The Book of Why

by Nicholas Montemarano

  As long as you believe, as long as you know beyond any doubt, you can heal any illness. Let nothing interfere with your intention to heal. Eliminate all negativity. Don’t allow in any energy that will weaken your resolve. Refuse to talk about the disease. Focus on reasons to feel good. Recognize only the health and perfection in others. Breathe in only wellness. Be grateful for every breath, for the blood flowing through your body. Give thanks to every beat of your heart.

  Remember: As you think, so shall you be. That’s not me, that’s Jesus Christ. Some of you may know him.

  Maybe Michelangelo speaks to you more than Jesus. He said, “The greater danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.”

  I’m asking you all to aim high, I know. But the stakes are high. Your very lives. And the quality of your lives. The greater the stakes, the greater the opportunity. Every obstacle, including disease, is an opportunity. It’s a chance for faith to win over doubt, for peace and happiness to win over tragedy and suffering, for self-love to win over fear. It’s your chance to cancel dis-ease and replace it with ease.

  The year of hats.

  She didn’t lose her hair, but wore them anyway. Baseball hats, knitted berets, a linen newsboy cap, a wool tam, a tweed mod cap. For Christmas, for her birthday, for no reason, people gave her hats. She had so many hats she could go a month without wearing the same one twice. I wore a hat, too—the same one every day. An old, shapeless Mets hat my father had worn proudly when they were the worst team anyone had ever seen.

  It was also the year of sleeping while holding hands or touching feet—a part of my body had to be touching hers. It was the year of slowing down, of noticing things I might not have noticed had she not been ill. I recorded. I pre-remembered. At moments I thought, No, I mustn’t, this way of thinking will manifest exactly that—her gone, my having to remember. But I couldn’t stop seeing the present from the perspective of a future without her.

  The world became smaller and larger. I noticed the quarter-moons at the bottoms of her fingernails, and on clear nights I could hear the stars ask their question: Does your small life, your small suffering, mean anything under this infinite canopy?

  It was the year of talking to stars, to empty rooms, to the face in the mirror. To her, when she wasn’t home. Practice. How to tell her what I couldn’t tell her. That she could heal herself, could think the tumor away, if she believed she could.

  Sometimes I practiced losing her; I was angry with her for dying before she died. Then I’d catch myself and say how stupid to think this way, you’ll make it come true, practice being alone and you will be alone. So I tried to imagine her old. Gray hair was easy, and wrinkles around her eyes and mouth. I imagined her changing for bed or getting out of the shower, her belly rounder, softer. She covered her breasts with her hands. I tried to see her at fifty, sixty, seventy, but I was faking it. Difficult enough to imagine her forty. No matter how much gray, no matter how much gravity might change her body, she would remain young. Stooped and three inches shorter, she would skip.

  WHY SHOULDN’T YOU, of all people, have a soft leather chair. Why shouldn’t you, of all people, rest with your feet up, the better to nod off as the drugs drip into your veins. Recline far enough and you’re floating on a blow-up raft in your childhood pool in Northampton, Massachusetts, sixteen and tan, much too young to care about cancer, much too relaxed on this lovely June afternoon to care that your sister keeps switching the radio station. The neighbor’s chocolate Lab comes into your yard through the open gate and at full speed belly-dives into the pool. Close your eyes. When you hear the dog’s breathing close, extend your hand from the raft and wait for him to lick your fingers. Why shouldn’t this previously lost memory return to you here, of all places, as you wade into sleep. Why shouldn’t they have Us Weekly and People and Time and Self and Sports Illustrated and Better Homes and Gardens to read as you drift off. Why not celebrity cellulite, if that’s what you like, or a review of the new Johnny Depp movie, or a close-up of a wide-eyed pole-vaulter about to clear the bar, a new world record, a split second before the flyaway. Better, maybe, to bring your favorite children’s books—Blueberries for Sal, Katy and the Big Snow, Leo the Late Bloomer—and have your husband read them to you as you drift, a sixteen-year-old girl and a woman more than twice her age, both of you nodding off in this soft leather chair in a room of soft leather chairs, blissfully unaware of the soft but steady sound of a slow leak.

  A MAN WHO looks like me wakes in the night to no one beside him. He fell asleep with his foot touching hers, his hand warm against her stomach, just beneath her breasts, and now nothing. Two pillows, not four, and he panics. He sits up in bed and thinks, My God, did it happen already? Did I lose her years ago and dream that last night she was here?

  He turns on a light, waits for his eyes to adjust. No dog on the floor, no robe draped over the chair, no slippers beside the bed. No sign of her. Not her glasses on the night table. Not the smell of her or the shape of her body on the sheets. He looks at his boxer shorts, blue-and-white stripes, and doesn’t recognize them. The memory of having bought them, lost, just as the memory of having lost her, lost. His hair is short. When did he have it cut? He feels for his beard—still there, but trimmed. He wonders, Could it be summer? When he fell asleep it was March; it had been snowing.

