Extraordinary Adventures Page 8

  “Understood,” he said, crestfallen.

  “I would, but it’s the only one I have.”

  “Understood,” he said again.

  Then she got in her car and drove away, and Bronfman watched her go, waving at her as if she were family—a cousin, maybe—and kept waving until the car swam into the early-evening traffic and disappeared. He had her number. It was on a card—the first time a woman had ever given him one, but the second time his life might be changed by a card in just the past three days.

  He walked back inside his sad apartment and looked at the places where things used to be. He knew exactly who had done this. Once he had proof he would call her, and they would meet for coffee, and he would give her the news.

  THREE

  It was Thomas Edison. Thomas Edison had stolen Bronfman’s things. He had no proof yet, but also no doubt about it at all. He knew that if he’d had Officer Stanton go to Thomas Edison’s apartment she would have found everything there. His TV, his flatware, his cowboy hat. The apples. Bronfman wanted to handle this on his own, though; it was important to him that he did. It felt as if the universe was testing him, waiting to see how he’d respond, even though he felt like a newborn, three days old. He had called the police to suggest to his neighbor that there were other forces involved in this enterprise—put the fear of God into him, as his mother used to say. But when Officer Stanton came by it appeared that Thomas Edison wasn’t at home. His apartment was dark, and strangely quiet. He was gone for the rest of the day and into the night, and wasn’t even there smoking on his stoop the next morning when Bronfman left for work.

  * * *

  Work was a dull choreographed performance, so routine and mechanized that it was no trouble for Bronfman to go through the motions—shuffle his papers, shoot off emails, answer his phone—when in reality all he could think about was the confrontation that was sure to occur later that evening. He lived through half a dozen imaginary scenarios, one in which fists were thrown (if that’s what one does with fists) and another in which he made Thomas Edison cry. But here’s how it was going to play out, probably: Bronfman would go straight to Thomas’s apartment after work that evening, rap on his door, and, in some yet to be determined way, ferret out proof of his neighbor’s responsibility for the crime. Boom. Done. Thomas would apologize, return Bronfman’s things, and they’d go on with their lives. Bronfman would have passed this test, this labor, and would be free to move on to the next and the next after that. This was what happened when you became a part of the world. The world gave you things to do.

  He left his desk a few minutes early, hoping to get ahead of the traffic, but the elevator took even longer than usual today, and by the time he got to the first floor he had lost whatever time he’d hoped to gain. In the lobby of the Cranston Building were three maintenance men taking positions around the desk that used to belong to Sheila McNabb. The computer was gone, as was the telephone console, as was everything but the desk itself.

  “Hi. So. What’s going on?” Bronfman asked the smallest of the maintenance men. Maintenance men intimidated him, large maintenance men especially. So the smaller of the three seemed the safest bet.

  He was wrong.

  “Do I stand beside you at your job and ask you what’s going on?”

  “No,” Bronfman said. “I’m sorry. I—”

  “Don’t be a dick, Stuart,” said the largest of the three. To Bronfman: “We’re removing the desk.” To Stuart: “Was that so hard?” To Bronfman: “It’s all becoming automated. Everything.”

  “At least we’re not robots,” Bronfman said.

  “Maybe we are and we just don’t know it.”

  “I don’t think so,” Bronfman said—which was exactly, he realized, what a robot that’s unaware of being a robot would say. But if he were a robot he would have to believe that Sheila McNabb was being deleted from his robotic memory, and that the removal of her desk—which reminded him of her every day—was another step toward total eradication.

  But here was Mr. Mangioni, watching the progress while leaning against one of the grand marble columns in the lobby’s colonnade. Mr. Mangioni was the manager of the Cranston Building, a dusty middle-aged Italian from Palermo, bald, roly-polyesque, who had nevertheless impressed Bronfman with his accent and his worldly elisions.

  Bronfman approached him and let all his words tumble out of him.

  “Mr. Mangioni, hi, Edsel Bronfman. Looks like they’re taking out the desk—time for a change, I guess. The Cranston Building’s coming into the twenty-first century.”

  “Seems so,” Mangioni said. “Seems so.”

