers. More likely he'd say, “That's a great question” or “Beats me” or “What do
you
think?”

HAD I NAMED
years then, twenty years before you started that tradition, I might have named it the year of the blackout or the year of the Son of Sam or the year of making things disappear. I might have named it the year of hearing voices. I might have chosen any number of names had the year's name, in retrospect, not been so painfully obvious.

I might have called it the year I had to start a second, then a third box to hold all the objects my father brought me. Little gifts, little nothings, other people's junk.

He brought me discarded postcards I'd read and reread before sleep, trying to imagine the lives of the people who had written them. At least once a week he brought me a postcard from San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Fe, small towns with the strangest names: Surprise, Arizona; What Cheer, Iowa; Come by Chance, New South Wales; Truth or Consequences, New Mexico; Hell, Michigan; Paradise, Pennsylvania; Ecstasy, Texas. Most of the notes were cheerful, overexclamatory, but in some, usually near the end, I detected a hint of sadness; these were the ones I tended to reread most. A man named Steven told a woman named Lee about a play he saw in Chicago called
When Three Become Two
,
how it made him miss her, how he'd keep his promise, but in his PS, which was written in tiny cursive, he mentioned the despair he felt on the Skydeck of the Sears Tower, not because it was windy and he could feel the tower swaying, but because the sky was clear and he could see across Lake Michigan to Indiana, where he knew she was. It was, for a while, my favorite postcard. I had rotating favorites, which I'd bring to school and keep inside my books and read throughout the day; I'd daydream during class, wondering what Lee looked like, what Steven's promise had been.

There was a Rita who wrote from Richmond that she was considering giving up, that she had tried and tried, but her prayers hadn't been answered. There was a John in Austin who'd had the best day of his life with a girl named Linda he'd just met, and a Jon without an
h
in Vancouver who'd lost his wallet and had to sleep in a park and was about to hitch his way to Walla Walla, he might miss the funeral, please give his apologies to the kids. In my mind Rita hadn't given up, John had married Linda, Jon had made it to Walla Walla for the funeral, and all these people knew each other, and they knew Steven and Lee, and somehow everything and everyone were connected, we were all part of the same story, and I wanted it to have a happy ending. I imagined that if I brought the right postcard to school, if I reread it often enough and sent the person who had written the note my best wishes and played out in my mind a happy ending for whatever story I had created, then all would be well.

But the next week my father would bring me a new postcard from Salem or St. Paul or Baton Rouge, another note filled with exclamation points but with a passing sadness or regret, a parenthetical or PS that said, though not always directly, help me, love me, don't leave me, come back, don't give up, don't let me give up, I'm sorry, I'll try harder, do better, be better.

It was the year of hearing voices.

My father brought me a transistor radio he'd found in good condition, batteries included. In bed at night, I would roam the AM dial until a voice compelled me to stop; it could have been a word or phrase that stopped me, or just the tone or conviction of the person's voice.

“The chaos around you has been put there by design.”

“You're the boss, you're the chief. I see bright skies for you. But you're standing in your own way, man. Give up that negativity—dump it.”

“Doesn't it seem true that we wouldn't get into so many tight spots if we asked for God's help a little sooner?”

“She set fire to the garage because she believed Satan was inside.”

“You're lucky there isn't a bullet in your heart.”

“I am protected and guided by the Divine at all times. Let us step into the Light together.”

I fell asleep with the radio pressed to my ear. Some nights I woke afraid someone was in the room with me; I would lie still, trying to locate the voice—closet, attic, under the bed.

“One son put him in the grave,” a man's voice said. “The other wants to raise him from it.”

I felt the radio under my pillow, brought it to my ear, and waited, but there was only silence. I thought the batteries had died, but when I tried other stations, my room filled with voices again.

“She's a happy, satisfied camper with the Lord,” a woman said. “She doesn't ever want to be without Him.”

My father was teaching me how to make things disappear that year, but I wasn't very good at it, not at first. Whatever he made disappear, I made him make reappear. Marbles, pens, paper clips, bottle caps, anything I asked him to.

He closed his hand around a matchbook, blew on his hand, and showed me his empty palm.

“Where did it go?”

“Back where it came from,” he said.

“Where did it come from?”

“Where everything comes from.”

“But
where?
 ”

“Nowhere,” he said.

“How can something be nowhere?”

He shrugged.

“Fine,” I said. “Make it come back.”

He closed his hand, blew on his fist. When he opened his hand, the matchbook was there, as if it had never been gone. I opened it and counted the matches; there were eight where there had been nine.

“There's a match missing,” I said.

“I guess it didn't want to come back.”

“Why not?”

“Maybe it was burned out,” he said.

“Not funny,” I said.

He struck a match to light his cigarette. Seven where there had been eight.

“Can you make bigger things disappear?”

“Like what?”

“People.”

“Who?”

“The Son of Sam.”

He breathed smoke out of his nose. “I can work on that, see what I can do.”

He was the man in my dreams who took me away, who took away my mother and father; he was the voice I'd hear faintly in the static between stations; he was the creak I'd hear on the attic steps; he was the wind rattling my bedroom window; he was a shadow in the basement when my mother sent me down to fold laundry; he was dead leaves blowing in the backyard; he was the crow cawing on the clothesline; he was the man who walked by our house three times one night, then rooted through our trash; he was the man sitting in a black car across the street from the cemetery when I walked past in the early-morning dark to deliver the
News
;
he was the front-page headline I promised myself I wouldn't read but kept reading; he was the man in my closet; he was the man sitting alone in the back of church who kept looking at me; he was the man talking to himself while feeding pigeons in the park near school; he was footsteps in the school bathroom as I sat in a stall between classes; he was silence and any sound that broke it; he was why my teacher's husband came to school each day to pick her up; he was why women were cutting their hair and dyeing it blond; he was why my mother pushed her dresser against her bedroom door each night; he was why I had nightmares about my father pushed into a trash compactor; he was why I waited by the window for my father to come home from work; he was why I kept asking my father, kept pestering him, could he make a person disappear.

