Fantastic Metropolis

Important: The novel excerpted here is a work in progress. As such, the text in these pages is still subject to editing and rewriting, and may even be omitted from the finished novel. Please bear this in mind when reading the excerpt, and do not quote any part of it in reviews without first checking against a published copy.

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This is a story about an apartment house and the people who live inside… everyday people leading everyday lives. To some it will be a love story, to others a saga about New York. To others still, it will be a tale about a car and the events leading to one particular stormy November night.

The truth is it’s all of these. But most of all, it is an investigation into loss and celebration, infidelity and redemption, and youth and age. In other words, life and death.

—Peter Crowther

Chapter One: Beyond Repair

“I don’t think New York City is like other cities. It is all characters—in fact, it is everything. It can destroy a man, but if his eyes are open it cannot bore him. Once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough.”

—John Steinbeck, New York Times, February 1 1953

The city awoke to the smell of itself, a grid-designed composite of petroleum, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, feces, urine, sweat, hopes, dreams, rotting vegetables and fresh coffee. A symmetry of hope and despondency, elation and fear, longing and resignation… for emotions too have smells, smells that hang onto the air like ill-fitting clothes rescued from thrift stores, garage and yard sales or the year-round bargain basements that litter the side streets.

At nighttime, all cities sleep deeply. All cities, that is, except New York. New York only dozes. A mixture of paranoia, a constant wonder at and of itself, and a lingering curiosity as to what awaits at the far end of the next second renders it fitful.

This is the moment that it likes the best. A moment that signifies a new day. Filled with new developments, undreamed of possibilities.

Some of the city’s people never see the sun lift itself resignedly over distant rooftops and spires. They never see the long shadows retreat from the stone and the brick, withdrawing like feral creatures afraid of the light, guiltily scuttling across the pitted streets and building-sides, hoisting themselves up the metal pull-down fire escapes and melting across the rooftops into nook and cranny and crevice. Some people never hear the city kick-start its lungs and its heart, once more dragging itself into a semblance of tired life, a muted muffle of early morning feet and of sputtering engines and radio news bulletins, and the plaintive drone of a distant English horn drifting through an open tenement window, the constant block-away wails of sirens gloating or bemoaning battles lost or about to commence, the occasional human howl filled to bursting with the realization of another time of wakefulness to be endured.

But since his wife’s death, Matt Blenheim saw and heard everything.

The days were the easiest. In the daytime, the bustle of the people made recent events less real… like scenes in a TV soap opera, where characters walked off-set and had a coffee or a cigarette, argued with their agent or studied their lines for the next episode. In those fictional slices of so-called everyday life, dead people got to their feet after the end credits and carried on with life, leaving the anguished music and the effects-induced tears of loved ones far behind. Watching from his second story window, Matt saw all daytime life this way: it wasn’t real. It was The Trueman Show multiplied a millionfold, with nothing needing to stay the way he saw it; it was every talk show writ large, without mics and cameras, without autocue or clipboard, without rehearsal or roughcut edits.

Sure, there were people with problems down there on the sidewalk or driving by in cars or trucks or cabs—maybe they had folks sick back at home or holed up in Bellevue or NYU Medical or Cabrini Medical or even Beth Israel Medical or St. Vincent’s, ankles blown up with steroids, smelling of lavender and night stocks left to turn, the first cloying hint of decay hanging on the pallid skin that makes even the lightest kiss both arduous and frightening. But their very movement—the fact that they were out there moving around on the few yards of street and sidewalk in front of Matt’s apartment house—made a lie of it. No not a lie, an inconsequentiality. Hell, life went on despite their troubles and that made those troubles of negligible importance to anyone but them.

The world was a tree all decked out with an electric flex of 600 billion tiny flickering bulb-lights… with every nano-second some of them blinking out and some new ones blinking on with their first faltering personal shines, but the general appearance didn’t alter significantly. The loss of one bulb or the appearance of another mattered only to the handful of bulbs situated nearby.

The daytime held so much light that it was hard to reconcile or even imagine one tiny element fading away. But the night-time was different.

In the night, when the streets cleared of people walking the sidewalk to the store or to work or just to commune with the day, the world grew quiet and introspective. In the gathering darkness, where the homeless people held sway, their heads jerking side to side as they listened to the colors fade and watched the city sounds drop to all-fours, it was all too easy to imagine a light popping out.

