confess, I've never thought too much about giving lessons... I hope you like the enclosed T-shirt, which I took the liberty of signing for you. Your mate, Ringo I didn't like the enclosed T-shirt. I loved it! Although unfortunately it wasn't white, so I couldn't wear it. I laminated Ringo's letter and tacked it to my wall. Then I did some research on the Internet about the locks of New York, and I found out a lot of useful information. For example, there are 319 post offices and 207,352 post office boxes. Each box has a lock, obviously. I also found out that there are about 70,571 hotel rooms, and most rooms have a main lock, a bathroom lock, a closet lock, and a lock to the minibar. I didn't know what a mini-bar was, so I called the Plaza Hotel, which I knew was a famous one, and asked. Then I knew what a minibar was. There are more than 300,000 cars in New York, which doesn't even count the 12,187 cabs and 4,425 buses. Also, I remembered from when I used to take the subway that the conductors used keys to open and close the doors, so there were those, too. More than 9 million people ive in New York (a baby is born in New York every 50 seconds), and everyone has to live somewhere, and most partments have two locks on the front, and to at least some of the bathrooms, and maybe to some other rooms, and bviously to dressers and jewelry boxes. Also there are offices, and art studios, and storage facilities, and banks with safeeposit boxes, and gates to yards, and parking lots. I figured that if you included everything--from bicycle locks to roof atches to places for cufflinks--there are probably about 18 locks for every person in New York City, which would mean about 162 million locks, which is a crevasse-load of locks. Schell residence ... Hi, Mom ... A little bit, I guess, but still pretty sick ... No ... Uh-huh ... Uh-huh ... I guess ... I think I'll order Indian ... But still ... OK. Uh-huh. I will ... I know ... I know... Bye." timed myself and it took me 3 seconds to open a lock. Then I figured out that if a baby is born in New York every 50 econds, and each person has 18 locks, a new lock is created in New York every seconds. So even if all I did as open locks, I'd still be falling behind by locks every second. And that's if I didn't have to travel from one lock to the next, and if I didn't eat, and didn't sleep, which is an OK if, because I didn't actually sleep, anyway. I needed a better plan. That night, I put on my white gloves, went to the garbage can in Dad's closet, and opened the bag that I'd thrown all of the pieces of the vase into. I was looking for clues that might lead me in a direction. I had to be extremely careful so that I wouldn't contaminate the evidence, or let Mom know what I was doing, or cut and infect myself, and I found the envelope that the key was in. It was then that I noticed something that a good detective would have noticed at the very beginning: the word "Black" was written on the back of the envelope. I was so mad at myself for not noticing it before that I gave myself a little bruise. Dad's handwriting was weird. It looked sloppy, like he was writing in a hurry, or writing down the word while he was on the phone, or just thinking about something else. So what would he have been thinking about? I Googled around and found out that Black wasn't the name of a company that made lockboxes. I got a little disappointed, because it would have been a logical explanation, which is always the best kind, although fortunately it isn't the only kind. Then I found out that there was a place called Black in every state in the country, and actually in almost every country in the world. In France, for example, there is a place called Noir. So that wasn't very helpful. I did a few other searches, even though I knew they would only hurt me, because I couldn't help it. I printed out some of the pictures I found--a shark attacking a girl, someone walking on a tightrope between the Twin Towers, that actress getting a blowjob from her normal boyfriend, a soldier getting his head cut off in Iraq, the place on the wall where a famous stolen painting used to hang--and I put them in Stuff That Happened to Me, my scrap-book of everything that happened to me. The next morning I told Mom I couldn't go to school again. She asked what was wrong. I told her, "The same thing that's always wrong." "You're sick?" "I'm sad." "About Dad?" "About everything." She sat down on the bed next to me, even though I knew she was in a hurry. "What's everything?" I started counting on my fingers: "The meat and dairy products in our refrigerator, fistfights, car accidents, Larry--" "Who's Larry?" "The homeless guy in front of the Museum of Natural History who always says 'I promise it's for food' after he asks for money." She turned around and I zipped her dress while I kept counting. "How you don't know who Larry is, even though you probably see him all the time, how Buckminster just sleeps and eats and goes to the bathroom and has no raison d'être, the short ugly guy with no neck who takes tickets at he IMAX theater, how the sun is going to explode one day, how every birthday I always get at least one thing I already ave, poor people who get fat because they eat junk food because it's