The Book of Why (11 page)

“No, I wasn't.”

“Yes, you were.” He opened the alcove in the hall where my mother stored pillows and blankets; he crawled in, beneath the attic steps. “This is a great hiding place,” he said.

“Careful in there,” I said.

“Why?”

“Just be careful.”

Lucy sat on my bed. “Were you looking for the man?”

“What man?”

“The man who looks like you.”

“I found something!” Vincent shouted. He crawled out holding a baseball card covered in dust. I didn't recognize the card; it must have been my father's. Sam Leslie, Brooklyn Dodgers, 1934. He was standing on first base, reaching up to catch the ball. No field behind him; he was playing baseball in the clouds.

“Can I keep it?” Vincent said.

“Sure,” I said, but he put the card on the dresser and forgot about it.

“He's in the closet,” Lucy said.

“Who?”

“The man.”

“Let's get him!” Vincent said.

He went for the door, but I grabbed him. “Stay out of there.”

“You're afraid,” he said.

“Aren't you?”

“No,” he said, but then I could see he was.

“Go ahead,” I said. “Open the door. See who's there.”

“I'm not afraid,” he said, then ran out of the room.

“Are you going to look?” Lucy said.

“Would you like me to?”

She shook her head no, and we went downstairs.

I helped in the kitchen while Cary played with the kids in the yard. My mother handed me a carving knife. I stabbed the turkey with a two-pronged fork made for a giant. The knife sliced through easily and thin pieces of meat fell onto a floral plate. My mother put her hand on my back and smiled at what I was doing. She found a small piece on the plate and lifted it to her mouth. She picked up another piece, but this one she brought to my mouth. I turned my head, but she followed my mouth with the meat. Like a child, I pressed my lips together. My mother pushed the turkey into my lips; I could taste it. I opened my mouth to speak and she forced the meat inside.

I spit it out, and her smile was gone.

“Not even one piece?”

“You know I don't eat meat.”

“This isn't meat—it's turkey.”

“I don't eat anything that used to have a heartbeat.”

“But you wear leather sneakers.”

“Let's not go through that again.”

She tried to take the knife, but I wouldn't let her. She tried again, but I pulled back. She winced, pulled her hand away. A thin line of blood formed on her finger. “Let me see,” I said, but she walked away. The turkey that would have been mine she gave to a skinny black cat in the yard.

During dinner my mother kept licking her finger; she looked up to make sure I was watching. Vincent lowered his face to his plate and spooned corn into his mouth as if eating were a contest. Lucy moved the food around her plate warily. She flattened her mashed potatoes into a kind of canvas and made a picture: corn as stars, peas and pieces of yam and cranberry as leaves on turkey trees. Cary told my mother how good everything tasted. She seemed happiest on days she should have been, and probably was, sad. Holidays, when she must have missed her family. Her mother's birthday, her father's birthday, her sister's wedding anniversary. The anniversary of the day the plane had crashed.

Somehow she convinced my mother to allow her and the kids to wash dishes. It took great effort for my mother to remain seated at the table while others cleaned. Every few minutes Vincent would show himself drying a plate. My mother praised the good job he was doing, then said, “Careful you don't drop it, honey. You don't want a piece of glass stuck in your foot.”

The kids brought in dessert plates and clean forks and the cheesecake. “Come eat,” my mother called to Cary, and Cary said, “Okay, Ma, in a minute,” and I could hear something in her voice, though maybe I'd been looking for it all day. A few more minutes passed, and I went in to check on her. The water was running; she was leaning over the sink, her face in her hands. She heard me behind her and quickly straightened; her eyes were red.

“What's wrong?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Just a headache.”

“You've been crying.”

“No,” she said. “I was rubbing my eyes, and my hands are wet.”

My mother came into the kitchen and wanted to know what was wrong.

“Nothing,” I said.

