Excerpt of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
(Page 5 of 8)
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That night we ordered General Tso's
Gluten for dinner and I
noticed that Dad was using a fork, even
though he was perfect with
chopsticks. "Wait a minute!" I said, and
stood up. I pointed at his fork. "Is
that fork a clue?" He shrugged his
shoulders, which to me meant it was a
major clue. I thought: Fork, fork. I ran
to my laboratory and got my metal
detector out of its box in the closet.
Because I'm not allowed to be in the
park alone at night, Grandma went with
me. I started at the Eighty-sixth
Street entrance and walked in extremely
precise lines, like I was one of the
Mexican guys who mow the lawn, so I
wouldn't miss anything. I knew the
insects were loud because it was summer,
but I didn't hear them because
my earphones covered my ears. It was
just me and the metal underground.
Every time the beeps would get close
together, I'd tell Grandma to
shine the flashlight on the spot. Then
I'd put on my white gloves, take the
hand shovel from my kit, and dig
extremely gently. When I saw something, I
used a paintbrush to get rid of the
dirt, just like a real archeologist. Even
though I only searched a small area of
the park that night, I dug up a quarter,
and a handful of paper clips, and what I
thought was the chain from a lamp
that you pull to make the light go on,
and a refrigerator magnet for sushi,
which I know about, but wish I didn't. I
put all of the evidence in a bag and
marked on a map where I found it.
When I got home, I examined the
evidence in my laboratory under
my microscope, one piece at a time: a
bent spoon, some screws, a pair of
rusty scissors, a toy car, a pen, a key
ring, broken glasses for someone with
incredibly bad eyes . . .
I brought them to Dad, who was reading
the New York Times at
the kitchen table, marking the mistakes
with his red pen. "Here's what I've
found," I said, pushing my pussy off the
table with the tray of evidence. Dad
looked at it and nodded. I asked, "So?"
He shrugged his shoulders like he
had no idea what I was talking about,
and he went back to the paper. "Can't
you even tell me if I'm on the right
track?" Buckminster purred, and Dad
shrugged his shoulders again. "But if
you don't tell me anything, how can I
ever be right?" He circled something in
an article and said, "Another way of
looking at it would be, how could you
ever be wrong?"
He got up to get a drink of water, and
I examined what he'd circled
on the page, because that's how tricky
he could be. It was in an article about
the girl who had disappeared, and how
everyone thought the congressman
who was humping her had killed her. A
few months later they found her body
in Rock Creek Park, which is in
Washington, D.C., but by then everything
was different, and no one cared anymore,
except for her parents.
statement, read to the hundreds of
gathered press from a makeshift media
center off the back of the family home,
Levy's father adamantly restated his
confidence that his daughter would be
found. "We will not stop looking until
we are given a definitive reason to stop
looking, namely, Chandra's return."
During the brief question and answer
period that followed, a reporter from El Pais asked Mr. Levy if by "return" he
meant "safe return." Overcome with
emotion, Mr. Levy was unable to speak,
and his lawyer took the
microphone. "We continue to hope and
pray for Chandra's safety, and will do
everything within......
It wasn't a mistake! It was a message
to me!
I went back to the park every night for
the next three nights. I dug
up a hair clip, and a roll of pennies,
and a thumbtack, and a coat hanger, and
a 9V battery, and a Swiss Army knife,
and a tiny picture frame, and a tag for
a dog named Turbo, and a square of
aluminum foil, and a ring, and a razor,
and an extremely old pocket watch that
was stopped at 5:37, although I
didn't know if it was a.m. or p.m. But I
still couldn't figure out what it all
meant. The more I found, the less I
understood.
From Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,
pages 1-15. Copyright © 2005 by Jonathan Safran
Foer. Reprinted by permission of
Houghton Mifflin Company.
