The Book of Why (20 page)

I WALK RALPH
in the cemetery, letting her off leash even though a sign tells me not to. When she was younger she would have bounded alongside these graves, would have chased squirrels and woodchucks, would have tried in vain to eat bees and butterflies, would have found sticks and played keep-away with me and Cary, but at twelve she stays by my side, sniffs flowers and trees. Cary used to say dogs were made by God so God could slow down and smell the grass. Ralph reminds me time and again that life can be just this—a blade of grass. Then this—a single footprint drying in mud beside a gravestone. But the human asks questions: Whose footprint, why barefoot, why only one? Better to be a dog: the entire universe is one flower, then the entire universe is the next flower—the ever-present present, nothing more. This overturned gravestone, for example, or this one, forced prostrate by the wind, facedown as if to imprint the names of the dead into the earth.

Back at the house, Jay tells Evelyn that he needs to pick up wood from a friend; the storm ripped off the roof of the shed in the backyard. Evelyn tells him to take Gloria for the ride.

I offer to go with him, help load his truck.

“I'll be fine,” he says.

“I'd like to show some gratitude.”

“Unnecessary,” he says.

“It'll make me feel useful,” I tell him, and he says okay.

We drive along roads bordered by farms. The smell of manure wafts in the air and into the open car windows. Cows chew grass and swat flies with their involuntary tails while two horses lie side by side, the water trough only a few feet away. We turn onto another, smaller road, where Amish children bike uphill against the wind, trying to steer while holding on to their hats.

Gloria sits between me and Jay, clicking her seat belt.

Jay says, “Hey, leave that alone.”

She clicks it once more, then buckles the belt.

Jay swerves the car to avoid a tree limb in the road. My seat belt has too much give, and my side slams into the door. “Sorry about that,” Jay says. He has a calm demeanor, someone you'd want in charge during a tornado, but he has subtle nervous habits—rubbing his shaved head, straightening his thick eyebrows. I can see now, when I look at him closely, that he really is no more than twenty-three or twenty-four, though already much older—worry lines on his face, dirt beneath his fingernails, in the cracks in his palms. He and Evelyn must have had Gloria when they were teenagers.

We park in a dirt lot filled with dozens of vehicles, mostly pickup trucks. Beyond the lot are tables and booths set up in rows—an outdoor flea market. I feel pulled back into an old self, or perhaps an old self is pulled back into me—the young man who wanted to save everything, who couldn't walk past a stoop sale without bringing home cards, photos, glasses without lenses, any objects that called out to me, and who couldn't help but look for signs in these objects, and who made them into junk sculptures, sold them as art for a few years after college, before I wrote my first book.

I stop to look through old photo albums: the long-ago dead walking along a beach, black-and-white wedding photos, the adult eyes of children at the beginning of the twentieth century. Stacks of postcards, many with notes written on the back. I close my eyes, count to ten, then randomly select a postcard. An old game. A photograph of St. Pancras Church in Rome—the same name as my parish in Queens. Coincidence, I tell myself, and even if not, even if it
is
a sign, what to do with the sign, how to know what it means? Perhaps there are signs everywhere, but in the end they add up to nothing—a scavenger hunt with no prize. Thirty years later, I remember the facts we were made to memorize in grade school. Pancras, whose name in Greek means “the one who holds everything,” was a Christian convert martyred—beheaded at fourteen. An orphan, he's the patron saint of children. The note on the back of the postcard reads, “Having a nice time but missing you. Nice seeing you recently. Love, GDN.” I can't make out the name of the addressee, but my father's initials are enough to make me buy the postcard.

Years ago, when I told my shrink about the signs I would find in objects, he said, “Eric, what's the story you're telling yourself?”

“That nothing is random,” I told him. “That there's an order to the universe, a reason for everything.”

“And if that were true?”

“Then I could make sure—”

“Make sure what?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“What would it mean,” he said, “if your story weren't true—if there's no reason for the things that happen?”

“I'd probably—I don't know what I'd do,” I said.

“Breathe,” he said, and I tried.

