A single afternoon spent riffling the Yellow Pages and dialing the telephone was enough to prove to me that the idea of psychiatry was unworkable in fact, no matter how good it might be in theory. The closest I came to an actual appointment was a receptionist who told me that Dr. Jauss might be able to work me in the following January. She intimated even that would take some inspired shoehorning. The others held out no hope whatsoever. I tried half a dozen therapists in Newark and four in White Plains, even a hypnotist in Queens, with the same result. Mohammed Atta and his Suicide Patrol might have been very bery-bery bad for the city of New York (not to mention for the in-SHOO-rance business), but it was clear to me from that single fruitless afternoon on the telephone that they had been a boon to the psychiatric profession, much as the psychiatrists themselves might wish otherwise. If you wanted to lie on some professional’s couch in the summer of 2002, you had to take a number and wait in line.
I could sleep with those things in my apartment, but not well. They whispered to me. I lay awake in my bed, sometimes until two, thinking about Maureen Hannon, who felt she had reached an age (not to mention a level of indispensability) at which she could wear her amazingly long hair any way she damn well liked. Or I’d recall the various people who’d gone running around at the Christmas party, waving Jimmy Eagleton’s famous Farting Cushion. It was, as I may have said, a great favorite once people got two or three drinks closer to New Year’s. I remembered Bruce Mason asking me if it didn’t look like an enema bag for elfs—”elfs,” he said—and by a process of association remembered that the conch shell had been his. Of course. Bruce Mason, Lord of the Flies. And a step further down the associative food chain I found the name and face of James Mason, who had played Humbert Humbert back when Jeremy Irons was still just a putter. The mind is a wily monkey; sometime him take-a de banana, sometime him don’t. Which is why I’d brought the sunglasses downstairs, although I’d been aware of no deductive process at the time. I’d only wanted confirmation. There’s a George Se-feris poem that asks, Are these the voices of our dead friends, or is it just the gramophone? Sometimes it’s a good question, one you have to ask someone else. Or
. . . listen to this.
Once, in the late eighties, near the end of a bitter two-year romance with alcohol, I woke up in my study after dozing off at my desk in the middle of the night. I staggered off to my bedroom, where, as I reached for the light switch, I saw someone moving around. I flashed on the idea (the near certainty) of a junkie burglar with a cheap pawnshop .32 in his trembling hand, and my heart almost came out of my chest. I turned on the light with one hand and was grabbing for something heavy off the top of my bureau with the other—anything, even the silver frame holding the picture of my mother, would have done—when I saw the prowler was me. I was staring wild-eyed back at myself from the mirror on the other side of the room, my shirt half-untucked and my hair standing up in the back. I was disgusted with myself, but I was 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 ‘Ol. 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 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 D’Amico’s joke sunglasses, the ones with the red frames and the heart-shaped Lolita lenses. Sonja D’Amico who had, according to Warren Anderson (who was, so far as I knew, the only other surviving employee of Light and Bell’s 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 day’s 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.