Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel Read online

  Abby Black lived in #1 in a townhouse on Bedford Street. It took me two hours and twenty-three minutes to walk there, and my hand got exhausted from shaking my tambourine. There was a little sign above the door that said the poet Edna Saint Vincent Millay once lived in the house, and that it was the narrowest house in New York. I wondered if Edna Saint Vincent Millay was a man or a woman. I tried the key, and it went in halfway, but then it stopped. I knocked. No one answered, even though I could hear someone talking inside, and I guessed that #1 meant the first floor, so I knocked again. I was willing to be annoying if that's what was necessary.

  A woman opened the door and said, "Can I help you?" She was incredibly beautiful, with a face like Mom's, which seemed like it was smiling even when she wasn't smiling, and huge boobs. I especially liked how her earrings sometimes touched her neck. It made me wish all of a sudden that I'd brought some kind of invention for her, so that she'd have a reason to like me. Even something small and simple, like a phosphorus brooch.

  "Hi." "Hello." "Are you Abby Black?" "Yes." "I'm Oskar Schell." "Hello." "Hi." I told her, "I'm sure people tell you this constantly, but if you looked up 'incredibly beautiful' in the dictionary, there would be a picture of you." She cracked up a bit and said, "People never tell me that." "I bet they do." She cracked up a bit more. "They don't." "Then you hang out with the wrong people." "You might be right about that." "Because you're incredibly beautiful."

  She opened the door a bit more. I asked, "Did you know Thomas Schell?" "Excuse me?" "Did you know Thomas Schell?" She thought. I wondered why she had to think. "No." "Are you sure?" "Yes." There was something unsure about the way she said she was sure, which made me think that maybe she was keeping some sort of secret from me. So what would that secret be? I handed her the envelope and said, "Does this mean anything to you?" She looked at it for a while. "I don't think so. Should it?" "Only if it does," I told her. "It doesn't," she told me. I didn't believe her.

  "Would it be OK if I came in?" I asked. "Now is not really the best time." "Why not?" "I'm in the middle of something." "What kind of something?" "Is that any of your business?" "Is that a rhetorical question?" "Yes." "Do you have a job?" "Yes." "What's your job?" "I am an epidemiologist." "You study diseases." "Yes." "Fascinating." "Listen, I don't know what it is that you need, but if it has to do with that envelope, I'm sure I can't help—" "I'm extremely thirsty," I said, touching my throat, which is the universal sign for thirsty. "There's a deli on the corner." "Actually, I'm diabetic and I need some sugar asap." Lie #35. "Do you mean A.S.A.P.?" "Anyway."

  I didn't feel great about lying, and I didn't believe in being able to know what's going to happen before it happens, but for some reason I knew I had to get inside her apartment. In exchange for the lie, I made

  a promise to myself that when I got a raise in my allowance, I would donate part of that raise to people who in reality do have diabetes. She took a heavy breath, like she was incredibly frustrated, but on the other hand, she didn't ask me to leave. A man's voice called something from inside. "Orange juice?" she asked. "Do you have any coffee?" "Follow me," she said, and she walked into the apartment. "What about non-dairy creamer?"

  I got a look around as I followed her, and everything was clean and perfect. There were neat photographs on the walls, including one where you could see an African-American woman's VJ, which made me feel self-conscious. "Where are the sofa cushions?" "It doesn't have cushions." "What is that?" "You mean the painting?" "Your apartment smells good." The man in the other room called again, this time extremely loudly, like he was desperate, but she didn't pay any attention, like she didn't hear it, or didn't care.

  I touched a lot of things in her kitchen, because it made me feel OK for some reason. I ran my finger along the top of her microwave, and it turned gray. "C'est sale," I said, showing it to her and cracking up. She became extremely serious. "That's embarrassing," she said. "You should see my laboratory," I said. "I wonder how that could have happened," she said. I said, "Things get dirty." "But I like to keep things clean. A woman comes by every week to clean. I've told her a million times to clean everywhere. I've even pointed that out to her." I asked her why she was getting so upset about such a small thing. She said, "It doesn't feel small to me," and I thought about moving a single grain of sand one millimeter. I took a wet wipe from my field kit and cleaned the microwave.

