Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

in 5A. May I please ask you a few questions?” “Hello, young man!” he said, and he was kind of weird-looking, because he had on a red beret, like a French person, and an eye patch, like a pirate. He said, “I'm Mr. Black!” I said, “I know.” He turned around and started walking into his apartment. I guessed I was supposed to follow him, so I did.
    Another thing that was weird was that his apartment looked exactly like our apartment. The floors were the same, the windowsills were the same, even the tiles on the fireplace were the same color green. But his apartment was also incredibly different, because it was filled with different stuff. Tons of stuff. Stuff everywhere. Also, there was a huge column right in the middle of the dining room. It was as big as two refrigerators, and it made it impossible for the room to have a table or anything else in it, like ours did. “What's that for?” I asked, but he didn't hear me. There were a bunch of dolls and other things on the mantel, and the floors were filled with little rugs. “I got those in Iceland!” he said, pointing at the seashells on the windowsill. He pointed at a sword on the wall and said, “I got that in Japan!” I asked him if it was a samurai sword. He said, “It's a replica!” I said, “Cool.”
    He led me to the kitchen table, which was where our kitchen table was, and he sat down and slapped his hand against his knee. “Well!” he said, so loudly that I wanted to cover my ears. “I've had a pretty amazing life!” I thought it was weird that he said that, because I didn't ask him about his life. I didn't even tell him why I was there. “I was born on January 1, 1900! I lived every day of the twentieth century!” “Really?” “My mother altered my birth certificate so I could fight in the First World War! That was the only lie she ever told! I was engaged to Fitzgerald's sister!” “Who's Fitzgerald?” “Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, my boy! A Great Author! A Great Author!” “Oops.” “I used to sit on her porch and talk to her father while she powdered her nose upstairs! Her father and I had the most lively conversations! He was a Great Man, like Winston Churchill was a Great Man!” I decided that it would be better to Google Winston Churchill when I got home, instead of mentioning that I didn't know who he was. “One day, she came downstairs and was ready to go! I told her to hold on for a minute, because her father and I were right smack in the middle of a terrific conversation, and you can't interrupt a terrific conversation, right!” “I don't know.” “Later that night, as I was dropping her off on that same porch, she said, 'Sometimes I wonder if you like my father more than me!' I in herited that damn honesty from my mother, and it caught up with me again! I told her, 'I do!' Well, that was the last time I told her 'I do,' if you know what I mean!” “I don't.” “I blew it! Boy, did I blow it!” He started cracking up extremely loudly, and he slapped his knee. I said, “That's hilarious,” because it must have been for him to crack up so much. “Hilarious!” he said. “It is! I never heard from her again! Oh, well! So many people enter and leave your life! Hundreds of thousands of people! You have to keep the door open so they can come in! But it also means you have to let them go!”
    He put a teakettle on the stove.
    “You're wise,” I told him. “I've had enough time to get wise! See this!” he hollered, and he flipped up his eye patch. “That's from Nazi shrapnel! I was a war correspondent and ended up attaching myself to a British tank corps going up the Rhine! We were ambushed one afternoon, toward the end of '44! I bled my eye all over the page I was writing on, but those sons of bitches couldn't stop me! I finished my sentence!” “What was the sentence?” “Ah, who can remember! The point is I wasn't going to let those bastard Krauts stop my pen! It's mightier than the sword, you know! And the MG34!” “Could you please put the patch back?” “See that!” he said, pointing at the kitchen floor, but I couldn't stop thinking about his eye. “There's oak under those rugs! Quarter-sawn oak! I should know, I laid it myself!” “Jose,” I said, and I wasn't just saying it to be nice. I was keeping a list in my head of things I could do to be more like him. “My wife and I renovated this kitchen ourselves! With these hands!” He showed me his hands. They looked like the