Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

the next blank page I wrote, “If there's anything you want to know, I'll tell you,” she said, “I know it will make your life easier to tell me, but I don't want to know anything.” How could that be? I asked her to tell me about you, she said, “Not our son, my son,” I asked her to tell me about her son, she said, “Every Thanksgiving I made a turkey and pumpkin pie. I would go to the schoolyard and ask the children what toys they liked. I bought those for him. I wouldn't let anyone speak a foreign language in the apartment. But he still became you.” “He became me?” “Everything was yes and no.” “Did he go to college?” “I begged him to stay close, but he went to California. In that way he was also like you.” “What did he study?” “He was going to be a lawyer, but he took over the business. He hated jewelry.” “Why didn't you sell it?” “I begged him. I begged him to be a lawyer.” “Then why?” “He wanted to be his own father.” I'm sorry, if that's true, the last thing I would have wanted was for you to be like me, I left so you could be you. She said, “He tried to find you once. I gave him that only letter you ever sent. He was obsessed with it, always reading it. I don't know what you wrote, but it made him go and look for you.” On the next blank page I wrote, “I opened the door one day and there he was.” “He found you?” “We talked about nothing.” “I didn't know he found you.” “He wouldn't tell me who he was. He must have become nervous. Or he must have hated me once he saw me. He pretended to be a journalist. It was so terrible. He said he was doing a story about the survivors of Dresden.” “Did you tell him what happened to you that night?” “It was in the letter.” “What did you write?” “You didn't read it?” “You didn't send it to me.” “It was terrible. All of the things we couldn't share. The room was filled with conversations we weren't having.” I didn't tell her that after you left, I stopped eating, I got so skinny that the bathwater would collect between my bones, why didn't anyone ask me why I was so skinny? If someone had asked, I never would have eaten another bite. “But if he didn't tell you he was your son, how did you know?” “I knew because he was my son.” She put her hand on my chest, over my heart, I put my hands on her thighs, I put my hands around her, she undid my pants, “I'm nervous,” despite everything I wanted, the sculpture was looking more and more like Anna, she closed the door behind her, I'm running out of room ... I spent most of my days walking around the city, getting to know it again, I went to the old Columbian Bakery but it wasn't there anymore, in its place was a ninety-nine-cent store where everything cost more than ninety-nine cents. I went by the tailor shop where I used to get my pants taken in, but there was a bank, you needed a card just to open the door, I walked for hours, down one side of Broadway and up the other, where there had been a watch repairman there was a video store, where there had been a flower market there was a store for video games, where there had been a butcher there was sushi, what's sushi, and what happens to all of the broken watches? I spent hours at the dog run on the side of the natural history museum, a pit bull, a Labrador, a golden retriever, I was the only person without a dog, I thought and thought, how could I be close to Oskar from far away, how could I be fair to you and fair to your mother and fair to myself, I wanted to carry the closet door with me so I could always look at him through the keyhole, I did the next best thing. I learned his life from a distance, when he went to school, when he came home, where his friends lived, what stores he liked to go to, I followed him all over the city, but I didn't betray your mother, because I never let him know I was there. I thought it could go on like that forever, and yet here I am, once again I was proven wrong. I don't remember when the strangeness of it first occurred to me, how much he was out, how many neighborhoods he went to, why I was the only one watching him, how his mother could let him wander so far so alone. Every weekend morning, he left the building with an old man and went knocking on doors around the city, I made a map of where they went, but I couldn't make sense of it, it made no sense, what were they doing? And who was the old man, a friend, a teacher, a replacement for a