“She’s a happy, satisfied camper with the Lord,” a woman said. “She doesn’t ever want to be without Him.”
* * *
My father was teaching me how to make things disappear that year, but I wasn’t very good at it, not at first. Whatever he made disappear, I made him make reappear. Marbles, pens, paper clips, bottle caps, anything I asked him to.
He closed his hand around a matchbook, blew on his hand, and showed me his empty palm.
“Where did it go?”
“Back where it came from,” he said.
“Where did it come from?”
“Where everything comes from.”
“But where? ”
“Nowhere,” he said.
“How can something be nowhere?”
He shrugged.
“Fine,” I said. “Make it come back.”
He closed his hand, blew on his fist. When he opened his hand, the matchbook was there, as if it had never been gone. I opened it and counted the matches; there were eight where there had been nine.
“There’s a match missing,” I said.
“I guess it didn’t want to come back.”
“Why not?”
“Maybe it was burned out,” he said.
“Not funny,” I said.
He struck a match to light his cigarette. Seven where there had been eight.
“Can you make bigger things disappear?”
“Like what?”
“People.”
“Who?”
“The Son of Sam.”
He breathed smoke out of his nose. “I can work on that, see what I can do.”
He was the man in my dreams who took me away, who took away my mother and father; he was the voice I’d hear faintly in the static between stations; he was the creak I’d hear on the attic steps; he was the wind rattling my bedroom window; he was a shadow in the basement when my mother sent me down to fold laundry; he was dead leaves blowing in the backyard; he was the crow cawing on the clothesline; he was the man who walked by our house three times one night, then rooted through our trash; he was the man sitting in a black car across the street from the cemetery when I walked past in the early-morning dark to deliver the News; he was the front-page headline I promised myself I wouldn’t read but kept reading; he was the man in my closet; he was the man sitting alone in the back of church who kept looking at me; he was the man talking to himself while feeding pigeons in the park near school; he was footsteps in the school bathroom as I sat in a stall between classes; he was silence and any sound that broke it; he was why my teacher’s husband came to school each day to pick her up; he was why women were cutting their hair and dyeing it blond; he was why my mother pushed her dresser against her bedroom door each night; he was why I had nightmares about my father pushed into a trash compactor; he was why I waited by the window for my father to come home from work; he was why I kept asking my father, kept pestering him, could he make a person disappear.
* * *
One hot night in July, as I was about to go to bed, I asked my father if he could make the whole world disappear.
“Why would you want to do that?”
“Just asking.”
He put out his cigarette in an ashtray about to overflow. “I suppose,” he said, “if you put your mind to it.”
And then the world did disappear.
My father was gone; the couch he was sitting on was gone; the coffee table on which he’d been resting his feet was gone; the entire room was gone. I couldn’t see my hands when I waved them in front of my face; I couldn’t see anything. My mother cried out from the basement, where she had been folding laundry. “Glen,” she said, “I’m down here in the dark!”
“We’re all in the dark,” my father said.
I was relieved to hear their voices, was relieved to feel the floor beneath my feet. I was still there; my mother and father were still there; the world was still there, even if I couldn’t see it.
My father opened the front door, and it was all darkness. Streetlights and porch lights were out. Small circles of light moved across the ground: our neighbors on their stoops with flashlights.
I felt my way upstairs and brought down my radio: that was how we knew for sure that it was a blackout. Later, when we realized there was nothing we could do to turn darkness into light, someone brought out a boom box, and someone else brought out a card table and a bowl of chips, and someone else brought out a cooler filled with beer, and it turned into a block party. My father was able to convince my mother to come outside and dance with him. I knew people by their voices or the smell of their cigarettes or perfume. You could be invisible as long as you didn’t speak, as long as you avoided the glow of flashlights. The dark, as long as we were all in it together, felt safe.
Use the box your new pair of sneakers came in, the one that’s been sitting empty in your closet the past few weeks. With a black Magic Marker write wish box on the lid. Cross out wish and write creation, because you’re making things, not asking for them. Go through your old newspapers and cut out a police sketch of his face. Glue it onto a piece of construction paper, and above the sketch write in black Magic Marker caught! Concentrate on the headline you’ve created; know that it will be true. Don’t doubt, not even a week later, when two more people are shot in the head while kissing in a car in Brooklyn, the woman killed, the man blinded. The male victim’s name is violante, which looks and sounds like violent, and you wonder what that can do to a person, having to say such a name so many times, having to spell it, having to write it on exams and forms, a violent word. You believe, even as a boy, that names have meaning, have power, and you wonder how his life might have turned out differently had his name been violet, had he not parked his car in a neighborhood called gravesend. Before he left his house that night, his mother said, “Be careful, you know what’s going on.” And later, when he was with his date, swinging on park swings, she got nervous and wanted to go back to the car. This is further evidence that it’s best not to be afraid. Animals, even human animals, can smell fear. Resist the urge to open your creation box to make sure the Son of Sam is still inside. If you look, that would be a sign that you don’t believe. If you show faith, it will be rewarded two weeks later when your father shows you the front-page headline: caught! Now you may open your creation box and show your father. He won’t be surprised; he’ll pat you on the back and say, “Nice work—you got him!”