  "Since you're an epidemiologist," I said, "did you know that seventy percent of household dust is actually composed of human epidermal matter?" "No," she said, "I didn't." "I'm an amateur epidemiologist." "There aren't many of those." "Yeah. And I conducted a pretty fascinating experiment once where I told Feliz to save all the dust from our apartment for a year in a garbage bag for me. Then I weighed it. It weighed 112 pounds. Then I figured out that seventy percent of 112 pounds is 78.4 pounds. I weigh 76 pounds, 78 pounds when I'm sopping wet. That doesn't actually prove anything, but it's weird. Where can I put this?" "Here," she said, taking the wet wipe from me. I asked her, "Why are you sad?" "Excuse me?" "You're sad. Why?"

  The coffee machine gurgled. She opened a cabinet and took out a mug. "Do you take sugar?" I told her yes, because Dad always took sugar. As soon as she sat down, she got back up and took a bowl of grapes from her refrigerator. She also took out cookies and put them on a plate. "Do you like strawberries?" she asked. "Yes," I told her, "but I'm not hungry." She put out some strawberries. I thought it was weird that there weren't any menus or little magnetic calendars or pictures of kids on her refrigerator. The only thing in the whole kitchen was a photograph of an elephant on the wall next to the phone. "I love that," I told her, and not just because I wanted her to like me. "You love what?" she asked. I pointed at the picture. "Thank you," she said. "I like it, too." "I said I loved it." "Yes. I love it."

  "How much do you know about elephants?" "Not too much." "Not too much a little? Or not too much nothing?" "Hardly anything." "For example, did you know that scientists used to think that elephants had esp?" "Do you mean E.S.P.?" "Anyway, elephants can set up meetings from very faraway locations, and they know where their friends and enemies are going to be, and they can find water without any geological clues. No one could figure out how they do all of those things. So what's actually going on?" "I don't know." "How do they do it?" "It?" "How do they set up meetings if they don't have E.S.P.?" "You're asking me?" "Yes." "I don't know." "Do you want to know?" "Sure." "A lot?" "Sure." "They're making very, very, very, very deep calls, way deeper than what humans can hear. They're talking to each other. Isn't that so awesome?" "It is." I ate a strawberry.

  "There's this woman who's spent the last couple of years in the Congo or wherever. She's been making recordings of the calls and putting together an enormous library of them. This past year she started playing them back." "Playing them back?" "To the elephants." "Why?" I loved that she asked why. "As you probably know, elephants have much, much stronger memories than other mammals." "Yes. I think I knew that." "So this woman wanted to see just how good their memories actually are. She'd play the call of an enemy that was recorded a bunch of years earlier—a call they'd heard only once—and they'd get

  panicky, and sometimes they'd run. They remembered hundreds of calls. Thousands. There might not even be a limit. Isn't that fascinating?" "It is." "Because what's really fascinating is that she'd play the call of a dead elephant to its family members." "And?" "They remembered." "What did they do?" "They approached the speaker."

  "I wonder what they were feeling." "What do you mean?" "When they heard the calls of their dead, was it with love that they approached the jeep? Or fear? Or anger?" "I don't remember." "Did they charge?" "I don't remember." "Did they cry?" "Only humans can cry tears. Did you know that?" "It looks like the elephant in that photograph is crying." I got extremely close to the picture, and it was true. "It was probably manipulated in Photoshop," I said. "But just in case, can I take a picture of your picture?" She nodded and said, "Didn't I read somewhere that elephants are the only other animals that bu
ry their dead?" "No," I told her as I focused Grandpa's camera, "you didn't. They just gather the bones. Only humans bury their dead." "Elephants couldn't believe in ghosts." That made me crack up a little. "Well, most scientists wouldn't say so." "What would you say?" "I'm just an amateur scientist." "And what would you say?" I took the picture. "I'd say they were confused."

  Then she started to cry tears.

  I thought, I'm the one who's supposed to be crying.

