“Oh,” he said, “she died twenty-four years ago! Long time ago! Yesterday, in my life!” “Oops.” “It’s OK!” “You don’t feel bad that I asked about her? You can tell me if you do.” “No!” he said. “Thinking about her is the next best thing!” He poured two cups of tea. “Do you have any coffee?” I asked. “Coffee!” “It stunts my growth, and I’m afraid of death.” He slapped the table and said, “My boy, I have some coffee from Honduras that’s got your name on it!” “But you don’t even know my name.”
We sat around for a while and he told me more about his amazing life. As far as he knew, which seemed pretty far, he was the only person still alive who had fought in both of the world wars. He’d been to Australia, and Kenya, and Pakistan, and Panama. I asked him, “If you had to guess, how many countries would you guess you’ve been to?” He said, “I wouldn’t have to guess! One hundred twelve!” “Are there even that many countries?” He told me, “There are more places you haven’t heard of than you’ve heard of!” I loved that. He had reported almost every war of the twentieth century, like the Spanish Civil War, and the genocide in East Timor, and bad stuff that happened in Africa. I hadn’t heard of any of them, so I tried to remember them so I could Google them when I got home. The list in my head was getting incredibly long: Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, powdering her nose, Churchill, Mustang convertible, Walter Cronkite, necking, the Bay of Pigs, LP, Datsun, Kent State, lard, Ayatollah Khomeini, Polaroid, apartheid, drive-in, favela, Trotsky, the Berlin Wall, Tito, Gone With the Wind, Frank Lloyd Wright, hula hoop, Technicolor, the Spanish Civil War, Grace Kelly, East Timor, slide rule, a bunch of places in Africa whose names I tried to remember but had already forgotten. It was getting hard to keep all the things I didn’t know inside me.
His apartment was filled with the stuff he’d collected during the wars of his life, and I took pictures of them with Grandpa’s camera. There were books in foreign languages, and little statues, and scrolls with pretty paintings, and Coke cans from around the world, and a bunch of rocks on his fireplace mantel, although all of them were common. One fascinating thing was that each rock had a little piece of paper next to it that said where the rock came from, and when it came from, like, “Normandy, 6/19/44,” “Hwach’on Dam, 4/09/51,” and “Dallas, 11/22/63.” That was so fascinating, but one weird thing was that there were lots of bullets on the mantel, too, and they didn’t have little pieces of paper next to them. I asked him how he knew which was which. “A bullet’s a bullet’s a bullet!” he said. “But isn’t a rock a rock?” I asked. He said, “Of course not!” I thought I understood him, but I wasn’t positive, so I pointed at the roses in the vase on the table. “Is a rose a rose?” “No! A rose is not a rose is not a rose!” And then for some reason I started thinking about “Something in the Way She Moves,” so I asked, “Is a love song a love song?” He said, “Yes!” I thought for a second. “Is love love?” He said, “No!” He had a wall of masks from every country he’d been to, like Armenia and Chile and Ethiopia. “It’s not a horrible world,” he told me, putting a Cambodian mask on his face, “but it’s filled with a lot of horrible people!”
I had another cup of coffee, and then I knew it was time to get to the point, so I took the key off my neck and gave it to him. “Do you know what this opens?” “Don’t think so!” he hollered. “Maybe you knew my dad?” “Who was your dad!” “His name was Thomas Schell. He lived in 5A until he died.” “No,” he said, “that name doesn’t ring a bell!” I asked if he was one-hundred-percent sure.” He said, “I’ve lived long enough to know I’m not one-hundred-percent anything!” and he got up, walked past the column in the dining room, and went over to the coat closet, which was tucked under the stairs. That was when I had the revelation that his apartment wasn’t just like ours, because his had an upstairs. He opened the closet, and there was a library card catalogue inside. “Cool.”
He said, “This is my biographical index!” “Your what?” “I started it when I was just beginning to write! I’d create a card for everyone I thought I might need to reference one day! There’s a card for everyone I ever wrote about! And cards for people I talked to in the course of writing my pieces! And cards for people I read books about! And cards for people in the footnotes of those books! In the mornings, when I’d read the papers, I would make cards for everyone that seemed biographically significant! I still do it!” “Why don’t you just use the Internet?” “I don’t have a computer!” That made me start to feel dizzy.
