J. Lennon - See You in Paradise

That beautiful lie! She had never before uttered it. He buried his face in her hot neck, and he pressed his lips to the vein there, which pulsed and leaped with blood, and they stayed that way for a long time, as out in the world things were bombed, and polls were taken, and money was allocated, and money was spent. To their child, should it be born, none of this would ever be quite real. All of it — the terrorism, the torture, the scandals — would have the hazy quality of near legend, the actual truth just barely out of reach, like a scary campfire tale about something that, swear to God, actually happened to a best friend’s cousin’s roommate. The events, though factual, would seem invented, and the characters would be parodies of themselves, rough outlines, without particular depth or dimension.

A tragedy, Carl and Lurene might have said, that the truth was always forgotten, that history was dulled and simplified until it didn’t resemble itself at all. But they understood that forgetting was the way people managed to go on. Even they would be forgotten, eventually, and once they were gone, their child would come to wonder what they were really like, back when the world was such a storied mess. The child would recall Lurene as firm and stoic, Carl as decent and shy, and the two would seem long-suffering and impossibly old, heavy with the burdens of their age, like statues come to life.

A LIBRARY CARD, from a town he wishes he still lived in

A STUDENT BIBLE, received at confirmation, its red plastic cover melted by the radiator

LOVE LETTERS, seized by federal agents in an unsuccessful drug raid, tested in a lab for traces of cocaine, exhaustively read for references to drug contacts, sealed in a labeled plastic bag and packed, along with a plush bear holding a plastic heart, into an unlabeled cardboard box, itself loaded into a truck with hundreds of similar boxes when the police headquarters was moved, and forever lost

CAR WASH SUDS, evaporating on the pavement

A PAINTED EGG, thought to have been broken by the housekeeper, forgotten in the absence of compelling evidence, swept into a cheap plastic tumbler and inadvertently donated, with the set, to Goodwill

THE SCRATCHED STONE, covered by fallen leaves, that marks where a previous owner’s cat is buried

A MINNIE MOUSE DOLL you found by the roadside and brought home, intending to run it through the washer and give it to your infant son, but which looked no less forlorn after washing and was abandoned on a basement shelf, only to be found by your son eight years later and mistaken for a once-loved toy that he had himself forsaken, leading to his first real experience of guilt and shame

NUDE POLAROIDS of a thirteen-year-old female cousin

A WHITE GLOVE worn through just below the second knuckle of the fourth finger, where she tapped her wedding ring for many years against the brass studs of the armchair

THE UNPAINTED PATCH on the hood of the car where vandals scrawled epithets

AN ACCOMPLISHED FORGERY of a famous painting lost in a 1965 mansion fire, which now hangs in the largest gallery of a major American art museum

THE METAL PAIL from which the last traces of blood could not be scrubbed

AN ICICLE preserved in the freezer by a child, which, when discovered months later, is thought to be evidence of a problem with the appliance, leading to a costly and inconclusive diagnostic exam by a repairman

A GAY PORNO MAGAZINE thrown onto a baseball field from a car window and perused with great interest by the adolescent members of both teams, two of whom meet in the woods some weeks later to reproduce the tableaux they have seen, leading to a gradual understanding that they are in fact gay: an incident the memory of which causes one of the two, when he is well into a life that is disappointing emotionally, professionally, and sexually, to fling a gay porno magazine out his car window as he passes an occupied baseball field on his way to what will be an unsuccessful job interview

A RÉSUMÉ that betrays its author as utterly unqualified for the position for which she has applied, but which, because it smells good, leads its reader, a desperate, experientially undernourished middle manager at an internet-based retail corporation, to invite her into the office for an interview that, although it further betrays the applicant’s complete unsuitability for the job, provides the middle manager with a physical impression to complement the good smell, which impression is intensely exciting, forcing him to hire her as a supplemental secretary, much to the bafflement, chagrin, and eventual disgust of his extant secretary, who, during her employer’s lunch hour, removes the résumé in question from his files and personally delivers it to the CEO, and who is with the CEO when he barges into the middle manager’s office and finds the unsuitable supplemental secretary standing beside him, crying silently with her dress half off, while he sits in his reclining office chair sweating profusely and holding a plastic letter opener in a threatening manner

THE MORTAR spilled by the mason, hardened onto the rubberized plastic strips of your chaise longue

AN UPTURNED BIRD’S NEST, blown from a tree into a snowbank

AN OVERTURNED CAN OF PAINT, unnoticed for months, which when found is lifted whole from the floor, the spilled liquid hardened into the shape of a puddle in an accidental imitation of the fake-spilled-drink gags available in any gift or joke shop

MEAT, left out on the butcher block by an unidentified tenant in the eight-bedroom house, which each tenant, insisting that he is not responsible, refuses to dispose of, and which within a day begins to reek, and within three days has drawn flies, and within a week, maggots, but which by now has become a symbol of the mistrust each tenant feels for his housemates and its continued putrefaction a point of pride, so that each tenant eats his meals locked in his room or out of the house, until the meat has nearly been consumed by the insects that have occupied it, and the house fills with flies, and the meat disappears almost entirely, save for a few dried strings of sinew and a dark stain that, at the semester’s end, cannot be bleached out by the landlord, who retains the tenants’ security deposit to cover the cost of replacing the block