My mother looked at Cary, who said, “It's just a headache. Let's go eat some…” There was a long pause; she seemed to be searching for the word
cake
as if she'd forgotten it. “Let's go eat,” she said.

Vincent put cake on Lucy's nose and she left it there, and Cary put cake on her own nose, then I put some on my mother's face, and for a moment she seemed happy.

As we were leaving, my mother asked if we were taking the BQE home.

“Not sure,” I said.

“Don't take the streets,” she said. “That neighborhood—my God, what's happened to it.”

This was an old movie; I knew all the lines.

I kissed her goodbye.

My mother kissed Cary and said, “I grew up in Bushwick. Such a shame what's happened.”

“What happened?” Vincent said.

“Never mind,” I said, and we drove home through Bushwick.

Under the flashing light of a red-and-yellow bodega, boys drank from paper bags. One kid kicked a bottle from another's hands; the other boy picked it up and smashed it on the street. They wandered in front of our car; the light turned green. I waited while they argued. The light turned yellow, then red. It was as if we weren't there. Lucy slept in the back. Vincent was awake, his nose against the window. I pressed the button that locked the doors. One of the boys turned to the car and said, “You
better
lock your doors.” He put his foot on the car's hood as if daring me to step on the gas. One of his friends removed his shirt, closed his eyes, and spread his arms as if Christ on the Cross.

Peace and safety.

Silently I repeated the words I'd begun my day with. I'd been running them through my head from the moment my mother warned us not to take the streets, which was also the moment I'd decided that was precisely how we'd go. A battle between my mother's fear and my positive thinking, my confidence in my ability to create a safe drive home no matter what neighborhood we drove through. A battle between mother and son, but only son knew it was being waged. My mind filled with two and only two words until they became a sound more powerful than whatever the boys were saying. Peace, safety. Peace, safety.

The light turned green, yellow, red. They stood in front of the car passing a bottle. Green, yellow, red.

One of the boys, the tallest and maybe the oldest, a beard already, approached the passenger side of the car, where Cary was sitting; he pulled on the handle, then started kicking the door. Cary released her seat belt and moved toward me. Lucy was awake; Vincent's face was still pressed against the glass as if watching a movie. I stepped on the gas and the boys moved out of the way and we went through a red light, and one of them—his arms still outstretched on his cross—called after us, “I never asked to be born, you know! I never asked to be born!”

SHE COULD SPEAK,
but not the word I wanted her to say.

I pointed to my beard. “What's this?”

She pointed to her own face.

“Tell me what this is.”

“Face,” she said.

“What's this
on
my face?”

“Hair.”

“Yes, but what's it called?”

She was blinking back tears.

I held her wrist, rubbed her hand on my face. “Say it,” I said.

She tried to kiss me, but I turned away.

“Please say the word,” I said. “I know you know.”

I closed my eyes and imagined that when I opened them, the past few minutes would be revealed to have been a dream.

But the word was lost to her. She no longer knew
beard
. Just,
hair on your face
. She no longer knew
lamp,
which she called
light,
and
sweater,
which she called
thick shirt,
and
guitar,
which she called
music,
and
tub,
which she called
small pool,
and
bed,
which she called
home
.

Two more days of this—the words
day
and
night
were gone, too—and I took her to our doctor. She had difficulty telling him what was wrong. She used the words of a child or someone new to the language. The names for objects and body parts and feelings weren't enough; she needed to describe them, redefine them. How do you say
wind
without the word? How do you say
door?
How do you say
headache?
How do you say
dizziness?
You say,
What moves grass and bends trees
. You say,
What you open to move from one room to another
. You point and say,
It hurts up here
. You say,
The world has been moving
. But what if you've lost the words
trees
and
grass,
too? What if you've lost the words
room
and
world?
You say,
What I feel on my face
. Without the word
face,
you say,
The thing I can't see that touches me
. You say,
What keeps me out or lets me in
. You say,
It hurts here
and
Everything seems to be moving without me
.