“How many cards do you have?” “I’ve never counted! There must be tens of thousands by this point! Maybe hundreds of thousands!” “What do you write on them?” “I write the name of the person and a one-word biography!” “Just one word?” “Everyone gets boiled down to one word!” “And that’s helpful?” “It’s hugely helpful! I read an article about Latin American currencies this morning! It referred to the work of someone named Manuel Escobar! So I came and looked up Escobar! Sure enough, he was in here! Manuel Escobar: unionist!” “But he’s also probably a husband, or dad, or Beatles fan, or jogger, or who knows what else.” “Sure! You could write a book about Manuel Escobar! And that would leave things out, too! You could write ten books! You could never stop writing!”
He slid out drawers from the cabinet and pulled cards from the drawers, one after another.
“Henry Kissinger: war!
“Ornette Coleman: music!
“Che Guevara: war!
“Jeff Bezos: money!
“Philip Guston: art!
“Mahatma Gandhi: war!”
“But he was a pacifist,” I said.
“Right! War!
“Arthur Ashe: tennis!
“Tom Cruise: money!
“Elie Wiesel: war!
“Arnold Schwarzenegger: war!
“Martha Stewart: money!
“Rem Koolhaas: architecture!
“Ariel Sharon: war!
“Mick Jagger: money!
“Yasir Arafat: war!
“Susan Sontag: thought!
“Wolfgang Puck: money!
“Pope John Paul II: war!”
I asked if he had a card for Stephen Hawking.
“Of course!” he said, and slid out a drawer, and pulled out a card.
“Do you have a card for yourself?”
He slid out a drawer.
“So do you have a card for my dad?” “Thomas Schell, right!” “Right.” He went to the S drawer and pulled it halfway out. His fingers ran through the cards like the fingers of someone much younger than 103. “Sorry! Nothing!” “Could you double-check?” His fingers ran through the cards again. He shook his head. “Sorry!” “Well, what if a card is filed in the wrong place?” “Then we’ve got a problem!” “Could it be?” “It happens occasionally! Marilyn Monroe was lost in the index for more than a decade! I kept checking under Norma Jean Baker, thinking I was smart, but completely forgetting that she was born Norma Jean Mortenson!” “Who’s Norma Jean Mortenson?” “Marilyn Monroe!” “Who’s Marilyn Monroe?” “Sex!”
“Do you have a card for Mohammed Atta?” “Atta! That one rings a bell! Lemme see!” He opened the A drawer. I told him, “Mohammed is the most common name on earth.” He pulled out a card and said, “Bingo!”
I sat down on the floor. He asked what was wrong. “It’s just that why would you have one for him and not one for my dad?” “What do you mean!” “It isn’t fair.” “What isn’t fair!” “My dad was good. Mohammed Atta was evil.” “So!” “So my dad deserves to be in there.” “What makes you think it’s good to be in here!” “Because it means you’re biographically significant.” “And why is that good!” “I want to be significant.” “Nine out of ten significant people have to do with money or war!”
But still, it gave me heavy, heavy boots. Dad wasn’t a Great Man, not like Winston Churchill, whoever he was. Dad was just someone who ran a family jewelry business. Just an ordinary dad. But I wished so much, then, that he had been Great. I wished he’d bee
n famous, famous like a movie star, which is what he deserved. I wished Mr. Black had written about him, and risked his life to tell the world about him, and had reminders of him around his apartment.
I started thinking: if Dad were boiled down to one word, what would that word be? Jeweler? Atheist? Is copyeditor one word?
“You’re looking for something!” Mr. Black asked. “This key used to belong to my dad,” I said, pulling it out from under my shirt again, “and I want to know what it opens.” He shrugged his shoulders and hollered, “I’d want to know, too!” Then we were silent for a while.