  He held a small Dixie Cup full of coffee, which he sipped delicately as he glanced at Bronfman and back to the maintenance men.

  Bronfman formulated his next move.

  “So, anyway. It just occurred to me. The woman who was here before,” he said. “What happened to her?”

  “Ah, Sheila,” Mangioni said. “Lovely Sheila. Crazy Sheila McNabb.”

  “Wait. What. She’s crazy?”

  Mangioni shrugged. “Nice lady,” he said. “Sweet. But yes, I think so. Up one day, down the next. Sometimes she wouldn’t answer the telephone. Said she had enough voices in her head. But, still, maybe not crazy in a bad way.”

  “What’s the good way?”

  Mangioni shrugged again. “Mostly, she was interesting,” he said. “That’s probably what I meant. She was interesting. Very interesting.”

  This relieved Bronfman. She was definitely interesting, and that was better than crazy, though he could see how one could very well seem to be the other.

  “I wonder where she went,” Bronfman said, asking a question without having to actually ask the question

  “Sheila?” Mangioni said, as if they hadn’t been talking about her the whole time. “No idea.”

  “I guess you don’t have a telephone number or anything like that,” he said, still not asking for anything, especially the thing he wanted most.

  Mangioni really looked at Bronfman, narrowed his eyes. He gave him the evil eye. “Oh, now I see,” he said. “Bronfman and Sheila, sitting in a tree.”

  “Not so much,” Bronfman said. “Not really.”

  “K-i-s-i-n-g.”

  “S-s,” Bronfman said.

  “Huh?”

  “Two esses in kissing.”

  “Thank you. But I can’t tell you where she might be. Can’t tell. It’s the law.” He held his hands out in front of him, chained in imaginary manacles. “I tell you and they throw me in the clinker.”

  “Of course,” he said. “I understand.”

  “What if I tell you and you find her and cut her up into a million pieces, then they come looking for me and say, ‘Was it you who told the killer where she lived?’ Don’t want that.”

  “I’m not a killer,” Bronfman said. “If that matters at all.”

  “That’s good. Still.” Mangioni laughed and gave Bronfman a pat on the back, the kind one Italian might give another. “Better, anyway, to let that ship sail.”

  “Oh? Why do you say that?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “She may be too interesting,” and he gave Bronfman a long look, up and down. “For you. If you hear what I’m saying.”

  Bronfman nodded. “I hear you,” he said, and turned back to look for a moment at the space Sheila had once filled before her perhaps too-interesting ship set sail. There was nothing there anymore. Nothing at all.

  FOUR

  On the way to his apartment, Bronfman tried to imagine himself knocking on Thomas Edison’s door. That would be his first step. But even that small action seemed unimaginable. He had never done that before, and he didn’t know if under these circumstances he could bring himself to do it.

  Luckily, he didn’t have to knock. Thomas Edison was sitting on his stoop when Bronfman drove up. He was smoking, whiling away the time like a man escaping, for a brief, precious moment, the world’s oppressive hurly-burly. At least he was wearing a shirt, an old
faded blue one with a tractor on the front and the name of the people who made the tractor on the back. Bronfman had seen it many times.

  “Mr. B.!” he called out as Bronfman approached, as if they were the closest of friends. The truth was, they kind of were. Bronfman had thought of him as a friend before all of this happened, in the way that certain friends were friends because of very specific shared interests or experiences. In the case of Thomas Edison and Bronfman, it was the complex where they lived, King’s Manor, the place where they shared their day-to-day lives. This was why it hurt so much, what he did to Bronfman, because now they were friends no more. “Mr. B.,” he said again. “On schedule as usual. If I had a watch I could set it to Bronfman time, and it would always be right-on.”

  Thomas smiled as if even he were surprised at how clever he could be, and he locked eyes with Bronfman until Bronfman felt compelled to laugh as well. Thomas Edison could maintain eye contact longer than anyone Bronfman had ever known; it rattled him. But—aha! That casual reference to his schedule. Clearly he was aware of when Bronfman was gone, when he’d return. He knew it well enough to plan the robbery without fear of being caught. Case closed.

