The Book of Why (12 page)

“I believe it because I've lived it,” she said.

“I wonder if you might tell a bit of your story,” Angela said. “For those listeners who might not be familiar with it.”

“My story is the story of the universe,” she said. “You'd have to go back to the Big Bang. It's all related, sweetie.”

Her story was well known: raped when she was ten; abused by her stepfather; pregnant at fifteen, the child given up for adoption; two failed marriages before she was forty; cancer at forty-five; her miraculous self-healing through nutrition, forgiveness, and enemas; a series of mega-bestsellers listing every ailment in the human body and its emotional cause. If you had a problem with your eyes, you were in denial—there was something in your life you didn't want to see.
When I see a child wearing glasses, I think: Something's going on in that child's home that she doesn't want to see.
Bladder problems came from anger.
From being pissed off, sweetie—this stuff isn't rocket science.
Migraines were created by people who wanted to be perfect, who were angry at being imperfect.
It's almost always alleviated by masturbation—the sexual release dissolves the anger and pain.
Sexually transmitted diseases were caused by sexual shame.
The anus is as beautiful as the eyes; you need to begin to relate to your rectum!

“Everyone suffers from self-hatred and guilt,” she said now. “This creates illness, which is a form of self-punishment. The good news is that releasing these emotions will dissolve even cancer.”

“Do you agree, Eric Newborn?”

“It can't be denied that the mind is powerful,” I said. “Everywhere you go in the world you meet yourself—your own thoughts manifest.”

I looked out at the audience. A man missing both legs held himself up with bodybuilder arms, his stumps not even touching the floor. A woman with a nervous twitch shook her hands incessantly, as if about to roll dice. A boy sitting beside his obese mother kept squeezing his penis. I fingered the pill bottle in my pocket, looked for the positive. I went back to the amputee's arms—how powerful they were. But then he must have grown tired; he lay in the aisle and stared at the ceiling.

“When you're angry,” Mona Lisa said, “hold your middle finger tightly and watch what happens—the anger dissolves. Right middle finger for a man, left for a woman—works every time.”

The first caller wanted to know about nutrition.

“Easy,” Mona Lisa said. “If it grows, eat it. If it doesn't grow, don't eat it.”

The next caller wanted to know about a typical day in our lives, so I talked about segmenting, which I'd written about in my second book,
It's On Its Way.
You break your day into segments, one moment at a time: brushing your teeth, taking a shower, going for a hike, reading a book, eating a peach. You focus on the positive, the wondrous, and if you do this, you'll attract more of the same in your next segment.

“What if you happen to notice something negative?” the caller said. “Say, you're on a hike and you see a dead bird.”

“You always have a choice,” I said. “You can bless the bird's life, give gratitude that the bird ever existed.”

“We live in a ‘yes' universe,” Mona Lisa added. “Whatever you send out into the universe, it sends right back to you. That's why I'm filled with gratitude every day. Actually, I'm not filled with gratitude. I
am
gratitude. I bless my home, knowing that only good comes into it. I bless my telephone and mailbox, knowing that only good news comes to me. I'm
pre
-grateful. I sit for at least an hour every day with my arms open. I begin every day by looking into the mirror and saying, ‘You are wonderful and I love you. This is one of the best days of your life.' Sometimes I sing this to myself.”

The caller was gone. Angela said, “What if that doesn't work?”

“Impossible,” Mona Lisa said. “It always works—what you give out, you receive.”

“Does it ever not work for you?” Angela asked me.

“Depends what you mean,” I said. “Does good always come to me? No. Does what I send out always come back? Yes, I believe so.”

“Bullshit!”

We looked into the crowd; it had been a man's voice.

Then we heard the voice again: “I hope you all get cancer.”

A man walked forward from the back: glasses, thinning hair, shirt and tie, barefoot. “What about the Holocaust?” he said. “Did those people have too many negative thoughts?” He came closer, stopped where we were sitting. His hands were crossed in front of him as if he were praying; he blinked behind his glasses. His voice grew louder: “What about September? Did every person in the Towers have too many negative thoughts?”

