BEAUTIFUL AND TRUE
Mom made spaghetti for dinner that night. Ron ate with us. I asked him if he was still interested in buying me a five-piece drum set with Zildjian cymbals. He said, 'Yeah. I think that would be great.'
'How about a double bass pedal?'
'I don't know what that is, but I bet we could arrange it.' I asked him why he didn't have his own family. Mom said, 'Oskar!' I said, '
What
?' Ron put down his knife and fork and said, 'It's OK.' He said, 'I did have a family, Oskar. I had a wife and a daughter.'
'Did you get divorced?' He laughed and said, 'No.'
'Then where are they?' Mom looked at her plate. Ron said, 'They were in an accident.'
'What kind of accident?'
'A car accident.'
'I didn't know that.'
'Your mom and I met in a group for people that have lost family. That's where we became friends.' I didn't look at Mom, and she didn't look at me. Why hadn't she told me she was in a group?
'How come you didn't die in the accident?' Mom said, 'That's enough, Oskar.' Ron said, 'I wasn't in the car.'
'Why weren't you in the car?' Mom looked out the window. Ron ran his finger around his plate and said, 'I don't know.'
'What's weird,' I said, 'is that I've never seen you cry.' He said, 'I cry all the time.'
My backpack was already packed, and I'd already gotten the other supplies together, like the altimeter and granola bars and the Swiss Army knife I'd dug up in Central Park, so there was nothing else to do. Mom tucked me in at 9:36.
'Do you want me to read to you?'
'No thanks.'
'Is there anything you want to talk about?' If she wasn't going to say anything, I wasn't going to say anything, so I shook my head no. 'I could make up a story?'
'No thank you.'
'Or look for mistakes in the
Times
?'
'Thanks, Mom, but not really.'
'That was nice of Ron to tell you about his family.'
'I guess so.'
'Try to be nice to him. He's been such a good friend, and he needs help, too.'
'I'm tired.'
I set my alarm for 11:50 P.M., even though I knew I wouldn't sleep.
While I lay there in bed, waiting for the time to come, I did a lot of inventing.
I invented a biodegradable car.
I invented a book that listed every word in every language. It wouldn't be a very useful book, but you could hold it and know that everything you could possibly say was in your hands.
What about a googolplex telephones?
What about safety nets everywhere?
At 11:50 P.M., I got up extremely quietly, took my things from under the bed, and opened the door one millimeter at a time, so it wouldn't make any noise. Bart, the night doorman, was asleep at the desk, which was lucky, because it meant I didn't have to tell any more lies. The renter was waiting for me under the streetlamp. We shook hands, which was weird. At exactly 12:00, Gerald pulled up in the limousine. He opened the door for us, and I told him, 'I knew you'd be on time.' He patted me on the back and said, 'I wouldn't be late.' It was my second time in a limousine ever.
As we drove, I imagined we were standing still and the world was coming toward us. The renter sat all the way on his side, not doing anything, and I saw the Trump Tower, which Dad thought was the ugliest building in America, and the United Nations, which Dad thought was incredibly beautiful. I rolled down the window and stuck my arm out. I curved my hand like an airplane wing. If my hand had been big enough, I could've made the limousine fly. What about enormous gloves?
Gerald smiled at me in the rearview mirror and asked if we wanted any music. I asked him if he had any kids. He said he had two daughters. 'What do they like?'
'What do they
like
?'
'Yeah.'
'Lemme see. Kelly, my baby, likes Barbie and puppies and bead bracelets.'
'I'll make her a bead bracelet.'
'I'm sure she'd like that.'
'What else?'
'If it's soft and pink, she likes it.'
'I like soft and pink things, too.' He said, 'Well, all right.'
'And what about your other daughter?'
'Janet? She likes sports. Her favorite is basketball, and I'll tell you, she can play. I don't mean for a girl, either. I mean she's
good
.'
'Are they both special?' He cracked up and said, 'Of course their pop is gonna say they're special.'
'But objectively.'
'What's that?'
'Like, factually. Truthfully.'
'The truth is I'm their pop.'
I stared out the window some more. We went over the part of the bridge that wasn't in any borough, and I turned around and watched the buildings get smaller. I figured out which button opened the sunroof, and I stood up with the top half of my body sticking out of the car. I took pictures of the stars with Grandpa's camera, and in my head I connected them to make words, whatever words I wanted. Whenever we were about to go under a bridge or into a tunnel, Gerald told me to get back into the car so I wouldn't be decapitated, which I know about but really,
really
wish I didn't. In my brain I made 'shoe' and 'inertia' and 'invincible.'
It was 12:56 A.M. when Gerald drove up onto the grass and pulled the limousine right next to the cemetery. I put on my backpack, and the renter got the shovel, and we climbed onto the roof of the limousine so we could get over the fence.
Gerald whispered, 'You sure you want to do this?'
Through the fence I told him, 'It probably won't take more than twenty minutes. Maybe thirty.' He tossed over the renter's suitcases and said, 'I'll be here.'
Because it was so dark, we had to follow the beam of my flashlight.
I pointed it at a lot of tombstones, looking for Dad's.
Mark Crawford
Diana Strait
Jason Barker, Jr.
Morris Cooper
May Goodman
Helen Stein
Gregory Robertson Judd
John Fielder
Susan Kidd
I kept thinking about how they were all the names of dead people, and how names are basically the only thing that dead people keep.
It was 1:22 when we found Dad's grave.
The renter offered me the shovel.