A light like Eleanor Belnheim. Matt’s beloved wife, Ellie.

And so the darkness was the worst. The darkness accentuated the loss, doubled the silence, spread the loneliness thick on the soul.

Since the funeral, Matt had dreaded the night.

The people on the TV talked to him in that impersonal way they had of talking to a camera containing millions of faces and trying to make it seem pertinent to each of them. Newsreaders adopted grave voices to tell of accidents, and jaunty voices—usually at the end of the broadcast—to pass on details of something suitably wacky.

And last night in Queens, a beaming-faced anchor-woman on ABC had chuckled to Matt from the TV set early that very morning, a 57-year-old woman foiled a would-be mugger by pretending she was a police undercover agent. When the man grabbed hold of her bag, Alice Veetner spoke into the mock-diamond brooch fastened to her lapel and asked for back-up while she held onto the bag for dear life. The camera panned back to show the young woman’s male colleague smiling broadly and shaking his head. Shuffling her papers together, the woman concluded by saying, She told the police later that the brooch was the best dollar-forty-nine she had ever spent.

Another light managing to stay on.

For the rest of the time it was a steady diet of old sitcom re-runs—Gilligan’s Island, The Andy Griffiths Show, Hogan’s Heroes, The Honeymooners—talk shows discussing a variety of subjects that grew more risque as midnight passed (one show just a couple of nights ago had been discussing anal sex) and a welter of advertisements for cars and pizzas, the one often indistinguishable from the other. Banal, yes; uninteresting, absolutely; but the diversion was much appreciated by Matt.

But another night was now over and the day stretched ahead.

This day was like any other in Manhattan, spring, summer, fall or winter: they were all the same. Only the name of the season and the date/temperature signs on the various buildings were different. That and perhaps the clothing of the passers-by—books and newspapers, clutch bags and business cases, all clasped in their hands and, occasionally, a folded $20 bill tucked away in pocket or purse compartment to appease muggers (though Matt wondered whether, after the success of Alice Veetner, more of them might start wearing jewelry on their clothing)—traveling here from there, there from here, talking on cellphones and facing another day while they turned their backs on the past.

He leaned against the wood panelling at the side of the window, sipped his coffee and looked out onto the world.

The merchants in the eateries and delis were pulling down their awnings, glancing squint-eyed at the sky. The sky was clear but the forecasts had predicted rain—a real honest-to-goodness storm was predicted.

Now, Matt knew, even without smelling them, the smells of breakfast—Danish, donuts, burgers, muffins and hot sandwiches—would be mingling with the aroma of coffee, interlocking with perfumes and colognes, mixing it up with the vaguely antiseptic afterthought of cleaning agents in the sharp-pressed pants and jackets, and the skirts and blouses, and the breathed-out vaporous mist of toothpaste and medicated floss.

Already, it was after nine o’clock.

A Thursday morning in November.

A little way down the road, Thanksgiving straddled the horizon and after it, Christmas and then New Year’s, bringing a whole calendar of special days, commemorative days. Empty days.

Matthew Blenheim continued to look out of his window.

Across the street, alongside the recessed benches at the entrance to a small and unnamed park that used to be, up until just a few years ago, two seperate buildings, long boarded over and home to only rats and roches, two men with long beards, dressed head to foot in black, sat on a wall and watched an old man remove giant chess pieces from a small lock-up, staring, with an eagerness that time and repetition had not quite entirely dimmed, as the man set out the pieces on the scuffed and faded black and white squares painted long ago onto the sidewalk.

Yellow cabs drifted from left to right, right to left, honking horns as traffic built up, like four-wheeled beasts establishing their territory, frisky with the morning, hoods flicking proudly and even aggressively to come on lady, to get a move on fella.

Matt took another sip of coffee and looked up the street.

Already it was crowding up, with the subway up around the corner on West 4th Street disgorging and absorbing people, some—even though Matt couldn’t actually see them from his windows—coming up the steps into the daylight while others passed them to descend into the electronically-lit subway darkness. Most of the people did not speak to each other, the only sound—Matt knew from experience—being the sound of their feet and the insistent buzz of personal stereos, the clop and clack of shoe heels, the whining moan of the slow-passing traffic, the occasional swish of dresses and underclothes… hidden worlds protected from inquisitive eyes.