EYES CLOSED DURING
the ride from airport to casino hotel.

I had been to Vegas once before, after my second book was published; the lights and sounds hadn't bothered me then.

Now, even through my eyelids, I could see lights blinking across the cool night air, the kind of flashing that causes seizures in reflex epileptics.

I could not cover my ears, as the driver—a long-bearded man short enough to have to sit on a cushion to see over the steering wheel—was talking about a murder he had witnessed a few days earlier, a woman who ran over her husband with their car.

I opened my eyes; neon-lit faces flashed by, too close to the car.

“Kept backing over him,” he said. “A dozen times, at least.” He shook his head, looked in the rearview for a reaction; I closed my eyes again.

“Headache?”

“No.”

“I get bad headaches, but only at night, when I can't sleep.”

Illness is an extension of negative emotion. Any malady in the body can be healed faster than it was created.

“Haven't slept more than three hours straight in, oh, about twenty years.”

It's important not to absorb any negative energy you may encounter. Imagine a shield surrounding your body; this will not allow the energy to enter you.

“You sure you feel okay?”

“Yes.”

“Not making you carsick, am I?”

“No.”

“Because if I am, you should say something. I wouldn't take it personally.”

“You're not.”

“Mind if I smoke?”

“No.”

“Never mind. I can wait.” He pressed the horn three times in succession. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Guy's going to kill—Have you ever smoked?”

“No.”

“Bad habit, but I love it.”

The flick of a lighter, then the smell. “I'm blowing it out the window, okay? Right out the window.”

“Actually…”

“Stupid,” he said. “Stupid, stupid, stupid. I don't want to give
you
cancer. Me, that's okay, but you didn't ask for it.”

Three weeks without a sustained negative thought, and now this. I quickly replaced the driver in my mind with the image of a flower. I opened my eyes: a tall, skinny man, taller and skinnier than I was, an Indian giant, stood outside the cab, offering me roses wrapped in plastic. I reached into my pocket, but the light turned green and we were gone. I turned to see the giant standing in the street, blocking traffic, watching me. I had the silly thought, though I don't think it's so silly now, that I would never see that man again, that he would live the rest of his life, however many years, then die, and this encounter would have meant nothing to him. Had I been able to give him the five hundred dollars in my pocket, he might have remembered; it might have changed his life.

The car rolled along a street lined with palm trees and strewn with trash blown by December desert winds. A gust pressed a piece of paper against the windshield; a word written in black ink.
Cancer. Cancel. Concern. Concede.
I leaned forward to see, but the word was upside down and backward. The driver turned on the wipers, and the paper was lifted into the air and behind us in traffic.

If not for the colored lights on the trees, I would have forgotten that in five days it would be Christmas.

A series of loud pops that sounded like fireworks.

I must have jumped. “It's all right,” the driver said. “Just a car backfiring.” He laughed. “Unless it's gunfire.”

Traffic stopped; I looked at my watch. Thirty minutes to check in and get to the radio show.

I had told Cary that I didn't want to go, especially given the circumstances, but she insisted. She was feeling fine, she told me; it would be good for me to get away for a few nights. “There's nothing you can do for me,” she said. “There's nothing anyone can do.”

“I don't believe that.”

“But I do.”

“I don't believe that
you
believe that.”

“I know you mean well,” she said.

“Looks serious,” the driver said. “Three-car accident.”

“Are we far?”

“Five, six blocks.”

“I can walk.”

“You know where you're going?”

“No.”

“Straight ahead. Take it to the end.”

“That way?”

“Straight to the end. Can't miss it.”

I gave him a one-hundred-dollar bill but didn't wait for change. I closed the door before he could thank me, and began walking against the wind, the straps on my bag digging into my shoulders.

A boy, twelve or thirteen years old, dark eyes and long curly hair, blocked my way. “Let me carry your bag, please.”

“No, thank you.”

