The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 60: May 9

Today I found a Rolodex in a trash can at JFK. I was about to enter the security check when I remembered the half-full water bottle in my bag. I needed to dispose of it before I held up the security line and became the scourge of Terminal B. I found a tall, space-age trash can. Its smoothly rounded mouth resembled a portal. Before throwing the bottle into it, I looked inside. I saw a Rolodex of family photographs. I was in a hurry and didn’t have time to wonder Why is there a Rolodex in the trash can at JFK? I only knew that the Rolodex made me feel bad to the bone. No matter what I decided to do with the Rolodex (return it to the trash can; keep it), I was in a bind. The statement “The situation demanded something of me” felt extremely applicable. How would I respond to the situation?

Situations have demanded something of me before. Once, in my twenties, when I was studying in France, I was with a group of Americans approached by a con artist looking for money. The con artist, an American who was clearly not a student or a tourist, beseeched us, his fellow countrymen, for help. His wallet had been stolen! Also his father had died! He needed money to catch a train to his plane, which left from Paris tomorrow, and which he had to make so that he could attend his father’s funeral! Thank God I have found some Americans! He repeatedly said. We all knew the guy was conning us — he wore leather shoes in an era when Americans wore nothing but big white sneakers — but none of us wanted to be the first to call bullshit to his face. The situation demanded a choice. Who did we want to appear to be? To give him money was to appear stupid in front of our friends. To not give him money was to appear heartless. Most people, publicly at least, choose looking stupid over appearing heartless. Or most of the people I know would choose to look stupid.

The Rolodex, like the fake American tourist, was a lose-lose situation that nonetheless demanded a choice. No one was around to publicly shame me, but I am perfectly able to shame myself. And worse — around myself it is not a matter of appearing to be stupid or heartless; instead I confirm to myself that I am definitively one or the other.

To keep the Rolodex was to be stupid; to discard it was heartless.

I kept it.

In the security line, I worried. Wasn’t I a version of the gullible traveler who acts as an unwitting mule of illegality, i.e., the person who transports, as a kindness, a kilo of heroin hidden in a knitting bag for an innocent-seeming granny? If asked, how would I answer the question, Did a stranger give you anything to carry?

The situation gave me a Rolodex. The situation demanded of me that I carry it.

Maybe there was an explosive in the Rolodex. Maybe a suicide bomber suffered a crisis of faith or nerve at the security line and ditched the bomb and went back to Queens. Maybe the photos were acid tabs or coated with cocaine that, following a crafty extraction process, would yield enough to net me a life sentence in an Italian jail. (I was headed to Italy to go to the artist colony.) What if, while going through customs in Rome, a dog smelled the drugs on my Rolodex?

It was already becoming my Rolodex.

I made it through security. If the Rolodex contained a bomb, it was a good bomb. Maybe, instead of cocaine, the photos were coated with a bioweapon designed to release at cruising altitude. I called my parents to say good-bye. (I hoped it wasn’t good-bye.) I told them about the Rolodex. My dad said, “Someone in those photos must have really pissed someone off.” I’d also considered this possibility; the cursedness I’d sensed originated from anger or hate directed at a person in the Rolodex photos. Somebody needed to release himself from these bad feelings. He’d thrown the photos away, betting on the psychic exorcism of a landfill burial.

I’d screwed up the process. I’d kept live what should have been dead. Many of the photos had captions. Whoever chose the moments to be memorialized in the Rolodex was obsessed by accidents. There was a photo of a violently shredded white picket fence with the caption “Accident, 1965.” There were photos of trees upended in various hurricanes. There was a photo of the Maidstone Club after a fire destroyed the cafeteria. There was a photo of a road hugging a cliff. The caption read, “Dubrovnik, 1971: Accident going down this coast (to Greece),” after which appeared a photo of a man in a hospital bed (“Belgrade — Yugoslavia”) reading James Michener’s The Drifters.

I countered my dad’s theory with what was — bombs and drugs and anger aside — the likeliest theory. Many of the photos were taken in nearby Long Island. Probably the owner of the Rolodex had recently died. The children — from the photos, I guessed them to be in their sixties by now — had flown in from wherever they lived to clean out the family museum, long docented by the lone surviving parent. Nobody wanted the Rolodex, but nobody could justify throwing it away. One sibling insisted to another sibling, “You take the Rolodex!” The situation demanded that the sibling not refuse. The sibling who took the Rolodex — it was heavy, and an awkward size, and the photos, in my bag at least, kept sliding out of their plastic jackets — had probably been struggling to find his or her ID to go through security, and the fucking Rolodex was in the way, and it had started to come apart, and in a fit of annoyance the sibling dumped it. He or she had been praying all along for a good excuse to get rid of the Rolodex, just like I’d been praying for an excuse to divorce my ex-husband years ago and was so relieved when he provided me one by spending our savings on the sly. He misbehaved in a way that would hold up in a court of public opinion. It would also hold up in my court of private opinion. I would not appear heartless to the court or to myself by divorcing him. The Rolodex had likewise misbehaved. The sibling was so relieved when it obstructed his basic ability to properly identify himself, find his ticket, and board a plane. He was so relieved to discover it was broken. In all good conscience, the sibling had probably thought to himself: Finally I am justified in ditching this thing.