I thought I was going to cry, but I didn’t want to cry in front of him, so I asked where the bathroom was. He pointed to the top of the stairs. As I walked up, I held the railing tight and started inventing things in my head: air bags for skyscrapers, solar-powered limousines that never had to stop moving, a frictionless, perpetual yo-yo. The bathroom smelled like an old person, and some of the tiles that were supposed to be on the wall were on the floor. There was a photograph of a woman tucked in the corner of the mirror above the sink. She was sitting at the kitchen table that we were just sitting at, and she was wearing an enormous hat, even though she was inside, obviously. That’s how I knew that she was special. One of her hands was on a teacup. Her smile was incredibly beautiful. I wondered if her palm was sweating condensation when the picture was taken. I wondered if Mr. Black took the picture.
Before I went back down, I snooped around a little bit. I was impressed by how much life Mr. Black had lived, and how much he wanted to have his life around him. I tried the key in all of the doors, even though he said he didn’t recognize it. It’s not that I didn’t trust him, because I did. It’s that at the end of my search I wanted to be able to say: I don’t know how I could have tried harder. One door was to a closet, which didn’t have anything really interesting in it, just a bunch of coats. Behind another door was a room filled with boxes. I took the lids off a couple of them, and they were filled with newspapers. The newspapers in some of the boxes were yellow, and some were almost like leaves.
I looked in another room, which must have been his bedroom. There was the most amazing bed I’ve ever seen, because it was made out of tree parts. The legs were stumps, the ends were logs, and there was a ceiling of branches. Also there were all sorts of fascinating metal things glued to it, like coins, pins, and a button that said ROOSEVELT.
“That used to be a tree in the park!” Mr. Black said from behind me, which scared me so much that my hands started shaking. I asked, “Are you mad at me for snooping?” but he must not have heard me, because he kept talking. “By the reservoir. She tripped on its roots once! That was back when I was courting her! She fell down and cut her hand! A little cut, but I never forgot it! That was so long ago!” “But yesterday in your life, right?” “Yesterday! Today! Five minutes ago! Now!” He aimed his eyes at the ground. “She always begged me to give the reporting a break! She wanted me at home!” He shook his head and said, “But there were things I needed, too!” He looked at the floor, then back at me. I asked, “So what did you do?” “For most of our marriage I treated her as though she didn’t matter! I came home only between wars, and left her alone for months at a time! There was always war!” “Did you know that in the last 3,500 years there have been only 230 years of peace throughout the civilized world?” He said, “You tell me which 230 years and I’ll believe you!” “I don’t know which, but I know it’s true.” “And where’s this civilized world you’re referring to!”
I asked him what happened to make him stop reporting war. He said, “I realized that what I wanted was to stay in one place with one person!” “So you came home for good?” “I chose her over war! And the first thing I did when I came back, even before I went home, was to go to the park and cut down that tree! It was the middle of the night! I thought someone would try to stop me, but no one did! I brought the pieces home with me! I made that tree into this bed! It was the bed we shared for the last years we had together! I wish I’d understood myself better earlier!” I asked, “Which was your last war?” He said, “Cutting down that tree was my last war!” I asked him who won, which I thought was a nice question, because it would let him say that he won, and feel proud. He said, “The ax won! It’s always that way!”
He went up to the bed and put his finger on the head of a nail. “See these!” I try to be a perceptive person who follows the scientific method and is observant, but I hadn’t noticed before that the whole bed was completely covered in nails. “I’ve hammered a nail into the bed every morning since she died! It’s the first thing I do after waking! Eight thousand six hundred twenty-nine nails!” I asked him why, which I thought was another nice question, because it would let him tell me about how much he loved her. He said, “I don’t know!” I said, “But if you don’t know, then why do you do it?” “I suppose it helps! Keeps me going! I know it’s nonsense!” “I don’t think it’s nonsense.” “Nails aren’t light! One is! A handful are! But they add up!” I told him, “The average human body contains enough iron to make a one-inch nail.” He said, “The bed got heavy! I could hear the floor straining, like it was in pain! Sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night afraid that everything would go crashing to the apartment below!” “You couldn’t sleep because of me.” “So I built that column downstairs! Do you know about the library at Indiana University!” “No,” I said, but I was still thinking about the column. “It’s sinking a little more than an inch a year, because when they built it, they didn’t take into account the weight of all of the books! I wrote a piece about it! I didn’t make the connection then, but now I’m thinking of Debussy’s Sunken Cathedral, one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written! I haven’t heard it in years and years! Do you want to feel something!” “OK,” I said, because even though I didn’t know him, I felt like I knew him. “Open your hand!” he said, so I did. He reached into his pocket and took out a paper clip. He pressed it into my hand and said, “Make a fist around it!” So I did. “Now extend your hand!” I extended my hand. “Now open your hand!” The paper clip flew to the bed.
