In the hall closet, behind the infrequently used vacuum cleaner, a lamp that needs rewiring, a scrolled map of the world, and a collection of classic comic books in a carton, Bunny finds the paper shredder. A paper shredder for home use looks like a portable printer set on a mid-sized plastic bucket lined with a Hefty bag. A paper shredder for home use was a popular item back when shredding paper was thought to be a safeguard against identity theft. Now, it’s hardly worth the effort to sift through garbage looking for old bank statements dirtied with coffee grounds and wet paper towels when you can hack into a computer instead. But fear of identity theft was not Bunny’s reason for having bought a paper shredder. Her reason was Albie’s penchant for xeroxing, in a minimum of triplicate—just in case, and despite being filed on his computer—copies of his papers, notes he’s made for papers not yet written, far-flung correspondence and a gazillion articles of interest torn from newspapers and magazines. His file cabinets bulge like extra pounds around the middle when your pants won’t zip up no matter how much you suck it in. “Just in case of what?” Bunny had asked, countless times. “Just in case of what?”
Just in case of nothing that has a sensible answer, except Albie finds peace of mind in having more than one of everything: three tubes of toothpaste, seven boxes of jumbo paper clips, four rolls of Scotch tape, a dozen six-packs of uni-ball pens (four black, two blue), five jars of his favorite fig jam, and it’s possible they’ll never again have to buy toilet paper. When he can, Albie buys in multiples, in bulk. Even crap they never use or things that have turned unusable over time, like the hundreds of rubber bands that dried out and broke.
Albie’s response to the paper shredder was, “Haha. Very funny.”
Bunny could’ve brought it back to Staples, exchanged it for more pens and Scotch tape, but she didn’t bother. Instead, she put the paper shredder in the closet and, more or less, forgot about it.
Now, as if she were walking in her sleep, walking in a way that is at once vague and yet deliberate, a ghost on a mission, Bunny carries the paper shredder to the small room that serves as her office. A television documentary that Bunny and Albie once watched on the phenomenon of sleepwalking featured a man who woke up to a policeman rapping on his car window because he was parked in front of a fire hydrant. A fire hydrant that happened to be almost a hundred miles from his home. In a sound sleep, the man drove almost one hundred miles and parked his car. Bunny couldn’t get over it. “In his sleep,” she marveled. “The man parallel parked his car. While sleeping.” Because Albie grew up in the city and never learned to drive, he was less impressed by this feat than Bunny. He said something about the enigma of the brain, how little about it is understood, how it is the last frontier of physiology. “You’re missing the point,” Bunny said. “Most people can’t parallel park when they’re awake.”
In terms of size, Bunny’s office isn’t much bigger than a refrigerator. It’s a tight fit, but it accommodates her desk, a battered old schoolteacher’s desk of heavy oak with a set of drawers on each side, the matching swivel chair, a four-drawer file cabinet, and a narrow bookcase. A corkboard hangs above the desk. Also similar to a refrigerator, the office has no windows. It suits her, or rather, it suited her quite well until five or six months ago when, as if a barbed-wire fence had been erected, a barbed-wire fence enhanced with an electrical current, she kept her distance from the room that was hers. Now, except for additional layers of dust, she finds her office exactly as she left it. Exactly as she left it is anarchy in a box. There is a desk under the tarp of paper that extends from edge to edge. Paper which includes bank statements, advertisements torn from magazines, mostly for makeup or skin cream she’d intended to buy but didn’t, handwritten instructions, directions and phone numbers scribbled on the backs of envelopes, the crumpled wrapper of a Snickers bar, notes jotted down for later, thoughts, observations, conversations overheard, and daily to-do lists. In the midst of all this debris, rising up like a white whale, is her computer. The keyboard, however, is nowhere to be seen. A pair of scissors is open on the floor handy to a patent leather shoe with a four-inch heel. Also on the floor are a dirty ashtray, empty packs of cigarettes, a few wire hangers, and the dictionary, open. Four T-shirts and a bra hang over the back of the chair.