cheaper..." That was when I ran out of fingers, but y list was just getting started, and I wanted it to be long, because I knew she wouldn't leave while I was still going. "... domesticated animals, how I have a domesticated animal, nightmares, Microsoft Windows, old people who sit around all day because no one remembers to spend time with them and they're embarrassed to ask people to spend time with them, secrets, dial phones, how Chinese waitresses smile even when there's nothing funny or happy, and also how hinese people own Mexican restaurants but Mexican people never own Chinese restaurants, mirrors, tape decks, my unpopularity at school, Grandma's coupons, storage facilities, people who don't know what the Internet is, bad andwriting, beautiful songs, how there won't be humans in fifty years--" "Who said there won't be humans in fifty ears?" I asked her, "Are you an optimist or a pessimist?" She looked at her watch and said, "I'm optimistic." "Then I have some bad news for you, because humans are going to destroy each other as soon as it becomes easy enough to, which ill be very soon." "Why do beautiful songs make you sad?" "Because they aren't true." "Never?" "Nothing is beautiful nd true." She smiled, but in a way that wasn't just happy, and said, "You sound just like Dad." What do you mean I sound just like Dad?" "He used to say things like that." "Like what?" "Oh, like nothing is so-and-so. Or everything is so-and-so. Or obviously." She laughed. "He was always very definitive." "What's 'definitive'?" "It means certain. It comes from 'definite.'" "What's wrong with definitivity?" "Dad sometimes missed the forest for the trees." "What forest?" "Nothing." Mom?" "Yes?" "It doesn't make me feel good when you say that something I do reminds you of Dad." "Oh. I'm sorry. Do I do that a lot?" "You do it all the time." "I can see why that wouldn't feel good." "And Grandma always says that things I do remind her of Grandpa. It makes me feel weird, because they're gone. And it also makes me feel unspecial." "That's the last thing that either Grandma or I would want. You know you're the most special thing to us, don't you?" "I guess so." "The most." She petted my head for a while, and her fingers went behind my ear to that place that's almost never touched. I asked if I could zip her dress up again. She said, "Sure," and turned around. She said, "I think it would be good if you tried o go to school." I said, "I am trying." "Maybe if you just went for first period." "I can't even get out of bed." Lie #6. "And r. Fein said I should listen to my feelings. He said I should give myself a break sometimes." That wasn't a lie, exactly, lthough it wasn't exactly the truth, either. "I just don't want it to become a habit," she said. "It won't," I said. When she ut her hand on the covers, she must have felt how puffy they were, because she asked if I had my clothes on in bed. I old her, "I do, and the reason is because I am cold." #7. "I mean, in addition to being hot." As soon as she left, I got my things together and went downstairs. "You look better than yesterday," Stan said. I told him to mind his own business. He said, "Jeez." I told him, "It's just that I'm feeling worse than yesterday." I walked over to the art supply store on Ninety-third Street, and I asked the woman at the door if I could speak to the anager, which is something Dad used to do when he had an important question. "What can I do for you?" she asked. "I eed the manager," I said. She said, "I know. What can I do for you?" "You're incredibly beautiful," I told her, because she as fat, so I thought it would be an especially nice compliment, and also make her like me again, even though I was sexist. Thanks," she said. I told her, "You could be a movie star." She shook her head, like, What the? "Anyway," I said, and I showed her the envelope, and explained how I had found the key, and how I was trying to find the lock it opened, and how maybe black meant something. I wanted to know what she could tell me about black, since she was probably an expert of color. "Well," she said, "I don't know that I'm an expert of anything. But one thing I can say is it's sort of interesting that the person wrote the word 'black' in red pen." I asked why that was interesting, because I just thought it was one of the red pens Dad used when he read the New York Times. "Come here," she said, and she led me to a display of ten pens. "Look at this." She showed me a pad of paper that was next to the display. "See," she said, "most people write the name of the color of the pen they're writing with." "Why?" "I don't know why. It's just one of those psychological things, I guess." "Psychological is mental?" "Basically." I thought about it, and I had the evelation that if I was testing out a blue pen, I'd probably write the word "blue." "It's not easy to do what your dad did, riting the name of one color with another color. It doesn't come naturally." "Really?" "This is even harder," she said, and he wrote something on the next piece of paper and told me to read it out loud. She was right, it didn't feel natural at all, ecause part of me wanted to say the name of the color, and part of me wanted to say what was written. In the end I idn't say anything.