One hot night in July, as I was about to go to bed, I asked my father if he could make the whole world disappear.

“Why would you want to do that?”

“Just asking.”

He put out his cigarette in an ashtray about to overflow. “I suppose,” he said, “if you put your mind to it.”

And then the world
did
disappear.

My father was gone; the couch he was sitting on was gone; the coffee table on which he'd been resting his feet was gone; the entire room was gone. I couldn't see my hands when I waved them in front of my face; I couldn't see anything. My mother cried out from the basement, where she had been folding laundry. “Glen,” she said, “I'm down here in the dark!”

“We're all in the dark,” my father said.

I was relieved to hear their voices, was relieved to feel the floor beneath my feet. I was still there; my mother and father were still there; the world was still there, even if I couldn't see it.

My father opened the front door, and it was all darkness. Streetlights and porch lights were out. Small circles of light moved across the ground: our neighbors on their stoops with flashlights.

I felt my way upstairs and brought down my radio: that was how we knew for sure that it was a blackout. Later, when we realized there was nothing we could do to turn darkness into light, someone brought out a boom box, and someone else brought out a card table and a bowl of chips, and someone else brought out a cooler filled with beer, and it turned into a block party. My father was able to convince my mother to come outside and dance with him. I knew people by their voices or the smell of their cigarettes or perfume. You could be invisible as long as you didn't speak, as long as you avoided the glow of flashlights. The dark, as long as we were all in it together, felt safe.

Use the box your new pair of sneakers came in, the one that's been sitting empty in your closet the past few weeks. With a black Magic Marker write
wish box
on the lid. Cross out
wish
and write
creation,
because you're making things, not asking for them. Go through your old newspapers and cut out a police sketch of his face. Glue it onto a piece of construction paper, and above the sketch write in black Magic Marker
caught!
Concentrate on the headline you've created; know that it will be true. Don't doubt, not even a week later, when two more people are shot in the head while kissing in a car in Brooklyn, the woman killed, the man blinded. The male victim's name is
violante,
which looks and sounds like
violent,
and you wonder what that can do to a person, having to say such a name so many times, having to spell it, having to write it on exams and forms, a violent word. You believe, even as a boy, that names have meaning, have power, and you wonder how his life might have turned out differently had his name been
violet,
had he not parked his car in a neighborhood called
gravesend
. Before he left his house that night, his mother said, “Be careful, you know what's going on.” And later, when he was with his date, swinging on park swings, she got nervous and wanted to go back to the car. This is further evidence that it's best not to be afraid. Animals, even human animals, can smell fear. Resist the urge to open your
creation box
to make sure the Son of Sam is still inside. If you look, that would be a sign that you don't believe. If you show faith, it will be rewarded two weeks later when your father shows you the front-page headline:
caught!
Now you may open your
creation box
and show your father. He won't be surprised; he'll pat you on the back and say, “Nice work—you got him!”

Three months later, on Halloween, I wanted to be the Invisible Man. I wanted to be like during the blackout but better: others couldn't see me, but I could see them: their private selves, who they were when they believed no one was looking.

I wanted my father to make me disappear, even though I was afraid to be nowhere, wherever that was, the place everything came from. That morning, while my father shaved (he smoked even while shaving), I asked him if I could make
him
disappear, and he said, “Sure, but only if you believe you can,” and I asked him if he was afraid to be nowhere, and he said no, and I asked him if he'd come back, and he said, “If you bring me back,” and I said, “How do I bring you back?” and he said, “Same way you make me disappear,” and I said, “When you come back, will you tell me about nowhere?” He shifted his cigarette so he could shave the unshaven side of his face without burning his hand. “I'll tell you everything,” he said. “As long as I don't come back with amnesia.”

I put on a trench coat and fedora for my costume and had my father wrap my face and hands with bandages. The idea was to take off my clothes and unwrap the bandages and not be there. Or
be
there, but have everyone believe I wasn't.

Before I left for school, I took a photograph from the album in my mother's closet: me and my parents when I was five, my first day of school. I cut out my father, folded what remained, and put it in my pocket.

During the day, I kept the photograph on my desk. I imagined his chair by the front door empty; I imagined morning without him leaning over the sink to shave; I imagined my mother in bed alone; I imagined a garbage truck coming down our street with a man who was not my father on the side of the truck, a man who was not my father emptying cans and whistling for the driver to move up; I imagined my father's ashtray empty on the coffee table.

My classmates kept saying I was the Mummy, even though I'd told them I was the Invisible Man.

“But we can
see
you,” they kept saying.

Twins named Tara and Tina came as each other, but no one could tell if they'd really come as themselves.

A boy with one arm—he'd been born that way—came as someone who'd survived a Jaws attack.

The walk home took twice as long; I went out of my way, and out of my way again, to avoid kids with shaving cream that could have been Nair, but still got egged, my trench coat a too easy target.

I wouldn't meet you for another twenty years, and eventually I told you most of these stories, but here's one I never told you or anyone, not even my audiences or readers. Only my mother knows, and I'm not sure she has ever forgiven me. Sometimes, even now, I need to remind myself that it wasn't my fault, that it had nothing to do with me. I try to convince myself the same about you, about everything.