Whisper to Me(90)

“Sure, Dad.”

Ten minutes later there was another knock at the door.

“I know your dad’s angry, but you want to ride to work with me?” you said. “We can talk about stuff. I have an idea I think we could—”

“Yes,” I said.

I grabbed my keys and closed the door behind me.





You started the engine and pulled out, took Ocean and then Maple, driving to the center of town. As we drove, you turned to me. “Get anywhere with Julie?” you asked.

I rocked my hand; an equivocal gesture. “Maybe. She thinks it was a Jeep. One of the V8 sport models.”

“An SRT8?” you asked.

I looked at you, surprised. I hadn’t figured you for a car head. “Yeah. You know cars?”

You shook your head. “Nah. My dad is into them.”

“Mine too.” There were always magazines on our coffee table. Muscle Car. American Auto.

You smiled. “Something we have in common, then.”

You made a couple of turns, getting closer to the center. We pulled up at a stop sign. “Could be enough,” you said, almost to yourself.

“Huh?”

“The model. Gives us something to go on.”

“For what?”

You did like a bear with me wave of your hand. “I’ll tell you. I want to show you something first.”

“It had better not be your genitals,” I said.

You laughed, surprised. I liked to hear you laugh. Then I felt guilty because Paris was dead and here I was flirting with you. I shut up after that, and you stopped talking too—I think the same thought had crossed your mind.

Soon we had arrived at the closest thing Oakwood has to a main drag, the little grocery stores and liquor stores and toy stores. A few restaurants with outside seating.

You turned onto an alleyway, passed a bar with a neon sign showing a woman kneeling on a table, a cowboy hat on her head, swinging a lasso in one hand and holding a beer in the other. The sign was off.

Beyond the bar, there was a long, low warehouse—a redbrick building with steel roll-up doors. You parked in front of the doors and made an expansive gesture at them. “Welcome to the nerve center,” you said.

Then you got out of the pickup and went to the steel door. You entered a code on a padlock; snapped it open. You rolled the door up and came back to the truck. Then you drove us both in.

“Wow,” I said.

We were in a vast space; you wouldn’t have known from the street how big it was. It must have covered most of the block. There was only one floor, so the ceiling was high. Corrugated-iron roof, punctuated in places by plastic windows. From these, shafts of sunlight cut down, illuminating random piles of goods, as if to highlight treasure. Motes of dust swirled in the light, little grains of darkness; inverse constellations.

And piled up, in hills, in mountains, all over the floor were bags of stuffed toys. Thousands, maybe even millions of them. Okay, not millions. But thousands.

You went to that place every day; I guess it didn’t impress you anymore. But the first time I saw it … it was something else. It’s weird: people think of the everyday world as banal, as mundane. But when you really consider it, there’s so much weird and amazing stuff. For instance: an amusement park has to have a place to store its prizes.

And that place has to be amazing.

I walked around for a bit, just staring. There were wide walkways between the piles, so it was possible to see almost all the way to each wall; it only increased the sense of scale. It was surreal. Warehouses are usually hard, industrial, practical places, right? This one looked like a warehouse—the corrugated iron, the bare brick walls. But it was full, I mean absolutely full, of soft toys. It was like something out of a fairy tale.

As I wandered, I realized the mountains were arranged by type, each towering pile of transparent bags containing a different character. There was one that was all Pokémon, another—larger—full of Angry Birds. Disney characters took up an entire wall. Minnies, Donald Ducks. Olafs. There was a whole alpine range of Beanie Babies.

“This is crazy,” I said.

“It’s pretty full on,” you agreed.

“How do you know where everything is?”

You shrugged. “You get used to it.”

“What are you getting today?”

You pulled a piece of paper out of your pocket. “Two bags medium Bugs Bunny. Three bags large Minecraft people. The kids love Minecraft. And a small bag of Mickeys.”

“And you know where all of those are?”

“Yep. There. There. And there.” You pointed to three corners of the warehouse. “I’ll grab them in a moment. Come over here.”

You led me to a small mound of stuffed dinosaurs. You pulled out a bag of them and motioned for me to sit on it. Then you sat down next to me.

“You want to show me dinosaurs?” I said.

You looked puzzled for a second. “Oh! No. But I thought of something.” You pulled out your phone. “I was thinking, we could start a hash tag. #SRT8; something like that. Get people to tweet the location if they see one.”

“What?”

“To find the car, you know?”

“No.”

“You don’t want to find it?”

“I mean, no, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”