Roller-bladed men and women, their elbows, knees and backs cushioned by colorful materials, weaved and threaded their way among the waiting traffic, mounting sidewalks, crossing intersections, their heads thrust forward to challenge any obstruction and their faces into the wind.

Matt turned to look down the street.

On the hoarding fronting the park, a young man climbed a tented ladder spreadeagled across the sidewalk to replace a billboard poster piece by piece, the wind one minute ballooning his jacket and pants and the next flattening the garments against his skin, as though all the air had been removed.

The meteorlogical pundits had been predicting bad weather for days but the most that the elements seemed to to have been able to muster was a wind that managed to come, in intervals of mere minutes at a time, from every direction and then none at all. The wind was as playful as a puppy, taking discarded bags and wrappers—and an occasional beret of Fedora—in its maw and whisking them first one way and then another before abandoning them within tantalizing reach of their owners before lifting them up again to someplace else.

Matt studied the man on the ladder as he finished smoothing down the errant edges of what appeared to be sand bedecked with glittering jewels. For some time, the image of this poster would make no sense to the man: it was only when, much later, he would stand back and survey his finished handiwork that he would finally see The Big Picture. Despite himself, Matt smiled. The man would be looking forward to that, and probably to lunchtime, and maybe to the evening, when he could have a beer or maybe two on the way home, forgetting the posters and their strange image of sand and jewels and worlds he was not really privvy to… despite what the ad men would have him believe.

As though sensing someone watching him, the man turned around and looked down at the sidewalk, first one way and then the other. He stretched his back and flexed his muscles, yawning, the wind momentarily causing him to grasp the wooden surround at the base of the billboard. Then, having regained his stability, he unscrewed a thermos and poured steaming coffee into a plastic beaker while he checked his watch.

Matt did the same.

Almost 9.25.

Replacing the thermos cap, the man looked down at the street below… just one street of the many hundereds—maybe thousands—that threaded their way around and about Manhattan, while his hair waved first to one side and then the other.

Now, along those same streets once trodden by Henry Ward Beecher and William Cullen Bryant and Horace Greely, new people would be venturing.

Now, at the same intersections and park entrances passed maybe only yesterday by Ed Koch or Woody Allen or Jimmy Breslin, different people would be moving into the game to fill the gaps left by office and shop workers.

These people were different because, for the most part, they wanted to be different. These were the tenement dwellers, denizens of occasional housing projects and the homeless.

The city held a soft spot for these street people. Sometimes it talked to them, whispering their names out of brown paper bags that smelled of cheap liquor, making rash promises in exchange for even rasher acts, calling them to its dust- and cigarette-butt-festooned skirts where the buildings met the ground and where, if one were careful and not too demanding, one could find protection of a kind and a sense of temporary well-being.

One of them crossed the street directly beneath the scaffolding where the young man was busy attaching the second large square of the billboard poster. He stopped for a few seconds in the middle of the street, staring up either at the poster-hanger or the poster itself, and then crossed over to the coffee shop down from Matt’s apartment house.

Matt hoped the man would enjoy his breakfast and then, frowning, wondered where the thought had come from, thinking why should he care anything about the man or about anyone else for that matter. Maybe it was because every breakfast should be savored, and every coffee and every breath of air and—he watched the young man on the scaffolding—and every poster hung on billboards throughout the land, bringing color to every highway and interest to every journey. Every action and every experience was special.

To Matthew Blenheim, everything was special.

His home on the once fashionable Washington Square area of downtown Manhattan—a special city if ever there was one—was a three-flight walk-up situated between on MacDougal Street, just around the corner from Bleecker, where many years ago the young tow-headed Bob Dylan had arrived from Minnesota to play the Village coffee houses.

Matt often thought of Dylan, Ellie having loved those early songs so much, and right now, looking out of the window, he wondered if the singer had once walked along these streets in that long-ago summer of 1962 and whether he and Ellie had ever been looking out of these very same windows to see him, walking along, his head filled with tunes and his neck arched back to take in the building fronts and the sights of the great city.