“You'll only have to tip someone else.”

“Thank you, but no.”

“Why not?”

“I'm sorry.”

“Don't you trust me?”

“I'm sorry,” I said again.

“I won't run away with your bag.”

“Here,” I said. “Let's carry it together.” I gave him one strap, I took the other, and we walked to the end of the strip, where the casino flashed its manic lights at us.

I gave him one hundred dollars.

“Thank you,” he said, but he sounded sad, as if my giving him so much money proved just how destitute he was.

“Now you have to give it to someone who needs it more.”

“I don't know anyone who needs it more.”

“There's always someone.”

“But what about me?”

“It will come back to you,” I said. “It will double.”

“How do you know?”

“It will if you believe it will.”

“Are you a magician?”

“No.”

“Are you Jesus?”

“No.”

“Is this real money?”

“Yes.”

He stared at me for a moment, then turned and ran. I stood in front of the hotel, waiting to see if he would look back, but he never did.

In the lobby, people fed coins into slot machines, and the machines made their gleefully sad noise. After I checked in at the front desk, I took an elevator to the tenth floor, but there must have been a mistake: the entire floor was water. Gondoliers sang arias while ferrying tourists across indoor canals. I tried the eleventh floor, but there were no rooms; it was a mall. People carried shopping bags from one brightly lit storefront to the next; children sucked on ice pops and chased each other in circles. On the ninth floor, a kind of warehouse space, hundreds of headless mannequins stood in rows, wearing sequined gowns.

I went back down to the lobby. I considered walking past the front desk to the street, where I might find the boy and the giant and buy them dinner, but a pale woman with frizzy red hair recognized me and asked me to sign her copy of my book. She said she was looking forward to my talk the next day. She had read all three of my books; they had changed her life, she told me: she had used the power of intention to cure her arthritis and chronic fatigue, and then she met the love of her life; they were getting married in the spring.

“Congratulations,” I said. “Best of luck.”

“We create our own luck.”

I signed my name and beneath it wrote
Best wishes
,
then gave her the book. “Be well,” I said. “Take care.”

She grabbed my hand, closed her eyes, and bowed. For a moment I thought she might kiss my hand. “Thank you
so
much,” she said.

I tried to pull away, but she wouldn't release my hand. I pulled harder, and finally she let go; she opened her eyes as if waking from a dream.

“You're a living saint,” she said.

She stood there, waiting for me to say thank you, to confirm or deny her claim. “Goodbye,” I said, and walked away.

On my way back to the elevator—my room, I discovered, was on the twelfth floor—I walked past the sales area: dozens of merchants selling books, inspirational calendars, CDs, angel “oracle” cards, crystals, rocks, jewelry, and something called Goddess wear: white and gray medieval dresses trimmed with black velvet ribbon; blue cotton gowns with matching shawls; a red velvet dress with bell sleeves; the kinds of outfits worn in fairy tales.

I continued past the elevator because I heard applause; it was coming from a large lecture room overflowing with people. I joined the others in the doorway. A small Japanese man, behind a dais onstage, was explaining how water molecules respond to human thought and emotion. His assistant changed the slide: what water molecules look like when you say the word
Hitler.
Click. Water molecules when you say the word
love.
Click. The words
fear, thank you, amen.
An asymmetrical pattern of dull colors or a complex and colorful snowflake pattern, depending on the words said or thought. The slides changed too quickly; I couldn't tell which were good, which were bad. They all looked both beautiful and frightening to me. “The human body is made up of mostly water,” he said. Click. And I left to find my room.

