The Goldfinch (14 page)

“The other day,” said Andy, “somebody, I really believe it was Malcolm whats-his-name or some other supposedly respected writer—anyway, he made a big production the other day in the
Science Times
of pointing out that there are more potential games of chess than there are grains of sand in the entire world. It’s ridiculous that a science writer for a major newspaper would feel compelled to belabor a fact so obvious.”

“Right,” I said, returning with effort from my thoughts.

“Like who doesn’t know that grains of sand on the planet, however numerous, are finite? It’s absurd that someone would even comment on
such a non-issue, you know, like,
Breaking News Story!
Just throwing it out there, you know, as a supposedly arcane fact.”

Andy and I, in elementary school, had become friends under more or less traumatic circumstances: after we’d been skipped ahead a grade because of high test scores. Everyone now appeared to agree that this had been a mistake for both of us, though for different reasons. That year—bumbling around among boys all older and bigger than us, boys who tripped us and shoved us and slammed locker doors on our hands, who tore up our homework and spat in our milk, who called us
maggot
and
faggot
and
dickhead
(sadly, a natural for me, with a last name like Decker)—during that whole year (our Babylonian Captivity, Andy called it, in his faint glum voice) we’d struggled along side by side like a pair of weakling ants under a magnifying glass: shin-kicked, sucker-punched, ostracized, eating lunch huddled in the most out-of-the-way corner we could find in order to keep from getting ketchup packets and chicken nuggets thrown at us. For almost two years he had been my only friend, and vice versa. It depressed and embarrassed me to remember that time: our Autobot wars and Lego spaceships, the secret identities we’d assumed from classic
Star Trek
(I was Kirk, he was Spock) in an effort to make a game of our torments.
Captain, it would appear that these aliens are holding us captive in some simulacrum of your schools for human children, on Earth.

Before I’d been tossed in with a tight, competitive bunch of older boys, with a label reading “gifted” tied around my neck, I’d never been especially reviled or humiliated at school. But poor Andy—even before he was skipped ahead a grade—had always been a chronically picked-upon kid: scrawny, twitchy, lactose-intolerant, with skin so pale it was almost transparent, and a penchant for throwing out words like ‘noxious’ and ‘chthonic’ in casual conversation. As bright as he was, he was clumsy; his flat voice, his habit of breathing through his mouth due to a chronically blocked nose, gave him the appearance of being mildly stupid instead of excessively smart. Among the rest of his kittenish, sharp-toothed, athletic siblings—racing around between their friends and their sports teams and their rewarding after-school programs—he stood out like a random pastehead who had wandered out onto the lacrosse field by mistake.

Whereas I’d managed to recover, somewhat, from the catastrophe of fifth grade, Andy had not. He stayed home on Friday and Saturday nights;
he never got invited to parties or to hang out in the park. As far as I knew, I was still his only friend. And though thanks to his mother he had all the right clothes, and dressed like the popular kids—even wore contact lenses some of the time—no one was fooled: hostile jock types who remembered him from the bad old days still pushed him around and called him “Threepio” for his long-ago mistake of wearing a Star Wars shirt to school.

Andy had never been overly talkative, even in childhood, except in occasional pressured bursts (much of our friendship had consisted of wordlessly passing comic books back and forth). Years of harassment at school had rendered him even more close-tongued and uncommunicative—less apt to employ Lovecraftian vocabulary words, more prone to entomb himself in advanced-placement math and science. Math had never interested me much—I was what they called a high verbal—but while I’d fallen short of my early academic promise, in every area, and had no interest in good grades if I had to work for them, Andy was in AP everything and at the very top of our class. (Certainly he would have been sent off to Groton like Platt—a prospect that had terrified him, as far back as third grade—had not his parents worried with some justification about sending away to school a son so persecuted by his classmates that he had once been nearly suffocated at recess by a plastic bag thrown over his head. And there were other worries as well; the reason I knew about Mr. Barbour’s time in the “ding farm” was that Andy had told me, in his matter-of-fact way, that his parents were afraid he might have inherited something of the same vulnerability, as he put it.)

During his time home from school with me, Andy apologized for having to study, “but unfortunately it’s necessary,” he said, sniffling and wiping his nose on his sleeve. His course load was incredibly demanding (“AP Hell on wheels”) and he couldn’t afford to fall even a day behind. While he labored over what seemed endless amounts of schoolwork (Chem and Calculus, American History, English, Astronomy, Japanese) I sat on the floor with my back against the side of his dresser, counting silently to myself: this time only three days ago she was alive, this time four days, a week. In my mind, I went over all the meals we’d eaten in the days leading up to her death: our last visit to the Greek diner, our last visit to Shun Lee Palace, the last dinner she’d cooked for me (spaghetti carbonara) and the last dinner before that (a dish called chicken Indienne, which
she’d learned to make from her mother back in Kansas). Sometimes, to look occupied, I turned through old volumes of
Fullmetal Alchemist
or an illustrated H. G. Wells he had in his room, but even the pictures were more than I could absorb. Mostly I stared out at the pigeons flapping on the window ledge as Andy filled out endless grids in his hiragana workbook, his knee bouncing under the desk as he worked.

Andy’s room—originally one large bedroom that the Barbours had divided in half—faced Park Avenue. Horns cried in the crosswalk at rush hour and the light burned gold in the windows across the street, dying down around the same time as the traffic began to thin. As the night wore on (phosphorescent in the streetlamps, violet city midnights that never quite faded to black) I turned from side to side, the low ceiling over the bunk pressing down on me so heavily that sometimes I woke convinced I was lying underneath the bed instead of on top of it.