Matt’s house was a big double-fronted with shuttered windows and a gabled roof, a direct throwback to the great brownstones of a bygone age and a forgotten time, its back windows overlooking what was surely once a communal courtyard servicing four other apartment buildings but which had since been partitioned into roughly-equal quarter sections, a high wall containing the four left and right, and each bearing its own individual character.

Summer nights, with their back windows opened wide to the sounds of the city, Matt and Ellie would stop every now and again and marvel at the sound coming in, a collective sound of life and all the misery and wonder that goes with it, looking out over the rooftops of the two houses opposite, craning their necks to the left to face Washington Square Park and letting out soft heartfelt sighs of astonishment at the distant glow of the theater district and Midtown lighting the dark sky that looked down on Manhattan.

And in the haze of winter, when the temperature fell so low you could feel your eyebrows crackle when you raised them and the snow lay heavy and thick on the streets, Matt and Ellie would watch out of those same windows at their son, Richard, building thick-girthed men and squat igloos in the yard.

All year long, season in and season out, those back windows stared in wide-open fascination at the houses opposite, bringing their cooking smells into the apartment and making Matt and Ellie—and Richard, when he had lived there with them—hungry enough to eat a horse between two mattresses… and, in the evenings, wafting in the faint strains of a mixture of musical rhythms, some of which almost had continued to resemble the great sounds that Matt and Ellie used to listen to in their courting days. Almost, but not quite.

The seven rooms of the apartment were still sparingly furnished. Matt and and Ellie had never gone in for a lot of clutter, a fact more noticeable now since the inconsequential but somehow strangely important debris that life throws up was nowhere to be seen.

Matt had spent most of the tearful week following the accident removing all trace of Ellie… the handwritten notes telling him she’d gone down to the store for something she’d forgotten, and the anniversary and birthday cards they had sent each other and which they’d collected—ghoulishly, on reflection, Matt had decided reluctantly—in a long drawer that ran almost the full length of the polished light oak dining table in the kitchen. Out they went, along with the scuffed and battered soft leather mocassins that Ellie used to wear while they watched the television; the various lipsticks that Ellie would leave around the apartment and then forget where she’d put them… Matt found every one, eight of them, each discovery feeling like an arrow through his soul; the photocopied grocery lists that Ellie had produced on Matt’s word processor—he’d trust to luck and memory from now on… he couldn’t face filling in those columns any more than he could face walking the supermarket aisles with people staring at his bloodshot eyes. And, anyway, he wasn’t eating that much these days. Not since the accident. Now life was simply a matter of shitting and shaving, with Matt’s requirements from the 24-hour convenience store on Broadway more-or-less comprising only toilet tissues and razor-blades, with all other sustenance provided either by the liquor store on the corner of West 3rd and Sixth or Ssbarro’s call-out pizza service over on Broadway.

“You can’t exist on pizzas, Dad,” Richard had said when he and his shrew-faced wife, Sandra, the dental receptionist from Des Moines, had come down to stay with Matt over the funeral week, turning his face away in that mock-laugh of his, adjusting his glasses like he was delivering lines at a stand-up amateur night. “Listen to reason, will you,” he’d said, getting agitated, thumping his chest against the indigestion that always seemed to start up when things weren’t going quite the way he’d planned them. “Goddam Ssbarro’s profits must be going through the roof, for Crissakes.”

Matt had kept calm, though he couldn’t understand why. A coronary would have been good news that week… would have meant he didn’t have to stand alongside the open grave at the small cemetery adjoining St.-Lukes-in-the-Field over on Weehawken, while a man Matt and Ellie had never met said nice but inevitably insincere and therefore meaningless things about Ellie, calling her Eleanor, which Ellie hated—had hated—Matt turning and glaring at Richard, who had arranged the service… Richard seeing the look and glancing away quickly, staring down at his shoes, sensible lace-ups, polished respectfully.

But respect was only a game to Matt’s son, the grown-up man who had replaced the boy who used to build snow figures in the yard back when the world was younger and happier. For Richard, ‘respect’ was simply a piece of clothing he pulled on when he deemed it necessary and never because he felt it with his heart. Richard was corporate through and through, a trait that had secured him a high managerial position with a savings and loan outfit based in Connecticut, whose name Matt could never remember—a source of annoyance to Richard that pleased his father no end, though Matt was not by nature a malicious or vindictive man.

