Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

hands on the skeleton in the Rainier Scientific catalogue that Ron offered to buy for me, except they had skin, blotchy skin, and I didn't want gifts from Ron. “Where's your wife now?” The teakettle started to whistle.
    “Oh,” he said, “she died twenty-four years ago! Long time ago! Yesterday, in my life!” “Oops.” “It's OK!” “You don't feel bad that I asked about her? You can tell me if you do.” “No!” he said. “Thinking about her is the next best thing!” He poured two cups of tea. “Do you have any coffee?” I asked. “Coffee!” “It stunts my growth, and I'm afraid of death.” He slapped the table and said, “My boy, I have some coffee from Honduras that's got your name on it!” “But you don't even know my name.”
    We sat around for a while and he told me more about his amazing life. As far as he knew, which seemed pretty far, he was the only person still alive who had fought in both of the world wars. He'd been to Australia, and Kenya, and Pakistan, and Panama. I asked him, “If you had to guess, how many countries would you guess you've been to?” He said, “I wouldn't have to guess! One hundred twelve!” “Are there even that many countries?” He told me, “There are more places you haven't heard of than you've heard of!” I loved that. He had reported almost every war of the twentieth century, like the Spanish Civil War, and the genocide in East Timor, and bad stuff that happened in Africa. I hadn't heard of any of them, so I tried to remember them so I could Google them when I got home. The list in my head was getting incredibly long: Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, powdering her nose, Churchill, Mustang convertible, Walter Cronkite, necking, the Bay of Pigs, LP, Datsun, Kent State, lard, Ayatollah Khomeini, Polaroid, apartheid, drive-in, favela, Trotsky, the Berlin Wall, Tito, Gone With the Wind, Frank Lloyd Wright, hula hoop, Technicolor, the Spanish Civil War, Grace Kelly, East Timor, slide rule, a bunch of places in Africa whose names I tried to remember but had already forgotten. It was getting hard to keep all the things I didn't know inside me.
    His apartment was filled with the stuff he'd collected during the
    wars of his life, and I took pictures of them with Grandpa's camera. There were books in foreign languages, and little statues, and scrolls with pretty paintings, and Coke cans from around the world, and a bunch of rocks on his fireplace mantel, although all of them were common. One fascinating thing was that each rock had a little piece of paper next to it that said where the rock came from, and when it came from, like, “Normandy, 6/19/44,” “Hwach'on Dam, 4/09/51,” and “Dallas, 11/22/63.” That was so fascinating, but one weird thing was that there were lots of bullets on the mantel, too, and they didn't have little pieces of paper next to them. I asked him how he knew which was which. “A bullet's a bullet's a bullet!” he said. “But isn't a rock a rock?” I asked. He said, “Of course not!” I thought I understood him, but I wasn't positive, so I pointed at the roses in the vase on the table. “Is a rose a rose?” “No! A rose is not a rose is not a rose!” And then for some reason I started thinking about “Something in the Way She Moves,” so I asked, “Is a love song a love song?” He said, “Yes!” I thought for a second. “Is love love?” He said, “No!” He had a wall of masks from every country he'd been to, like Armenia and Chile and Ethiopia. “It's not a horrible world,” he told me, putting a Cambodian mask on his face, “but it's filled with a lot of horrible people!”
    I had another cup of coffee, and then I knew it was time to get to the point, so I took the key off my neck and gave it to him. “Do you know what this opens?” “Don't think so!” he hollered. “Maybe you knew my dad?” “Who was your dad!” “His name was Thomas Schell. He lived in 5A until he died.” “No,” he said, “that name doesn't ring a bell!” I asked if he was one-hundred-percent sure.“ He said, ”I've lived long enough to know I'm not one-hundred-percent anything!“ and he got up, walked past the column in the dining room, and went over to the coat closet, which was tucked under the stairs. That was when I had the revelation that his apartment wasn't just like ours, because his had an upstairs. He opened the closet, and there was a library card catalogue inside. ”Cool."
    He said, “This is my