“Oh Brian,” she whispered now, after seven years her tone more aggrieved than angry. She hadn’t, as some widows do, rinsed his memory clean over the years. Instead, she’d extinguished it altogether—unable or unwilling to scrub the stains from it, to preserve the salvageable portions, she’d just . . . chucked it. When she and Alexis visited Brian’s parents in Oradell, as they did two or three times a year, it was as if Sara was bringing Alexis to visit fond old neighbors, or relatives so distant it stressed the brain to map the familial ties—whenever Mr. Tooney brought up his lost son, or fetched the old photo albums for Alexis, Sara would flee to the kitchen to remove herself, bodily, from the connection. In Sara’s carefully structured mind—where the fragments of her past were segregated into something like a caste system in which Brian was the sole untouchable and the rest curved parabolically upward from there—Mr. and Mrs. Tooney were not quite Alexis’s grandparents; they were merely old people, vague obligations, suppliers of corned beef and hugs. It demanded some fierce mental acrobatics, this blotting of memory, but Sara had found it necessary. To do otherwise required confronting that inside-out world, or sifting through her twelve years with Brian to pan the truth from the lies without a single means of verifying which was which. He’d died, and then she’d killed him. It was the only way.
With an affected casualness, her body taut and angled, she rifled deeper into the box—but guardedly, with just two fingers of her left hand, as if fearful of an insect attack or some other, less palpable danger. She didn’t like the pull she was feeling—this gravitational force threatening to vacuum away all the dividers she’d so diligently constructed in her mind—but she felt powerless to withstand it. Only after she’d devised a more clinical line of inquiry—what had Liz saved of his?—was she able to balance it, or rather submit to it, and continue in earnest, with both hands.
The organization of the box’s contents was rhymeless, reasonless, reflecting Liz’s haste and her unfamiliarity with what she’d been forced to stockpile: one of Brian’s high school yearbooks (where were the rest?); loose photographs from disparate periods (Brian and Sara on the dancefloor at Megan and Robert’s wedding, Brian voguing some comic disco pose, Sara’s hands clasped, her face elongated with laughter; Brian and Robert as sunburnt teens, sitting in a canoe and making growly-faces at the camera; Brian at the zoo with Alexis on his shoulders, a mushy Popsicle tangled in his hair; Brian in his first office, grinning, his feet on his desk, an unlit cigar between his teeth); a folded, unread copy of the Times whose inclusion made no sense until she checked the date (April 18, 1993: Alexis’s birth); two MetroCards and a Giants ticket stub; and, deeper in the box, a clear plastic tube filled with collar stays, a felt box containing all of his cufflinks, and a bottle of 212 by Carolina Herrera, his cologne. She swirled the bottle and stared at it. Why on earth had Liz saved this? Thoughtlessly, Sarah spritzed her inner wrist, then brought it to her nose. Regretting it instantly, she rubbed at her wrist to erase it. She knew why Liz had thought to preserve it, and the realization pricked her. Liz thought she might want him back. “Someday,” as Liz had said, so softly.
Unfolding a manila folder, fished from near the bottom, Sara frowned. Here was the playbill from Fosse, the Broadway show they’d seen together, in 1998, when Brian’s mother babysat Alexis and they’d spent the night at a hotel in the city; that evening had been a marital high point, and they’d even made love, again, the next morning, giggling like teens at their childless freedom. This time, with a faint roiling of her stomach, she didn’t wonder about Liz—why had Brian saved it? And here was the invitation Brian had designed for Sara’s thirtieth birthday, a surprise party—at the top were six headshots of Sara, carefully scissored out of photos: Sara as a child, as a teen, as a backpacker in Europe, and so on. (She’d found one of the decapitated photos beforehand, and, disturbed, confronted Brian. “Something we need to discuss?” she’d asked dryly.) Here, too, was the room service menu from the hotel in Barbados where they’d spent their honeymoon. And their wedding invitation. And a clipping, nineteen years old, from the Post’s lukewarm review of The Cherry Orchard, her name—the maiden version—proudly underlined. Confused, and stung by the parallels between this manila folder and her memory of another one—the one she’d filled, with that awful dossier of Jane L. Becker’s emails—Sara dumped the folder back into the box and sloppily resealed its cardboard flaps. Enough, she said to herself, and cursed herself for having opened it in the first place. Her pulse rate was incongruously high for a woman of her age and fitness, seated. Scanning the boxes around her, she felt cornered by the blue writing on their sides, the letters seeming to glow and throb with an almost menacing exigence: BRIAN, TROPHIES; BRIAN, CLOTHES; BRIAN, WORK STUFF. Everything, she realized: Liz had saved everything. He was all here.