It was only then that I observed that the key was reaching toward the bed. Because it was relatively heavy, the effect was small. The string pulled incredibly gently at the back of my neck, while the key floated just a tiny bit off my chest. I thought about all the metal buried in Central Park. Was it being pulled, even if just a little, to the bed? Mr. Black closed his hand around the floating key and said, “I haven’t left the apartment in twenty-four years!” “What do you mean?” “Sadly, my boy, I mean exactly what I said! I haven’t left the apartment in twenty-four years! My feet haven’t touched the ground!” “Why not?” “There hasn’t been any reason to!” “What about stuff you need?” “What does someone like me need that he can still get!” “Food. Books. Stuff.” “I call in an order for food, and they bring it to me! I call the bookstore for books, the video store for movies! Pens, stationery, cleaning supplies, medicine! I even order my clothes over the phone! See this!” he said, and he showed me his muscle, which went down instead of up. “I was flyweight champion for nine days!” I asked, “Which nine days?” He said, “Don’t you believe me!” I said, “Of course I do.” “The world is a big place,” he said, “but so is the inside of an apartment! So’s this!” he said, pointing at his head. “But you used to travel so much. You had so many experiences. Don’t you miss the world?” “I do! Very much!”
My boots were so heavy that I was glad there was a column underneath us. How could such a lonely person have been living so close to me my whole life? If I had known, I would have gone up to keep him company. Or I would have made some jewelry for him. Or told him hilarious jokes. Or given him a private tambourine concert.
It made me start to wonder if there were other people so lonely so close. I thought about “Eleanor Rigby.” It’s true, where do they all come from? And where do they all belong?
What if the water that came out of the shower was
treated with a chemical that responded to a combination of things, like your heartbeat, and your body temperature, and your brain waves, so that your skin changed color according to your mood? If you were extremely excited your skin would turn green, and if you were angry you’d turn red, obviously, and if you felt like shiitake you’d turn brown, and if you were blue you’d turn blue.
Everyone could know what everyone else felt, and we could be more careful with each other, because you’d never want to tell a person whose skin was purple that you’re angry at her for being late, just like you would want to pat a pink person on the back and tell him, “Congratulations!”
Another reason it would be a good invention is that there are so many times when you know you’re feeling a lot of something, but you don’t know what the something is. Am I frustrated? Am I actually just panicky? And that confusion changes your mood, it becomes your mood, and you become a confused, gray person. But with the special water, you could look at your orange hands and think, I’m happy! That whole time I was actually happy! What a relief!
Mr. Black said, “I once went to report on a village in Russia, a community of artists who were forced to flee the cities! I’d heard that paintings hung everywhere! I heard you couldn’t see the walls through all of the paintings! They’d painted the ceilings, the plates, the windows, the lampshades! Was it an act of rebellion! An act of expression! Were the paintings good, or was that beside the point! I needed to see it for myself, and I needed to tell the world about it! I used to live for reporting like that! Stalin found out about the community and sent his thugs in, just a few days before I got there, to break all of their arms! That was worse than killing them! It was a horrible sight, Oskar: their arms in crude splints, straight in front of them like zombies! They couldn’t feed themselves, because they couldn’t get their hands to their mouths! So you know what they did!” “They starved?” “They fed each other! That’s the difference between heaven and hell! In hell we starve! In heaven we feed each other!” “I don’t believe in the afterlife.” “Neither do I, but I believe in the story!”