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said nothing; he held the knife at his side, against the leg of his jeans, blade pointing down. He kept squeezing the knife’s handle.
    â€œShe doesn’t know what I know,” my father said, “which is that there’s no reason to be afraid. It’s just that you walked into the wrong house. It’s been a long night, and you’re lost.”
    My father puffed on his cigarette and said, “What you want to do is put that down.” I knew he meant the knife, and was glad he hadn’t said the word. “You won’t need that here,” my father said.
    The man raised the knife; he looked at it as if unsure how it came to be in his hand. He blinked a few times, then stepped forward and laid the knife on the coffee table.
    â€œNow what you want to do,” my father said, “is go down two blocks to the pay phone and call someone who can pick you up.” He reached into his pocket and gave the man a dime. “Here you go,” he said. “Good luck getting home.”
    The man nodded, put the dime in his pocket, opened the door, and left; he didn’t bother taking his knife.
    My father didn’t rush to lock the door; that’s what I would have done. He didn’t call the police until the next day, and only when my mother insisted.
    I came down the stairs and asked them who the man was.
    â€œHe was lost,” my father said.
    â€œWhat did he want?” I said.
    â€œWe live in a sick world,” my mother said.
    â€œEverything’s fine,” my father said.
    â€œIt’s a miracle you wake up alive,” she said.
    She started shaking. My father tried to hold her, but she pushed him away as if he’d done something wrong, as if he hadn’t just saved us.
    The next night, at bedtime, my father asked me if I was afraid to go to sleep; I said yes. “Nothing to be ashamed of,” he said. “But I want you to know something.” He turned his head away to breathe out smoke. “When you’re afraid of something,” he said, “it tends to find you.”
    I waited for him to say more, but he didn’t.
    â€œWhy did he do what you told him to do?”
    â€œThe mind’s powerful,” he said. “I saw him put down that knife, then he did. I saw him leave, then he did.”
    â€œHow do you know God didn’t do it?”
    â€œGod did do it,” my father said. “But where do you think God lives?”
    â€œWhere?”
    He tapped my head with his finger. “Right here,” he said.

 
    WE LIVED SURROUNDED by the dead: a mausoleum behind our garage, rows of gravestones as far as you could see. Our house backed up against the cemetery where Harry Houdini was buried. Each Halloween, on the anniversary of his death, dozens of people would gather at his grave and wait for him to rise from the dead or contact them from the other side—to give them a sign that he still existed somewhere, in some form. When my father told me this, I was both thrilled and terrified that the dead might rise, that resurrection might not be Jesus’ exclusive miracle. My mother, a devout Catholic who believed that magic was sacrilege, told my father to stop filling my head with nonsense.
    â€œLook who’s talking,” he said.
    My father, with a quiet, childlike wonder, saw the world as a strange, magical place; my mother saw the world as a place to fear. My mother carried her cross while my father pointed out how beautiful the wood was. I’ve spent most of my life trying to figure out which one of them was right. It’s entirely possible, of course, that they both were.
    But for a while my father won.
    His name was Glen Dale Newborn, and we lived in Glendale, Queens, and so I believed that the neighborhood had been named for him. I believed, too, when I was a boy, that Glendale was the entire world, that there was nothing else, so the world had been named for my father.
    My mother’s name is Rose,