Three months later, on Halloween, I wanted to be the Invisible Man. I wanted to be like during the blackout but better: others couldn’t see me, but I could see them: their private selves, who they were when they believed no one was looking.
I wanted my father to make me disappear, even though I was afraid to be nowhere, wherever that was, the place everything came from. That morning, while my father shaved (he smoked even while shaving), I asked him if I could make him disappear, and he said, “Sure, but only if you believe you can,” and I asked him if he was afraid to be nowhere, and he said no, and I asked him if he’d come back, and he said, “If you bring me back,” and I said, “How do I bring you back?” and he said, “Same way you make me disappear,” and I said, “When you come back, will you tell me about nowhere?” He shifted his cigarette so he could shave the unshaven side of his face without burning his hand. “I’ll tell you everything,” he said. “As long as I don’t come back with amnesia.”
I put on a trench coat and fedora for my costume and had my father wrap my face and hands with bandages. The idea was to take off my clothes and unwrap the bandages and not be there. Or be there, but have everyone believe I wasn’t.
Before I left for school, I took a photograph from the album in my mother’s closet: me and my parents when I was five, my first day of school. I cut out my father, folded what remained, and put it in my pocket.
During the day, I kept the photograph on my desk. I imagined his chair by the front door empty; I imagined morning without him leaning over the sink to shave; I imagined my mother in bed alo
ne; I imagined a garbage truck coming down our street with a man who was not my father on the side of the truck, a man who was not my father emptying cans and whistling for the driver to move up; I imagined my father’s ashtray empty on the coffee table.
My classmates kept saying I was the Mummy, even though I’d told them I was the Invisible Man.
“But we can see you,” they kept saying.
Twins named Tara and Tina came as each other, but no one could tell if they’d really come as themselves.
A boy with one arm—he’d been born that way—came as someone who’d survived a Jaws attack.
The walk home took twice as long; I went out of my way, and out of my way again, to avoid kids with shaving cream that could have been Nair, but still got egged, my trench coat a too easy target.
I wouldn’t meet you for another twenty years, and eventually I told you most of these stories, but here’s one I never told you or anyone, not even my audiences or readers. Only my mother knows, and I’m not sure she has ever forgiven me. Sometimes, even now, I need to remind myself that it wasn’t my fault, that it had nothing to do with me. I try to convince myself the same about you, about everything.
We stood in my room, listening.
My father kept coughing—so much that he put out his cigarette without finishing it, something I’d never seen him do. I told him to be quiet.
My mother was on the stoop, a coffee can filled with pennies in her lap.
I cared too much what other kids thought of me to go door to door with a sack. I didn’t even like candy; years ago my mother had killed that joy by cutting chocolate bars into pieces in case there were razor blades. My father, to tease her, would eat before she cut. “You’ll be sorry when your tongue falls out,” she’d say.
My mother liked to shake the can, her attempt to entice, unaware that the last thing kids wanted was pennies, that they would make fun of her, would call her the penny lady.
Silence would be our warning that she was coming, that she’d run out of pennies or that there were no more trick-or-treaters.
She wouldn’t have liked what we were doing. She would have said, What did I say about magic, about putting silly ideas into your son’s head? She would have said, You’ll be sorry.
It was difficult to concentrate while listening for the sound of pennies. If a minute passed in silence, we paused, waited for her to shake the can.
I told my father to get in my closet.
“So that’s where I’m going to disappear from.”
“Yes.”
“As long as wherever I go, I can breathe.” My father coughed again, and for a moment I wondered if he would ever stop. “I’m really coming down with something,” he said.
“Try to be quiet,” I said.
He walked into the closet and stood with his back against my school shirts. Before I closed the door, he said, “So long. See you soon.”
“Later,” I said.
I closed the door, sat on my bed, shut my eyes tightly, and imagined the closet without my father.
And then a sound: high-pitched, a girl just pinched. A sharp intake of breath.
I was angry that he’d broken my concentration. “Be quiet in there,” I said.
He made a sound like when he gargled in the morning, then banged—or seemed to have banged—on the closet door, as if asking to be let out.
We’d have to begin again. I couldn’t properly imagine him gone when he was making noise.
When I opened the door, he fell out.
My father’s eyes were open, but he wasn’t looking at me. A joke, I thought. A Halloween trick. To scare me, to scare my mother.
I heard the front door open, then close; my mother’s footsteps.
“She’s coming,” I whispered to him. “Get up—hurry.”
My mother came up the stairs; I could hear her walking across the hallway to my room.
“Get up,” I said.
“What are you two doing in there?”
I flicked his ears, pulled his hair, pinched the skin on his hand.
I stood, kicked my father gently. “Come on,” I said.
My mother tried to open the door, but he was in the way. “Let me in,” she said, and pushed.
