16. Practice #2
One drawer, one slip, nothing else in it.
A carbonless copy, the flimsy pink third page of a three-page form, the kind a counter clerk tears off and gives you so you can prove later that you handed something over or took something away.
The top of it has been cut off cleanly with a blade against a straightedge.
No company. No address. No date. Just the bottom third of a form, and a line, and on the line a signature.
G. D’Amato.
I know that G. I have known that G my whole life. My brother made his capital G open at the top, never closed the loop, and he did it on purpose. He told me why when he was fifteen and had just learned to be insufferable, and what he said was that a closed letter is a finished argument.
I stand in a killing room in Mount Vernon holding the bottom third of a form with my dead brother’s unfinished argument on it, and for a period of time that I would put at twenty seconds and that Valeria would want minuted properly, I want to burn it.
I have a lighter.
Nobody knows this drawer exists. Fabrizio offered to walk in here so I would never have to and I told him no.
Tazio is three blocks south with the engine off.
The clerk does not remember. In twenty seconds this piece of paper could stop existing and my brother could stay what he has been since the morning he died, which is a man somebody killed, instead of becoming whatever this makes him by nine o’clock tonight.
And the woman at home would never know.
I get the lighter out of my coat. I hold the slip by the top edge, away from the signature, the way you hold a thing you have already decided about, and I strike it, and I put the corner of my brother’s name into the flame.
It takes. Pink paper takes fast. There is a second where the edge goes brown and lifts and I can smell it, and in that second I am not a man deciding anything, I am just a man watching a problem become smaller.
Then I think: it would be the second time I decided what she was allowed to look at.
I did not want you to look at my hands.
I close my fist on it. It burns the side of my thumb and goes out and I stand in a killing room in Mount Vernon with a piece of evidence crushed in my hand and my heart going like I have run up the stairs.
When I open my hand the corner is gone. Not much of it. A brown crescent the size of a thumbnail, cupped and curled, nowhere near the signature, and permanent.
She will see it in about twenty hours.
She will see it before I say a word, because she looks at paper before she looks at people.
I take out my phone and I photograph the slip in my hand.
Then I photograph the drawer. Then I bag it, and I write the time on the bag, 8:51 a.m., and the place, and my own name, and then I write one more line under it: Damage to lower left corner occurred at approximately 8:49 a.m. and was caused by me.
Because a chain that starts with an unnamed man is not a chain. And because if I am going to hand her a ruined thing, I am going to hand it to her ruined, with my name on the ruin, in my own writing.
Then I stand there with it and make myself say the next part out loud in an empty room, because saying it in my head is how a man gets to keep half of it.
“I am not qualified to know my brother’s handwriting.”
That is the miserable, technical, correct truth. I am the least qualified person alive to look at that G, because I want it to be a forgery so badly that my wanting has weight, and weight bends things.
So I do not decide. I hold the question open, formally, the way you hold a bid open, and I hear how much I sound like a man protecting himself and I hold it open anyway, and I carry it down twenty feet and out the door and down the stairs past the whitewashed window of Wexler Sign and Awning into a street where somebody is running a leaf blower for no reason at all.
Tazio is three blocks south with the engine off.
“Forty minutes,” he says. “You took thirty-one.”
“Get a crew. Nobody touches the bench. Nobody opens the crate. Two men, and one of them is Ciro, and neither of them goes in past the door.”
“What is in there?”
I think about the pegboard.
“Everything is in there,” I say. “That is the problem.”
I get home at ten past nine at night.
The house is dark the way it is only ever dark now, room by room instead of all at once. Soldo comes down the hall sideways to tell me about his day and then loses interest halfway and lies down on the third stair.
On the counter, on my side, upside down on the saucer, there is a cup.
I know it has been there since four because I know her, and because the arrangement is the arrangement, and because whatever else has been taken apart between us, at four o’clock she stood in this kitchen and reached up and took a cup off a hook for a man she has not forgiven.
I stand there with the evidence bag still in my coat and I look at a cup for longer than I looked at the jigs.
Then I take a second cup off the hook and I set it on her side, for tomorrow, because I will not be sure of tomorrow.
Upstairs she is awake. I can tell from the hall. She does not call out and I do not go in, and we lie in two rooms with a wall between us like two people holding the same rope from different ends, and neither of us puts it down, and that is not nothing. It is not yet anything else.
I lie there in the dark, in a marriage I bought with a lie I have already confessed and not yet paid for, and I think about the clean rectangle in the gray film beside jig five.
Somewhere out in the cold between this house and the water there is a finished thing standing on a shelf or riding in a coat pocket, made patiently, standing up, in good light. It is not in that room. Which means it is in a room with somebody in it.
That is the thought I expect to keep me up, and it is not.
Because at some point after two I go back through the tray one more time, the way you go back through a hand of cards you have already lost, and I count.
One is where he learned. Two and three are where he got good. Four needed a shim glued in, two hairs thick, because the fourth thing had to sit tighter than the third. Five was cut by a man who had stopped needing to learn.
Four of them have been used.
And she has buried three.
I sit up in the dark and I put my feet on the floor and I do the arithmetic again slowly, because I have made money my whole life out of not being wrong about numbers at night.
Domenico. Sandro. Giulio. Two, three, four.
In order. Whoever numbered those blocks numbered them the way a man numbers anything he intends to keep doing, which is starting at one and going up.
Which puts jig one before Domenico.
Which puts it before her.
She has spent nine years being told she is unlucky. She has been called a curse in her own language by men who kissed her at the funerals. Somebody was already doing this, already good at it, already staining the bottom of a channel over and over in the good light, before he ever heard her name.
She did not draw it down on herself.
Somebody looked at a woman with a dead husband, years ago, and saw a shape he could use again.
My mother drew around every pan on her board so she would know the second one went missing. That was the whole point of the outlines. Not neatness. Notice.
There is a man in the ground somewhere from that first jig, and nobody ever drew around him, and he has been gone long enough that no one is still turning to look at the empty place where he was.
I am the first person in nine years to count him.
And I do not know his name.