  "Don't cry," I told her. "Why not?" she asked. "Because," I told her. "Because what?" she asked. Since I didn't know why she was crying, I couldn't think of a reason. Was she crying about the elephants? Or something else I'd said? Or the desperate person in the other room? Or something that I didn't know about? I told her, "I bruise easily." She said, "I'm sorry." I told her, "I wrote a letter to that scientist who's making those elephant recordings. I asked if I could be her assistant. I told her I could make sure there were always blank tapes ready for recording, and I could boil all the water so it was safe to drink, or even just carry her equipment. Her assistant wrote back to tell me she already had an assistant, obviously, but maybe there would be a project in the future that we could work on together." "That's great. Something to look forward to." "Yeah."

  Someone came to the door of the kitchen who I guessed was the man that had been calling from the other room. He just stuck his head in extremely quickly, said something I didn't understand, and walked away. Abby pretended to ignore it, but I didn't. "Who was that?" "My husband." "Does he need something?" "I don't care." "But he's your husband, and I think he needs something." She cried more tears. I went over to her and I put my hand on her shoulder, like Dad used to do with me. I asked her what she was feeling, because that's what he would ask. "You must think this is very unusual," she said. "I think a lot of things are very unusual," I said. She asked, "How old are you?" I told her twelve—lie #59—because I wanted to be old enough for her to love me. "What's a twelve-year-old doing knocking on the doors of strangers?" "I'm trying to find a lock. How old are you?" "Forty-eight." "Jose. You look much younger than that." She cracked up through her crying and said, "Thanks." "What's a forty-eight-year-old doing inviting strangers into her kitchen?" "I don't know." "I'm being annoying," I said. "You're not being annoying," she said, but it's extremely hard to believe someone when they tell you that.

  I asked, "Are you sure you didn't know Thomas Schell?" She said, "I didn't know Thomas Schell," but for some reason I still didn't believe her. "Maybe you know someone else with the first name Thomas? Or someone else with the last name Schell?" "No." I kept thinking there was something she wasn't telling me. I showed her the little envelope again. "But this is your last name, right?" She looked at the writing, and I could see that she recognized something about it. Or I thought I could see it. But then she said, "I'm sorry. I don't think I can help you." "And what about the key?" "What key?" I realized I hadn't even shown it to her yet. All of that talking—about dust, about elephants—and I hadn't gotten to the whole reason I was there.

  I pulled the key out from under my shirt and put it in her hand. Because the string was still around my neck, when she leaned in to look at the key, her face came incredibly close to my face. We were frozen there for a long time. It was like time was stopped. I thought about the falling body.

  "I'm sorry," she said. "Why are you sorry?" "I'm sorry I don't know anything about the key." Disappointment #3. "I'm sorry, too."

  Our faces were so incredibly close.

  I told her, "The fall play this fall is Hamlet, in case you're interested. I'm Yorick. We have a working fountain. If you want to come to opening night, it's twelve weeks from now. It should be pretty great." She said, "I'll try," and I could feel the breath of her words against my face. I asked her, "Could we kiss for a little bit?"

  "Excuse me?" she said, although, on the other hand, she didn't pull her head back. "It's just that I like you, and I think I can tell that you like me." She said, "I don't think that's a good idea." Disappointment #4. I asked why not. She said, "Because I'm forty-eight and you're twelve." "So?" "And I'm married." "So?" "And I don't even know you." "Don't you feel like you know me?" She didn't say anything. I told her, "Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are." "And the more you wage war?" Then I was the silent one. She said, "You're a sweet, sweet boy." I said, "Young man." "But I don't think it's a good idea." "Does it have to be a good idea?" "I think it does." "Can I at least take a picture of you?" She said, "That would be nice." But when I started focusing Grandpa's camera, she put her hand in front of her face for some reason. I didn't want to force her to explain herself, so I thought of a different picture I could take, which would be more truthful, anyway. "Here's my card," I told her, when the cap was back on the lens, "in case you remember anything about the key or just want to talk."

  ***

  I went over to Grandma's apartment when I got home, which is what I did basically every afternoon, because Mom worked at the firm on Saturdays and sometimes even Sundays, and she got panicky about me being alone. As I got near Grandma's building, I looked up and didn't see her sitting at her window waiting for me, like she always did. I asked Farley if she was there, and he said he thought so, so I went up the seventy-two stairs.

