Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (6 page)

if the sick person's device didn't detect the device of someone he knew nearby. And if the device
did
detect the device of someone he knew, the ambulance could flash the name of the person in the ambulance, and either

or, if it was something major,

And maybe you could rate the people you knew by how much you loved them, so if the device of the person in the ambulance detected the device of the person he loved the most, or the person who loved him the most, and the person in the ambulance was really badly hurt, and might even die, the ambulance could flash

One thing that's nice to think about is someone who was the first person on lots of people's lists, so that when he was dying, and his ambulance went down the streets to the hospital, the whole time it would flash

'Grandma? Over?'

'Yes, darling? Over?'

'If Grandpa was so great, then why did he leave? Over.' She took a little step back so that she disappeared into her apartment. 'He didn't want to leave. He had to leave. Over.'

'But
why
did he have to leave? Over.'

'I don't know. Over.'

'Doesn't that make you angry? Over.'

'That he left? Over.'

'That you don't know why. Over.'

'No. Over.'

'Sad? Over.'

'Sure. Over.'

'Hold on,' I said, and I ran back to my field kit and grabbed Grandpa's camera. I brought it to the window and took a picture of her window. The flash lit up the street between us.

10. Walt

9. Lindy

8. Alida

Grandma said, 'I hope you never love anything as much as I love you. Over.'

7. Parley

6. The Minch I
Toothpaste (tied)

5. Stan

I could hear her kissing her fingers and then blowing.

4. Buckminster

3. Mom

I blew her a kiss back.

2. Grandma

'Over and out,' one of us said.

1. Dad

We need much bigger pockets, I thought as I lay in bed, counting off the seven minutes that it takes a normal person to fall asleep. We need enormous pockets, pockets big enough for our families, and our friends, and even the people who aren't on our lists, people we've never met but still want to protect. We need pockets for boroughs and for cities, a pocket that could hold the universe.

Eight minutes thirty-two seconds…

But I knew that there couldn't be pockets that enormous. In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that, and so I felt, that night, like the turtle that everything else in the universe was on top of.

Twenty-one minutes eleven seconds…

As for the key, I put it on the string next to my apartment key and wore it like a pendant.

As for me, I was awake for hours and hours. Buckminster curled up next to me, and I conjugated for a while so I wouldn't have to think about things.

I woke up once in the middle of the night, and Buckminster's paws were on my eyelids. He must have been feeling my nightmares.

MY FEELINGS

12 September 2003

Dear Oskar,

I am writing this to you from the airport.

I have so much to say to you. I want to begin at the beginning, because that is what you deserve. I want to tell you everything, without leaving out a single detail. But where is the beginning? And what is everything?

I am an old woman now, but once I was a girl. It's true. I was a girl like you are a boy. One of my chores was to bring in the mail. One day there was a note addressed to our house. There was no name on it. It was mine as much as anyone's, I thought. I opened it. Many words had been removed from the text by a censor.

I took the letter straight to my room. I put it under my mattress. I never told my father or mother about it. For weeks I was awake all night wondering. Why was this man sent to a Turkish labor camp? Why had the letter come fifteen years after it had been written? Where had it been for those fifteen years? Why hadn't anyone written back to him? The others got mail, he said. Why had he sent a letter to our house? How did he know the name of my street? How did he know of Dresden? Where did he learn German? What became of him?

I tried to learn as much about the man as I could from the letter. The words were very simple. Bread means only bread. Mail is mail. Great hopes are great hopes are great hopes. I was left with the handwriting.

So I asked my father, your great-grandfather, whom I considered the best, most kindhearted man I knew, to write a letter to me. I told him it didn't matter what he wrote about. Just write, I said. Write anything.

That letter is the only thing of my father's that I have left. Not even a picture.

Next I went to the penitentiary. My uncle was a guard there. I was able to get the handwriting sample of a murderer. My uncle asked him to write an appeal for early release. It was a terrible trick that we played on this man.