The crowd behind the man backed away, all except the amputee, who remained where he was, though now he was standing on his hands again.

Security approached the man from all sides; he put his hands behind his back. “I know the routine,” he said. He was handcuffed and taken away, but even as he was leaving he yelled to us, “This is not how the universe works! This is
not
how it works! We are
not
responsible for our own suffering!”

Angela tried to make a decent recovery by saying, “Our listeners might have been able to hear that. There was a disturbance here—a man with some difficult questions. I wonder if either of you would like to respond.”

With one hand I managed to remove the cap and reach into the bottle. Under the guise of scratching my beard, I put a pill into my mouth. I decided not to swallow, but the pill began to dissolve on my tongue, a bitter taste I remembered immediately.

“God bless him,” Mona Lisa said. “That's cancer waiting to happen. I can only hope he lets go of his anger.”

“I wonder about his question, though,” Angela said. “How does human suffering on a grand scale—something like the Holocaust or genocide or a terrorist attack—fit into your spirituality?”

“I'm sorry,” Mona Lisa said, “but I have to be honest and say—Listen,” she said, “this isn't a time for condemnation. The past is the past. Now is a time for healing.”

“Eric Newborn,” Angela said, “any response?”

“Everywhere you go in the world,” I said, “you meet yourself.”

Children went room to room that night, singing carols.

I lay in bed, shaken by what the man had said. But the pill, years after having expired, was working. Maybe it was just the placebo effect. Either way, the anxiety moved from my chest to my arms and legs, then floated up from my fingers and toes to the ceiling, a yellow shadow waiting for the drug to wear off so it could begin its descent back into my body while I was sleeping, or in the morning, or during my talk the next day, or when I returned home to Cary and what was growing inside her, the thing I had feared all along. It didn't matter when; it would hover above me patiently, and then it would descend.

The drug sang to my blood: an old song, but I knew the lyrics. Sad, but sung sweetly, that was all that mattered. The music moved outside me, then a knock on my door: children singing about a babe in a manger, stars brightly shining, our dear Savior's birth. The carolers wanted me to join them; they handed me the words, but I didn't need them: some things you never forget. I would like to say that I sang—it's true that my mouth moved and made sounds—but it wasn't my voice; it was the drugs swimming through my blood and nestling in my brain.

She'd been following me for years.

Always the same yellow dress; that was how I knew her. It had been two years since the last time—a talk in Chicago, I think. Dark skin, dark hair going gray, tinted glasses behind which I couldn't see her eyes. She had gained weight—at least fifty pounds, it looked like. She must have bought the same dress in a larger size.

She sat in the front row, as always. She had come to a half dozen of my talks over the years. Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Portland. I forget where else. It doesn't matter; even when she wasn't there, she was there.

It might have been easier had she been someone to fear, like the man who had interrupted the radio taping the previous evening. Then security could have escorted her out of the conference room. But she was polite and soft-spoken and never took up much of my time; she was always considerate of the people in line behind her. The first time she approached me—I think it was in New York, because I remember that I didn't stay in a hotel that night—she asked me her question.

Why?

That was the short version.

The slightly longer version: Why was her son—a bright, optimistic young man, first in the family to be admitted to college, scholarship to Princeton—why was her son shot while driving to pick up his grandmother for Thanksgiving dinner? If our thoughts manifest, if that's how the universe works—she was willing to grant me this possibility—then why was her son shot in the head, why was he now unable to move, to smile, to blink yes or no, to respond in any way; why did his mother have to shave him, change him, prop him in bed in a position that at least created an illusion that he was still a sentient being? If there were no such things as accidents, then what were we to call what happened to her son?

Reading these words, here, I can see how they might translate as angry or bitter, but they were not when spoken. Her questions were always asked kindly, with a genuine desire to hear my answers, no matter what they were.

