on that day. They’d been there when I went up with my office supplies, and were still
there when a far less carefree Scott Staley came back down. A Scott Staley who had
discovered a small but noticeable hole in the column of reality. Just the two of them
being there was enough for me. I walked up and held my right hand, the one with the
sunglasses in it, out to Pedro.
“What would you call these?” I asked, not bothering to excuse myself or anything,
just butting in headfirst.
He gave me a considering stare that said, “I am surprised at your rudeness, Mr. Staley,
truly I am,” then looked down at my hand. For a long moment he said nothing, and a
horrible idea took possession of me: he saw nothing because there was nothing to see.
Only my hand outstretched, as if this were Turnabout Tuesday and I expected him to
tip me. My hand was empty. Sure it was, had to be, because Sonja D’Amico’s
sunglasses no longer existed. Sonja’s joke shades were a long time gone.
“I call them sunglasses, Mr. Staley,” Pedro said at last. “What else would I call them?
Or is this some sort of trick question?”
Rafe the FedEx man, clearly more interested, took them from me. The relief of seeing
him holding the sunglasses and looking at them, almost studying them, was like
having someone scratch that exact place between your shoulder blades that itches. He
stepped out from beneath the awning and held them up to the day, making a sun-star
flash off each of the heart-shaped lenses.
“They’re like the ones the little girl wore in that porno movie with Jeremy Irons,” he
said at last.
I had to grin in spite of my distress. In New York, even the deliverymen are film
critics. It’s one of the things to love about the place.
“That’s right, Lolita, ” I said, taking the glasses back. “Only the heart-shaped
sunglasses were in the version Stanley Kubrick directed. Back when Jeremy Irons was
still nothing but a putter.” That one hardly made sense (even to me), but I didn’t give
Shit One. Once again I was feeling giddy…but not in a good way. Not this time.
“Who played the pervo in that one?” Rafe asked.
I shook my head. “I’ll be damned if I can remember right now.”
“If you don’t mind me saying,” Pedro said, “you look rather pale, Mr. Staley. Are you
coming down with something? The flu, perhaps?”
No, that was my sister, I thought of saying. The day I came within about twenty
seconds of getting caught masturbating into her panties while I looked at a picture of
Miss April. But I hadn’t been caught. Not then, not on 9/11, either. Fooled ya, beat the clock again. I couldn’t speak for Warren Anderson, who told me in the Blarney Stone
that he’d stopped on the third floor that morning to talk about the Yankees with a
friend, but not getting caught had become quite a specialty of mine.
“I’m all right,” I told Pedro, and while that wasn’t true, knowing I wasn’t the only one
who saw Sonja’s joke shades as a thing that actually existed in the world made me
feel better, at least. If the sunglasses were in the world, probably Cleve Farrell’s
Hillerich & Bradsby was, too.
“Are those the glasses?” Rafe suddenly asked in a respectful, ready-to-be-awestruck
voice. “The ones from the first Lolita?”
“Nope,” I said, folding the bows behind the heart-shaped lenses, and as I did, the
name of the girl in the Kubrick version of the film came to me: Sue Lyon. I still
couldn’t remember who played the pervo. “Just a knock-off.”
“Is there something special about them?” Rafe asked. “Is that why you came rushing
down here?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Someone left them behind in my apartment.”
I went upstairs before they could ask any more questions and looked around, hoping
there was nothing else. But there was. In addition to the sunglasses and the baseball
bat with CLAIMS ADJUSTOR burned into the side, there was a Howie’s Laff-Riot
Farting Cushion, a conch shell, a steel penny suspended in a Lucite cube, and a