I said, 'You go first.'
He put it in my hand.
I pushed it into the dirt and stepped all of my weight onto it. I didn't even know how many pounds I was, because I'd been so busy trying to find Dad.
It was extremely hard work, and I was only strong enough to remove a little bit of dirt at a time. My arms got incredibly tired, but that was OK, because since we only had one shovel, we took turns.
The twenty minutes passed, and then another twenty minutes.
We kept digging, but we weren't getting anywhere.
Another twenty minutes passed.
Then the batteries in the flashlight ran out, and we couldn't see our hands in front of us. That wasn't part of our plan, and neither were replacement batteries, even though they obviously should have been. How could I have forgotten something so simple and important?
I called Gerald's cell phone and asked if he could go pick up some D batteries for us. He asked if everything was all right. It was so dark that it was even hard to hear. I said, 'Yeah, we're OK, we just need some D batteries.' He said the only store he remembered was about fifteen minutes away. I told him, 'I'll pay you extra.' He said, 'It's not about paying me extra.'
Fortunately, because what we were doing was digging up Dad's grave, we didn't need to see our hands in front of us. We only had to feel the shovel moving the dirt.
So we shoveled in the darkness and silence.
I thought about everything underground, like worms, and roots, and clay, and buried treasure.
We shoveled.
I wondered how many things had died since the first thing was born. A trillion? A googolplex?
We shoveled.
I wondered what the renter was thinking about.
After a while, my phone played 'The Flight of the Bumblebee,' so I looked at the caller ID. 'Gerald.'
'Got 'em.'
'Can you bring them to us so we don't have to waste time going back to the limousine?' He didn't say anything for a few seconds. 'I guess I could do that.' I couldn't describe where we were to him, so I just kept calling his name, and he found my voice.
It felt much better to be able to see. Gerald said, 'Doesn't look like you two have gotten very far.' I told him, 'We're not good shovelers.' He put his driving gloves in his jacket pocket, kissed the cross that he wore around his neck, and took the shovel from me. Because he was so strong, he could move a lot of dirt quickly.
It was 2:56 when the shovel touched the coffin. We all heard the sound and looked at each other.
I told Gerald thanks.
He winked at me, then started walking back to the car, and then he disappeared in the darkness. 'Oh yeah,' I heard him say, even though I couldn't find him with my flashlight, 'Janet, the older one, she loves cereal. She'd eat it three meals a day if we let her.'
I told him, 'I love cereal, too.'
He said, 'All right,' and his footsteps got quieter and quieter.
I lowered myself into the hole and used my paintbrush to wipe away the dirt that was left.
One thing that surprised me was that the coffin was wet. I guess I wasn't expecting that, because how could so much water get underground?
Another thing that surprised me was that the coffin was cracked in a few places, probably from the weight of all that dirt. If Dad had been in there, ants and worms could have gotten in through the cracks and eaten him, or at least microscopic bacteria could have. I knew it shouldn't matter, because once you're dead, you don't feel anything. So why did it feel like it mattered?
Another thing that surprised me was how the coffin wasn't locked or even nailed shut. The lid just rested on top of it, so that anyone who wanted to could open it up. That didn't seem right. But on the other hand, who would want to open a coffin?
I opened the coffin.
I was surprised again, although again I shouldn't have been. I was surprised that Dad wasn't there. In my brain I knew he wouldn't be, obviously, but I guess my heart believed something else. Or maybe I was surprised by how incredibly empty it was. I felt like I was looking into the dictionary definition of emptiness.
I'd had the idea to dig up Dad's coffin the night after I met the renter. I was lying in bed and I had the revelation, like a simple solution to an impossible problem. The next morning I threw pebbles at the guest room window, like he wrote for me to in his note, but I'm not very accurate at throwing, so I had Walt do it. When the renter met me at the corner I told him my idea.
He wrote, 'Why would you want to do that?' I told him, 'Because it's the truth, and Dad loved the truth.'
'What truth?'
'That he's dead.'
After that, we met every afternoon and discussed the details, like we were planning a war. We talked about how we would get to the cemetery, and different ways of climbing fences, and where we would find a shovel, and all of the other necessary instruments, like a flashlight and wire cutters and juice boxes. We planned and planned, but for some reason we never talked about what we would actually do once we'd opened the coffin.
It wasn't until the day before we were going to go that the renter asked the obvious question.
I told him, 'We'll fill it, obviously.'
He asked another obvious question.
At first I suggested filling the coffin with things from Dad's life, like his red pens or his jeweler's magnifying glass, which is called a loupe, or even his tuxedo. I guess I got that idea from the Blacks who made museums of each other. But the more we discussed it, the less sense it made, because what good would that do, anyway? Dad wouldn't be able to use them, because he was dead, and the renter also pointed out that it would probably be nice to have things of his around.
'I could fill the coffin with jewelry, like they used to do with famous Egyptians, which I know about.'
'But he wasn't Egyptian.'
'And he didn't like jewelry.'
'He didn't like jewelry?'
'Maybe I could bury things I'm ashamed of,' I suggested, and in my head I was thinking of the old telephone, and the sheet of stamps of Great American Inventors that I got mad at Grandma about, and the script of
Hamlet
, and the letters I had received from strangers, and the stupid card I'd made for myself, and my tambourine, and the unfinished scarf. But that didn't make any sense either, because the renter reminded me that just because you bury something, you don't really bury it. 'Then what?' I asked.
'I have an idea,' he wrote. 'I'll show you tomorrow.'