With a sudden, powerful chill, causing her to stand and step away from the boxes, it occurred to Sara that this, rather than the Fresh Kills Landfill, where the ashes and debris from the World Trade Center had been buried, and rather than the plot at Holy Cross Cemetery in Brooklyn, where Brian’s tombstone overlooked a narrow rectangle of unturned earth, was Brian’s true burial ground: that this ten-by-fifteen-foot unit, stacked high with domestic debris, was his mausoleum. That she was standing in his grave. She’d never felt anything at Fresh Kills, with her arm around Alexis’s shoulder at Mound 1/9, her eyes sweeping the site for any and all traces of the dead, or the sacred, but finding only a garbage-strewn wasteland: tire-treaded mudruts, sneakers, carpet scraps, listless, poisoned-looking gulls, a white plastic bag snagged by a weed waving like a tattered flag in the same gentle salt breeze carrying the odor of landfill gasses, leaking from the rust-flaked pipes, toward their crinkling noses. Nor had she ever felt his presence at Holy Cross, which, aside from the funeral, she’d visited just once, with Alexis. Just the opposite, in fact: That was just a random marble slab, its presence and location based only upon its proximity to the other Tooneys buried beside it. There had been no corpse, and no ashes identified as Brian’s—only his abrupt, traceless absence, and the smoke curling upward from the end of the island like that from a smoldering cigarette tip, and the stray brown hairs and lingering beery sweat-scent on the pillow of his that she clung to, and had even kissed, not softly but passionately, in those few pure days separating the 9/11 attacks from Jane L. Becker’s attack. He’d been swept as cleanly from the earth as Sara had tried sweeping him from her memory.
Except for this: these six or seven boxes of miscellaneous stuff—the golf trophies, the curled-edged photos, the cocktail shaker, the cufflinks—that refuted his absence, that proved, like fossilized footprints, that he’d been here, that he’d walked and golfed and drunk Bass Ale among us, that he’d transformed Sara Tetwick into Sara Tooney and imprinted his daughter with undeniable replicas of his own hard eyes and slanted grin which Sara struggled so hard to deny anyway. If ghosts existed—and Sara didn’t believe they did—then this was where his dwelled. With a mental violence that surprised Sara, this realization—that Brian was here, in this climate-controlled tomb—clawed at her, pushing her back out into the hallway, and when the door opened, at the end of the hall, shattering the quiet and admitting a cold squall of outside air, she made a sharp, brief shriek, clutching a hand to her chest.
From down the hall, a short, round man in a bulky black overcoat stared at her. “Sorry,” he said, waving. “We didn’t mean to scare you.”
Sara waved back, with a pageant-loser’s synthetic smile. “Just startled.”
This was a mistake, Sara scolded herself. This entire errand. She should have known better—but how? She’d just wanted her roasting pan. After rolling the unit’s door back down and relocking the lock, she held the door to the outside open while the round man, followed by a morose, lanky teen, hauled in a white dresser of the disposable fiberboard variety sold at IKEA. “Thanks a lot,” the man said, gasping for breath as he squeezed past her. “Put it down over here, Bobby.” The teen didn’t acknowledge her, as he
passed, save for the furtive, appreciative glance he gave her breasts. For a moment, she stared at the dresser: at its chipped edges, and at the faint wrinkles and blisters in its veneer, puzzling over why they were interring it here. It was certainly no keepsake. When she glanced at the man, for some clue, he was bent over with his hands on his knees, as if defeated by the task. Something in that pose—his labored breathing, and the openmouthed, faraway stare he wore before his face drooped out of sight—made her wonder if the dresser had belonged to yet another dead pharaoh, and if they were bringing it here to be entombed like Brian’s golf trophies. She noticed a sticker of a pink unicorn affixed to one of the top drawers, and, with a shudder of dark imagining, wondered if the man had lost a daughter. Something Alexis had mentioned—about one of her classmates flipping her car on Route 94 the weekend prior—came reeling back into her head. And when she looked again, the boy’s torpid, bored expression appeared to her mournful instead, an adolescent/macho mask obscuring torrents of confused grief beneath, and the man appeared not just defeated but crushed, his limp neck suggesting an imminent, weepy collapse. Flooding with pity, she released the door, and moved two hesitant steps toward the man—to help him with his load, or perhaps, if indeed he crumpled, even embrace him. But when he lifted his head, revealing a wide grin spreading across his face, his cheeks as round and red as Gala apples, she immediately realized her error. “Hey, Bobby,” he said to the boy, casting a curious sidelong glance at the busty, shrieksome woman hovering just inside the doorway. “Do your dad a favor, willya? Never get fat. I mean, Jesus, I gotta sit down.”
