Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

shoulders and hollered, “I'd want to know, too!” Then we were silent for a while.
    I thought I was going to cry, but I didn't want to cry in front of him, so I asked where the bathroom was. He pointed to the top of the stairs. As I walked up, I held the railing tight and started inventing things in my head: air bags for skyscrapers, solar-powered limousines that never had to stop moving, a frictionless, perpetual yo-yo. The bathroom smelled like an old person, and some of the tiles that were supposed to be on the wall were on the floor. There was a photograph of a woman tucked in the corner of the mirror above the sink. She was sitting at the kitchen table that we were just sitting at, and she was wearing an enormous hat, even though she was inside, obviously. That's how I knew that she was special. One of her hands was on a teacup. Her smile was incredibly beautiful. I wondered if her palm was sweating condensation when the picture was taken. I wondered if Mr. Black took the picture.
    Before I went back down, I snooped around a little bit. I was impressed by how much life Mr. Black had lived, and how much he wanted to have his life around him. I tried the key in all of the doors, even though he said he didn't recognize it. It's not that I didn't trust him, because I did. It's that at the end of my search I wanted to be able to say: I don't know how I could have tried harder. One door was to a closet, which didn't have anything really interesting in it, just a bunch of coats. Behind another door was a room filled with boxes. I took the lids off a couple of them, and they were filled with newspapers. The newspapers in some of the boxes were yellow, and some were almost like leaves.
    I looked in another room, which must have been his bedroom. There was the most amazing bed I've ever seen, because it was made out of tree parts. The legs were stumps, the ends were logs, and there was a ceiling of branches. Also there were all sorts of fascinating metal things glued to it, like coins, pins, and a button that said ROOSEVELT.
    “That used to be a tree in the park!” Mr. Black said from behind me, which scared me so much that my hands started shaking. I asked, “Are you mad at me for snooping?” but he must not have heard me, because he kept talking. “By the reservoir. She tripped on its roots once! That was back when I was courting her! She fell down and cut her hand! A little cut, but I never forgot it! That was so long ago!” “But yesterday in your life, right?” “Yesterday! Today! Five minutes ago! Now!” He aimed his eyes at the ground. “She always begged me to give the reporting a break! She wanted me at home!” He shook his head and said, “But there were things I needed, too!” He looked at the floor, then back at me. I asked, “So what did you do?” “For most of our marriage I treated her as though she didn't matter! I came home only between wars, and left her alone for months at a time! There was always war!” “Did you know that in the last 3,500 years there have been only 230 years of peace throughout the civilized world?” He said, “You tell me which 230 years and I'll believe you!” “I don't know which, but I know it's true.” “And where's this civilized world you're referring to!”
    I asked him what happened to make him stop reporting war. He said, “I realized that what I wanted was to stay in one place with one person!” “So you came home for good?” “I chose her over war! And the first thing I did when I came back, even before I went home, was to go to the park and cut down that tree! It was the middle of the night! I thought someone would try to stop me, but no one did! I brought the pieces home with me! I made that tree into this bed! It was the bed we shared for the last years we had together! I wish I'd understood myself better earlier!” I asked, “Which was your last war?” He said, “Cutting down that tree was my last war!” I asked him who won, which I thought was a nice question, because it would let him say that he won, and feel proud. He said, “The ax won! It's always that way!”
    He went up to the bed and put his finger on the head of a nail. “See these!” I try to be a perceptive person who follows the scientific method and is observant, but I hadn't noticed before that the whole bed was completely covered in nails. “I've hammered a nail into the bed every morning since she died! It's the first thing I do after waking! Eight thousand six