  The man who looks like me walks like me down the hallway. His office, unchanged. His three books in cloth, in paperback, in German, Italian, Japanese. On his desk, inside a blue binder, notes for The Book of Why; he hasn’t looked at them in months. A box filled with letters from his readers. It could be the present or the future. That makes no sense, it’s always the present. What he means is, some future present. Maybe he fell asleep in 2002 and woke five or ten years later. His wife gone, their dog gone, the same unfinished book on his desk.

  Her studio is the same. White paper on her drafting table. Her overlarge, childlike writing. She doesn’t write in straight lines—not in lines at all. Her writing looks more like drawing. Circles and arrows and smiley faces and notes to herself in caps, NO SONG BELONGS TO YOU, words traced over and over until they break through the page, GIVE EVERYTHING AWAY. She liked to stand when she wrote songs. Already she’s in the past tense. She likes to stand when she writes. Most days he surprises her with a glass of lemonade, finds her leaning against the table, her eyes closed, or sitting on a stool in the center of the room, guitar on her lap. She sang—sings—as if each note is a secret. He looks for a date, but she has never dated her work, has never owned a calendar. Her favorite sweater, blue and red with wood buttons, a blue hood, hangs on a hook by the door. Blue socks inside her clogs on the floor. Three children’s school desks facing each other. She used to draw with the twins. Their doodles are still on the desk in crayon. At least they were real, the man who looks like me thinks. He can think about them in the past tense. She drew with the children, wrote songs for them, with them. They’re gone now. Not gone, just gone from here. Back with their mother, who stole his first book, read it, and healed herself.

  In his first book he wrote: “Nothing is impossible. We believe something is impossible because we’ve never seen it done. The best place to see something done—especially something you believe is impossible—is in your mind. Seeing is believing, believing is seeing. What you see clearly in your mind, you will believe. What you believe will manifest in the world.”

  The man who looks like me walks like me to the bathroom. The door is open. The room, like the rest of the apartment, is dark. He needs to see his own face, needs to know how old he is, what year it is. He turns on the light and sees her on the floor, beside the toilet. A pillow beneath her head, another pulled into her chest. The dog sleeps beside her, opens her eyes to the light.

  He looks in the toilet, wants to flush.

  For her, not for him.

  He wants to carry her to bed, but is afraid to disturb her sleep; it might have taken her hours to find this positi
on. And so he lies beside her, on cold tiles, wraps his arms around her. The dog shifts, yawns loudly. He gestures for her to be quiet, even though she knows no sign for this command; he uses the sign he’d use for a human, finger to his lips. She looks at him, waits for her language. He gives her the sign that means lie down, but she’s already lying down, so she stares at him. He closes his eyes, opens them. Closes his eyes again, opens them a few minutes later to the dog still staring. The ceiling light hums; he should have turned it off before lying beside his wife.

  It will become the night they all slept on the bathroom floor, during the week she was the sickest she’d ever been, during the month she lost fifteen pounds, during the year they put chemicals into her body to kill what was killing her. The winter before the spring she would trust him, do it his way, even though it wasn’t his body, wasn’t his life or death, though it felt that way to him.

  She wakes in the night, though the light’s on and the blinds are drawn, so it could just as likely be day. The man who looks like me guesses he’s been asleep for an hour, tops, so let’s say night.

  “How are the children?”

  He can’t tell if she’s confused, as he was, about time. Maybe he’s still confused. Maybe he’s more confused than he was when he woke and walked around the apartment. Maybe the children are sleeping in their room; maybe they’re not past tense, after all.

  She asks again, clearly, “How are the children?”

  “They’re fine,” he says.

  Gone, he should have said. Not here.

  He stands, lifts her to her feet. “I’m going to bring you to bed.”

  “Will you tuck me in?”

  “Of course.”

  “Will you stay?”

  “Yes.”

  How slight, he thinks as he walks her down the hallway, his arm hooked around hers. How almost nothing she feels, her body the body of a child. Her feet make no sound on the wood floor.

  The children are gone, he wants to say. You wanted practice letting things go, and you got your wish.

  It takes great will, but the man who looks like me doesn’t say this. Perhaps he knows a man who looks like him will write it years later, in a book. Will confess, among other confessions, his desire to be cruel to his wife or to whatever caused her disease: bad genes, bad thoughts, suppressed guilt, a God who insists on writing his own story no matter the suffering of his characters.

  Her feet. He doesn’t want them to die. Not soon, not ever. They lie beside each other under a blanket her sister made. Head to feet. He rubs warmth into her feet, kisses her toes, the blood flowing through them. If she could live but he could only kiss her feet, never her lips or face or hands or belly, he would take it. If she could live but they could never speak, every day a silent day, he would take it. If she could live but they could never see each other, if they could speak but only with a door between them, he would take it. If they couldn’t speak or see each other but could only write letters, he would take that, if it meant she could live. If they couldn’t see each other or speak or write letters or send e-mails, but he could hear her sing, he would take that, if it meant she could live. Even if they could never live together, even if they could never speak or write or send e-mails, if he could only watch her, a woman walking to the market, a woman playing in the snow with her dog, a woman blowing bubbles in the park, a woman living a life without him, falling in love with someone else, singing her song where he can’t hear it, he would take that, as long as she could live. If she could live, if she could keep on living, but only in another body, a body he couldn’t love—a man’s, a child’s—he would take that. As long as she could live, he would agree not to know her. He would agree—and this would be most difficult—never to have known her. All this—bargaining, really—as he falls asleep with his lips against her feet.