How was it possible to miss someone as much as I missed my mother? I missed her so much I wanted to die: a hard, physical longing, like a craving for air underwater. Lying awake, I tried to recall all my best memories of her—to freeze her in my mind so I wouldn’t forget her—but instead of birthdays and happy times I kept remembering things like how a few days before she was killed she’d stopped me halfway out the door to pick a thread off my school jacket. For some reason, it was one of the clearest memories I had of her: her knitted eyebrows, the precise gesture of her reaching out to me, everything. Several times too—drifting uneasily between dreaming and sleep—I sat up suddenly in bed at the sound of her voice speaking clearly in my head, remarks she might conceivably have made at some point but that I didn’t actually remember, things like
Throw me an apple, would you?
and
I wonder if this buttons up the front or the back?
and
This sofa is in a terrible state of disreputableness.

Light from the street flew in black bands across the floor. Hopelessly, I thought of my bedroom standing empty only a few blocks away: my own narrow bed with the worn red quilt. Glow-in-the-dark stars from the planetarium, a picture postcard of James Whale’s
Frankenstein.
The birds were back in the park again, the daffodils were up; this time of year, when the weather got nice, sometimes we woke up extra early in the mornings and walked through the park together instead of taking the bus to the West Side. If only I could go back and change what had happened, keep it from happening somehow. Why hadn’t I insisted we get breakfast instead
of going to the museum? Why hadn’t Mr. Beeman asked us to come in on Tuesday, or Thursday?

Either the second night after my mother died or the third—some time at any rate after Mrs. Barbour took me to the doctor to get my headache seen to—the Barbours were throwing a big party at the apartment that it was too late for them to cancel. There was whispering, a flurry of activity that I could scarcely take in. “I think,” said Mrs. Barbour when she came back to Andy’s room, “you and Theo might enjoy staying back here.” Despite her light tone, clearly it was not a suggestion but an order. “It’ll be such a bore, and I really don’t think you’ll enjoy yourselves at all. I’ll ask Etta to bring you a couple of plates from the kitchen.”

Andy and I sat side by side on the lower bunk of his bed, eating cocktail shrimp and artichoke canapés from paper plates—or, rather, he ate, while I sat with the plate on my knees, untouched. He had on a DVD, some action movie with exploding robots, showers of metal and flame. From the living room: clinking glasses, smells of candle wax and perfume, every now and then a voice rising brilliantly in laughter. The pianist’s sparkling, up-tempo arrangement of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” seemed to be floating in from an alternate universe. Everything was lost, I had fallen off the map: the disorientation of being in the wrong apartment, with the wrong family, was wearing me down, so I felt groggy and punch-drunk, weepy almost, like an interrogated prisoner prevented from sleeping for days. Over and over, I kept thinking
I’ve got to go home
and then, for the millionth time,
I can’t.

iv.

A
FTER FOUR DAYS, OR
maybe it was five, Andy loaded his books in his stretched-out backpack and returned to school. All that day, and the next, I sat in his room with his television turned to Turner Classic Movies, which was what my mother watched when she was home from work. They were showing movies adapted from Graham Greene:
Ministry of Fear, The Human Factor, The Fallen Idol, This Gun for Hire.
That second evening, while I was waiting for
The Third Man
to come on, Mrs. Barbour (all Valentino-ed up and on her way out the door to an event at the Frick) stopped by Andy’s room and announced that I was going back to school
the next day. “
Any
body would feel out of sorts,” she said. “Back here by yourself. It isn’t good for you.”

I didn’t know what to say. Sitting around on my own watching movies was the only thing I’d done since my mother’s death that had felt even vaguely normal.

“It’s high time for you to get back into some sort of a routine. Tomorrow. I know it doesn’t seem so, Theo,” she said when I didn’t answer, “but keeping busy is the only thing in the world that’ll make you feel better.”

Resolutely I stared at the television. I hadn’t been at school since the day before my mother died and as long as I stayed away her death seemed unofficial somehow. But once I went back it would be a public fact. Worse: the thought of returning to any kind of normal routine seemed disloyal, wrong. It kept being a shock every time I remembered it, a fresh slap: she was gone. Every new event—everything I did for the rest of my life—would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.

“Theo.”

Startled, I looked up at her.

“One foot after the other. There’s no other way to get through this.”

The next day, they were having a World War II spy marathon (
Cairo, The Hidden Enemy, Code Name: Emerald
) that I really wanted to stay home and see. Instead, I dragged myself out of bed when Mr. Barbour stuck his head in to wake us (“Up and at ’em, hoplites!”) and walked to the bus stop with Andy. It was a rainy day, and cold enough that Mrs. Barbour had forced me into wearing an embarrassing old duffel coat of Platt’s over my clothes. Andy’s little sister, Kitsey, danced ahead of us in her pink raincoat, skipping through puddles and pretending she didn’t know us.

I knew it was going to be horrible and it was, from the second I stepped into the bright hall and smelled the familiar old school smell: citrus disinfectant and something like old socks. Hand-lettered signs in the hallway: sign-up sheets for tennis lab and cooking classes, tryouts for
The Odd Couple,
field trip to Ellis Island and tickets still available for the Swing into Spring concert, hard to believe that the world had ended and yet somehow these ridiculous activities kept grinding on.

The strange thing: the last day I’d been in the building, she was alive. I kept on thinking it, and every time it was new: last time I opened this
locker, last time I touched this stupid fucking
Insights in Biology
book, last time I saw Lindy Maisel putting on lip gloss with that plastic wand. It seemed hardly credible that I couldn’t follow these moments back to a world where she wasn’t dead.