Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (17 page)

I counted off seven minutes that night, and then fourteen minutes, and then thirty. I knew I'd never be able to fall asleep, because I was so excited that the next day I'd be able to search for the lock. I started inventing like a beaver. I thought about how in one hundred years every name in the 2003 Yellow Pages will be for someone who's dead, and how once when I was at The Minch's I saw a TV show where someone ripped a phone book in half with his hands. I thought about how I wouldn't want someone to rip a 2003 Yellow Pages in half in one hundred years, because even though everyone will be dead, it still felt like it should make a difference. So I invented a Black Box Yellow Pages, which is a phone book that's made out of the material that they make the black boxes on airplanes out of. I still couldn't sleep.

I invented a postage stamp where the back tastes like creme brulee.

I still couldn't sleep.

What if you trained Seeing Eye dogs to be bomb-sniffing dogs, so that they'd be Sniffing Eye Seeing Bomb dogs? That way, blind people could get paid for being led around, and could be contributing members of our society, and we'd all be safer, too. I was getting further and further from sleep.

When I woke up it was Saturday.

I went upstairs to pick up Mr. Black, and he was waiting in front of his door, snapping his fingers next to his ear. 'What's this?' he asked when I handed him the present I made for him. I shrugged my shoulders, just like Dad used to. 'What am I supposed to do with it?' I told him, 'Open it, obviously.' But I couldn't keep my happiness in, and before he got the paper off the box I said, 'It's a necklace I made for you with a compass pendant so you can know where you are in relation to the bed!' He kept opening it and said, 'How nice of you!'

'Yeah,' I said, taking the box from him because I could open it faster. 'It probably won't work outside your apartment, because the magnetic field of the bed gets smaller the farther you get from it, but still.' I handed him the necklace and he put it on. It said that the bed was north.

'So where to?' he asked. 'The Bronx,' I said. 'The IRT?'

'The what?'

'The IRT train.'

'There isn't an IRT train, and I don't take public transportation.'

'Why not?'

'It's an obvious target.'

'So how do you plan on us getting there?'

'We'll walk.'

'That's got to be about twenty miles from here,' he said. 'And have you seen me walk?'

'That's true.'

'Let's take the IRT.'

'There is no IRT.'

'Whatever there is, let's take it.'

On our way out, I said, 'Stan, this is Mr. Black. Mr. Black, this is Stan.' Mr. Black stuck out his hand, and Stan shook it. I told Stan, 'Mr. Black lives in 6A.' Stan took his hand back, but I don't think Mr. Black was offended.

Almost the whole ride to the Bronx was underground, which made me incredibly panicky, but once we got to the poor parts, it went above-ground, which I preferred. A lot of the buildings in the Bronx were empty, which I could tell because they didn't have windows, and you could see right through them, even at high speeds. We got off the train and went down to the street. Mr. Black had me hold his hand as we looked for the address. I asked him if he was racist. He said poverty made him nervous, not people. Just as a joke I asked him if he was gay. He said, 'I suppose so.'

'Really?' I asked, but I didn't take back my hand, because I'm not homophobic.

The building's buzzer was broken, so the door was held open with a brick. Agnes Black's apartment was on the third floor, and there was no elevator. Mr. Black said he'd wait for me, because the stairs at the subway were enough stairs for him for one day. So I went up alone. The floor of the hallway was sticky, and for some reason all of the peepholes had black paint over them. Someone was singing from behind one of the doors, and I heard TVs behind a bunch of others. I tried my key in Agnes's lock, but it didn't work, so I knocked.

A little woman answered who was in a wheelchair. She was Mexican, I think. Or Brazilian, or something. 'Excuse me, is your name Agnes Black?' She said, 'No espeaka Inglesh.'

'What?'

'No espeaka Inglesh.'

'I'm sorry,' I said, 'but I don't understand you. Could you please repeat yourself and enunciate a little bit better.'

'No espeaka Inglesh,' she said. I pointed a finger in the air, which is the universal sign for hold on, and then I called down to Mr. Black from the stairwell, 'I don't think she speaks English!'

'Well, what does she speak?'

'What do you speak?' I asked her, and then I realized how dumb my question was, so I tried a different approach: '
Parlez-vous Français
?'

'
Espanol
,' she said. 'Espanol,' I hollered down. 'Terrific!' he hollered back. 'I picked up a little
Espanol
along the way!' So I brought her wheelchair to the stairwell, and they hollered to each other, which was kind of weird, because their voices were traveling back and forth but they couldn't see each other's faces. They cracked up together, and their laughter ran up and down the stairs. Then Mr. Black hollered, 'Oskar!' And I hollered, 'That's my name, don't wear it out!' And he hollered, 'Come on down!'

When I got back to the lobby, Mr. Black explained that the person we were looking for had been a waitress at Windows on the World. '
What the?
'

'The woman I just spoke with, Feliz, didn't know her personally. She was told about her when she moved in.'

'Really?'

