The Book of Why

by Nicholas Montemarano

  “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 col
leagues 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 everything,” 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.

  “I can’t stay,” I tell her.

  We were supposed to meet, Sam says. Maybe the reason doesn’t have as much to do with her brother or Gloria Foster—though she’s still open to that possibility—as with each other, she says. We needed to come into each other’s life at this exact moment, she says. We can help each other, she says. Maybe we’re both lonely, she says. Think about all the signs, she says. There are no accidents, she says. There are signs everywhere, she says. You wrote books about this, she says.

  “I burned those books,” I tell her.

  “Listen to me,” she says. “Something strange is happening.”

  “I’m done with strange,” I tell her.

  “I found us at the Laundromat, then in the park, on the side of a tree.”

  She turns off the burner and serves eggplant, peppers, and baby corn onto two plates of rice; she brings the food to the table. We stand there watching steam rise from the plates. She pulls out a chair, but doesn’t sit. She looks at the table, then back at me, then back at the table; I follow her eyes: on top of each napkin is a square of white paper the size of a stamp.

  She lays one in each of my palms, then covers my hands with hers. It looks like we’re about to play a game of red hands—the slap game.

  Eric is on one square, in fading black ink, and Sam is on the other square, in red to match her hair.

  She found them in separate dryers, she tells me. She thought they were labels that had fallen off her shirts.

  That would have been strange enough, she says, but when she stopped to pet a dog in Madison Square Park and looked up, our names were carved into a tree.

  “Eric and Sam,” I say. “Some gay couple.”

  “Come on,” she says.

  “Come on what?”

  “I’ll show you,” she says. “I’ll take you right now.” She grabs her keys from her desk and walks to the door.

  “I believe you,” I tell her.

  “I want to show you.”

  “Sit down,” I say, but she doesn’t move. “You can put down your keys—you don’t need them.”

  “I keep calling the locksmith,” she says. “I swear.”

  “I know you’re still married,” I say.

  She lets her keys drop to the floor. The noise wakes Ralph; she looks at us, then lowers her head and falls immediately back to sleep.

  “You were running away,” I tell her.

  “It’s not him,” she says. “I really did leave my husband years ago, and it was because of you—your first book. But somehow”—she takes a deep breath—“somehow, despite my best intentions, I married him again. Not him, but someone like him.”

  “I’m sorry,” I tell her.

  She sits on the floor at my feet, but doesn’t look up. “Why do I keep attracting men like that into my life?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re supposed to know,” she says.

  “I don’t have any answers.”

  “I asked him to leave,” she says. “I changed the lock.”

  “You should call the police.”

  She looks up at me. “I must be doing something wrong.”

  “You’re trying your best,” I tell her. I give her my hand and pull her up. I take her other hand too and hold them both and wait for her to say whatever else she needs to say. But she just looks into my eyes, and eventually I let go.

  She sits at the table and moves her food around on her plate. “Don’t you believe that all of this is supposed to be happening?”

  “Things happen whether we want them to or not.”

  “Well, what do you want to happen?”

  I want her to be happy and safe. I want her to stop looking for answers. I want her to stop reminding me who I used to be. I want to live entirely in every moment. I want to want only what I have, only what is. I want to be more like Ralph. I want to be more like Cary. Like Cary was.

  “Tell me,” she says. “What do you want?”

  “The truth,” I tell her, “is that I want to go back in time.”

  “Not me,” she says. “I don’t want to relive any of it.”

  “No,” I say. “I’d do things differently.”

  “Oh,” she says. “You and me and everyone.”

  Sam sits on the
floor again and makes kissy sounds. Ralph gets up and stretches. She walks over, puts her head on Sam’s lap, and makes her content noise—low moan, eyes closed—as Sam scratches her ear. “See,” Sam says. “I know all her favorite spots.”

  “I should go,” I say.

  I walk to the door; Ralph jumps up, runs to my side.

  “I’m afraid,” Sam says.

  “So is everyone.”

  “One last question,” she says. “If you were to write a self-help book now—”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “Let’s pretend,” she says. “If you were to write another book—”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “But if you were to write one.”

  “Keep trying your best,” I tell her. “That’s what my book would say.”

  Part Eight

  The End of Every Story

  We could end with her sleeping.

  We could end with her leaning against a man who looks like me.

  They’re sitting on a bench in Prospect Park after a short walk after days of not walking or eating or getting out of bed.

  The dog’s off leash. She’s running across a field covered with snow and ice, then running back to the bench where they sit. She shakes snow from her coat, cries for them to throw something, but there’s nothing except the pathetic excuse for a snowball he makes. He throws, the dog chases. But the snowball breaks apart midair. The dog makes circles in the field, nose to the snow. She sees it as her duty to fetch whatever’s thrown, and it upsets her not to be able to.

  The man who looks like me makes another snowball and tosses it high enough for the dog to get under it. But when she catches it, she catches nothing, or so it might seem to her; it disappears in her mouth, it turns to water, and she waits for the man to make it reappear as if by magic, by miracle.

  “Here, Ralph,” he says. “Right here.” And he throws again.

  Some books say the past and future are illusions: the past gives you a false identity and the future promises salvation. Some books say the present moment is all there is, there’s nothing other than right now.