Chapter One #2
They were rimmed with dark red thread and embroidered with small yellow flowers.
The leaves of the flowers were green and the red thread had been used again, very sparingly, to outline the midrib and veins of the tiny leaves.
Whoever had sewn and decorated the sock had finished the threads in three clusters, one on the front, one at the back heel, and one on the sole, so that tufts of soft frayed cotton burst out into tassels of green, red, and yellow from these points.
After enough time it had become easy for me to spend hours sifting through the shoes and socks, carrying out my tasks with an indifferent concentration, unplagued by thoughts of who the owners of these garments had been, what their lives had been like, and what had become of them, but occasionally some insignificant detail—a small stain or tear, a worn and tattered heel, or, conversely, a slipper so pristine it was obvious it had never been worn—affected me so immensely that it derailed the rest of my day.
Today it was the punishing needlework evinced by the careful veins stitched atop the green leaf, which to me made perceptible the long-dead, anonymous maker’s love of beauty.
Suddenly it was as if she was very nearby, and veiled from me by only a very thin screen.
I left early for lunch and, on my way outside, accepted a request to drop off a stack of posters for an upcoming Mummy Night at the university’s main administrative building.
The morning’s coolness had worn off, and I was glad when I reached the office and found the air conditioning on full blast.
After I passed the posters to the receptionist, she told me that she had received some mail for the museum that had been delivered there by mistake, and asked me to wait while she fetched it.
I plucked a Polo mint from the tray on her desk and sat in one of the waiting room chairs with a clear view of the front door.
I was the only person in the room when a tall Asian guy wearing glasses and an Eagles hoodie walked in and sat down next to me, even though all the other chairs were free.
I looked at him, and he, perhaps sensing that I was confused, said, “I like to face the front, in case people come in shooting.
Not that it would make much of a difference.
But there’s something about the idea of getting shot in the back that just doesn’t sit right with me, you know?”
As he spoke, I was rolling the donut-shaped mint around in my mouth, allowing it to deposit its piquancy all over the inside of my cheeks, feeling the embossed letters dissolve, and poking into its hole with the tip of my tongue.
I nodded along to what he was saying, agreeing with it precisely because he had admitted there was no logic motivating his behavior, only a feeling.
But he spoke as if the feeling was sufficient, and did not need to be justified with reason, or even a caveat assuring me he was aware of his own irrationality.
With my molars I bit down on the sweet, cracking the ring in half, and said, “Me too.”
He leaned forward and pointed at the clock on the wall in front of us.
“Have you noticed all the clocks in here are tilted?”
he said. He pointed at another clock, on the adjacent wall, above the receptionist’s desk, and then he swiveled in his seat and pointed to a third clock, hanging above us. They all leaned to the left. “Weird, right?”
“It’s weirder,”
I said, “that there are so many clocks at all.”
“Maybe it’s because—”
“Dinh?”
the receptionist said. She had reemerged, without mail.
“See you.”
He disappeared down the hall leading to the offices.
The receptionist apologized and told me she hadn’t found the letters where she thought she’d left them, but had dispatched someone named Norm, whom she suspected of having moved the letters, to recover them.
She added that if I had somewhere to be I could leave, and she would find another way to send them along to the museum.
I thought of the yellow petals and the red stitching and said that I could wait.
I tapped my feet on the ground and won dered whether “Dinh”
was a student, and how old he might be, and what he was doing there. I tried not to look at the clocks.
“Hey, you don’t study biology, do you? Or psych?”
He was back, and sitting down next to me again.
“No.”
“Neuroscience? Pre-med?”
“I’m not a student. I’m a member of the workforce.”
“Oh, great. Me too, kind of. Can I tell you a secret?”
I glanced at the receptionist. She was reaching for a Polo mint with one hand, thumbing her phone with the other. I looked back at “Dinh.”
The lenses of his glasses were smudged, and I, who did not wear glasses, felt a passing urge to remove them, gently, and wipe them for him with my shirt and then place the frames, just as gently, back on the bridge of his nose.
“A secret?”
“Yeah.”
“What if I can’t keep it?”
“I trust you.”
“You don’t even know me.”
He paused to consider this.
“Well, I’m a trusting person. I just need to get this off my chest. I’m Hoang, also.”
“Okay. What’s the secret?”
“Wait, what’s your name?”
“Penelope.”
“Penelope. So,”
Hoang said, dropping into a low voice, “I work in the cancer research lab, right? And the labs have been reporting all these missing mice. The techs are supposed to euthanize the mice after experiments and put the bodies in the biowaste freezers. But a ton, like forty or fifty mice, have been disappearing from the freezers over the past year.”
“How did they know they were missing?”
“The mice have numbered ear tags. So a bunch of numbers are gone, and they think someone has been releasing the mice instead of euthanizing them. So they’ve been calling us all in, to interrogate us. They thought it was one of the undergrads, but they’re wrong.”
“How do you know?”
There was a pause. He looked expectant.
“You’re the culprit?”
“The culprit.”
Hoang smiled, and a dimple appeared on his cheek. “I like that.”
“You gave them your confession just now?”
“My confession! You’re making me sound like a criminal. But yes, yes, I confessed. They were pretty shocked, they didn’t really know what to do. They just told me to go home and they’d contact me soon, I think it’s all over.”
A disheveled man who must have been Norm came ambling into the room, holding a sheaf of papers.
“What’s all over? You’ll get in more trouble?”