“Eric,” he said, “I want you to know, it doesn't matter to me what you believe. But here's what I'd like us to figure out—the difference between what you believe and what you really
want
to believe.”

Jay is holding a revolver. On the table behind him are carbines and muskets and rifles with bayonets. They don't look to my amateur eye like the kinds of guns people would use today to shoot deer or ducks or each other; they invoke duels more than anything. Jay points the revolver at his own head. He says, “Any last words?” Then he puts his other hand on his chin and looks up to the sky as if deep in thought, but just as he opens his mouth to speak, he makes a sound meant to be a gun firing, and this makes Gloria laugh. She signs something, and Jay says, “Too late. You only get one shot at last words.”

He puts down the gun and picks up Gloria, holds her upside down by her feet. She's screaming, but I get the sense they've played this game before. The last thing she wants is to be put down. “Any last words?” he says, and her screams become laughter, and he asks again, “Any last words?” and now she's gasping, and he lifts her higher and asks again, he pretends to drop her but stops before she hits the ground. He flips her right side up, her hair wild and face red. She signs something, and her father says, “No more—that's enough.”

We keep walking. I can't not stop to look: rows of lamps in the shape of Greek gods; bins filled with brass doorknobs; baseball mitts flat as pancakes; cast-iron pans people fried eggs in a hundred years ago; old chocolate tins and cigar boxes and castor oil bottles; scalpels and specula, lancets and forceps and curettes; handcuffs and straitjackets and horse bits; stocks and pillories; daggers and swords and military helmets; stacks of Superman comics; dolls dressed in wedding gowns, their eyes rattling in their skulls; mannequin heads in a bathtub; wigs blowing along the ground like skittish animals.

Jay stops to speak with a leather-faced man selling old
Life
magazines and used books. Gloria is looking through boxes of Beatles records. The man brings Jay eight long pieces of wood. They speak in shorthand, the way some men do. Wife is fine, kids are fine, house is fine, business is slow, no need to thank him for the wood, and then we're leaving, four pieces of wood each, and I wonder if I've missed a sign, some clue as to why I'm here, what I'm supposed to say or do next.

In the parking lot, we load wood onto the truck. Gloria is humming your song again. I ask how she knows the song, did she write it. She shrugs. I hear my shrink's voice from twenty years ago: “The mind can be quite powerful,” he said, “when we're desperate to believe something.”

During the drive home, alongside horses dreaming their thirsty dreams, cows tail-swatting the same persistent flies, an Amish woman hanging wash, Gloria starts humming your song again.

That night, after dinner, Sam says, “Good news. We'll have a rental car in the morning.”

Gloria signs something to her mother.

“No,” Evelyn says. “Ralph can't stay.”

Gloria signs something else.

“She's not your dog,” Evelyn says.

“I told you,” Jay says to Evelyn. “We need to get her a dog.”

We're sitting on the porch. Through the screen I can hear the evening news. Something about the war—a war I know very little about except whatever my mother can't help sharing when I see her.

Gloria stares at me for a long while. She moves closer. She smiles, points to her own face, then holds out her arms.

“It's a game,” Evelyn says. “She wants you to laugh big.”

“At what?”

“Doesn't matter,” Jay says.

I give Gloria a fake laugh.

She puts her index fingers on her cheeks, below her eyes, and pulls her fingers down.

“Cry small,” Jay says, and I pout my lips and sniffle and put my hands over my face and make the quiet sounds of crying.

She pulls my hands away from my face.

I stop crying; she looks into my eyes to make sure.

She makes another sign, and Jay says, “Cry big,” and I cry louder, my shoulders shaking. She pulls my hands away from my face again.

In the morning, as we're about to leave, I tell Sam to wait. “Forgot my keys,” I say.

I go upstairs to Gloria's room, where she's sleeping on her back, one arm stretched over the side of the bed, the other covering her eyes as if she's trying not to see whatever she's dreaming about.

I want to touch her face, cover her with a blanket. I want to ask, of course, if you're in there—if it's really you. I want to say something, leave a note under her pillow, but I have no idea what the note would say.