Even at the hearing—hastily arranged because one of Richard’s Manhattan colleagues knew a paper shuffler attached to the DA’s office—when the man who had driven head-on into 55-year-old Ellie Blenheim’s ‘74 Mustang II, her pride and joy, the very first and only car she had ever had all to herself, the result of Matt’s job at the small advertising and design studio over on Downing Street earning him a company vehicle. The car—a Dodge, something that Matt couldn’t get out of his mind, recalling the line from The Graduate about old Elaine Robinson got started in a Ford… old Ellie Blenheim got wasted by a Dodge—hit his wife’s Mustang with a combined speed impact of around 80 miles an hour on MacDougal outside of a dimly lit store that sold second-hand CDs and old vinyl albums… the kind that Matt and Ellie used to buy when they were first going together… stuff on the old Blue Note label, Jimmy Smith, Horace Silver… stuff like that… even when that man, early twenties, soused on booze and who knew what else, got only a suspended sentence and a driving ban, Matt had shrugged.

“Suspended fucking sentence,” Richard had said as they came out of the courthouse somewhere uptown—Matt couldn’t remember that either—“he should’ve got a fucking suspended sentence… they should’ve hung the bastard.”

“Hanged,” Matt had said, correcting him without even thinking what he was doing, thinking instead of Ellie’s eyes and Ellie’s smile… wondering suddenly how he was going to be able to live without them.

“What?” Richard had said, his eyes wide and staring. “Hanged? What the hell are you-”

“Dick, watch your language,” the shrew-faced dental receptionist from Des Moines had said softly, glancing around at the people passing them on the sidewalk as they walked to Richard’s Toyota Four Wheel through the late October sunshine, smiling her perfectly capped-teeth smile, a receptionist’s smile, devoid of real warmth, all show and no feeling. Small-time corporate, just like her husband.

Dick. Matt hated that word. Dick was what drunks called their peckers.

Matt wondered if that was the way Sandra saw her husband: a pecker with a pocketbook… he liked the alliteration even though ‘wallet’ was actually the most appropriate word. Maybe that was the way Sandra saw her husband… a phallus that earned almost obscene amounts of money which enabled them to live in palatial splendor in a nineteenth century family house on the Farmington River, about 10 miles west of Hartford, where even the garages had heat-sensor security devices and cameras, though break-ins were a rarity.

Richard Blenheim’s life was one of gadget measurability and an almost sterile orderliness. Matt and Ellie had never liked going to visit… had never liked having to place newspapers in the newspaper rack, being told like they were kids, patronizing words, detailed explanations of how neatness made for an ordered mind. Thankfully, invitations had always been thin on the ground.

Coming out of the courthouse, Richard had shaken his head, thumped his chest a couple of times to dislodge both his acid attack and the unfairness of it all, mad more at the fact that someone had gotten away with something than at the fact that his mother was dead… never mind that she had effectively been murdered. Richard being corporate again, following rules and guidelines, taking care of business.

But for that very reason, Matt knew, having spent a considerable portion of his own life facing boardroom battles and business politics, Richard would never be a success. He had never learned one of the most important rules: there are battles to fight and battles to walk away from. You get the two mixed up—the tendency to do which was human nature—and you wind up winning none and making yourself look like an asshole to all and sundry. When he had said as much to Ellie, after one particularly fraught weekend at a seafood restaurant up near where Richard and Sandra lived, a meal during which Richard had insisted not only a completely free meal but also a second complimentary meal, again for four, for the somewhat less-than-heinous crime of (a) Ellie’s bisque being cool and (b) their main courses arriving after those served to a couple who had come into the restaurant a good half-hour behind them.

“You don’t get nothing unless you show these bastards who’s the boss,” Richard had confided to his father, not so sotto voce, thumping his chest and then slugging back claret like it was water. On that occasion, Matt had decided against lecturing his son on double-negatives.

Not surprisingly, Ellie hadn’t gone a bundle on having Richard called an asshole: she didn’t particularly like the word and she certainly didn’t feel it appropriate for Matt to think it of his—their—own son. But then, when she thought Matt wasn’t watching her, she stared glassy-eyed out of the window as they drove back to Manhattan, watching the world go by and wondering what they had done for their only son to turn out that way. And what way is that? Matt imagined one of the gremlin voices in his wife’s head asking. Like an asshole, he imagined the response from one of the other voices.

