He might wait years.
Until then, he would be the voice in the static between stations; the creak on the attic steps; the rain against my bedroom window; the wind that blew leaves across the backyard; a blue jay on our clothesline; footsteps, shadows, silence; any sound that broke silence.
IT WAS THE year of rules.
So was the next year, and the next. With every year came more and more rules, refinements of old rules.
You couldn’t break one, or else.
The first rule, the most important, was Think positive.
Every thought was positive, negative, or neutral, and you had to be careful.
With practice negative could become neutral and neutral positive, and with more practice, negative could bypass neutral and become positive.
The negative It’s cold and snowing and someone will throw ice at my face became the neutral It’s cold and snowing, became the positive Thank you for morning sunlight reflecting off the white world, became a mantra you could repeat all day, became a song, Thank you for sunlight, thank you for the white world, all day to keep out the negative.
Negative made my lips tingle, made my arms and legs weak, made me fear falling.
That was how I knew I needed to change my thoughts or else.
The first time I felt my lips tingle: Rockaway Beach, an August morning, my tenth birthday. The steady sound of waves breaking, a lifeguard’s whistle, the cries of seagulls as they swooped down to scavenge bread crusts, crumbs clinging to muffin wrappers. The ripe smell of seaweed. Sea wind blew sand onto my legs. Waves, louder and closer, sprayed my face with ocean dew.
I opened my eyes: skywriters wrote words that faded before I could read them. A fat boy ran past with a jellyfish impaled on a stick.
My mother covered her pale legs with a towel. But the towel didn’t cover her feet; they were starting to burn.
She’d had a severe sunburn once, had stayed in bed three days. The way she’d moaned, I’d been afraid she might die. My father had made a game of peeling her skin—whoever peeled the biggest piece won.
Now my father dozed with a hat over his eyes. My mother suggested we move our beach chairs away from the water; my father told her to stop worrying so much. My mother said, The water’s rough, it’s coming closer, and I felt the tingling in my lips as if I’d tried to eat that jellyfish. My mother moved her chair and told me to do the same. My father didn’t move; he said nothing when the water reached his feet, not when it rose to his ankles, not when a wave knocked him from his chair. He lay on his back on the sand, and the water rolled over his head, back out, over him again, and I wanted to speak, but my mouth didn’t work, and the water rolled in and out, my father could have been a body washed ashore.
You could make a negative memory positive by revising it: we all moved our chairs back; the water never reached my father.
* * *
Thank you for morning sunlight. Thank you for the sound fall leaves make when I walk through them. Thank you for the sight of my breath in cold morning air. Thank you for the long eyelashes of the girl sitting across from me on the bus, so long they look fake. Thank you for when she blinks.
She pulled the bell cord and stood: the other side of her face was pink with burn scars; only one eye had lashes.
Years later, in Atlanta, a woman with facial burns asked me to sign her copy of my third book, There Are No Accidents. She had lost her house in a fire. Within a year, she had lost her job and her marriage.
I wasn’t thinking the right thoughts, it was nothing but negativity and anger and self-pity, and your book got me back on the right path. I feel beautiful again, I really do. Thank you, thank you for everything.
I signed her book, For Sharon, with best wishes and admiration.
I wrote in my notebook about the girl on the bus. I described her eyelashes and tried to think of them from time to time, especially when I was trying to turn a negative positive.
But it was impossible to think of her eyelashes without thinking of her burns, you couldn’t have one half of her face without the other, and eventually I tore that sheet from my notebook and decided it was best not to think about her at all.
I slept with the notebook under my pillow. I brought it to school. I hid it in my closet with my father’s ashtray and his last pack of cigarettes.
There were four sections: Rules, Signs, Proof, and Positive Thoughts.
I didn’t want my mother to find it.
Composition, not spiral, which could unwind over time and cut you. Pencil, not pen, in case I made a mistake.
I pressed hard, and sometimes it was impossible to erase a mistake completely; sometimes the eraser was dirty and made things worse, and I had to buy a new notebook and copy everything from the old one.
A week after the day it had been a year, a windy November morning, my mother tied a yellow ribbon around the tree in front of our house. Many of our neighbors did the same—dozens of yellow ribbons, their long strings flapping in the wind. I knew why—I’d seen the headlines in the papers I delivered—but I liked to pretend the ribbons were for my father, so that he’d return.
I walked to the bus stop, and it was yellow and more yellow, and I thought how nice it would be to be kidnapped and held hostage, to be taken away for a while, to be feared dead, to have so many people missing you, and then to return. It would be the closest one could come to coming back from the dead. It would be like dying without dying.
Four hundred forty-four days later, two hundred twenty-two times two, the hostages came home.
One by one they walked down the airplane steps waving. Some of the men had long beards, and I decided then—I was in high school—that when I was able, I would grow a beard. A beard meant you’d been away for a long time; a beard meant you weren’t allowed to shave; a beard—and Jesus was proof of this, too—meant you had suffered.
