“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.”
“We’ll get it trending,” you said. “Offer a prize or something to get the ball rolling. An iPad. It doesn’t matter. We can worry about making good on it later.”
I looked right into your eyes. “What. Are. You. Talking. About?”
You narrowed your eyes. “Wait. You don’t know Twitter?”
“Yeah. I mean, I’ve heard of it.”
“But you haven’t used it?”
“No. I look on Instagram sometimes. For, like, fashion. You know.”
You glanced at my clothes, raised your eyebrows.
“Very funny,” I said.
You put a hand over your heart. “Sorry. It was too easy. Okay. Listen.” You took out your phone, opened the Twitter app. You showed me the timeline, the trending hashtags. “What I’m thinking is, if we get people to tweet every time they see an SRT8, and we ask them to include a location, we might start to see a pattern.”