  She wakes once before light, asks again, “The children—where are they?”

  “They’re fine,” he says. “They’re somewhere sleeping. They’re dreaming about you.”

  “I was dreaming about them,” she says. “They were much older. So were you. You had a gray beard, but I was a little girl.”

  LAST WEEK OF April, first warm days of spring. One night we huddled under blankets, the next we opened windows and slept shirtless under the white noise of a ceiling fan. Overnight, the cherry trees on our street bloomed. A good sign, Cary said. We set two chairs by the bedroom window and read. Every few pages we stopped to look at the trees, then every few paragraphs. Then we put our books down, moved our chairs closer, and dozed in the morning breeze.

  We ate lunch—bananas and cheese sandwiches and fig bars, things Cary could stomach—while we walked up and down our block, the pink blossoms already falling like snow, covering the ground, the hoods of cars. We found them on our back and shoulders and in our hair; we found them that night on our pillows. One blossom was pressed against Cary’s back the next day when she undressed for the doctor.

  When we came home from the hospital, our neighbors were shoveling. The sound made me afraid it was winter again; we didn’t want to relive the past four months, didn’t want to have to get through what we’d already gotten through.

  But then I looked; the snow was pink.

  “So pretty,” Cary said. “Even on the ground.”

  “They get slippery,” I said.

  “Such short lives,” she said. We sat on the stoop and watched our neighbors—people we knew by face and by dog but not by name—bag cherry blossoms as more fell.

  “Mayflies,” Cary said, excited to have remembered this word. “Mayflies live only a few minutes, just long enough to lay their…”

  I waited while her brain searched for the word. “Long enough to lay their…”

  “Eggs,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “That might be nice.”

  “I’d rather live to be a hundred fifty.”

  “Much too long,” she said. “There’s something…” She paused, her mouth open, waiting for the word. “Beauty,” she said. “There’s something beauty about a short life.”

  “Beautiful,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Tell that to a giant tortoise.”

  “Next time I see one.”

  We sat watching our neighbors stuff bags into trash cans set curbside for morning pickup. Then we went inside, where the rest of the day—the part we still had to live—stretched in front of us.

  When faced with sadness, play a game; that was her way. The word game—the one she’d made up. No names for things, and try to guess them. Easy for her—she’d lost so many words. It made her laugh to see me have to try so hard. She seemed so happy, you’d never know the news had been bad that morning.

  “Hey,” she said. “At least it didn’t spread.”

  Before my face could betray me, I pulled her against me. I stroked her hair and imagined it gray. I was hugging an old lady; we’d been married fifty years. No kids, but so what. Young couples would stare at us as we walked by, holding hands, and say, “Let’s be like them.”

  After a few minutes, I felt her begin to pull away; it was the only time it had ever been her. It was something she took silly pride in: she was never first to break a hug, not even when college kids were giving free hugs in Prospect Park and there was a long line. Such a good hugger, they asked her to join them for a while, and she did.

  She pulled away again, and this time I let her.

  She hadn’t lost tree, so even she had to work at that one. She called them the earth’s whiskers. Pass to me. The earth was the universe’s cloudy eyeball. Pass to her. Cloud: what breaks your fall. Fall: the time of rakes. Rake: a cartoon blow to the face. Face: what a blind lover feels. Blind: to see better, to smell better. Smell: to breathe colors. Breathe: to be still, to do nothing. Nothing: anything other than everything.

  Enough, I said, but she wanted to keep going.

  “I don’t like this game,” I said. “I can’t tell when you’re playing.”

  “I know clogs.
And dog and hair.”

  “What makes the sky wet?”

  She shrugged.

  “Rain,” I said, and she repeated the word, rain, rain, a child learning a new language.

  “What about the thing you’re reading?”

  “You’re right,” she said. “We shouldn’t play.”

  “Book,” I said.

  “Are you mad at me?”

  “No,” I said. A reflex, the right answer, even if not true.

  “It’s no one’s fault,” she said.

  I kneeled in front of her chair. I kissed her hands—each finger, front and back. My mouth never said, Of course it’s no one’s fault.

  Behind her, the sky had turned dark. Cherry trees swayed in the wind and lost more blossoms. The sky flashed bright, and already Ralph was shaking at the door. I looked at Cary and waited.

  “Lightning,” she said.

  Then a long, low rumble across the sky. Ralph stood on her back legs and scratched the door.

  “Something and lightning,” she said.

  “Begins with a t.”

  She closed her eyes, opened them, shook her head no.

  “It’s all right,” I said.

  “Timber,” she said. “Timber and lightning.”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  Ralph scratched at our closet; we opened the door to show her it wasn’t a way out. She put her paws on the sill; we opened the window to let her smell the rain and see the flashing sky, but still she wanted out. She stood in the corner and started to pee—whether from fear or a full bladder, we weren’t sure—and I said, “Let’s give her what she wants.”