Would I have been this numb if Boots were here, lying beside me? I missed him but my brain was too crowded for the missing to take root. He floated through my mind like a disembodied head.
Regardless of his motivations, I had hoped that Clive was right this whole time. I thought perhaps seeing these men might cure me of my addiction to them in the same way I suspected chain-smoking a carton of cigarettes might cure me of ever wanting another. Instead, years of unsatisfied curiosity had rotted into further obsession. This is how addiction works, I thought. Like a houseguest. It does not break in; it is invited. There is no announcement of when your old impulses roll over to form new ones. Suitcases are exploded, toilet paper rolls denuded. One day your spatula is put back in the wrong drawer and you think “that’s weird” and the next all the paint has been stripped from the walls and you think absolutely nothing at all.
I got up from bed, disturbing the cat, whose look of betrayal was apparent. Then I went to the hall closet and returned with my box of mementos, plopping it down between my legs, a girl showing off her sticker collection to no one. I started unfolding letters, their creases stiff from being pressed for so long. I didn’t bother turning on the light, but I also didn’t need to read them. I had them memorized, down to the syntax. There were NBA ticket stubs from Cooper and letters from Knox, written on airmail paper. There were drawings of animals meant to represent me and their artist, Jonathan. There were all manner of postcards scrawled from road trips or purloined from restaurants, filched cocktail napkins with flirty word games inked into the grain. There was Howard’s “please cum?” and the note from Phillip, still hoping I was well after all these years.
I needed to see these men because I’d kept the evidence and I’d kept the evidence because I needed to see these men.
A conundrum.
I put the letters back delicately, individually, like court documents. But as I did, out slid something thick and square, a curious object. It poked my thigh as it fell. I turned it around in my fingers, pressing at corners to make the folder open. Any denial I might have experienced about its provenance was cleared up when I reached inside and extracted a piece of carbon paper. It drooped as I held it up to the light of the window. The bowler hat. The oculus. I looked at the contents of the box. Then at the carbon paper again. Back and forth, back and forth, an uneasy sensation rising within me.
I tried to work backward. Clive had started the Golconda when the magazine folded. He had a penchant for putting the cart before the horse, which meant he probably printed business cards before he did anything else. Which meant an ex had sent me the card a long time ago, slipped it into an envelope or jacket pocket on purpose or by accident, and I hadn’t noticed. Because I wouldn’t. Because it looked blank to the naked eye.
One of these men knew this was coming.
“But who?” I asked the tidy pile of my life.
The tidy pile of my life did not respond.
14
And then the shelf came down. Because apparently my physical world was hell-bent on crumbling at pace with my mental one. It was the one with the majority of Boots’s creations, his personal island of misfit toys. I don’t know what made it come down but it was the middle of the night and I woke to the sound of glass smashing and the sensation of the cat’s claws digging into my forearm. I padded out to the hallway, swept up what I could of the glass, and dumped it into the trash. For a moment, when I woke again the next morning, I thought I’d dreamed it. But then I went out to survey the damage. Some of what broke were samples, pitchers with handles too thin for their jugs. But, in addition to the little Medusa sculptures and the vases with the frosty coloring, the shelf had taken two bites out of the wall. I stared at the stillness of the wreckage, those holes like misshapen eyes. I could not guess if the news of the lost ring would soften the blow about the shelf or the other way around. This, too, felt like something I should know. Something a different girlfriend would know.
Either way, this would require more than spackle, more than our super nodding at the problem and never returning. There was only one person for this job—the same one who’d convinced himself that manual labor was an act of social revolution.
“Bonkers,” Zach said, admiring the craters. “It’s like you sat on it.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t.”
“But it looks like you did.”
“Can I give you fifty bucks to make it look like I didn’t?”
He knocked on the wall, putting his ear to it.