'I wouldn't make that up.' We went out to the street and started walking. A car drove by that was playing music extremely loudly, and it vibrated my heart. I looked up, and there were strings connecting a lot of the windows with clothes hanging on them. I asked Mr. Black if that's what people meant when they said 'clotheslines.' He said, 'That's what they mean.' I said, 'That's what I thought.' We walked some more. Kids were kicking rocks in the street and cracking up in the good way. Mr. Black picked up one of the rocks and put it in his pocket. He looked at the street sign, and then at his watch. A couple of old men were sitting in chairs in front of a store. They were smoking cigars and watching the world like it was TV.

'That's so weird to think about,' I said. 'What is?'

'That she worked there. Maybe she knew my dad. Or not knew him, but maybe she served him that morning. He was there, in the restaurant. He had a meeting. Maybe she refilled his coffee or something.'

'It's possible.'

'Maybe they died together.' I know he didn't know what to say to that, because of course they died together. The real question was how they died together, like whether they were on different ends of the restaurant, or next to each other, or something else. Maybe they had gone up to the roof together. You saw in some of the pictures that people jumped together and held hands. So maybe they did that. Or maybe they just talked to each other until the building fell. What would they have talked about? They were obviously so different. Maybe he told her about me. I wonder what he told her. I couldn't tell how it made me feel to think of him holding someone's hand.

'Did she have any kids?' I asked. 'I don't know.'

'Ask her.'

'Ask who?'

'Let's go back and ask the woman who's living there now. I bet she knows if Agnes had any kids.' He didn't ask me why that question was important, or tell me she already told us everything she knew. We walked back three blocks, and I went up the stairs and brought her wheelchair back to the stairwell, and they talked up and down the stairs for a while. Then Mr. Black hollered, 'She didn't!' But I wondered if he was lying to me, because even though I don't speak Spanish, I could hear that she said a lot more than just no.

As we were walking back to the subway, I had a revelation, and then I got angry. 'Wait a minute,' I said. 'What were you cracking up about before?'

'Before?'

'When you were talking to that woman the first time, you were cracking up. Both of you.'

'I don't know,' he said. 'You don't know?'

'I don't remember.'

'Try to remember.' He thought for a minute. 'I can't remember.' Lie #77.

We bought some tamales that a woman was selling by the subway from a huge pot in a grocery cart. Normally I don't like food that isn't individually wrapped or prepared by Mom, but we sat on the curb and ate our tamales. Mr. Black said, 'If anything, I'm invigorated.'

'What's 'invigorated'?'

'Energized. Refreshed.'

'I'm invigorated, too.' He put his arm around me and said, 'Good.'

'These are vegan, right?' I shook my tambourine as we walked up the stairs to the subway, and held my breath when the train went underground.

Albert Black came from Montana. He wanted to be an actor, but he didn't want to go to California, because it was too close to home, and the whole point of being an actor was to be someone else.

Alice Black was incredibly nervous, because she lived in a building that was supposed to be for industrial purposes, so people weren't supposed to live there. Before she opened the door, she made us promise that we weren't from the Housing Authority. I said, 'I suggest you take a look at us through the peephole.' She did, and then she said, 'Oh, you,' which I thought was weird, and she let us in. Her hands were covered with charcoal, and I saw drawings everywhere, and they were all of the same man. 'Are you forty?'

'I'm twenty-one.'

'I'm nine.'

'I'm one hundred and three.' I asked her if she was the one who made the drawings. 'Yes.'

'All of them?'

'Yes.' I didn't ask who the man in the drawings was, because I was afraid the answer would give me heavy boots. You wouldn't draw someone that much unless you loved him and missed him. I told her, 'You're extremely beautiful.'

'Thanks.'

'Can we kiss?' Mr. Black stuck his elbow in my side and asked her, 'Do you know anything about this key?'

Allen Black lived on the Lower East Side and was a doorman for a building on Central Park South, which was where we found him. He said he hated being a doorman, because he had been an engineer in Russia, and now his brain was dying. He showed us a little portable TV that he kept in his pocket. 'It plays DVDs,' he said, 'and if I had an e-mail account, I could check it on this, too.' I told him I could set up an e-mail account for him if he wanted. He said, 'Yeah?' I took his device, which I wasn't familiar with, but figured out pretty quickly, and set everything up. I said, 'What do you want for a user name?' I suggested 'Allen,' or 'AllenBlack,' or a nickname. 'Or 'Engineer.' That could be cool.' He put his finger on his mustache and thought about it. I asked if he had any kids. He said, 'A son. Soon he's going to be taller than me. Taller and smarter. He'll be a great doctor. A brain surgeon. Or lawyer for the Supreme Court.'

'Well, you could make it your son's name, although I guess that might be confusing.' He said, 'Doorman.'

'What?'

'Make it 'Doorman.'

'You can make it anything you want.'

'Doorman.' I made it 'Doorman215,' because there were already 214 doormen. As we were leaving, he said, 'Good luck, Oskar.' I said, 'How did you know my name was Oskar?' Mr. Black said, 'You told him.' When I got home that afternoon I sent him an e-mail: 'It's too bad you didn't know anything about the key, but it was still nice to meet you.'

Arnold Black got right to the point: 'I just can't help. Sorry.' I said, 'But we haven't even told you what we need help with.' He started getting teary and he said, 'I'm sorry,' and closed the door. Mr. Black said, 'Onward ho.' I nodded, and inside I thought,
Weird

.