I pushed back, but could hear anger in her voice, so I gave my father up. “He’s teasing me,” I said.
My mother pushed her way in.
I expected her to say, Now you know how it feels to be teased. Or, Glen, will you please, once and for all, grow up.
But as soon as she saw him, she got down on her knees beside him and shook him. “Glen,” she said. “Glen.” She shook him again, harder. “It’s okay,” she said. “You can get up now, you can get up,” she said.
Then, to me: “What happened?”
She didn’t wait for an answer. She shook him too hard. She slapped his face, his chest, got on top of him, looked into his eyes. She shook him some more and kept saying Glen until Glen sounded strange, a word I was hearing for the first time, a word in another language.
“He’s teasing,” I said.
She ran down the stairs, then back up. She kneeled beside him, put her mouth against his ear. “I won’t leave you,” she said. “I won’t leave, don’t worry.” But as soon as she said this, she ran down the stairs again.
I could hear her out on the street, calling for help. One of our neighbors was a nurse; she had saved a neighbor choking on a cherry pit in the middle of the night.
I kept watching. Not his eyes—I couldn’t look into them—but just above them, near enough to see if they moved.
A neighbor whose name I didn’t know—an older man who drove a brown Cadillac and smoked a cigar on his stoop every night—ran up the stairs with my mother. Other people came—strangers, the fathers of children I knew but weren’t my friends. The man who smelled like cigars got down on the floor with my father and kept saying Glen, that sound that was no longer a word. He slapped my father’s face; he pressed his finger to my father’s neck, his ear to my father’s chest.
MY MOTHER DIDN’T want to leave.
I stood facing a soda machine, turning over in my hand two quarters the nurse had given me. I could see the reflection of my mother and the doctor. He looked down at her, his hand on his chin. She was yelling, but in a whisper. They didn’t do enough, she said. He was too young for this to happen.
I saw a nurse give my mother a pill and a small paper cup, the kind you use to rinse after having a cavity filled. My mother pushed it away. She wanted to speak with whoever was in charge. The nurse put her hand on my mother’s shoulder.
When my mother stopped crying, she accepted the pill and the paper cup, then sat down.
The machine swallowed one coin, then the other. I pressed a button that sent them back to me, and I kept doing this, even though long ago I’d decided orange. I didn’t want to have to turn around; I could look at my mother’s reflection, not at her. I inserted the coins and pressed the orange button. The can making its way down through the machine and into the receptacle was as loud as I believed my own heart was. I pulled off the tab and took my first sip; everything was too loud. I drank too quickly, and it was more than half gone. When it was all gone, I’d have to face her, I’d have to say something or nothing, and then she might say it—that it had been my fault, how many times had she told me, this was God punishing me for not doing what I’d been told, for doing what I’d been told not to do, this was my cross, hers too, this was permanent, irreversible, did I know what that word meant, it meant the rest of our lives.
The cab ride home, the two of us without him. My mother beside me on the backseat.
Two boys threw eggs at the cab. One boy was shirtless and had tiny nipples; the other boy wore a red bandana, which was something I’d asked for the previous Christmas because it looked like you had a wound under it and I thought it was romantic to have a wound, people would consider you tragic and brave, but instead my mother got me a herringbone-tweed cap other kids made fun of.
Th
e eggs hit the window where I was sitting, but I didn’t flinch. The streets were dark but for jack-o’-lanterns still lit in windows and on stoops. Then streets I recognized, streets close to ours, houses I knew. Our house. The brown car my father drove, had driven, which my mother didn’t know how to drive, which would sit in front of our house for five years; I would start it once a week, twice a week in winter, until I was old enough to drive.
A magic wand was stuck in our tree. Wind blew candy wrappers along the sidewalk. In the street were a glittery princess slipper and a cracked vampire mask. On our front door was a shaving-cream smiley face and below it the words, I’ll be back.
The dark house, the click of a lamp turned on. A closet opened, my mother’s coat hung on a hanger, the smell of mothballs. Her footsteps, then mine, up the creaking stairs. My mother in her room, what had been their room, and me in mine, where it had happened.
Even in the dark I could see the outline of the closet door. I got out of bed, turned on the light, and put my hand on the knob.
It was all a trick, I realized—the ultimate illusion. My father was that good. Better than anyone, even Houdini. A trick to make the heart stop. A trick so good that it fooled the men who’d come to the house and breathed into his mouth and pushed on his chest and put a mask over his face and pressed a plastic ball that sent air into his body; so good that it fooled the doctors and nurses at the hospital.
I imagined him laughing as he stood up from the operating table, where they must have pronounced him dead. I imagined him tiptoeing into the hallway, down the stairs, and outside to a cab. He could have gotten home before us. He’d disappeared, and now, if I focused my thoughts, he would reappear.
I stood with my hand on the knob, listening for his breathing.
He might wait until morning, I thought.
He might wait until the wake or the burial—a knock from inside the coffin as it’s lowered.
The Book of Why Page 5