One by one they emerged from the plane, but it was never him.
* * *
Another rule was, don’t step on a crack while delivering newspapers, don’t allow the shopping cart’s wheels to touch a crack because electricity counted.
I had to push down on the cart’s handle to wheelie the front wheels over each crack, then lift the handle so that the back wheels cleared the crack, then step over the crack. If I touched a crack, I had to back up—clearing the crack in reverse—and try again.
It was slow going, but the time saved not having to do a do-over was worth the time it took not to make a mistake in the first place.
I had to get up earlier than the birds. There were dark circles beneath my eyes, which were almost as tragic as a beard.
Eventually it became muscle memory. I almost never stepped on a crack.
This wasn’t about not breaking my mother’s back; it was much bigger than that. It was about keeping the earth in its orbit around the sun and the galaxy in its trajectory through the universe; it was about everything that could go wrong not going wrong, disasters large and small I tried not to think about.
Another rule was, don’t read headlines. Headlines were almost never positive and more likely negative than neutral.
Another rule was, if you make a mistake and read a negative headline, rewrite it positive.
Woman Saves Children, Self. Three Rescued from Brooklyn Fire. Plane Crash Kills No One. Headless Body Not Found in Topless Bar.
* * *
Thank you for morning sunlight. Thank you for the sight of my breath in cold morning air. Thank you for everything this day and every day forward going well for me and for everyone. Thank you for the license plate that just passed with my father’s initials and his date of birth—GDN 519—thank you for that wink, just when my body was tingling and a wave was just about to take me under.
There were signs, winks from the universe that I wasn’t alone, that I was following the rules, thinking positive thoughts.
One morning a garbage truck passed as I pushed my cart beside the cemetery gate, not more than a hundred yards from my father’s g
rave. Fat-lettered graffiti on the side of the truck read: It’s all in your head.
Later the same day, I sat in a bathroom stall at school, not because I had to go, but because I had to get out, had to leave class: the boy sitting next to me was picking his nose, and his desk was touching the floor, and the floor was touching my desk, and my desk was touching me. My lips tingled and my arms went weak, and when I raised my hand to ask to use the lavatory—for years I’d thought it was laboratory—it was as if I held a medicine ball—we’d tried that in gym that week—and the teacher said fine. I could tell it wasn’t fine—I asked to be excused more than any other student—but went anyway. I sat on the toilet seat, but then I realized that the other boy’s desk touched the floor, and the floor touched the toilet, and even when I stood on the toilet, I might as well have been touching that boy, and I looked to the side and saw written on the wall, It’s all in your head, dude.
That night, in bed, I heard the cop from the cop show my mother watched: Snap out of it! It’s all in your head!
Some days—I still remember them—it seemed as if the world heard my every thought. I wanted a seat on the bus—I didn’t like to touch the hanging straps—and there was a seat. I wanted someone else to pull the bell cord—I didn’t want to touch it—and someone did. I wanted the clouds to part and they parted. I didn’t want to go to gym and the teacher was out sick. I thought of a song and the song came on the radio. I thought of a bluebird and a bluebird alighted on a low-hanging branch on our tree.
One day, on my way home from high school, a squat man wearing an army jacket was walking toward me. His jeans were baggy and too long. He was talking to himself, but was looking at me.
An image in my mind of the man hitting me—just a flash. I had to pass him to reach the subway. I didn’t want to cross the street, only to have to cross back, even though that’s what my mother had told me to do to avoid people who don’t look right.
As I walked past the man, he came at me as if that had been his intention all along. He punched my face, then pulled my jacket over my head so I couldn’t see. He threw me to the ground and kicked me, then took my jacket and walked away talking to himself.
People stopped to look, but no one went after the man.
An older man with a gray broom-handle mustache—he was hosing the sidewalk in front of a florist—asked me if I was all right. He reached into the pocket of his apron and gave me a handkerchief.
The taste of blood running from my nose; the lovely smell of flowers.
Another rule was, Don’t be afraid.
Another was, Whatever you’re afraid of will find you.
Part Three
Gloria Foster
Donald E. Stephens Convention Center, Rosemont, Illinois, 2000
It’s not an accident that I’m standing on this stage. It’s not an accident that each of you is sitting exactly where you’re sitting. Believe me, there are no such things as accidents. We have complete responsibility for all that we’re experiencing in our lives. We create everything, even so-called accidents. Coincidences are never coincidences. Nothing is random. Nothing means nothing.
This is good news. There’s a reason behind everything, and that reason is you.
Synchronicity is just the universe winking back at you. The universe is saying, “Pay attention. This means something. This is what you’ve been thinking about, what you’ve been asking for.”
When you’re aligned with abundance, you can create accidents on purpose. You can count on everything and everyone you need to show up at the perfect moment. Don’t hope and pray for the right person to enter your life. Don’t hope and pray for lucky breaks. There’s no such thing as luck except the luck we create.
