I wanted this to be like that. I wanted it to be the mirror, the gramophone, even someone playing a nasty practical joke (maybe someone who knew why I hadnt been at the office on that day in September). But I knew it was none of those things. The Farting Cushion was there, an actual guest in my apartment. I could run my thumb over the buckles on Alices ceramic shoes, slide my finger down the part in her yellow ceramic hair. I could read the date on the penny inside the Lucite cube.
Bruce Mason, alias Conch Man, alias Lord of the Flies, took his big pink shell to the company shindig at Jones Beach one July and blew it, summoning people to a jolly picnic lunch of hotdogs and hamburgers. Then he tried to show Freddy Lounds how to do it. The best Freddy had been able to muster was a series of weak honking sounds like well, like Jimmy Eagletons Farting Cushion. Around and around it goes. Ultimately, every associative chain forms a necklace.
In late September I had a brainstorm, one of those ideas so simple you cant believe you didnt think of it sooner. Why was I holding onto this unwelcome crap, anyway? Why not just get rid of it? It wasnt as if the items were in trust; the people who owned them werent going to come back at some later date and ask for them to be returned. The last time Id seen Cleve Farrells face it had been on a poster, and the last of those had been torn down by November of 01. The general (if unspoken) feeling was that such homemade homages were bumming out the tourists, whod begun to creep back to Fun City. What had happened was horrible, most New Yorkers opined, but America was still here and Matthew Broderick would only be in The Producers for so long.
Id gotten Chinese that night, from a place I like two blocks over. My plan was to eat it as I usually ate my evening meal, watching Chuck Scarborough explain the world to me. I was turning on the television when the epiphany came. They werent in trust, these unwelcome souvenirs of the last safe day, nor were they evidence. There had been a crime, yeseveryone agreed to thatbut the perpetrators were dead and the ones whod set them on their crazy course were on the run. There might be trials at some future date, but Scott Staley would never be called to the stand, and Jimmy Eagletons Farting Cushion would never be marked Exhibit A.
I left my General Tsos chicken sitting on the kitchen counter with the cover still on the aluminum dish, got a laundry bag from the shelf above my seldom-used washing machine, put the things into it (sacking them up, I couldnt believe how light they were, or how long Id waited to do such a simple thing), and rode down in the elevator with the bag sitting between my feet. I walked to the corner of 75th and Park, looked around to make sure I wasnt being watched (God knows why I felt so furtive, but I did), then put litter in its place. I took one look back over my shoulder as I walked away. The handle of the bat poked out of the basket invitingly. Someone would come along and take it, I had no doubt. Probably before Chuck Scarborough gave way to John Seigenthaler or whoever else was sitting in for Tom Brokaw that evening.
On my way back to my apartment, I stopped at Fun Choy for a fresh order of General Tsos. Last one no good? asked Rose Ming, at the cash register. She spoke with some concern. You tell why.
No, the last one was fine, I said. Tonight I just felt like two.
She laughed as though this were the funniest thing shed ever heard, and I laughed, too. Hard. The kind of laughter that goes well beyond giddy. I couldnt remember the last time Id laughed like that, so loudly and so naturally. Certainly not since Light and Bell, Insurers, fell into West Street.
I rode the elevator up to my floor and walked the twelve steps to 4-B. I felt the way seriously ill people must when they awaken one day, assess themselves by the sane light of morning, and discover that the fever has broken. I tucked my takeout bag under my left arm (an awkward maneuver but workable in the short run) and then unlocked my door. I turned on the light. There, on the table where I leave bills that need to be paid, claim checks, and overdue-book notices, were Sonja DAmicos joke sunglasses, the ones with the red frames and the heart-shaped Lolita lenses. Sonja DAmico who had, according to Warren Anderson (who was, so far as I knew, the only other surviving employee of Light and Bells home office), jumped from the one hundred and tenth floor of the stricken building.
He claimed to have seen a photo that caught her as she dropped, Sonja with her hands placed primly on her skirt to keep it from skating up her thighs, her hair standing up against the smoke and blue of that days sky, the tips of her shoes pointed down. The description made me think of Falling, the poem James Dickey wrote about the stewardess who tries to aim the plummeting stone of her body for water, as if she could come up smiling, shaking beads of water from her hair and asking for a Coca-Cola.
I vomited, Warren told me that day in the Blarney Stone. I never want to look at a picture like that again, Scott, but I know Ill never forget it. You could see her face, and I think she believed that somehow yeah, that somehow she was going to be all right.
Ive never screamed as an adult, but I almost did so when I looked from Sonjas sunglasses to Cleve Farrells CLAIMS ADJUSTOR, the latter once more leaning nonchalantly in the corner by the entry to the living room. Some part of my mind must have remembered that the door to the hallway was open and both of my fourth-floor neighbors would hear me if I did scream; then, as the saying is, I would have some splainin to do.
I clapped my hand over my mouth to hold it in. The bag with the General Tsos chicken inside fell to the hardwood floor of the foyer and split open. I could barely bring myself to look at the resulting mess. Those dark chunks of cooked meat could have been anything.
I plopped into the single chair I keep in the foyer and put my face in my hands. I didnt scream and I didnt cry, and after a while I was able to clean up the mess. My mind kept trying to go toward the things that had beaten me back from the corner of 75th and Park, but I wouldnt let it. Each time it tried to lunge in that direction, I grabbed its leash and forced it away again.
That night, lying in bed, I listened to conversations. First the things talked (in low voices), and then the people who had owned the things replied (in slightly louder ones). Sometimes they talked about the picnic at Jones Beachthe coconut odor of suntan lotion and Lou Bega singing Mambo No. 5 over and over from Misha Bryzinskis boom box. Or they talked about Frisbees sailing under the sky while dogs chased them. Sometimes they discussed children puddling along the wet sand with the seats of their shorts and their bathing suits sagging. Mothers in swimsuits ordered from the Lands End catalogue walking beside them with white gloop on their noses. How many of the kids that day had lost a guardian Mom or a Frisbee-throwing Dad? Man, that was a math problem I didnt want to do. But the voices I heard in my apartment did want to do it. They did it over and over.
I remembered Bruce Mason blowing his conch shell and proclaiming himself the Lord of the Flies. I remembered Maureen Hannon once telling me (not at Jones Beach, not this conversation) that Alice in Wonderland was the first psychedelic novel. Jimmy Eagleton telling me one afternoon that his son had a learning disability to go along with his stutter, two for the price of one, and the kid was going to need a tutor in math and another one in French if he was going to get out of high school in the foreseeable future. Before hes eligible for the AARP discount on textbooks was how Jimmy had put it. His cheeks pale and a bit stubbly in the long afternoon light, as if that morning the razor had been dull.
Id been drifting toward sleep, but this last one brought me fully awake again with a start, because I realized the conversation must have taken place not long before September Eleventh. Maybe only days. Perhaps even the Friday before, which would make it the last day Id ever seen Jimmy alive. And the lil putter with the stutter and the learning disability: had his name actually been Jeremy, as in Jeremy Irons? Surely not, surely that was just my mind (sometime him take-a de banana) playing its little games, but it had been close to that, by God. Jason, maybe. Or Justin. In the wee hours everything grows, and I remember thinking that if the kids name did turn out to be Jeremy, Id probably go crazy. Straw that broke the camels back, baby.