Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer Page A

in New Jersey. I kept going back to it, like a salmon, which I know about. Mom must have stopped to wash her face ten times. It was so quiet and so dark, and we were the only people there. What drinks were in the Coke machine? What fonts were the signs in? I went through the boxes in my brain. I took out a neat old film projector. What was the last film Dad made? Was I in it? I went through a bunch of the toothbrushes they give you at the dentist, and three baseballs that Dad had caught at games, which he wrote the dates on. What were the dates? My brain opened a box with old atlases (where there were two Germanys and one Yugoslavia) and souvenirs from business trips, like Russian dolls with dolls inside them with dolls inside them with dolls inside them…Which of those things had Dad kept for when I had kids?
    It was 2:36 A.M. I went to Mom's room. She was sleeping, obviously. I watched the sheets breathe when she breathed, like how Dad used to say that trees inhale when people exhale, because I was too young to understand the truth about biological processes. I could tell that Mom was dreaming, but I didn't want to know what she was dreaming about, because I had enough of my own nightmares, and if she had been dreaming something happy, I would have been angry at her for dreaming something happy. I touched her incredibly gently. She jumped up and said, 'What is it?' I said, 'It's OK.' She grabbed my shoulders and said, 'What is it?' The way she was holding me hurt my arms, but I didn't show anything. 'Remember when we went to the storage facility in New Jersey?' She let go of me and lay back down. 'What?'
    'Where Dad's stuff is. Remember?'
    'It's the middle of the night, Oskar.'
    'What was it called?'
    ' Oskar .'
    'It's just that what was the name of the place?' She reached for her glasses on the bedside table, and I would have given all of my collections, and all of the jewelry I'd ever made, and all future birthday and Christmas presents just to hear her say 'Black Storage.' Or 'Blackwell Storage.' Or 'Blackman.' Or even 'Midnight Storage.' Or 'Dark Storage.' Or 'Rainbow.'
    She made a weird face, like someone was hurting her, and said, 'Store-a-Lot.'
    I'd lost count of the disappointments.
     

    WHY I'M NOT WHERE YOU ARE
     
    5/21/63
    Your mother and I never talk about the past, that's a rule. I go to the door when she's using the bathroom, and she never looks over my shoulder when I'm writing, those are two more rules. I open doors for her but I never touch her back as she passes through, she never lets me watch her cook, she folds my pants but leaves my shirts by the ironing board, I never light candles when she's in the room, but I do blow candles out. It's a rule that we never listen to sad music, we made that rule early on, songs are as sad as the listener, we hardly ever listen to music. I change the sheets every morning to wash away my writing, we never sleep in the same bed twice, we never watch television shows about sick children, she never asks me how my day was, we always eat on the same side of the table, facing the window. So many rules, sometimes I can't remember what's a rule and what isn't, if anything we do is for its own sake, I'm leaving her today, is that the rule we've been organizing ourselves around this whole time, or am I about to break the organizing rule? I used to ride the bus here at the end of every week, to take the magazines and newspapers that people left behind when they got on their planes, your mother reads and reads and reads, she wants English, as much as she can get her hands on, is that a rule? I'd come late Friday afternoon, it used to be that I would go home with a magazine or two and maybe a paper, but she wanted more, more slang, more figures of speech, the bee's knees, the cat's pajamas, horse of a different color, dog-tired, she wanted to talk like she was born here, like she never came from anywhere else, so I started bringing a knapsack, which I would stuff with as