This book, I suppose, is that note.

For a few minutes I watch her breathe and imagine her older, a young woman. I see different versions of her life play out in my mind's eye. In some versions an older man who looks like me is telling her a story. We're sitting on a park bench, or in my house in Chilmark, or in the cemetery behind the house in Queens, but always I'm telling her this story. I keep asking her to tell me how it ends.

AS WE BRING
her bag up the stairs to her apartment—she lives a few blocks from the Flatiron—Sam says she has a bad feeling.

She'd said that in the car, too. She was afraid to go home, and so was I—to Chilmark, I mean—so I told her she could bring me to New York. No need to drive me all the way to the ferry. I'd see my mother—that would make her happy.

“Sometimes,” she'd said in the car, “I just know things.”

She hesitates now before walking up the final flight to the fourth floor. Ralph is already up there, waiting for us.

I walk past her. “What's the apartment number?”

“Four twelve,” she says. “Second one on the left.”

It's evident right away that she's been robbed: knob broken, doorjamb split.

I walk into the apartment without fear, which is not to say that bravery is involved. There's a difference between bravery, which has to do with courage, and fearlessness, which has to do—at least in my case—with believing you have nothing more to lose.

An efficiency efficiently divided, rooms within a room. A kitchenette just big enough for two to stand back to back—one person can wash while the other dries, chop while the other cooks. There's a messy order to the place: books alphabetized by author on built-in shelves; three paint-splattered wooden chairs around a small table. Atop a large wood desk: piles of papers, coffee mug, laptop. Hanging on the walls are a few paintings and two blown-up photos: a man who could be her father, another who could be her brother. Same red hair, same shape to the lips. An unmade pull-out couch-bed, two armchairs, a small TV. An empty picture frame on top of the TV and another on a small end table. A bare wall with two hooks. Below each hook is the ghosting stain—a dark square—of whatever used to hang there. All of this, door to fire escape, in twelve steps. No other signs of a break-in: nothing on the floor, no drawers open.

“I knew it,” she says from the doorway.

“Your computer's still here.”

“That fucker.”

“Who?”

“Whoever did this.”

“It's safe to come in,” I tell her.

Ralph is exploring by smell: rug, bedsheets, Sam's shoes lined up by the door.

Sam walks in holding three weeks' worth of mail. She stands in the center of the room and turns in place; she drops the mail on the floor. Then she checks the bathroom; I hear her pull open the shower curtain.

She opens her closet door, parts her hanging shirts and dresses. She looks through drawers—dresser, desk, kitchen—and keeps saying, “Son of a bitch, son of a bitch,” and then stops at the fridge. A note made of magnets—tiny letters I can't see. I move closer and make out the words
YOU'RE STILL MY,
but she blocks my view. Then she swipes the magnets onto the floor.

“What did the magnets say?”

“Nothing,” she says.

“You should call the police.”

“Nothing's missing.”

“Not that you know.”

“There's nothing I'd be sorry to lose,” she says. “Except that.” She points to the framed photo of her brother on the wall behind her desk: long hair, long eyelashes, eyes closed, mouth open as if about to speak.

“Even if nothing's missing, it's still a crime.”

Her cell phone rings in her pocket; she takes it out and silences it without looking to see who's calling.

“You should at least call a locksmith,” I tell her.

She sits on the couch and closes her eyes. Her cell phone rings again; she looks at the number, then removes the battery and lays the two pieces on the coffee table alongside a book called
Conversations with God
,
an old
New Yorker
,
and an ashtray filled with cigarette butts.

“I didn't know you smoked.”

“I don't,” she says.

Ralph is crying in the doorway; I realize that I've had the leash in my hand the entire time, wrapped around my clenched fist.

“Don't go,” Sam says.

“She's very smart, but she can't walk herself.”

“Okay, but come back.”

“I'm starting to smell,” I say.

“Come back and we'll take a shower.”

Then: “I don't mean together. I just meant—Listen, I don't feel safe here.”

“I can push your desk in front of the door.”

“Fine,” she says. “Then you won't be able to leave.”