To plug in the paper shredder, she’ll need to unplug either the computer or the printer. She doesn’t bother to note which one she pulls from the outlet because what difference does it make? Then, the way a raffle ticket is picked from a bowl of hundreds of raffle tickets, Bunny plucks a sheet of paper from the mess on her desk. The shredder is shark-like, swift and ferocious. The bank statement is in ribbons. The same goes for a Visa bill, an invitation to a baby shower, a request for a donation to fight cancer along with the free pink ribbon to pin to your blouse, a postcard from the dentist reminding her she is due for a cleaning, a plea that includes a gift of return address labels from the Humane Society and her PEN American Center membership-renewal form.
Bunny opens the top drawer of her file cabinet, and with no hesitation or break in time she shreds copies and originals of reviews of her books, and interviews she gave that appeared, for the most part, in newspapers and magazines read by people who don’t read books, and in obscure journals to which no more than eight people subscribe, albeit eight people who do read books. When the plastic bucket reaches capacity, when the shredded paper spills over the edge, Bunny goes to the kitchen for more Hefty bags. In the cabinet beneath the sink there is an open box of them, and three more boxes unopened.
Contracts she’s never read, and royalty statements, incomprehensible to her except for the fact that each of them ends in a negative number, emerge as confetti, and Bunny moves on to the file labeled author photos. In all of these photographs, Bunny is smiling widely. Photographs that span two decades and four books. Five books, if you include the last one, which Bunny does not. She feeds the eight-by-ten black-and-white headshots of herself into the shredder. It was a mistake, the smiling. She never should have smiled.
Next: two aborted novels, and stories that never took off.
Then: her college diploma, magna cum laude, together with her Phi Beta Kappa certificate, two documents that should have been proof—proof like the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz needed a piece of paper to prove that he had a brain—documented proof that she was not a dumb bunny. But the proof was tainted. The two nights, non-consecutive, with the chemistry professor cast doubt on the A; there was another one, too. Philosohpy of Religion. Phi Beta Kappa conferred on her nothing but shame; the shame that comes with winning when you know you cheated.
Letters from before there was email, and emails she’d printed out while under the delusion, obviously humiliating, that her correspondence might someday be of interest to PhD students of future generations.
A birthday card from Stella. You put the fun in dysfunctional.
The way she once saved ticket stubs and programs from high school football games, she later saved the note a man in a restaurant handed to her, nearly twenty years ago, passing by her table as he was leaving: Do you believe in love at first sight?
Matchbooks from places now gone—Trader Vic’s, the Mudd Club, Nell’s.
Mother’s Day cards signed (by Albie) Love, Angela.
Three photographs of Bunny and Albie standing in front of City Hall the day they were married. Another photograph: Bunny and her two sisters, the three girls sitting on the couch. Flanked by Nicole, age sixteen, and Dawn who was ten, Bunny, in the middle, was fourteen and had recently put on weight. They are dressed up for their cousin Laura’s wedding. Bunny’s dress pinched at her waist. Her sisters are wearing big say-cheese smiles. Bunny had refused to say cheese.
Why, for all these years, did she keep this cheap print of a girl holding a bouquet of daisies? The girl in the print, facing left, has long blond hair. She is wearing a pink dress and a straw boater hat, a black grosgrain ribbon trailing down her back. When it hung on her bedroom wall, it was in a white frame, and Bunny had wondered if her mother had put it there as a rebuke, a daily reminder that nothing about Bunny was as it should’ve been, that everything about Bunny was all wrong. The girl in the pink dress probably wasn’t even a real person in real life.
Postcards from Prague, Budapest, Venice—postcards in lieu of photographs—Los Angeles, Austin, Berlin, Paris, Minneapolis—her travels—Seattle, Krakow, Florence. Now, trying to spin memory from knowledge, from a vantage point higher up, she pictures herself on the Ponte Vecchio, walking across the bridge, in the way that people who claim to have died on an operating table relate the experience of the soul rising from the body, rising up to the track of fluorescent lights overhead, where the soul—a transparent self—hovers, watching as the doctors try to bring the body of their dead self back to life, which happens because God has intervened. Bunny has her first articulate thought about all this shredding paper. She thinks, God isn’t going to save me.
Unlike Albie, Bunny does believe in God. Not in any kind of formal or traditional way. More like concept, a theory. But in whatever guise, you might think Bunny’s God doesn’t much like her, either.
The picture of Bunny and Stella, on the day they graduated from college, dressed in their caps and gowns, sticking their tongues out at the camera. Shredded.