I held my arm above my head in the ceaseless glow of our bedroom, moving my bare hand through the morning air as if through water. I couldn’t sleep. I felt numb. A 24-hour plumber did, indeed, arrive at the scene. Not at lightning speed, but within two cigarettes and a whiskey soda from the bar down the street. But our hopes of him unscrewing the pipes were quickly dashed. The building was too old, the pipes too embedded. There was no way to address the problem in isolation; he’d have to rip out half the wall. As Vadis and I escorted him out, tipping him for this late-night evaluation, my legs drifted beneath me. I offered him a coffee. He looked at his watch, then again at me.
In the moment, I was devastated by the loss of the ring. I felt its closeness, like it could so easily not have happened. This was what I kept repeating to Vadis, a broken incantation, a spell that wouldn’t cast. But during the long walk home, I accepted the course of events, converting them to memory. The ring had fallen into a time and place marked by surrealness, a time and place that I had difficulty delineating as “the present,” so that now the loss of the ring felt as if it had happened to someone else.
Would I have been this numb if Boots were here, lying beside me? I missed him but my brain was too crowded for the missing to take root. He floated through my mind like a disembodied head.
Regardless of his motivations, I had hoped that Clive was right this whole time. I thought perhaps seeing these men might cure me of my addiction to them in the same way I suspected chain-smoking a carton of cigarettes might cure me of ever wanting another. Instead, years of unsatisfied curiosity had rotted into further obsession. This is how addiction works, I thought. Like a houseguest. It does not break in; it is invited. There is no announcement of when your old impulses roll over to form new ones. Suitcases are exploded, toilet paper rolls denuded. One day your spatula is put back in the wrong drawer and you think “that’s weird” and the next all the paint has been stripped from the walls and you think absolutely nothing at all.
I got up from bed, disturbing the cat, whose look of betrayal was apparent. Then I went to the hall closet and returned with my box of mementos, plopping it down between my legs, a girl showing off her sticker collection to no one. I started unfolding letters, their creases stiff from being pressed for so long. I didn’t bother turning on the light, but I also didn’t need to read them. I had them memorized, down to the syntax. There were NBA ticket stubs from Cooper and letters from Knox, written on airmail paper. There were drawings of animals meant to represent me and their artist, Jonathan. There were all manner of postcards scrawled from road trips or purloined from restaurants, filched cocktail napkins with flirty word games inked into the grain. There was Howard’s “please cum?” and the note from Phillip, still hoping I was well after all these years.
I needed to see these men because I’d kept the evidence and I’d kept the evidence because I needed to see these men.
A conundrum.
I put the letters back delicately, individually, like court documents. But as I did, out slid something thick and square, a curious object. It poked my thigh as it fell. I turned it around in my fingers, pressing at corners to make the folder open. Any denial I might have experienced about its provenance was cleared up when I reached inside and extracted a piece of carbon paper. It drooped as I held it up to the light of the window. The bowler hat. The oculus. I looked at the contents of the box. Then at the carbon paper again. Back and forth, back and forth, an uneasy sensation rising within me.
I tried to work backward. Clive had started the Golconda when the magazine folded. He had a penchant for putting the cart before the horse, which meant he probably printed business cards before he did anything else. Which meant an ex had sent me the card a long time ago, slipped it into an envelope or jacket pocket on purpose or by accident, and I hadn’t noticed. Because I wouldn’t. Because it looked blank to the naked eye.
One of these men knew this was coming.
“But who?” I asked the tidy pile of my life.
The tidy pile of my life did not respond.