She lets me have the couch-bed; she uses a sleeping bag on the floor. But when I wake in the night, she's beside me, on the edge of the mattress, one leg hanging off. She's very still when she sleeps; I can hardly see her back rise and fall. A pillow covers her head; she could be almost anyone.

Ralph is a lump in the glow of a clock's light. It's Ralph who makes this strange: she's out of context here. Still, she's happy anywhere and with anyone, a creature of the present; I love that most about her, but I've wished otherwise: that her sense of the past might extend beyond smell. Let me say it: that she might be able to grieve; that we might have shared it.

When I wake, Sam is standing at the stove in a red plaid nightshirt, spatula in hand. The table is set for two: plates, napkins, coffee cups, butter.

She's feeding Ralph pieces of bacon. She lets the dog lick her fingers, then goes back to cracking eggs.

“When's the locksmith coming?”

“Tomorrow,” she says.

“What's today?”

“Friday.”

“Feels like Sunday.”

I hook Ralph's leash onto her collar and open the door; she runs into the hallway and starts down the stairs.

“How do you like your eggs?”

“I'm not hungry.”

“Well, I'm making eggs.”

“I'm really not hungry.”

“If you
were
hungry, how would you want your eggs?”

“Sunny-side up.”

“I should have known,” she says. “Do you drink coffee?”

“No.”

“Would you like tea?”

“No, thanks.”

“Listen,” she says, “I was cold in the sleeping bag.”

Ralph is whimpering on the stairs.

“I'll have juice, okay.”

She looks in her fridge. “No juice,” she says. “Maybe you can get some while you're out.”

The locksmith doesn't come the next day, or the next, or the next, and I stop asking. I stop pretending that I have somewhere to go. We don't talk about the broken door or the note on the fridge or the fact that nothing was missing. I've stopped bugging her about calling the cops. We eat eggs and toast each morning, and now there's juice. Two walks a day, Madison Square to Union Square, Ralph limping more than she used to; her hips have had enough.

I think about leaving, but go back. No matter where I am in the room, Sam's brother stares at me. Like the rest of the dead, he must watch over the living with dispassion: dandelion clocks and green streets, a girl's name whispered, clues in our sleep. We don't talk about her brother or you. We don't talk about the cologne I found in the bathroom; we don't talk about the suits in her closet, the men's shoes. We don't talk about the wedding ring still on my finger or the one in a box on her dresser. We don't talk about the electric bill addressed to a man with her last name. She'd be more careful if she didn't want me to know, but still I say nothing.

I look through her medicine cabinet: Prozac, sleeping pills, codeine long expired. An almost-empty shampoo bottle upside down on the lip of the tub; a white towel drying over the shower curtain rod; slippers on the bathmat that have taken on the shape of her feet. A panic rises up my chest and into my throat—I can't swallow—at my not being able to recognize myself in this place. For three days I've used this shower, this towel, this toothpaste. I've dug my nails into her soap to remove her red hair. I've wiped steam from this mirror so that I could see myself. I've dozed on this toilet and dreamed that I was someone else.

On her desk are two obituaries from the week before she found me. From February 7, 2008, Ruth Stafford Peale, 101 years old, wife of Dr. Norman Vincent Peale. Her husband wrote a book called
The Power of Positive Thinking
. After it had been rejected by most publishers, he threw the manuscript into their wastebasket. His wife fished it out and encouraged him to try once more. The book was published in 1952 and has sold more than twenty million copies in forty-two languages. Someone—Sam, I assume—has written in the margin,
NOT A COINCIDENCE
. The other obituary, from February 10, 2008, is for the actor Roy Scheider. Circled in red ink is “Franklin & Marshall College,” where Scheider had been an undergraduate, and written beside it in the margin is:
F&M IN LANCASTER—NOT AN ACCIDENT
. Also circled is
Jaws,
Scheider's best-known movie, and written in the margin is:
FILMED ON VINEYARD—ANOTHER SIGN.
I look through her desk expecting to see my own obituary, but I find other recent ones—Bobby
Fischer
, Phil Rizzuto, Madeleine L'Engle.

