Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

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