and another one in French if he was going to get out of high school in the foreseeable
future. “Before he’s 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.
I’d 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 I’d ever seen Jimmy alive. And the l’il 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 kid’s name did turn out to
be Jeremy, I’d probably go crazy. Straw that broke the camel’s back, baby.
Around three in the morning I remembered who had owned the Lucite cube with the
steel penny in it: Roland Abelson, in Liability. He called it his retirement fund. It was
Roland who had a habit of saying “Lucy, you got some ’splainin to do.” One night in
the fall of ’01, I had seen his widow on the six o’clock news. I had talked with her at
one of the company picnics (very likely the one at Jones Beach) and thought then that
she was pretty, but widowhood had refined that prettiness, winnowed it into severe
beauty. On the news report she kept referring to her husband as “missing.” She would
not call him “dead.” And if he was alive—if he ever turned up—he would have
some ’splainin to do. You bet. But of course, so would she. A woman who has gone
from pretty to beautiful as the result of a mass murder would certainly have
some ’splainin to do.
Lying in bed and thinking of this stuff—remembering the crash of the surf at Jones
Beach and the Frisbees flying under the sky—filled me with an awful sadness that
finally emptied in tears. But I have to admit it was a learning experience. That was the
night I came to understand that things—even little ones, like a penny in a Lucite
cube—can get heavier as time passes. But because it’s a weight of the mind, there’s
no mathematical formula for it, like the ones you can find in an insurance company’s
Blue Books, where the rate on your whole life policy goes up x if you smoke and
coverage on your crops goes up y if your farm’s in a tornado zone. You see what I’m
saying?
It’s a weight of the mind.
The following morning I gathered up all the items again, and found a seventh, this one
under the couch. The guy in the cubicle next to mine, Misha Bryzinski, had kept a
small pair of Punch and Judy dolls on his desk. The one I spied under my sofa with
my little eye was Punch. Judy was nowhere to be found, but Punch was enough for
me. Those black eyes, staring out from amid the ghost bunnies, gave me a terrible
sinking feeling of dismay. I fished the doll out, hating the streak of dust it left behind.
A thing that leaves a trail is a real thing, a thing with weight. No question about it.
I put Punch and all the other stuff in the little utility closet just off the kitchenette, and
there they stayed. At first I wasn’t sure they would, but they did.
My mother once told me that if a man wiped his ass and saw blood on the toilet tissue,
his response would be to shit in the dark for the next thirty days and hope for the best.
She used this example to illustrate her belief that the cornerstone of male philosophy was “If you ignore it, maybe it’ll go away.”
I ignored the things I’d found in my apartment, I hoped for the best, and things