My uncle later told me that the inmate had been in prison for more than forty years. He had gone in as a young man. When he wrote the letter to me he was old and broken. His wife had remarried. She had children and grandchildren. Although he never said it, I could tell that my uncle had befriended the inmate. He had also lost a wife, and was also in a prison. He never said it, but I heard in his voice that he cared for the inmate. They guarded each other. And when I asked my uncle, several years later, what became of the inmate, my uncle told me that he was still there. He continued to write letters to the board. He continued to blame himself and forgive his wife, not knowing that there was no one on the other end. My uncle took each letter and promised the inmate that they would be delivered. But instead he kept them all. They filled all of the drawers in his dresser. I remember thinking it's enough to drive someone to kill himself. I was right. My uncle, your great-great-uncle, killed himself. Of course it's possible that the inmate had nothing to do with it. With those three samples I could make comparisons. I could at least see that the forced laborer's handwriting was more like my father's than the murderer's. But I knew that I would need more letters. As many as I could get.

So I went to my piano teacher. I always wanted to kiss him, but was afraid he would laugh at me. I asked him to write a letter. And then I asked my mother's sister. She loved dance but hated dancing.

I asked my schoolmate Mary to write a letter to me. She was funny and full of life. She liked to run around her empty house without any clothes on, even once she was too old for that. Nothing embarrassed her. I admired that so much, because everything embarrassed me, and that hurt me. She loved to jump on her bed. She jumped on her bed for so many years that one afternoon, while I watched her jump, the seams burst. Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly if there wasn't someone, somewhere, laughing?

I went to my grandmother, your great-great-grandmother, and asked her to write a letter. She was my mother's mother. Your father's mother's mother's mother. I hardly knew her. I didn't have any interest in knowing her. I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me. What kind of letter? my grandmother asked. I told her to write whatever she wanted to write. You want a letter from me? she asked. I told her yes. Oh, God bless you, she said.

The letter she gave me was sixty-seven pages long. It was the story of her life. She made my request into her own. Listen to me. I learned so much. She sang in her youth. She had been to America as a girl. I never knew that. She had fallen in love so many times that she began to suspect she was not falling in love at all, but doing something much more ordinary. I learned that she never learned to swim, and for that reason she always loved rivers and lakes. She asked her father, my great-grandfather, your great-great-great-grandfather, to buy her a dove. Instead he bought her a silk scarf. So she thought of the scarf as a dove. She even convinced herself that it contained flight, but did not fly, because it did not want to show anyone what it really was. That was how much she loved her father. The letter was destroyed, but its final paragraph is inside of me. She wrote:

I had a letter from everyone I knew. I laid them out on my bedroom floor, and organized them by what they shared. One hundred letters. I was always moving them around, trying to make connections. I wanted to understand.

Seven years later, a childhood friend reappeared at the moment I most needed him. I had been in America for only two months. An agency was supporting me, but soon I would have to support myself. I did not know how to support myself. I read newspapers and magazines all day long. I wanted to learn idioms. I wanted to become a real American.

Chew the fat. Blow off some steam. Close but no cigar. Rings a bell. I must have sounded ridiculous. I only wanted to be natural. I gave up on that.

I had not seen him since I lost everything. I had not thought of him. He and my older sister, Anna, were friends. I came upon them kissing one afternoon in the field behind the shed behind our house. It made me so excited. I felt as if I were kissing someone. I had never kissed anyone. I was more excited than if it had been me. Our house was small. Anna and I shared a bed. That night I told her what I had seen. She made me promise never to speak a word about it. I promised her.

She said, Why should I believe you?

I wanted to tell her, Because what I saw would no longer be mine if I talked about it. I said, Because I am your sister. Thank you. Can I watch you kiss? Can you watch us kiss?

You could tell me where you are going to kiss, and I could hide and watch.

She laughed enough to migrate an entire flock of birds. That was how she said yes.

Sometimes it was in the field behind the shed behind our house. Sometimes it was behind the brick wall in the schoolyard. It was always behind something.

I wondered if she told him. I wondered if she could feel me watching them, if that made it more exciting for her. Why did I ask to watch? Why did she agree?

I had gone to him when I was trying to learn more about the forced laborer. I had gone to everyone.