  I rang the doorbell. She didn't answer, so I opened the door, because she always leaves it unlocked, even though I don't think that's safe, because sometimes people who seem good end up being not as good as you might have hoped. As I walked in, she was coming to the door. It looked almost like she had been crying, but I knew that was impossible, because once she told me that she emptied herself of tears when Grandpa left. I told her fresh tears are produced every time you cry. She said, "Anyway." Sometimes I wondered if she cried when no one was looking.

  "Oskar!" she said, and lifted me from the ground with one of her hugs. "I'm OK," I said. "Oskar!" she said again, picking me up in another hug. "I'm OK," I said again, and then I asked her where she'd been. "I was in the guest room talking to the renter."

  When I was a baby, Grandma would take care of me during the day. Dad told me that she would give me baths in the sink, and trim my fingernails and toenails with her teeth because she was afraid of using clippers. When I was old enough to take baths in the bathtub, and to know I had a penis and a scrotum and everything, I asked her not to sit in the room with me. "Why not?" "Privacy." "Privacy from what? From me?" I didn't want to hurt her feelings, because not hurting her feelings is another of my raisons d'être. "Just privacy," I said. She put her hands on her stomach and said, "From me?" She agreed to wait outside, but only if I held a ball of yarn, which went under the bathroom door and was connected to the scarf she was knitting. Every few seconds she would give it a tug, and I had to tug back—undoing what she'd just done—so that she could know I was OK.

  She was taking care of me when I was four, chasing me around the apartment like she was a monster, and I cut my top lip against the end of our coffee table and had to go to the hospital. Grandma believes in God, but she doesn't believe in taxis, so I bled on my shirt on the bus. Dad told me it gave her incredibly heavy boots, even though my lip only needed a couple of stitches, and that she kept coming across the street to tell him, "It was all my fault. You should never let him be around me again." The next time I saw her after that, she told me, "You see, I was pretending to be a monster, and I became a monster."

  Grandma stayed at our apartment the week after Dad died, while Mom was going around Manhattan putting up posters. We had thousands of thumb wars, and I won every single one, even the ones I was trying to lose. We watched approved documentaries, and cooked vegan cupcakes, and went for lots of walks in the park. One day I wandered away from her and hid. I liked the way it felt to have someone look for me, to hear my name again and again. "Oskar! Oskar!" Maybe I didn't even like it, but I needed it right then.

  I followed her around from a safe distance as she star
ted to get incredibly panicky. "Oskar!" She was crying and touching everything, but I wouldn't let her know where I was, because I was sure that the cracking up at the end would make it all OK. I watched her as she walked home, where I knew she would sit on the stoop of our building and wait for Mom to come back. She would have to tell her I had disappeared, and that because she wasn't watching me closely enough, I was gone forever and there would be no more Schells. I ran ahead, down Eighty-second Street and up Eighty-third, and when she came up to the building, I jumped out from behind the door. "But I didn't order a pizza!" I said, cracking up so hard I thought my neck would burst open.

  She started to say something, and then she stopped. Stan took her arm and said, "Why don't you sit down, Grandma." She told him, "Don't touch me," in a voice that I'd never heard from her. Then she turned around and went across the street to her apartment. That night, I looked through my binoculars at her window and there was a note that said, "Don't go away."

  Ever since that day, whenever we go on walks she makes us play a game like Marco Polo, where she calls my name and I have to call back to let her know that I'm OK.

  "Oskar."

  "I'm OK."

  "Oskar."

  "I'm OK."

  I'm never exactly sure when we're playing the game and when she's just saying my name, so I always let her know that I'm OK.

  A few months after Dad died, Mom and I went to the storage facility in New Jersey where Dad kept the stuff that he didn't use anymore but might use again one day, like when he retired, I guess. We rented a car, and it took us more than two hours to get there, even though it wasn't far away, because Mom kept stopping to go to the bathroom and wash her face. The facility wasn't organized very well, and it was extremely dark, so it took us a long time to find Dad's little room. We got in a fight about his razor, because she said it should go in the "throw it away" pile and I told her it should go in the "save it" pile. She said, "Save it for what?" I said, "It doesn't matter for what." She said, "I don't know why he saved a three-dollar razor in the first place." I said, "It doesn't matter why." She said, "We can't save everything." I said, "So it will be OK if I throw away all of your things and forget about you after you die?" As it was coming out of my mouth, I wished it was going into my mouth. She said she was sorry, which I thought was weird.