The Book of Why by Nicholas Montemarano Page A

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.
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    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!”
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    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