Sometimes when Matt looked at his son, particularly during those strange days after Ellie’s funeral, he wondered where the young boy had disappeared, the young boy he and Ellie had chased around the rooms of Matt’s now empty and echoing apartment. Where was that single day, that briefest of pauses between what has been for so very long and what will now be forever more, that solitary heartbeat when Richard stopped being a boy and stretched out for manhood and all the things it carried with it?

If he were he able to go back to live through his life again but this time pay far more attention to even the most seemingly insignificant things, would Matt spot that moment? Would he be able to discern some change in the lines on his son’s face, see some dawning of higher intellect in the boy’s eyes, like the gradual dissipation of milky cataracts washed away by a magical healing fluid?

Matt wondered if everyone had a moment like Christopher Milne when, as Milne—then Christopher Robin—did in the final story of his father’s two Pooh books, he or she became disenchanted with childhood things (not least a one-time favorite teddy bear), and discarded them in favor of a future beckoning on a distant horizon shot through with the burnished reds and golds of a New Dawn and all its myriad opportunities.

When Matt had first read that story, ‘The Enchanted Place’, to the then seven- or eight-year-old Richard, while Ellie bustled in the kitchen preparing supper, his son’s eyes had misted over in tune with his own suddenly cracked and quavering voice, picking up the aching sadness of Christopher Robin’s fumbling attempt at explaining to Pooh that he was not able—or even inclined—to spend as much time with the bear in the future.

Now the book was filed on one of the shelves in the apartment, dusty from years of being left alone, and the boy that had listened and wept silently was also filed away, deep in the recesses of the adult he had become. Now, all Richard could think about was making sure the guy who ran into his mother’s Mustang II paid… and paid dearly.

As far as Matt was concerned, what the hell did it matter what the guy got? Ellie was dead. She’d be no less dead if they chopped off the guy’s nuts and fed them to him on Cable television. And she would be no more dead if they gave him the keys to the city and this week’s winning lottery ticket.

Matt was glad when Richard and Sandra went home, 3 November, early in the morning, with the day shining bright and oblivious of the dramas unfolding everywhere in the city, everywhere in every city in the world. Matt made an apologetic refusal to Sandra’s invitation to go with them and spend a few weeks in Farmington, saying he needed to come to terms with Ellie’s death and staying in the apartment was the only way to do that, Richard not repeating the offer, the shrew-faced dental receptionist air-kissing the side of Matt’s face, a self-confident off-Broadway starlet, saying ‘You give us a call now if you want anything, okay Dad?’, her name for him sounding silly and affected, speaking to Matt like he was the child she’d never had and never would have.

The apartment seemed to settle once again when they’d left, seemed to rest and grow easy, breathe out in relief. If an apartment could unbuckle its belt and flop down on a couch, Matt’s would have done it then, lifting its skirting boards and letting rip a mighty one with the sound of the Toyota Four Wheel revving up out on the street, Matt waving from the window once, seeing his son return the wave as the car pulled away from the curb, Sandra saying something, Matt seeing her mouth move… like she was chewing peanuts, Richard saying something back to her, things about him, Matt… things Matt would never know about, and banging his fist into his chest while he called names at some driver who didn’t do exactly as he wanted.

The resulting silence in the apartment was absolute and reflective.

It was as though Ellie was still there, sitting in her favorite chair, shaking her head at the TV guide, sitting behind him, pretending she was reading but secretly watching him wave out of the window at their son, too tired… too exhausted to come and stand alongside him. He could feel her regret like an oppressive summer heat, a sentient thing.

There had been times during that first week on his own when Matt could smell Ellie’s perfume wafting along the warm breezes that moved from room to room. There were times, too, in that part-horrible and strangely part-magical time between worlds—between lives—when he had unashamedly spoken to her, told her what he was doing… tried to explain to her memory how much he missed her and all her little ways. And always in his head he could hear her voice, telling him that she knew. Calling him Matty—Ellie’s name for him—and saying it was swell where she was. Swell. One of Ellie’s words… but Matt knew that it wasn’t Ellie saying it. He knew that it was only himself, putting words into his dead wife’s mouth.