  “Hey, Tommy,” Bronfman said, affecting a breezy tone. “How’s it going?”

  “It’s going how it’s going,” he said. “It is what it is.”

  Bronfman nodded, and Thomas took a long, slow, almost scandalous drag on his cigarette, closing his eyes in an evanescent rapture. Then he looked down at his cell phone, resting on the stoop beside his right leg, even though it hadn’t made a sound. Then he flicked the rock off his cigarette with his index finger and dropped the still smoking butt into the crabgrass, and sighed. This was a code Bronfman understood: their meeting was over.

  But it wasn’t. The drumbeat of Bronfman’s heart was proof of that.

  “I got robbed,” Bronfman said.

  Thomas Edison jerked his head toward Bronfman in a mechanical, calibrated twist. “What?” he said. “What the fuck!” Oh, he was surprised by this news. Very surprised. Unbelievably surprised. Bronfman could have said, “I’m an alien. My true form is much larger, green, and poisonous to the touch,” and he would have been greeted with the same expression of shocked confusion. That such a thing could happen in this great and wonderful world! In King’s Manor! “Oh, man,” he said. “That sucks big-time. What all’d they get?”

  “A lot of things,” Bronfman said. “I didn’t have much to get, but what I had they took. Whoever ‘they’ were. The police came yesterday.”

  “The police?”

  Bronfman nodded, and let that fester. He had Thomas’s attention now. Thomas was getting a peek at his future: handcuffed, fingerprinted, jailed, judged, and convicted. That’s all it took, and the hardy man who liked to not a wear a shirt when everybody else did withered like the core of a stolen apple in the parking lot right before Bronfman’s steely gaze. Bronfman tugged on his tie. He couldn’t swallow. The flesh there was damp and soft.

  “Officer Stanton?” Thomas asked.

  “Yes. But how would you know that?”

  “It’s a small town,” he said. “Sooner or later, you get to know everybody. The checkout girl, the pharmacist. The police.”

  “I suppose so,” Bronfman said.

  “She’s a cute thing,” Thomas Edison said. “You tell her I live here now?”

  “No,” Bronfman said. “Why would I do that?”

  But Thomas didn’t answer. He lit another cigarette, his back humped over, as if the weight of the world were on it. He shook his head. “I’m really sorry, Mr. B. I’ve been robbed, and it sucks. It sucks, like, in a thousand ways. They take your stuff, everything you love and worked so hard to get. But they take something else, too. Something else happens. You know? They take something inside.” Thomas touched the place on his chest where the inside was.

  Bronfman nodded. A golden ray of sun cut through a web of branches and fell on Thomas Edison’s face. Rough-hewn, sculpted out of a hard wood, his cheekbones were high and knobby, and his eyes, a muddy brown, rested on top of them, like marbles, balancing. His cheeks were drawn—from smoking so much, Bronfman thought—and his nose was almost perfect until it turned upward at the end, giving him an elfish look. A dangerous elf.

  “I’ve never been robbed before,” Bronfman said. “I know it happens to other people all the time. But I never thought it would happen to me.”

  “That’s how it goes,” Thomas said.

  “How what goes?”

  “No one thinks something bad is going to happen to them. Then it just does. People getting blown away by a tornado aren’t flying through the air thinking, I knew this would happen. It just happens. You think my life plan was to end up here without a job or the prospects for one, with no woman in my life, in debt up to my elbows, talking to Mr. B.? No offense intended.”

  “None taken,” Bronfman said, though there was some taken. A little. “I feel the same way. Exactly. Just as I wasn’t a part of your life plan, you weren’t a part of mine.”

  The truth was, neither of them had a life plan. Bronfman didn’t even know what a life plan was, or how to make one, or why you even would. Life wasn’t something that could be planned. As Thomas Edison said, life happened in ways you could never imagine. Life was a tornado.

  “Tommy,” Bronfman said. Clearly, Thomas recognized that tone of voice. Anybody would have recognized that tone of voice. I am about to introduce a topic of some seriousness, Bronfman was saying. Listen up!

  He looked at Bronfman, who was still standing over him, like a father lording it over his son. Thomas stared at him with that unfaltering gaze, and this time Bronfman didn’t look away. This was Bronfman, facing a fear.

