James Siegel - Epitaph

Where Mrs. Timinsky used to live-stop two on the Express to Nowhere-it was the lady in the next apartment over. One Mrs. Goldblatt, who offered him tea and cookies and two pillows which she insisted he put under his ass when he sat down on the couch.

She'd gotten a postcard too, but she didn't have it anymore and didn't remember what it said.

"It's the best thing for her," she told William.

He didn't understand.

"Florida. The very best thing."

Mrs. Timinsky had suffered from a liver disorder, she went on to say. Not to mention psoriasis, palsy, lumbago, and a general lack of anything to do.

"Florida's got lots of elderly people," she said, as if she was talking about people she had absolutely nothing in common with, though she couldn't have been younger than seventy. Well, age is a state of mind, they say. What they don't say is what that state of mind is exactly, which is generally poor, generally, unrelentingly miserable, as a state, akin to, say, the State of Nevada, half of which was bombed out and chock-full of radioactive half lives. Mrs. Goldblatt however was still in the state of cheeriness, or perhaps in the state of self-denial, just passing through on the way to the state of lunacy where Mr. Koppleman now resided.

"She'll fit right in there," Mrs. Goldblatt said, still talking about the State of Florida.

"She went there for her health, then?"

"Thank you very much-you look in good health too." Mrs. Goldblatt, apparently, was blessed with the one ailment that came in handy in the New York of the late twentieth century: encroaching deafness. William finished off his lemon butter cookies and his cup of tea; he left. And so it went. Halfway between Mrs. Goldblatt and the place where Mrs. Winters used to live, the rainstorm hit. It came like a slap in the middle of a quiet conversation, followed by deathly silence, then tears. Marble-sized raindrops knocked him back and forth across the sidewalk; he began to stagger. When he finally reached Mrs. Winters's old haunt, a boarding house not unlike the one he lived in, he was very cold, very wet, but also, he supposed, very pitiable. And pity wasn't too bad a thing to have going for him, he thought-it was, after all, a staple of beggars, and what was he but a beggar in nice clothes. Okay-decent clothes, clothes just this side of Goodwill. He'd picked Mrs. Winters third because of his hunch that if there was a Mr. Greely here, his name would be Raoul, instead of say, Sam. It was. He was, as it turned out, the landlord. Sure, he remembered Doris, he said, as he worked on a washing machine in the basement. Doris Winters. Nice old lady. She'd lived there for years. Then? She took off to Florida. He was a sort of friend of hers? No, not really. But they kept in touch? No, not really. Never wrote her a postcard? Not once? Well, now that he mentioned it, yes, once. A Christmas card. Any answer? No, now that he mentioned it, no answer. Not that he remembered, anyway. Though he did remember someone else asking him about Mrs. Winters-friend of his, perhaps? Perhaps. Washing machines were the worst, he said. Can't fix them. Never could. Any idea why she went to Florida in the first place? In the first place, it wasn't his business. In the second place-he thought her doctor had recommended it. That's what he thought. And any family to speak of? There was family. But not to speak of. A kid on the West Coast somewhere, maybe some grandkids too. A Christmas card every year and maybe they called her if she was lucky. Family, but not to speak of. So she didn't. Just another old person with nobody. He told Raoul thank you. He told him he'd been very helpful. If you say so, Raoul said, going back to his washing machine. William went back to the street.

A lawyer William used to see a great deal of once said to him: Never ask a question you don't know the answer to. Not in court and not in bed either. Especially in bed.

For the rest of the day then, William felt like a lawyer. A good one too. He asked questions but he already knew the answers, and by heart. The questions differed a little, here and there they did, but the answers were always the same. It was like interrogating the same witness twelve times, or perhaps twelve different witnesses, but to the same crime. The problem was, of course, that no one had actually seen a crime.

All they'd seen were twelve old people going off to Florida-innocuous enough, because they'd seen that every day. They didn't know that they'd never-with the exception, of course, of Mr. Koppleman-arrived there, that when they'd disappeared from the White Pages, they'd disappeared from the earth. If you were headed to the dog races, the woman had said to him, you took the wrong turn. Only there were twelve wrong turns here, and at the end of the street, something waiting.

Something that had taken all of them, but spared one.

Why were you spared? Jean had asked Koppleman. Why you?

Okay, this was something Jean had known, something Florida had just affirmed for him. You find what you look for. And he had, he had.

And now, sitting in his room at the end of the day, William was trying to find something too. A beginning.

Because that's where you begin. At the beginning.

It was still raining out. The sound was almost numbing; on another day, in another life-for instance, last week's-he might have slept to its simple rhythm. Dreamed about Rachel, wrestled a few demons, sawed a few logs. But this was this week, and this week he was William the Conquerer as opposed to William the Meek, William with the emphasis on will. In that he had one, in that it had allowed him to get on a plane to Florida and do a little old-fashioned gumshoeing in Flushing. Okay, the humidity in the room felt a little like tension- yes it did. His upper lip was stained with sweat, his palms were a trifle slippery. His shoulder was crying uncle- that too. But here he was, present and accounted for.

Here he was with two lists spread out in front of him- one with the names of the unspared-the unspared and Koppleman, the other with the ambiguous numbers in Jean's file, trying like mad to make a connection.

It was Koppleman, however, that kept taking the brunt of his scrutiny. The odd man out. And it was the odd that gave you an even chance, wasn't it. Like those grade school primers where five farm animals were followed by a clock. Which one didn't belong? Which one and why? The truth was, he hadn't been very good at those kind of questions. He was too left brain, maybe-he kept thinking the clock was too easy, that there were clocks on farms, that it might be the pig or the chicken. He hadn't been good at questions like that, and he still wasn't.

If Koppleman stood out, it was hard to see why, maybe even impossible. Beside each name he'd listed all that he'd learned about that particular person. They were all old; they'd all gone to Florida; they all had either no family or none worth mentioning; they'd all disappeared. Excepting Koppleman. The similarities ended there.

Some of them were Jewish. Some of them weren't. Some were born abroad. Most weren't. Some had sent postcards. Some hadn't.

Now the postcards, here's where things got interesting. He'd been able to collect two more-one from a next- door neighbor of Mr. Waldron's, the other from Sarah Dillon's companion-a spinsterish woman of fifty-five who'd lived below Mrs. Dillon and had, for a salary of twenty-five dollars a week, cleaned, cooked, and cared for her.

At first glance the postcards were entirely ordinary. One was of Miami Beach circa 1960. Two were of Sea World- Shamu and a couple of dazed-looking sea lions. Even what was written on them was ordinary, as dull and predictable as most postcards are. But here, ladies and gentlemen, was what was extraordinary. Ready, sitting up now? What was extraordinary, extraordinarily strange- okay, a little redundant, but so what-and extraordinarily chilling, was that the dull and predictable things Arthur Shankin had written to Mr. Greely were the same dull and predictable things Joseph Waldron had written to his next-door neighbor and the very same dull and predictable things Sarah Dillon had written to her companion. Not sort of the same. Not kind of the same. The same. Exactly the same. Word for word. Period for period.