I encourage you, every morning when you wake, to make the following commitments to yourself. I promise to pay attention today. I believe that everything means something. I believe that the universe is constantly winking at me, reflecting my internal state, giving me a chance to cancel and erase any negative thoughts and feelings I may be having. I commit today to being open to serendipity—to expecting it, in fact. I believe that everything I need will present itself to me. I believe that I will meet the exact people I need to meet at this moment in time. I believe in perfect timing. I believe in creating happy accidents.
Now, I acknowledge that there are people who don’t believe any of this. Some people believe that the worst that can happen, will. And so it should be no surprise when the worst does happen. They read the paper and begin their day looking for tragedy. They watch the evening news and end their day thinking the world is a dangerous place. Their dreams are dark, filled with anxiety. I don’t judge such people, but I really do feel sorry for them. Because they don’t have to live in such fear. Please hear me: I don’t deny that tragic things happen in the world. But by focusing on tragedy, we attract more of the same.
Each of you has to answer the following question, the most important question you’ll ever answer: Do you believe the universe is friendly or unfriendly? If you believe the universe is unfriendly, then that’s precisely the kind of universe you’ll live in. There’s plenty of evidence if you’d like to make that case. On the other hand, if you believe that the universe is friendly, then that’s precisely the kind of universe you’ll live in. A universe in which like attracts like, in which thoughts become things, in which you are not powerless, in which you deserve to feel as good as you’d like to feel, in which there’s no doubt or fear or competition or worry or jealousy or hatred or blame or desperation. A universe in which there’s always enough, in which there’s no such thing as exclusion. A universe in which one happy thought leads to another leads to another. A universe in which there are no limits. A universe in which miracles aren’t miraculous because they happen all the time.
Waking doesn’t feel like waking, more like being reborn: the world is still here, waiting for me.
My body aches everywhere, but I don’t care. A bag drips clear liquid into my arm. Inhale and the room swells; exhale and I see tiny white horses ride a wave of steam from my mouth. I try to breathe them back into my lungs, but they gallop across the room, disappear into the air.
Hanging from the ceiling above me is a cord. It’s so clear to me: if I pull, the world will turn off. I try to will my hand to move.
A tall woman with red hair stands at the window, her back to me. She’s breathing on the window, using her finger to write words on the fogged glass. I try to speak to her, to ask who she is, where I am, what happened, but I can make no sound.
Dawn or dusk, I can’t tell. I look through the window to see if the world will become lighter or darker.
With my thoughts—old habit—I try to communicate with her. Turn around, I think, and she does.
“Gloria,” she says.
I look past her and see that this is the word she’s been writing in her breath on the window.
She must have been telling me her name. But I don’t know anyone named Gloria, not that I can remember.
The arm she wasn’t writing with is in a sling. The bandage on her nose wraps around her head. She has a black eye.
“Gloria,” she says, her voice an echo.
I blink twice, deliberately, trying to start a code she might learn to recognize: one blink for yes, two for no.
I want to ask her if I’m critical, if I have information she needs before I die. Perhaps someone tried to murder me, tried to murder both of us. I wonder, for the first time, if she’s my wife, and then I remember that I have a wife, and I begin to cry I’m so happy, and my ribs ache with my shaking, the most wonderful hurt I’ve ever experienced, until I realize the error of my verb tense, not have, had, and now the hurt is just hurt. My fear has changed: I’m no longer afraid to die, but to live.
Memory returns: I live alone on Martha’s Vineyard, this woman came to find me, there was an accident, I couldn’t breathe, and then—
Gloria. She wants to know who Gloria is.
I don’t know, I think. Isn�
��t that your name?
I blink twice, but she doesn’t notice. I blink twice again.
“When you came back, you said Gloria. You told me to write it down. It was the only thing you said. I wasn’t sure if it was a name or if you saw God.”
Came back from where?
As if she can hear my thoughts: “You’re going to be fine, but for a few minutes you were gone.”
And then I remember. Not who Gloria is, but why I said this name, though I have no memory of having said it.
Here, there seems only a dream. Yet there, here seemed like a dream.
Dream or not, I heard the name. Gloria.
My father’s voice.
Impossible, yet it was my father’s voice that said this name.
Even if I could speak, I wouldn’t tell her everything, this woman who came to save me.
“I know who you are,” she says. “I told you—my accident wasn’t an accident. Neither was yours. I think it has something to do with Gloria.”
“Ralph.”
But that’s all I have in me—one word.
“She’s fine,” she says. “I’ve been taking care of her. I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve been staying at your house. It’s been a week.”
I try to wet my lips, but there’s no saliva in my mouth. She gives me an ice chip from a cup on the table beside the bed.
“Two cracked ribs,” she says. “Punctured lung. That’s what caused the real trouble. Concussion, too. You have a terrible headache, I bet.”
I blink once.
“Do you remember my name?”
I blink twice.
“Sam,” she says. “Sam Leslie.”
Night through the window: it had been dusk when I woke, not dawn. I close my eyes and listen to drugs drip into my arm.
The Book of Why Page 6