Even after a year, I still had an extremely difficult time doing certain things, like taking showers, for some reason, and getting into elevators, obviously. There was a lot of stuff that made me panicky, like suspension bridges, germs, airplanes, fireworks, Arab people on the subway (even though I'm not racist), Arab people in restaurants and coffee shops and other public places, scaffolding, sewers and subway grates, bags without owners, shoes, people with mustaches, smoke, knots, tall buildings, turbans. A lot of the time I'd get that feeling like I was in the middle of a huge black ocean, or in deep space, but not in the fascinating way. It's just that everything was incredibly far away from me. It was worst at night. I started inventing things, and then I couldn't stop, like beavers, which I know about. People think they cut down trees so they can build dams, but in reality it's because their teeth never stop growing, and if they didn't constantly file them down by cutting through all of those trees, their teeth would start to grow into their own faces, which would kill them. That's how my brain was.

One night, after what felt like a googolplex inventions, I went to Dad's closet. We used to Greco-Roman wrestle on the floor in there, and tell hilarious jokes, and once we hung a pendulum from the ceiling and put a circle of dominoes on the floor to prove that the earth rotated. But I hadn't gone back in since he died. Mom was with Ron in the living room, listening to music too loud and playing board games. She wasn't missing Dad. I held the doorknob for a while before I turned it.

Even though Dad's coffin was empty, his closet was full. And even after more than a year, it still smelled like shaving. I touched all of his white T-shirts. I touched his fancy watch that he never wore and the extra laces for his sneakers that would never run around the reservoir again. I put my hands into the pockets of all of his jackets (I found a receipt for a cab, a wrapper from a miniature Krackle, and the business card of a diamond supplier). I put my feet into his slippers. I looked at myself in his metal shoehorn. The average person falls asleep in seven minutes, but I couldn't sleep, not after hours, and it made my boots lighter to be around his things, and to touch stuff that he had touched, and to make the hangers hang a little straighter, even though I knew it didn't matter.

His tuxedo was over the chair he used to sit on when he tied his shoes, and I thought, Weird. Why wasn't it hung up with his suits? Had he come from a fancy party the night before he died? But then why would he have taken off his tuxedo without hanging it up? Maybe it needed to be cleaned? But I didn't remember a fancy party. I remembered him tucking me in, and us listening to a person speaking Greek on the shortwave radio, and him telling me a story about New York's sixth borough. If I hadn't noticed anything else weird, I wouldn't have thought about the tuxedo again. But I started noticing a lot.

There was a pretty blue vase on the highest shelf. What was a pretty blue vase doing way up there? I couldn't reach it, obviously, so I moved over the chair with the tuxedo still on it, and then I went to my room to get the Collected Shakespeare set that Grandma bought for me when she found out that I was going to be Yorick, and I brought those over, four tragedies at a time, until I had a stack that was tall enough. I stood on all of that and it worked for a second. But then I had the tips of my fingers on the vase, and the tragedies started to wobble, and the tuxedo was incredibly distracting, and the next thing was that everything was on the floor, including me, and including the vase, which had shattered. "I didn't do it!" I hollered, but they didn't even hear me, because they were playing music too loud and cracking up too much. I zipped myself all the way into the sleeping bag of myself, not because I was hurt, and not because I had broken something, but because they were cracking up. Even though I knew I shouldn't, I gave myself a bruise.

I started to clean everything up, and that was when I noticed something else weird. In the middle of all of that glass was a little envelope, about the size of a wireless Internet card. What the? I opened it up, and inside there was a key. What the, what the? It was a weird-looking key, obviously to something extremely important, because it was fatter and shorter than a normal key. I couldn't explain it: a fat and short key, in a little envelope, in a blue vase, on the highest shelf in his closet.

The first thing I did was the logical thing, which was to be very secretive and try the key in all of the locks in the apartment. Even without trying I knew it wasn't for the front door, because it didn't match up with the key that I wear on a string around my neck to let myself in when nobody's home. I tiptoed so I wouldn't be noticed, and I tried the key in the door to the bathroom, and the different bedroom doors, and the drawers in Mom's dresser. I tried it in the desk in the kitchen where Dad used to pay the bills, and in the closet next to the linen closet where I sometimes hid when we played hide and seek, and in Mom's jewelry box. But it wasn't for any of them.

In bed that night I invented a special drain that would be underneath every pillow in New York, and would connect to the reservoir. Whenever people cried themselves to sleep, the tears would all go to the same place, and in the morning the weatherman could report if the water level of the Reservoir of Tears had gone up or down, and you could know if New York was in heavy boots. And when something really terrible happened—like a nuclear bomb, or at least a biological weapons attack—an extremely loud siren would go off, telling everyone to get to Central Park to put sandbags around the reservoir.

Anyway.

The next morning I told Mom that I couldn't go to school, because I was too sick. It was the first lie that I had to tell. She put her hand on my forehead and said, "You do feel a bit hot." I said, "I took my temperature and it's one hundred point seven degrees." That was the second lie. She turned around and asked me to zip up the back of her dress, which she could have done herself, but she knew that I loved to do it. She said, "I'll be in and out of meetings all day, but Grandma can come by if you need anything, and I'll call to check on you every hour." I told her, "If I don't answer, I'm probably sleeping or going to the bathroom." She said, "Answer."

Once she left for work, I put on my clothes and went downstairs. Stan was sweeping up in front of the building. I tried to get past him without him noticing, but he noticed. "You don't look sick," he said, brushing a bunch of leaves into the street. I told him, "I feel sick." He asked, "Where's Mr. Feeling Sick going?" I told him, "To the drugstore on Eighty-fourth to get some cough drops." Lie #3. Where I actually went was the locksmith's store, which is Frazer and Sons, on Seventy-ninth.

"Need some more copies?" Walt asked. I gave him a high-five, and I showed him the key that I had found, and asked him what he could tell me about it. "It's for some kind of lockbox," he said, holding it up to his face and looking at it over his glasses. "A safe, I'm guessing. You can tell it's for a lockbox by its build." He showed me a rack that had a ton of keys on it. "See, it's not like any of these. It's much thicker. Harder to break." I touched all the keys that I could reach, and that made me feel OK, for some reason. "But it's not for a fixed safe, I don't think. Nothing too big. Maybe something portable. Could be a safe-deposit box, actually. An old one. Or some kind of fire-retardant cabinet." That made me crack up a little, even though I know there's nothing funny about being a mental retard. "It's an old key," he said. "Could be twenty, thirty years old." "How can you tell?" "Keys are what I know." "You're cool." "And not many lockboxes use keys anymore." "They don't?" "Well, hardly anyone uses keys anymore." "I use keys," I told him, and I showed him my apartment key. "I know you do," he said. "But people like you are a dying breed. It's all electronic these days. Keypads. Thumbprint recognition." "That's so awesome." "I like keys." I thought for a minute, and then I got heavy, heavy boots. "Well, if people like me are a dying breed, then what's going to happen to your business?" "We'll become specialized," he said, "like a typewriter shop. We're useful now, but soon we'll be interesting." "Maybe you need a new business." "I like this business."