“Doesn’t look that way.”
“Because the TV only shows you the ones who’re doing it. The news isn’t all the news, Jonah. Not by a long shot. It’s just what reporters want to tell you about. Riots come and go, wars come and go, but under the tumult, day after day, century after century, millions of people are doing nice things for one another, making sacrifices, mostly small things, but it’s all those little kindnesses that hold civilization together, all those people who live quiet lives and never make the news.”
On the silent TV, as the face of an anchorman replaced the riots, I said, “I don’t know about that.”
“Well, I do.”
The anchorman was replaced by a wind-whipped rain-lashed town over which towered a giant funnel cloud that tore a house apart in an instant and sucked the ruins off the face of the Earth.
“When weather’s big news,” my mother said, “it’s a hurricane, a tornado, a tidal wave. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the time, Mother Nature isn’t destroying things, she’s nurturing us, but that’s not what gets ratings or sells papers.” She switched off the TV again. “What do you want to be, Jonah—news or nice?”
“Nice, I guess.”
She smiled and pulled me against her and kissed the top of my head. “Then help me get ready for Mrs. Lorenzo. You can start by setting the table for dinner.”
A few minutes later, in the kitchen, as I was putting the plates on the place mats, I said, “Sooner or later, do you think my dad’s going to be news?”
She recognized the implication that I thought him incapable of being nice. “Be respectful, Jonah.”
I figured she knew the answer as well as I did.
17
The following morning, after Mom had left for Woolworth’s, I carried the kitchen trash bag to the alleyway behind the apartment building. The sky had lowered, as smooth and gray as concrete, as if the entire city had been roofed over and enclosed in a structure of fantastical dimensions. The air was still when I stepped outside, but as I tossed away the trash and turned from the Dumpster, a cat’s paw of wind came along the center of the littered alley, leaving most debris undisturbed, batting before it only a sphere about the size of a golf ball. It rolled to a stop in front of me, as the breeze died, and I saw that it was an eyeball. Not a real eye, this was one that might have once been sewn to a stuffed toy.
The orb looked up at me from the pavement. I didn’t remember bending down to retrieve it, but the next thing I knew, I held the object in my right hand. It was made of neatly stitched furry fabric and filled with some spongy material, overall beige, though affixed to it was a circle of white felt that bore a small blue disc at its center. Beige threads, with which it had been attached to some plush toy, trailed from it.
Perhaps because of the recent strange events and disturbing dreams, I was disposed to regard the eye as if it were not merely litter, as if it must have some ominous significance. As it gazed at me from the cupped palm of my right hand, I didn’t realize that the sounds of the city were diminishing, until suddenly I became aware that a profound silence had fallen over the alleyway. For an instant, I thought that I had gone deaf, but then I heard myself say, “What’s happening?” The silence was real, not a failure of perception, as though the metropolis had never been a human habitat, as if it were instead a vast clockwork mechanism that, after centuries of reliable performance, had exhausted the tension of its mainspring.
I glanced toward one end of the alleyway, then toward the other, wondering at the absence of traffic. In the warm August morning, many windows were open in the surrounding apartment buildings, though no voices issued from them, no music, no sounds of activity whatsoever. From the sky: no jet roar, no chatter of police helicopters.
When I turned my attention once more to the faux eye in my hand, I could not dismiss the ludicrous conviction that it could see me. It was inert materials, crafted by human hands, just fabric and thread and a bit of colored plastic, and yet I felt watched—and not just watched but also pondered and analyzed and judged—as if every detail this eye beheld was transmitted to some remote and highly curious entity that, but for me, was the only living creature still afoot in this silent city of stilled pendulums and frozen gears.