And yet he couldn't forget everything. He could forget a lot, but not everything. So there he'd be, glued to Men Who Date Canines, or listening peacefully to Mr. Brick- man recount the latest atrocity against some elderly woman, when he'd remember some other elderly woman-Mrs. Ross maybe. Tiptoeing into the room and tapping him on the shoulder like a little sister he'd been ignoring, the one whom he'd been told to look after. And even though he'd say go away, sometimes she didn't listen to him, and she'd stay there, right by his shoulder, breathing down his neck. Of course, then, more often than not, he'd remember something else-that house on Cherry Avenue for instance. He'd remember that voice telling him to come right in, and how it felt to fall into absolute nothingness. He'd listen to his old bones going ouch, and then, before you could say codeine, she'd be gone, poof, vanished. Memory, then, could be your friend. It could sometimes kick the crap out of other memories you didn't want to deal with.
One day he asked Mr. Leonati to get rid of the box, for he thought that it was deliberately staring at him. Anyway, every time he opened his eyes, it was there. Sitting there like some icon of a religion he'd lost his faith in. He wanted it thrown out. But just as Mr. Leonati was lifting it, he said no, never mind, maybe he should look through it once more and Mr. Leonati said fine, whatever, and put it back down.
But William didn't look through it. He turned on Nuns Who Strip instead. He played checkers with Mr. Brick- man. He puttered around with his two-pronged cane. He taught himself old again, not that he'd actually forgotten how. It was like falling off a bicycle-that easy.
But in the corner of the room was that box, and that box kept bothering him. There was no place in the oasis for that box. So one day he decided, really decided, to throw it out.
This time he asked Mr. Brickman to do it, and though Mr. Brickman wasn't happy about it, he agreed. He tried lifting it from several angles, like a golfer lining up a particularly difficult putt. When he finally decided on his approach, he dug in with both hands, grimaced for his audience of one, and lifted it slowly up off the carpet. And dropped it.
The box opened and almost everything came spilling out of it.
And that's how it happened, the way most things happen-not by design, but by simple, stupid accident-that William finally discovered what the numbers meant.
It was so simple, so ridiculously obvious, that for a good half minute or so he thought he must be mistaken, that it would dissolve like a thirst-induced mirage as soon as he gave it a second look.
But it didn't.
And he remembered again how there's two kinds of seeing, just like there's two kinds of reading. By rote, where every letter's letter-perfect, every word sounded out just the way Webster's tells you, but with just the most rudimentary understanding, without any real comprehension at all. And the second kind of reading, which is like reading with a third eye, like reading between the lines, where you suddenly understand everything. And William had been reading things the first way, not the second, so though he'd gone through Jean's box and made note of everything, he'd seen nothing. And he hadn't been listening either, not really. What had Weeks said? For a long while he did nothing, really nothing. That's right. He did nothing. Because he didn't read or have a television or even an interest. He didn't read. Or have a television, or an interest, or a hobby, or maybe even a friend. But he did have something. A baseball program, a little black book, two salt and pepper shakers, a couple of flyers. And a library card. He didn't read. But he had that. "Mr. Brickman," William said, "could you do me a favor and pick up that library card for me." Mr. Brickman, still smarting from his previous blunder, smiled meekly and picked up the card. "Does it have a date?" "A date?" "A date of issue?" "Oh… let's see…" Mr. Brickman peered at it. "Yep… March, of this year. Expires in 2000. Made out to-" "So it's a new card," William said, "brand-new," cutting him off, but not so much speaking to Brickman as to himself. "Yeah. It's a new card. So?" "So…?" So. So we stay in bed, so we turn on Teenagers Who Marry Their Fathers, so we bet the OTB, so we stay put. Or so we start over.
"Want to go to the library, Mr. Brickman?"
Mr. Brickman said okay.
Why the Flushing library, Mr. Brickman wanted to know, once they caught the bus on Northern Boulevard- William waving hello to his old friend, the black woman driver. Why the Flushing library when there was a perfectly good one right in Astoria-no more than ten blocks from them? And-if he hadn't noticed, it was hot outside, and-if he hadn't noticed, he could still hardly walk, so why then go all the way to Flushing?
"Because that's the library that's got what I want," William said.
That shut Mr. Brickman up-but only temporarily. He began, instead, to point out all the probable muggers among their fellow bus passengers-which was every man between fifteen and fifty who exhibited the slightest signs of antisocial behavior: not talking to the person next to them, or talking too much to the person next to them, or rolling their eyes, or dropping their chin, or cracking their knuckles, or biting their nails, or sleeping, or, more ominously, pretending to sleep-which just about, ladies and gentlemen, convicted each and every man on the bus. Muggers all.
And ladies and gentlemen, here's the amazing thing. William might have dismissed it with a condescending smile, he might have, all things being equal, but all things weren't equal; Mr. Brickman was old and they weren't, Mr. Brickman was old and so was he. And now that he'd been suitably reminded of that, he found himself scanning the would-be Murderers Row right along with Mr. Brickman, listening to his commentary with a judicious ear, and wondering if maybe that one did look a little suspicious, if that other one did have some bad intentions hiding somewhere behind his seemingly harmless demeanor. The problem with the younger ones was they all looked like that now-like hoods, they all had the hood look. Looking dangerous was in fashion-even your face had to look dangerous, you had to have the sneer. The problem was, some of those sneering delinquents were grade A honor students, but okay, some weren't- some of them were the Puerto Rican kid who'd spit in his face. The problem was, the only way to tell them apart was to wait until one of them knocked you down and the other one picked you up and walked you across the street. No doubt about it, this getting-old thing was tough-you had to be able to see a little keener just when your eyesight was walking out the door.
Then too, there was the way they looked at you. Or didn't. William had become aware of that only gradually, the way you gradually become aware that you've grown fat-one article of clothing after another growing tighter till suddenly they're all tight, too tight to wear, and you have to stop blaming it on shrinkage, on that stupid Chinese cleaners down the block, and face facts. That's sort of the way William discovered that he'd grown invisible. That he'd become, without the slightest help from Claude Rains, the Invisible Man. No doubt about it. He'd walk down the street and no one saw him. No one. And the older he got, the more invisible he became. To pretty girls, attractive women, to homely women, to just about every variety of woman there was, he'd suddenly ceased to exist. That's what he'd noticed first. Then he noticed men weren't seeing him either. Most men. They saw through him, around him, behind him, but not him. Which is just the way most people see the old-they don't, and the ones that do generally have something bad on their minds, like rearranging your face.
Back to Mr. Brickman's fear then; it was a real fear. William felt it, and being old, he caught it, and catching it, he was forced to sit with it for the entire twenty- minute ride into Flushing. Right now they were passing over Flushing Bridge, the river beneath them so pumped full of pollutants it resembled one of those tar pits, handy graveyards for numerous woolly mammoths. This one had swallowed cars though, cars and washing machines and garden hoses and rusted train tracks. There was a sandpit warehouse right at its edge, but the river refused to reflect it, or its clock, which was frozen, had been frozen for years, at precisely 2:17. It was like a reminder, that clock-that the only way to stop time was to drop dead.