the goldfinch bot

A rustle, next to me. “Potter?” said Boris. “You awake?”
“Can I ask you something?” I said. “What does the moon look like in Indonesia?”

But it was only Boris. He caught up with me, grabbed me by the arm and dragged me down the street.

‪Even if you don’t like Poe—he invented the detective story. And science fiction. In essence, he invented a huge part of the twentieth century. I mean—honestly, I don’t care as much for him as I did when I was a boy, but even if you don’t like him you can’t dismiss him as a crank.‬

8R, two keys and a combination padlock, 7522, the last four digits of Boris’s home phone in Vegas.

“You were a mess, Theo—fun to be with, most of time! up for anything! but a mess. Probably you should have been in hospital.”

I felt some profound shift in allegiance, blood-deep, a sudden, humiliating, eyewatering conviction of this place is good, this person is safe, I can trust him, nobody will hurt me here.

“Hmpf.” Boris made it plain that he only went to school because I went, and because there was nothing else to do.

Stow for Taxi, Take-off, and Landing, plastic trays and stale air through the shark-gill cabin vents—

“He’s so particular, Rembrandt. Even his religious subjects—it’s as if the saints came down to model for him in the life.”

(phosphorescent in the streetlamps, violet city midnights that never quite faded to black)

“New York,” I said—and was gratified at his silent double-take, his lowered eyebrows that said: very cool. “What about you?”

Why did I obsess over people like this? Was it normal to fixate on strangers in this particular vivid, fevered way?

how wall to wall carpet and fake Biedermeier furniture and a softly murmuring French announcer on Canal Plus can all somehow seem so necessary and right.

“Do they open up everything in the airport?” I asked, in a timid voice—and then asked again, because nobody seemed to hear me.

But I was blind and deaf to the future; my single, crushing, worry was the meeting at school.

Hadn’t their deaths affected her at all? Weren’t we supposed to at least talk about it at some point?

“I’ll write you a check for the whole amount. Just hold it until I tell you it’s okay to cash it, that’s all I ask. I never meant you any harm, I swear.”

“Well, from your essay, it seems as if you are drawn to what I’ll call for lack of a better term, the metaphysical territory. Such as why do good people suffer,” she said, when I continued to look at her blankly. “And is fate random”

“Let’s say I cared about him exactly as much as he did about me.”

He glared at me for a long moment and then brushed his arm off (as if I were dirty, as if I’d contaminated him by touching him) and stalked away.

In Ukraine, he had seen an elected official shot in the stomach walking to his car—just happened to witness it, not the shooter, just the broad-shouldered man in a too-small overcoat falling to his knees in darkness and snow.

Then we walked into Boris’s house one day after school, laughing and talking, to find him hunched at the kitchen table with a bottle and a glass.

We spent some time in front of a Hals portrait of a boy holding a skull (“Don’t be mad, Theo, but who do you think he looks like? Somebody”—tugging the back of my hair—“who could use a haircut?”)

It was weird to think I’d never be able to thank Jose and Goldie for the money they’d given me—or, even weirder, that I’d never be able to tell them my father had died: because who else did I know who had known him? Or would care?

Raise money? Hobie? “Farming it out?” I said; and then, remembering myself: “Farming out what?”

One—flowers in a glass—I dimly recognized as a Manet.

“How’d you store it?”
“In a pillowcase.”
“Cotton?”
“Well—is percale cotton?”

When I looked at the painting I felt the same convergence on a single point: a flickering sun-struck instant that existed now and forever.

I was fully prepared to admit my mistake if they did: inexperienced, new to the business, here’s your money back sir, accept my apologies.

—but soon I was filling my own pockets with apples and chocolate (other favored food items of Boris’s) before walking up brazenly to the counter to buy bread and milk and other items too big to steal.