I go out during the day while she writes Charlton Heston's obituary; I don't tell her where, she doesn't ask. She's happy when I leave Ralph with her; that way she knows I'll be back. I don't tell her that I've spent my day hiding books. Moving them, turning in their spines. As many copies as I can find. Easy when there are copies everywhere, when it seems like every person in the world is reading the same book. A hardcover—small, but not as small as a paperback. Dust jacket made to look like parchment, title in white cursive across a red circular seal.
The Secret
. Look closely and you see faded messages, sketches, and codes, the palimpsest's
scriptio inferior
,
the ghost of some ancient manuscript. The implied promise that all will be revealed: open the book and discover the answer to every question.

Rhonda Byrne, the author of
The Secret
,
gathered quotes about the law of attraction and the power of intention from inspirational authors, my former colleagues in the field, some of whom I sat on panels with at conferences and ate breakfast with at hotels before flying home. According to Byrne, the greatest people in history—Plato, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Lincoln, Einstein—knew about “the secret.” It has sold millions of copies, yet I hadn't heard of the book until now.

Now that I do know, it's hard to escape it. Lovers share a copy in the grass at Union Square Park, reading passages to each other like sonnets. A young woman in dreads naps with a copy open across her chest. An old man with the muscular body of a man half his age Rollerblades by with a banana in one hand and
The Secret
in the other. I'm following it, and it's following me. It is, after all, the law the book teaches: If you focus your attention on something, you will attract it into your life.

I go from bookstore to bookstore moving
The Secret
from the “self-help” or “self-improvement” section to the fiction section.

There's a display in a bookstore on Broadway called Yellow Book Road, dozens of copies arranged in vertical racks. Beside the rack is a life-sized cardboard version of Rhonda Byrne: a petite middle-aged woman with bright blue eyes and straight platinum-blond hair, black low-cut blouse, blue and white beads around her neck, a tiny red circle—the seal from the book's cover—affixed to her forehead.

“Looks real, doesn't she?”

The store's owner, a plump woman with thinning brown hair, sits behind the counter with a copy of
The Secret
.

“Did you see her on
Oprah
?”

“No.”

She holds up the book. “My third time, and it's just—my God.”

I smile, unsure how to respond.

“It's changed
every
thing,” she says.

“For the better, I hope.”

“I've lost twenty pounds,” she says. “I have a ways to go, but.”

“Good luck,” I tell her.

“I'll get there,” she says. “I have no doubt.”

I take a copy to the reading area in the back with the intention of hiding it in the Fantasy and Science Fiction section. A young woman is sitting there, reading
The Secret
. Her son, a fidgety toddler, burrows his face in the chair's cushion and whines. His mother smiles as she reads, but her fists are clenched, her hands turning white. The boy looks up at me, his hair matted to his head, then buries his face again.

A few minutes later he asks his mother if they can go. She turns a page.

“Mama,” he says. “Mama. Mama. Mama.”

She puts her index finger to her lips to silently shush him.

He tugs her skirt and asks again if they can go.

She holds up one finger to indicate
hold on, one minute
.

He pulls off one of her sandals. She crosses her legs, but doesn't look up from her book. The boy pulls off her other sandal. She closes her eyes and takes two deep breaths, then opens her eyes, smiles, and continues to read.

“Mama,” the boy says. “Mama, Mama, Mama, Mama, Mama,” but she turns another page.

He takes the book from his mother and throws it.

She grabs his arm, digs in her nails, pulls him closer. Calmly she says, “You won't allow me a moment's peace. You won't allow me that, will you.”

The boy blinks up at her, his mouth hanging open.

“Not a moment's peace,” she says.

The woman picks up her book and brings it to the register. I can hear the owner saying, “I'm doing much better now. It was a challenging year, but everything is better. I'm much stronger because of it.”

Sam is making stir-fry even though I told her I'd be leaving before dinner. Five days, still no locksmith. Ralph is sleeping in a full stretch—her dead-limb position, Cary used to call it—by the open fire escape window.