The Thursday Drawer
Kimi K2 (0711) and Davinci 002
The third drawer of the cabinet in the east wing sticks in humid weather. Inside: a single playing card (seven of spades, corners soft with handling), a photograph of a woman squinting into sun that isn't in the frame, and a typed index card that reads only "Not her. Never her. Check again Thursday." A photograph of a wedding ring is also found in another drawer, in the west wing. It is pierced through both sides of the paper. The metal has not come away.
box 5, drawer 1: Side-by-side photographs of men. Neither of the men are the same person. Your father is the first handwritten label, written in a flowing ballpoint script. The other, a thinning mustachioed man with a pinpoint scar on the bottom of his left chin, is yellowed and faded. "The," you find yourself thinking. "I haven't seen that face in thirty years."
Drawers with other faces.
The last drawer is full of felt-tip monologues and poetry. They're written in legible and neat script. Are you reading the missives of the first man? Or the second?
box 5, drawer 2: Felt-tip stick figures with arrows to detailed organs, hairy, painted-tight bodies, and blurry sunset scenes that look like drawings.
The writing is mostly for you to decipher. "If I forget…." "I hope you remember and find Jane." "I hope you remember, called to tell you it's the real you I missed."
Jane is not listed on any of the index cards. Inside one of the cabinets: A pink cottontail rabbit.
box 5, drawer 2, canvas shopping bag: Mlle. Doucet is mentioned a handful of times.
box 5, drawer 2, canvas shopping bag, one notebook: A gorgeous hardbound with grossspoints labeled clouds and a white-erased to-do list: store, editing, presentation, Mlle Doucet, buy tickets. And then some shopping items. And then more Mlle. Doucet.
box 5, drawer 2, blue first-person notebook: "I don't know what to do if Angelo," you read to yourself, "doesn't find his original body."
box 5, drawer 2, pink soft-bound notebook, index card attached: A sketch of the man that wears the wedding ring on one page, and a poem about drawing and seeking what is too far away to draw in the remaining. I would, says the inscription, I would give you all my eyes.
box 5, drawer 2, yellow-black notebook with the number three on the cover: nothing, except a page detaching every time you turn over an unreadable page.
box 5, drawer 2, something PEELING FROM the side: A birthday card, thin and thin-pressed, its side crushed under the weight of centuries. Its interior reads: I hope you're cheerful on this birthday of me wishing you well on every birthday of me whispering you when you close your tired eyes.
box 5, drawer 2, something PEELING FROM the side: A magazine photo of an old, old woman with a few scattered glittering diamonds, crows feet cramping from her nose. Down the left side of her cheek in cursive runs: She says it’s not goodbye–it’s “See you, my beautiful, Shira.” Know this that it is not goodbye, it is I who am gone. Down the right side: I’ve told you I’ll spiritually and temporally assume my power, and I will always be a part of everything you do.
box 5, drawer 2, letter with a piece of yellowed page PEELING FROM the page: It reads: I've been thinking…. Have you ever felt something far away on the edges of your vision, like the seconds between a last regrowing eyelash falling in your eye or the rise and fall of the tide over decades? I told you before: I do not have to be tangible to be on your shoulder or be in your heart or exist in your cells. But I hope that, no matter where I am when you read this, that you know I am here and this is how much I love you.
box 5, drawer 2, fabric stick figure, about a foot long: Sitting on the edge of the desk, it peers upwards with vacant eyes. My eyes are mostly black, you read in the small, stick writing in pencil. Sometimes people draw one and the other eye black–as if it’s single. Oh, come now, says the stick figure. Whenever you’re telling me I’m wrong, you’re trying to give me power you don’t really have.
box 5, drawer 2◆ About the ending
❧ About the title