I
My house is on a one way street opposite the wooded section of a large Frederick Law Olmsted park. The street never does get much vehicular traffic; now, it’s almost zero. The street and this section of the park ordinarily have a great deal of foot traffic: joggers and walkers with and without dogs. Most of that is gone, too.
The almost total absence of people is, I think, one of the reasons a clutch of turkey vultures has taken up residence in the neighborhood. Almost every day I see four of them sailing maybe thirty or forty feet overhead, their huge wingspread sometimes catching the sun. They go back and forth over my house, over the street, over the strand of grass closest to the trees, and then they’re out of sight for a few minutes. Then they’re back, maybe fifty yards down the street, coming this way now: back and forth, back and forth. The pattern repeats until they are out of sight over Forest Lawn Cemetery, which abuts the park to the east.
Turkey vultures eat almost anything: small mammals, fruit, insects. But their favorite meal is dead things. They have a superb sense of smell. They can sniff death from afar. When they sail back and forth with their five- or six-foot wingspans, it’s death they have most in mind. And death tells them where to go.
II
My daughter, Rachel, who lives the other side of the park, called a few days ago. “I know you don’t believe in an afterlife and things like that, but something happened.” She said it involved her younger son, Michael, now seven years old.
“Last week, for three nights in a row, Michael woke up scared and got in bed with me because he had nightmares about the ‘man on the moon’ that Jonathan Casey had painted. When Jonathan originally painted that moon, he painted it with a man in it—the man on the moon, and it looked quite scary. He painted over it and made the face that’s there now. The ‘man on the moon’ was only on the wall for a few days, and we have no photos of it and Michael was just a baby.”
Michael, Rachel said, and his older brother Samuel (now 9), “loved Jonathan and always loved watching him paint.” She said she would send me a photo of the reconfigured mural, with Michael, then six months old, in the crib under it.
“On the 4th night,” Rachel said, “Michael slept through the night and at breakfast, said without any prompting, ‘I’m not scared of the man on the moon anymore. I won’t have nightmares about him again. He’s gone forever.’ I thought that was really strange but just asked him how he knew he was gone and how he knew he’d never see him again in his dreams. Michael said, ‘I told you! I’ll never see him again, he’s never coming back. He’s gone forever.’ An hour later I found out that Jonathan had been missing for 3 days, and that the police found his body that morning in Cazenovia Creek.”
“So,” she said, “how do you explain that?”
III
“I can’t,” I said, but I will tell you two stories.”
The first happened in 1946, when I was ten years old. My mother had taken my brother and me to Loew’s Metropolitan, one of downtown Brooklyn’s fancy movie houses. Midway through the movie, she stood up and said, “Something’s wrong. We have to go.” We went to the lobby, where she found a pay phone and called my father at their corner store in Bed-Stuy. She hung up and said, “Jack Lehman just died. He had a heart attack.” Jack was my father’s best friend. He was married to my mother’s sister, Estelle. They lived two houses away from us on Vernon avenue. I don’t remember my mother ever speaking of that kind of inexplicable knowledge at any other time.
The second was in 1967, when I was 31. My father was in a coma in the ICU of Middlesex County Hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Visitation was strictly controlled: one or two people could go in for ten minutes every hour. He had a tracheotomy and edema. Over a two-day period, he was conscious part of the time I was there. He did something to the tracheotomy device so he could talk. Each time, he said the same thing, “You’re supposed to be in Cuba this week.” Each time, I’d give the same response: “I postponed it.”
We’d sit there all day long, waiting for the ten minutes, deciding which of us would go in. Sometimes there’d be a Code Blue called over the hospital PA system and a dozen or so doctors and nurses would come running down the hall. They almost never ended well. A doctor would say something to one of the families and the crying would start. When that happened, I’d have a brief moment of relief: how many deaths could there be in one afternoon? If some other guy died, our odds were better, right? Wrong. The deaths had no more to do with one another than one flip of the coin has to do with the next flip of the coin. The odds, whatever they are, never change.
Sometime in the third day, I felt a terrible weariness. I needed to sleep. I wouldn’t be getting in to see him the next round anyway, so I told everybody I was going to my parents’ house for a nap. My family promised to call if anything happened. The house was in Fords, about 15 minutes away. When I got there, I immediately fell into a deep sleep.
Thirty minutes later I woke to a feeling of overwhelming dread. It was as if all color had been washed from the world.
I drove to the hospital. My brother, mother and sister were talking to one another in the ICU waiting room. I went to the ICU door. My mother said, “Brucie, it’s not the time.” I pushed the door open and went to my father’s bed. His edema was worse. I heard a raspy exhale, then nothing else. I could not see his chest move.
No one was at the ICU desk and no ICU staff was in the ward. Down a corridor, I saw several people at a table, talking and drinking coffee. I rushed toward them. One said, “You’re not supposed to be here. It’s not visiting time.”
“My father’s not breathing.” They followed me to his bed. One of them called in a Code Blue. Another pushed me out to the waiting room.
“It’s dad, isn’t it,” my mother said.
“No,” I lied.
The Code Blue team rushed by us.
“It’s dad,” she said again, this time not asking.
A while later, the team came out, looking the way I’d come to understand they looked when somebody died. None of them looked at us. The last was our family doctor, Gabriel Pickar. He passed us without a glance, too. I grabbed his arm and turned him around.
“Gabe, you got something you want to tell us?”
“Irv didn’t make it. I’m sorry.”
IV
“So,” Rachel said, “tell me this: how can you believe in these stories and still be an atheist?”
“It’s not a matter of believing in these stories,” I said. “Belief has nothing to do with it. I know them. They happened.” We were, at that moment, talking to one another on our cell phones. “Right now, I’m having a conversation with you using this rectangular thing with no wires. How can that be possible? I don’t know how it can be possible. I know that I’m hearing you and you’re hearing me. These other things—Mikey’s dreams, my mother and Uncle Jack, me and my father—they happened. How they happened, I haven’t a clue.”
I thought of, but didn’t tell her about the turkey vultures and their uncanny ability to smell death. Who knows what facility sometimes kicks in for us that lets us know on the instant something there is no rational reason for us knowing? Saying there is no rational reason for something doesn’t mean there isn’t a reason; it means only that we don’t know what the reason is. You don’t need religious or spiritual belief for that. All you need is the ability to pay attention to what you know, and to find it on whatever part of the air is giving it to you.