I knew they were in my bag, but kept checking—twice in my room, again in the elevator, once again in the bathroom, a few minutes before the radio show was to begin. The pills had expired years earlier, the words on the label long ago worn away. A shrink had prescribed them when I was in my twenties. When he asked why I'd been feeling anxious, I told him the truth: that I believed I could make things happen with my mind; that I had to be careful what I thought; that I couldn't stop seeing the world in shades of dark and light, positive and negative; that my apartment was filled with junk it was my responsibility to salvage; that certain objects belonged with other objects; that there were too many rules, there were signs everywhere, everything meant something. He wore cardigans and round glasses that hooked behind his ears. He was eager to save me, we were alike that way, so I did my best to make him believe that he was helping me. He suggested that I was made up of many parts, some of which were trying to protect me, to prevent me from feeling pain. “It's an impossible job,” he said. I nodded and agreed, but never quite believed him. Then one day, after a year, I didn't show up for a session, and never went back.

The pills, even with refills, would eventually run out. I had to wean myself off them. Four a day, then three every other day, then three a day, then two every other day, and so on. But even after I'd stopped, I carried the bottle with me everywhere. Wallet, keys, pills. My pants pockets faded in the shape of the bottle. Years later, after my first book was published, I decided to leave them at home. Unless I was able to take a cab to the airport, and a plane to Chicago, and another cab to the hotel where I was speaking, without the pills, I would be a fraud, and nothing I could say to the people who had paid to hear me speak would mean much.

True bravery would have been to flush the pills down the toilet. That I kept them in the back of my desk drawer was a sign of my belief that one day I would need them again. I might have said, then, that I had created my own reality: a man standing in a bathroom stall in a casino hotel in Las Vegas, opening, then closing, then opening a pill bottle, trying to decide if he could get through a radio show without being tranquilized. That I didn't take one—not then—wasn't bravery as much as fear: that someone would know, that the pills no longer worked, that I'd be letting down every person who'd read my books.

So, instead, I sat in a chair beside Mona Lisa Mercer—the woman who had organized the Change Your Life! conference, a best-selling author herself, the grande dame of self-help, nearing eighty but looking closer to sixty, with her smooth skin and long gray hair—and kept my hand in my pocket. Anxious, I could pinch my skin through the lining of my pants. We were in a small room near the lobby, maybe one hundred people in the audience. Angela Payne, a woman from the radio station, also an author, was going to interview us and screen calls. She was my age. Dark hair, dark eyes, long blue skirt, black boots. I'd noticed a flyer in the elevator advertising her book,
Stress to Success in Thirty Days
.

Mona Lisa Mercer reached over and held my arm; she looked at me with her blue eyes and said, “You're not nervous, are you, sweetie?”

“No,” I said. “Of course not.”

“Because I can tell when someone's nervous.” She leaned in closer, narrowed her eyes, lowered her gaze to my chest. “Shows up as a yellow light in the area of the heart.”

“Well, maybe I'm a little nervous.”

“Be careful—you have a nice head of hair. Fear can cause baldness.” She looked up at my face again, released my arm. “I'm joking,” she said. “Fear
can
cause baldness, it's true, but not from just a little yellow near the heart.”

Angela Payne turned away from us to cough. “I hope I get through this without a hacking fit.”

“Listen to me,” Mona Lisa said. “Touch your throat.”

I touched mine, and she said, “No, I'm talking to Angela, but you can do this, too, if you want. Angela, touch your throat and repeat after me.”

Angela put her hand on her throat.

“I am willing to change,” Mona Lisa said.

“I am willing to change,” Angela said.

“A cough means stubbornness,” Mona Lisa said. “Every time a person in one of my workshops coughs, I stop what we're doing and have that person touch the throat and say, ‘I am willing to change.' If she coughs again, I have her say it again.”

I touched the bottle in my pocket. As soon as I did, Mona Lisa said, “Give me your hand.”

I released the bottle and removed my hand from my pocket. She held my hand tightly, looked at me, and said, “Eric, I'm grateful that you're here today. I bless you and your work.”

“Thank you,” I said.

When the show began, Angela introduced me and Mona Lisa, then interviewed us briefly. She asked Mona Lisa to tell her listeners how she came to believe in the power of the mind to create as well as heal illness.