  “Tommy,” he said again, “did you…”

  Thomas Edison waited for the end of the sentence, but it never came. “What? Did I what?”

  “Did you…”

  He couldn’t say it. He could only say it by not saying it. And Thomas—again, as anybody would have—understood.

  “Oh,” he said, and laughed—scoffed, really. Scoffed as if this was just another big pile of shit someone was dumping on his head, and it stank, but he was kind of used to it by now. “You think I did it.”

  Bronfman would neither confirm nor deny, and thus, in his silence, it was confirmed.

  Thomas looked away. Bronfman had never won this staring contest before. It felt good. It felt like a step in the right direction. Thomas rocked back and forth a little, shook his head, sighed. He spit. Then he stood and turned and opened his apartment door. “You coming?” he said.

  “What?” Bronfman asked. “Coming where?”

  Thomas flourished his right arm. “Inside. I want to show you something.”

  Bronfman’s heart, already beating dangerously fast, picked up speed and began thrumming calamitously. He felt it in his throat. If he threw up now—which was not beyond possibility—it would be his exploding heart that came out.

  Slowly he walked into the maw of the beast.

  He had never been inside Thomas Edison’s apartment before, but he found that it conformed quite closely to what he’d imagined. Exceptionally cluttered: trash cans full to overflowing; beer cans crushed and tottering on the edge of the coffee table; a threadbare tartan couch and an old leather easy chair; ashtrays; bottle tops; plastic cups with half an inch of beer at the bottom—all laden with soggy cigarettes and whatever else he smoked. The disarray seemed permanent. The floor was littered with pieces of paper. Only on close inspection did Bronfman see that they were scratch tickets. In the corner was a miniature Christmas tree, made of some sort of plastic, still draped in tiny lights of many colors and broken candy canes. Happy, joyous, bright, the little tree was in a perpetual battle with the scruffy grimness of this sad abode.

  “Yeah, look around,” Thomas said.

  “Tommy, I—”

  “I’m serious. Everywhere. Anywhere. See if there’s anything in here that’s yours. Look through my closet, the drawers, th
e kitchen cabinets—hell, look in the freezer.”

  “But—”

  “Please,” Tommy said. “For me.”

  Bronfman looked around. “I don’t see anything,” he said.

  “No? Maybe I hid it in here. Come on in the bedroom. Don’t be shy, come on.”

  The bedroom: farther away from the door, from escape. But Bronfman stepped over a pair of shoes and a pile of clothes—T-shirts, jeans—and followed Thomas into his bedroom. The bed? Just a mattress on the floor, one sheet, a rolled-up towel for a pillow.

  “Well?” Thomas Edison asked him. Bronfman shook his head. Thomas opened the closet door. “Here. Look. Really look. Stick your head in.”

  Bronfman looked. There was nothing at all in the closet. Not even a metal coat hanger.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Thomas said. “That I’ve already gotten rid of it all. But why would I have stolen it if I didn’t want it for myself? Couldn’t sell it. That television? What could I have gotten for that? Five bucks, maybe?”

  “How did you know the television was stolen?”

  Thomas let that hang there for a beat, thinking his answer through. “Someone breaks into your apartment, they’re not going to leave the TV. Crappy though it may be. Am I right?”

  Nice save. “I guess so,” Bronfman said. “I guess.”

  “So we’re good?” Thomas said.

  Bronfman wanted everything to be good. More than anything, he wanted everything to be good. But then he realized that the bathroom door was closed. He hadn’t looked in the bathroom. He was already so deep into it there was nothing left to lose.

  “What’s in there?” Bronfman said.

  “Where?”

  “The bathroom.”

  “It’s just the bathroom, man,” Thomas Edison said. “What do you mean, what’s in it? The sink, the shower, the shitter. That’s it. And it’s disgusting, so…”

  Bronfman said nothing.

  “We’re not going in the bathroom, Mr. B.,” Thomas said.

  Bronfman stood his ground, brave—or, perhaps, numb. He could not look directly into Thomas Edison’s eyes now, afraid of what he might see.