Sara left LifeSolutions and drove forty-three miles to Paramus, to the Williams-Sonoma store at Garden State Plaza, where, for $229.95, she bought the same All-Clad roaster with the V-shaped rack that she’d packed up for the storage unit, two years before, to make room in the kitchen cabinet for the massive juicer that Dave had moved in with him. He was ardent about fresh juices then—proudly demonstrating the way the electric juicer gobbled down the carrots and celery and apples he stuffed into its plastic chute—and Sara, long accustomed to spending her holidays with either Liz and her family, on Long Island, or with Brian’s parents in Oradell, hadn’t used her roaster in years. Back in the antiseptic safety of her car, with suburban New Jersey passing by in familiar glints of big-box store signage and soot-smeared snow and the pointillist red speckles of brakelights, she felt feeble and childish for having fled her own storage unit, for imagining the boxes of Brian’s stuff to be some kind of paranormal ark of the covenant, and, most of all, for buying the same damn roasting pan she’d gone to the unit to fetch. She comforted herself, just slightly, by noting that the new roaster had an anodized nonstick bottom, unlike the stainless-steel bottom of her other one, and that, as a bonus for spending more than $200, she’d received, for free, an All-Clad cast aluminum au gratin pan. Sara wasn’t sure she’d ever use the au gratin pan, but its presence in the backseat, as she steered the car toward home, made her feel that, in some small but significant way, she’d come out ahead.
4
THE DISTASTE MICAH FELT FOR MATTY, from the instant she saw him, was, at first, entirely secondhand. He reminded her of someone, and though she tried and tried to identify that someone—even as she welcomed Matty into their apartment, embracing him in the living room and kissing his coarse, tobacco-scented tangle of beard before he offloaded his overscuffed, overstuffed backpack and dug from it a bottle of whiskey, as a housewarming gift—she couldn’t pin it down. “Maybe someone from a movie?” Talmadge said later, but that was stupid and he knew it: Micah could count on her fingers all the movies she’d ever seen, and she’d never possessed a television, not even as a child. From the kitchen, as she cooked, she stared at Matty through the open doorway, straining to place the unpleasant evocation: at his slab of a beard, almost Hasidic in its wiry black lushness, and, covering his head’s opposite pole, a broad Stetson hat whose wide brim shadowed his eyes and much of his narrow, pockmarked face. He was wearing a puffy, big-pocketed red ski parka over a faded black t-shirt onto which was screenprinted D.A.R.E. (TO KEEP KIDS OFF DRUGS), and nodding, as a beaming Talmadge explained the apartment to him, as blithely and steadily as one of those dashboard bobblehead dolls. In their six months of squatting here, Micah and Tal had never let another person into the building, and maybe, Micah thought, that’s what Matty reminded her of: other people.
He’d come from Oakland on a packed transcontinental bus. “Three thousand, one hundred, twenty-two miles! Two days, twenty-one hours, and fifty-eight minutes!” he’d exclaimed to Talmadge outside the Port Authority Bus Terminal, where Talmadge had found him happily smoking beside a bowlegged panhandler. (“Hey, thanks for the stogie,” Matty told the guy as they left, prompting an admiring doubletake from Talmadge: Only Matty, he thought, could successfully panhandle a panhandler.) “Check this out, man,” Matty said, as they began their trip southward, Talmadge walking and Matty rolling atop his longboard. “Some old lady died on the bus. Somewhere in Missouri, fucking died. She’s like two rows in front of me, and this dude next to her, huge fucking black dude, I mean, check it, looked like Shaquille O’Neal, right? This dude stands up and he’s grinning like he’s embarrassed. Like he’s just crapped his pants and it’s so sad it’s funny, right? He’s looking all around, with that grin, until finally he’s like, to everybody, ‘I think this lady dead.’ And everyone’s just, like, staring at him. Like he’s talking Navajo. Nothing. So I go check it out and, yeah, I guess she’s dead, her eyes are open and shit. Dude is starting to freak a little, so I go tell the driver. He pulls the bus over and comes back and shuts her eyes and makes the sign of the cross on himself and asks if anyone on the bus knows her but no one does. By now dude is freaking hard, man, he is not sitting back down next to a dead lady, but it’s a full bus. So I switch seats with him. Just till St. Louis. No big deal, right? But check this out, here, zip open the side compartment on my pack, no, the other side”—there Talmadge found a half-empty fifth of Heaven Hill whiskey, and, sensing the storyline, gasped, “You ripped this off a dead lady?”—“Dude! She had it in a paper sack over by the window. Like the cops were gonna save it. Look at you! Man, I thought a cracker like you would be all psyched. A dead lady’s bourbon. That’s, like—what was that shit we had to read in Tutweiler’s class? Faulkner, right. That’s like spooky Faulkner shit. That’s right up your alley.