I wasn't brave enough to tell her that I had no answers, and so I told her that my next book would address these very questions about human suffering. It would be called
The Book of Why,
and I hoped to finish it in a year or so. I even told my editor about my plan to write this book.

But I couldn't do it. I had nothing to say on the subject that this woman—she never told me her name—might want to hear. Instead, I wrote more of the same; I dug deeper into what I already believed. Two books later, neither was the one I had promised her. I had tried to begin; I read about suffering, theories of why. But I couldn't tell this woman—couldn't write in a book and sign my name to it—that suffering was punishment, that God watches over the world, doling out his unique brand of justice, his infinite versions of hell on earth. My mother might be able to write that book, but not me. And I couldn't tell this woman that her son's suffering was part of God's larger plan, which was a mystery. Nor could I tell her, as some books claimed, that each soul chooses its path before human incarnation—it knows everything that will happen before it happens, and signs the contract—and that the point of being human is the evolution of the soul. Nor could I tell her, as I had told others, though not in these exact words, that suffering is self-imposed, that we are all guilty, and unless we become conscious of our thoughts, we will eventually think our way into all manner of woe. I knew that nothing I could say would change the fact that every day she wiped drool from her son's chin, and changed his diaper, and kept in a drawer beside her bed the photo of the dark spots on his brain, and looked at this photo each morning as if the verdict might have changed, as if the dark spots might have disappeared overnight.

She included photos with her letters; I've saved them all. Before and after—life behind her son's eyes, then none. She wrote to me:
My son must suck air through a hole in his Adam's apple. The doctor tried to cap it, but he can't swallow. Saliva and mucus close his airway.
She wrote:
Every day, after I brush his teeth and shave him, I put on a dab of cologne. So at least he smells like he used to.
She wrote:
His mouth hangs open all the time, he stares vacantly past me.
She wrote:
Sometimes I see his eyelids flutter and I think, There he is, he's in there somewhere.
She even sent me copies of his journal entries from the weeks leading to the shooting.
See for yourself, he was a very positive young man.
I couldn't argue with this after reading his words:
Most days, no matter what's happening around me, on the news, all that, I can still say that the world is a beautiful place.
In the margins she wrote:
This was my son. This was who he was. He didn't watch violent movies. He never played video games. He had no anger in his heart.

I heard from her, on average, every few months. Sometimes five or six months would pass without a letter, and I'd wonder if something had happened to her or to her son. Other months I'd receive a letter a week. She never signed her name, never wrote it on the envelopes above her return address. Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, and I knew it was her. I answered her letters for a while, then stopped. Dear, and then the letter. No name. Always the promise to write
The Book of Why
. Sometimes the lie that I was well into it and soon would be finished.

After a while, her son wasn't enough: she sent me photos of others. A boy in a wheelchair, restrained because he couldn't help chewing his own hand. A girl in Minsk, a victim of Chernobyl, her brain in a membrane outside her skull. A boy in the same institution, the legs of a monster, feet and toes swollen to unimaginable size. She wrote:
What child could have created this? What child could have dreamed this?
She wrote:
Think of my son, think of all of these people, as you write your book.

There were three hundred people in the audience, but the room might as well have been empty except for her seat. The words that came from my mouth could not—not that evening—stand up to the scrutiny of her suffering. I had been shy as a boy, a bit lonely; I had been afraid of the dark; I had lost my father when I was young. We all go through life bearing our crosses, but mine were not hers. I would rather
she
come up onstage and speak; I would rather
she
write
The Book of Why
.

But I was being paid to talk about my most recent book,
There Are No Accidents
. I didn't know, then, that it would be my final book. Before this one, I mean. Though I don't consider this a book as much as a letter: to the woman in the yellow dress, to Cary, to Gloria Foster. I didn't know, then, that I would ever need to write another book; that I would write
The Book of Why,
after all, though not as an answer but rather as an unanswerable question. I didn't know, when I thought I knew it all, that I would join the chorus of askers.