Boxes Within Boxes

Originally written Saturday, December 10, 2005 (continued)

It was a premature decision, however, as not a half hour after sundown a knock sounded at the door of my flat. I opened it to find Trudy and her new best friend already wiping their feet on the mat. Inwardly, I rolled my eyes at the extent of her gullibility and the depth of the possible consequences. Outwardly, I merely said to Moshe, “Excuse us for a second,” and motioned to Trudy to come inside. I closed the door on the hallway and Moshe and pulled Trudy farther in. “Why did you bring him here? I can’t trust him enough to let him in.”

“It’s all right. He’s a good guy. And I really think he could use your help.”

“Help? Trudy, he clocked Richard.” She looked blank. “Museum Richard.” I’d forgotten they still haven’t met.

“No. I mean, I don’t know. But he maybe didn’t know he was doing it. He’s been forgetting things.”

“How convenient.”

She exhaled vocally in obvious exasperation with me. “Not convenient. For real.”

“How do you know?”

“He told me.”

“And you believe him? You believe a guy who can make you talk about your favorite Pink Floyd album when what you really want to know is why he stole a bedpan from a museum?”

“How’d you know we talked about Pink Floyd?”

This time I did roll my eyes. “I didn’t. I pulled it out of my ass. It’s not the point. Trude, he’s violent.”

“And if he is? You’re worried about violence why? Look, I just need you to hear his side of it, and if you don’t believe him then fine. We’ll go away.”

“And by that time he has access to my house.” It wasn’t myself I was worried about, it was the chunk of carved black Caribbean coral that I had hidden in a box within boxes in my bedroom closet and that Trudy didn’t yet know about. I weighed the circumstances: my excuse was getting weaker in Trudy’s eyes; not letting him in might give away the fact that the charm he sought was here; and I’d be meeting Richard soon for some reason pertaining to the object in question. I sighed and relented. “OK, whatever. Give me five minutes. Tell him I have a project I need to clear out of the way in here.”

Once Trudy was back in the hall with Moshe, I went to the closet and located Bella’s charm. I hadn’t handled it since the last time I moved, and I hadn’t paid close attention to it in far longer than that. To see it on its own, it looks remarkably unimpressive. A crescent moon shape that would barely measure two inches in diameter when full, with a sallow color and an unfinished surface. The feel of it is uncanny, though. As I held it in my palm, its temperature rose from the coolness of the closet floor to match my own body heat almost immediately. In less than a moment, I could barely feel it in my hand. I found a necklace with a long chain in my bathroom (I have too little jewelry to justify a jewelry box), pulled the pendant off, and drew it through one of the natural coral holes. I hung it around my neck and pulled on a sweater, the better to hide any protrusion or bulk it might create under my clothing. When I was satisfied that it wasn’t visible, I opened the front door and apologized to Moshe for making him wait.

“Come on in,” I said.

“I don’t think I’m ever gonna get used to that,” he muttered, clearly discomfited by the indignity of being physically restricted by an unseeable force. Even if, out of common courtesy, he would never choose to enter a house uninvited, I can still understand how having to wait for the invitation can be rather humbling. I had to hand it to him, though: if the neophyte routine were pure pretense, he deserved an award. He looked completely exhausted, or depressed, and he seemed to be avoiding eye contact with me as he entered the flat.

“You will,” Trudy assured him.

We sat down in the living room, I in the armchair and my guests perched uneasily on either end of the couch. “OK,” I began, “what’s going on?”

They looked at each other as if to decide who would go first. Trudy, it seemed, would be the mediator this evening. “First of all, he doesn’t remember almost any of the times he talked to you and me. He has like a piece of time missing when all those things happened.”

“It’s true,” he offered. “I just told her when my missing periods of time were, and she agreed that those were the times. But when she started telling me what happened, what I did, some of it sounded real familiar. Like I knew… like it’s in there.”

Trudy continued, “Yeah, I thought we should tell you that first. I know that kind of makes more questions like why it’s been happening and stuff. I thought maybe he’s got like split personalities or something. You got any ideas?”

I glanced at Moshe, who appeared exactly as defeated and resigned to such amateur psychiatric diagnoses as someone with no better explanation for his side of this strange set of occurrences would be. My gut said that dissociative disorder was not the explanation, but I had no alternatives to offer, so I simply said, “Yours is as good a suggestion as any. Assuming he’s telling the truth, of course.” He had to deal not only with humiliating rules of the supernatural he probably hadn’t believed in before they came to apply to him but also with my unrelenting distrust. In response to my (admittedly snide) comment, he tensed up and found another corner of the room to stare into. I’m not normally so outwardly antagonistic even when antagonism is justified; I wasn’t sure why I was making an effort to make my doubts known. Maybe I half-hoped I could push him into an act of aggression in order to confirm my suspicions about him. In addition, Trudy was right—more new questions than new answers would develop—but I didn’t know how we might go about resolving them right then, so I thought we might shift the subject for a moment. “But assuming that, what was it you thought I could help with?”