also relieved.
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 hadn’t 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 Alice’s 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 Eagleton’s 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 can’t believe you didn’t think of it sooner. Why was I holding onto this unwelcome crap, anyway?
Why not just get rid of it? It wasn’t as if the items were in trust; the people who
owned them weren’t going to come back at some later date and ask for them to be
returned. The last time I’d seen Cleve Farrell’s 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, who’d
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.
I’d 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 weren’t in trust,
these unwelcome souvenirs of the last safe day, nor were they evidence. There had
been a crime, yes—everyone agreed to that—but the perpetrators were dead and the
ones who’d 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
Eagleton’s Farting Cushion would never be marked Exhibit A.
I left my General Tso’s 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 couldn’t believe how light they
were, or how long I’d 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 wasn’t 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
Tso’s. “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 she’d ever heard, and I laughed,
too. Hard. The kind of laughter that goes well beyond giddy. I couldn’t remember the
last time I’d 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