“And, hey,” he went on, with a slewed grin, as they waited for the light to change on 39th Street, “that’s your big thing now, right? Recycling?”
“Something like that,” said Talmadge. “You’ll see.”
Thirty-plus blocks later, on what looked to Matty like a shabby and unremarkable East Village side street, Talmadge stopped in front of a narrow brick building, painted red, and coolly surveyed the streetscape. Bright yellow leaves from caged sycamore trees carpeted the sidewalk and dappled the curbside snow mounds; the few pedestrians moved past with that New Yorky oblivion in their eyes, unheeding, uninterested. “Nice,” Matty said, noting an encircled A—the anarchy symbol—spraypainted on the padlocked door. Behind the iron bars shielding the first-floor windows was plywood that appeared to predate him and Talmadge. “We gotta be cool,” Talmadge warned, glancing an additional time, to his right and to his left, before crouching down on the sidewalk to unlock the steel cellar doors with a key attached to the carabiner he wore hooked to a belt loop. “Okay, go fast,” he urged Matty, once he’d pulled up one of the doors, and the two of them, fast and furtive like burglars, slunk beneath the sidewalk. Talmadge scanned the street one last time before pulling down the doors and sealing him and Matty in a cold, turpentine-scented darkness.
Talmadge also carried a penlight on the carabiner, and when he flicked it on, so that he could relock the cellar doors from the inside and light their path through the basement, he heard Matty whisper to himself, “Whoa, what the fuck.” A half inch of oily water covered the floor; psychedelic rainbow swirls glimmered in the flashlight’s thin
beam. Lining the walls were chain-link cages, which had once housed tenants’ overflow goods—now empty, they imbued the space, at least for Talmadge, with the feel of a medieval torture chamber or some other horror-strewn dungeon. Even after six months, Talmadge still couldn’t navigate the basement without hearing, inside his head, the screams of victims being skinned or sawn or slowly impaled, and owing to that, as well as his fear of rats, he moved swiftly and skittishly past the cages to a set of concrete stairs at the far end, ripples of water from his boots sloshing against the walls. Blinking, with his hands splayed in front of him, and cursing the wetness seeping into his sneakers, Matty struggled to keep up.
“It’s almost impossible to find a squat in Manhattan,” Talmadge was saying, as they climbed another steep set of darkened stairs, the flashlight beam bouncing across the walls and presenting a split-second montage of architectural decay: loose and leaning nail-studded boards; crumbled plaster; random sections of iron pipe and ducting; a sheaf of unused plywood sheets; a chandelier dangling from the flaked ceiling like the desiccated corpse of a mountaineer strangled by a fall. “We lucked into this one. We met some Christian anarchist dudes in Austin who’d just moved out, and we were like, why not? Micah was getting tired of Austin anyway. Supposedly the guy who owns the building is some superrich hippie who doesn’t know or doesn’t care how many buildings he owns. They called it the Tampon Tower because the guy’s family invented tampons or something like that. It’s been abandoned, like, forever—watch your head. See that? You can tell there was a fire here once. The latest date on the shit we’ve found is 1987. Whatever, man. It’s home.”
“Right on,” Matty said shakily.
At the top of the third staircase, Talmadge said, “Come on inside,” smiling and swinging his open hand back like a realtor at a condominium open house. Decrepit yet weirdly clean, with diffuse gray light coming from the unboarded windows in the rooms to their left, the main room was dominated by a massive oil painting, housed in one of those baroque bronze frames you see in museums, on the wall opposite the doorway. In the painting was a roly-poly nude woman, lounging on her side, surrounded by wooden bowls piled high with fruits and vegetables; Matty’s eyes were drawn, predictably, to her pale flat nipples, but also to the strange detail, in the top left corner, of an infant on horseback watching the woman through an open doorway. The painting looked vaguely valuable, in a minor-work-of-the-High-Renaissance way, but, as Talmadge explained to Matty, they’d fished it out of a construction dumpster on Bedford Street. “We call her Maybelle, the goddess of produce,” said Talmadge, pursing his lips as he stared at the painting alongside Matty. Thoughtfully, he added, “She looks like a Maybelle.” In the center of the room were a folding table and two metal chairs; a rickety side table and an upholstered, army-green recliner, its seat fabric worn down to whitish fuzz, were the only other furniture in the room. Against the streetside wall, on the floor beneath one of the boarded windows, was a kerosene wick heater, which accounted for the room’s pleasant balminess. On the wall to Matty’s right someone had painted: Foxes have holes and birds have nests but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head. Matthew 8:20. Noting Matty’s bewildered frown, Talmadge explained, “The Christian anarchists. Kinda some weird dudes.”
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