Matt thought back constantly, in those first Ellie-less days, to an old conundrum from his college years, a variation on the Schrodinger’s Cat theory: if a chair falls over in an empty house, does it still make a noise? Science and the laws of nature say that it does, of course, but nobody can prove it, for to prove it would require some kind of experimental observations and that would remove the primary criterion for the experiment. Perhaps, without any audience, the chair topples silently onto the wooden floor.

And perhaps, too, so long as he did not look to her favorite chair or to the door jamb leading into the kitchen where Ellie liked to lean when she was speaking on the telephone, Matt could trick the ways of the world and make it so that his wife was not dead. Not really. Not if he did not accept it.

That’s when he decided that he had to clear the place if he were to remain sane. He had to lance it as though it were a boil, remove the poison… because, though they were only memories, the things Ellie had left behind were just as poisonous: they caused him pain and they made him want to talk to her, ask her how she was. Matt had heard someone say once that losing someone wouldn’t be so bad if you could just call them up once in a while on the telephone. He now knew that to be true. The separation caused a type of madness, an incarceration of a sort, even though the freedom of the person left behind was not in any way hampered. A fine madness, if ever there was one. It was bad enough creaking along towards the big Six-Oh, hair thinning, teeth grinding down, arthritis playing up, breath shortening, memory failing… without losing your marbles into the bargain.

At first it was just a few things, the little incidentals, with the vast bulk of stuff he sorted through being placed lovingly and gently onto a ‘keep’ pile… until, at the end of one so-called ‘clearing’ session, the ‘keep’ pile looked pretty much exactly the same as the ‘to sort through’ pile he’d started out with. That was when Ellie’s clothes started appearing on the ‘throw’ pile… neatly folded sweaters, dresses, the blouse he’d bought her when they went down to New Orleans for their 25th anniversary, the shoes they’d bought in London on their one visit to England for Ellie’s 50th birthday… every single item seemed to have been purchased or saved simply to commemorate something. That was why it had to go. All of it. Every single thing. At the end of that one afternoon session, Matt was exhausted. He felt as though he could not cry another tear, his throat hoarse from endless outpourings of grief… endless questions as to why it had happened. Why her? Why him? Matt went to bed at 5 PM and slept until the following dawn, opening his eyes when the city opened its own eyes, the two of them facing another day with a marked lack of enthusiasm, like clocking onto a shift.

But, with breakfast, came an improvement. Matt suddenly felt better, though everything—including feelings—had to be taken on a strictly comparative and relative basis. Looking down at the black bags of trash in the yard, their tied edges blowing in the wind, Matt felt it had been a job well done… though, as the coffeepot put-putted on the counter beside him, he was amazed and fearful at the relatively small amount of stuff that accounted for a lifetime spent with another person.

So what were you expecting? the coffeepot put-putted, breathing life-restoring fumes into the apartment. A town dump?

But the exercise had been a success, Matt convinced himself as he sipped his first coffee of the day, a catharsis, albeit a qualified one. As he looked around the apartment he was both relieved and a little disappointed to see how thorough he had been: there seemed to be no trace of his wife. It were as though his apartment was a bachelor hideaway, had always been a bachelor hideaway.

There were photographs in small frames dotted around—on the breakfast bar in the kitchen, by his bed, by the telephone—but those tell-tale signs of another person, the ones you never notice until the person isn’t there any more, all of those were gone. He would never again go into the bathroom and find the toilet seat left down… little things like that.

Matt glanced out of the window at the backyard again, saw the black bags sitting by the trash, and wondered if he had gone maybe a little too far a little too quickly. Wondered if maybe he should have kept something, a keepsake, some kind of totem that he could touch, that would bring back the memory of Ellie… make her real again.

Then, almost a full month since his wife’s death and two weeks following the departure of Richard and Sandra, there came the day when Matt realized there was one thing he wanted to keep, one thing that he could keep, one thing that would bring him closer to his wife than anything else he could think of. It wasn’t clothing and it wasn’t jewellery; it wasn’t a favorite photograph or picture; it wasn’t a long-loved song or the heady scent of a perfume. In fact, Matt didn’t even think of it himself… it was a telephone call that started it off. A simple conversation that was to set in motion everything else that was to make up the rest of his life.