“Big trouble. I’m almost definitely losing my job.”
“Then why did you admit it was you?”
Hoang shrugged. “I don’t like lying.”
“Weren’t you lying when you took the mice? By omission?”
“Maybe. Is breaking the rules lying, if the rules are bad?”
“I don’t know,”
I said. “Why did you release them?”
“I spend all day with these mice,”
Hoang said. “I hold them, I feed them, sometimes I talk to them. I play them music. I get to know their personalities—you know they have personalities? They’re playful, they’re really smart, and they have preferences, like dogs, or people. Favorite foods. After all that, how could I kill them?”
The receptionist was waving at me.
“I have to go,” I said.
“See you later, Penelope.”
“See you.”
I walked up to the receptionist and she began to hand me the letters, one by one, insisting on reading aloud to me the intended recipients of each, even though their names were clearly written and I knew better than she where in the museum to find them. When I glanced back, Hoang was slipping out the door. He saw me looking, and waved, and then the door clicked shut.
“And both of these are for Bartholomew—”
I grabbed the rest of the letters from her and rushed out of the room.
“You heading this way too?”
Hoang said, when I caught up with him on the sidewalk.
“Yes,” I lied.
“I want to go to the park where I release the mice, since I probably won’t be doing it anymore,”
he said. We walked on, in the opposite direction of the museum and the halal food truck where I had planned on purchasing my lunch. The sidewalk was pasted with brown leaves, some of which had been trampled so many times that they looked like they’d been painted onto the concrete. We reached Clark Park, where I had spent a lot of time as a student, watching people unclip the leashes from their dogs’ collars to let the dogs bound across the grassy bowl.
“If you ever see a mouse with an ear tag running around here, now you know why,”
Hoang said.
I asked him how he got them out of the lab without people seeing, and he said he usually put them in his pockets; because they knew and trusted him, they were calm and did not wriggle too much, or make any noise. I asked him if he was this devoted to all animals, and he said that he liked animals, but he ate meat and had never seriously considered stopping, so he supposed that the answer would have to be no.
“It’s more just because I know them personally,”
he said. He stopped walking and pointed to a tree.
“What? Is there a mouse?”
“No. Just saying. I love a good birch.”
I looked at the tree again. It just looked like a tree to me. I didn’t think there was a tree in the whole city that I’d be able to identify on sight, unless maybe there were willows somewhere.
“My last name means forest in Chinese,” I said.
“Really? What is it?”
“Lin.”
“That’s crazy. Our last names kind of rhyme.”
He stopped at a cracked curb, looking around, and I stopped too.
“The light’s weird, isn’t it?”
He was right. It was midday, but there was a flatness to everything, and a darkness that didn’t correspond to storm cloud shade.
“Is it September fifth?” he said.
“It might be.”
“Okay, don’t look up, but I think there’s an eclipse.”
Immediately I looked up, and found the strange but still-bright sun. I looked at Hoang. He was squinting at it too.
“I thought you said don’t look.”
“I know, but then you did, and I didn’t want to miss out.”
I laughed, and he looked at me and grinned. “I didn’t even see anything,” I said.
“We’re gonna go blind. I know what we can do, though.”
He jogged over to the birch, scanning the ground like he was searching for something. Whatever it was, he didn’t find it, and he moved to a different tree.
“Come here! Quick!”
He was pointing at the pavement.
“Look.”
I looked, and found, wavering between the leaf shadows, hun dreds of tiny crescent moons. Hoang crisscrossed one hand over the other, making a lattice with his fingers, and in the daubs of sunlight that passed through the gaps and shone onto the concrete were more false moons—hangnails of sun, lunar masqueraders. I tried to copy him, but the crescents were already blurring away.
“It’s ending, I think,” he said.
“So soon?”
“They only last like a minute, right?”
“I don’t know,”
I said. “I’ve never really considered eclipses at all.”
“So which way’s your house?”
“I live in Chinatown.”
“Didn’t you say you were near the park?”
“Oh,”
I said, “I guess I lied.”
He frowned, looking not annoyed but confused, which was worse, like he didn’t understand why anyone would want to lie, and had not expected me to be the type of person who did.
At least, that was what my conscience led me to infer.
I cursed myself for telling the truth.
“I mean, I used to live around here. I wanted to see my old house again. But it was too weird to explain, so I just didn’t.”
“Okay,”
he said, “that’s cool.”
“Yeah, so. Yeah. I’ll go look at it now. It was nice to meet you.”
He nodded. “See you, Forest.”
I waited until he turned the corner, and then began walking back to the museum.
The sky was returning to its normal state.
I decided when I got home I would start reading up on North American trees so that I could identify them too.
I considered actually visiting my old house, and thus unmaking the lie I had told, but I didn’t really see the point.
The stray cat that used to sun itself on our porch and claw at the wooden banisters had died a few months before, according to a Facebook post from one of my former neighbors, and I suspected it would make me sad to see the scratch marks on the painted wood, and either the presence or the absence of the metal bowl that Paul used to fill up with water or milk for the cat to lap.
Up ahead, a cable worker was sitting on a stoop, legs stretched out on the steps, smoking a cigarette.
He wore a utility belt and a baseball cap embellished with the logo of the telecommunications conglomerate for which he worked, and he sat in the shade of an unidentifiable tree.
He saw me staring and he nodded. I nodded back.
“Eclipse,”
he said, pointing up at the sky.
“Yeah,”
I said. “Eclipse.”