Life With Objects

Decades later and Chael could still remember the first secret he put into his pocket, a cat’s eye marble, blue glass around a green ribbon. Help me find it, his friend had said after losing the marble in the weeds. The two of them had walked the boy’s backyard from end to end, stoop-shouldered and slow-stepping like egrets wading the shallows. It wasn’t long before Chael found the cat’s eye. He picked it up and began to call out but then didn’t, instead slipping the marble into the pocket of his shorts, shivering as a strange thrill jagged his guts. For an hour Chael continued on with the search, every so often pointing at a pebble and shouting, Is that it? so that the other boy would come running, hopeful then not, each disappointment an exhilaration and a balm.

Afterwards, Chael sought out other secrets to carry in his pocket-- a diary, a fountain pen, a sliver of black coral—singular objects made exquisite not by their value but by the simple fact of his possession, his pleasure deriving from the transgression of the thing rather than the thing itself. With time and repetition, carrying each secret became for Chael a kind of sacrament to himself, the ambit of his life marked and measured by them.

In college, Chael began to carry a razor blade in his pocket, convinced by the philosophers he studied that the recognition of the Absurd rendered suicide an act of will rather than an act of desperation, the razor a reaffirmation of his ability to end his life at any time of his choosing, a secret that, even if not exercised, made his self authentically his own.

Chael replaced this razor with a small pistol after being assaulted by three men in a parking lot, reasoning that it would serve the razor’s original function while also offering some means of defense. To his surprise, Chael found that having a gun in his pocket was perhaps the finest secret he had ever carried-- its lethal potentiality spiced every encounter with the possibility of violence-- and for the next two decades he had it with him at all times.

Yet the allure of the gun gradually faded, its transgressive nature degraded by an endless stream of movies and television until finally Chael knew that his time with it was over. Until the end of his life, Chael experimented with carrying different secrets for different occasions-- an SS Totenkopf badge while he toured the Holocaust Memorial, a flashdrive loaded with child pornography as he strolled through a park crowded with young families-- yet never again was he able to recapture that initial frisson, that electrified jolt that first struck him as a boy, a cat’s eye marble that was not his secured in a pocket that had once held nothing at all.

I emptied the pockets of my family’s laundry, hunched on the bedroom floor, a trash can within reach. I’d been sloppy before. I’d let tissues shred into litter too miniscule to remove. I’d let treasures—a watch my husband James bought me on our honeymoon in Paris, a Magic card my sixteen-year-old son Jonah couldn’t win his tournament without--disintegrate in the wash. This time I was systematic.

I pulled out of Jonah’s pocket a crumpled flyer for a dance, a play, a band audition, and soccer tryout. I couldn’t help reading everything he threw away, the life he would never tell me about. A few coins covered in melted candy. I sprayed Shout on the whole gloppy mess.

James walked in from the shower and pulled on a pair of khakis. “Do you know what that is?” he asked, pointing to the plastic container with yellow liquid I had just retrieved from Jonah’s jeans.

“No.” I wished I had already slipped it in the trash.

“Drugs!” James said.

“Jonah doesn’t use drugs.” I knew this with the same certainty I knew he was my child.

“They all do,” James said.

“Not Jonah.” He wouldn’t even take a sip of wine when we offered at dinner.

“They all do at some point--they’re teenagers,” he said. “It looks exactly like Exstasy.”

I didn’t want to know how James knew what Exstasy looked like, so I just kissed him good-bye and looked out the window as he sped down the street on his red Vespa.

Then I e-mailed the bio teacher. “I found a syringe in Jonah’s pocket. I wonder if it’s from a bio lab.”

I stared at the computer for hours, trying to work but getting nothing done, waiting for her to respond. If the answer were reassuring and easy, I thought, she would have written right away. A half hour more. Then another.

The e-mail finally came, minutes before I heard Jonah walk in. “Sorry to alarm you,” it said. “Yesterday we scraped our cheek cells and put them in a syringe for testing DNA.”

I finally breathed out. I exhaled suspension, addiction, and overdoses, invented scenarios about ecstasy and its evil twin. I decided to tell Jonah what I found, so we could laugh together at the absurdity. So I could segue into “the drug talk.”

“I’m not taking drugs,” Jonah told me, as he ate a bagel at the kitchen counter. “But,” he added: “some kids do.”

“Any of your friends?”

“No.” Then he’s safe, I thought. Kids follow their friends. I was so grateful for his candor I gave him a cookie.

He started walking out of the room, ignoring my treat. His hands were in his pockets, fingering God knows what. I would probably never find out; he would empty them himself now that he knew I always check. Then he smiled at me like I was a child who needed to have the world explained. “But, you know,” he said. “I wouldn’t tell you if they did.”