Object No. 65 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Laura Lippman, has ended. Original price: $2. Final price: $45.01.]

Her husband saved everything. He had a box, for example, of cigarette lighters, useless plugs taken from every car he had ever owned. He saved ticket stubs and playbills. He had three hand-knit sweaters from an elderly aunt, long deceased. The sweaters were scratchy and unattractive; he had never worn them and never would.

So a motel key, here in his cufflink drawer, didn’t necessarily mean anything. Yet she thought it might. And she knew that she that could, and would, make herself crazy about it. Or she could simply ask him. Why not ask him? She hadn’t been spying. She had been putting away his cufflinks, the ones that went with the tuxedo, which he wore more and more often these days, to events where he said she would be bored.

“I wasn’t spying,” she said. “But I have to ask – why did you save this?”

“Well, look at the name,” he said. “Perkins hotel.”

He waited, smiling broadly.

“I don’t get it.”

“Remember the movie Psycho?”

She did. Taxidermy, shower, mother issues. “That was the Bates Motel.”

“Yes, but the actor was Anthony Perkins. Isn’t that cool?”

“And what took you to Laconia, New Hampshire?”

“A road trip with a bunch of guys in our junior year of college.” He held the key, ran his thumb over it. “Drop in any mailbox,” it said, but he hadn’t.

Here it is, she thought. Here’s the moment where you choose to believe, or not to believe. A marriage is a kind of religion, defying rational thought. The idea that someone could love you – the idea that someone could love her – was about as plausible as water into wine, or reincarnation, or seventy-two virgins waiting in heaven. You believed or you didn’t. In or out.

The key is old, she told herself. All the motels have those electronic cards now, even in Laconia, New Hampshire. It holds a memory, and it’s something that occurred years ago, although probably not with a group of guys. Did he lie for her sake or for his own, to keep the story for himself, to enjoy the private thrill of whatever happened in Room 3?

Maybe she should stop putting his things away.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Colson Whitehead, has ended. Original price: 33 cents. Final price: $71.]

On September 16th, 2031 at 2:35 am, a temporal rift – a “tear” in very fabric of time and space – will appear 16.5 meters above the area currently occupied by Jeffrey’s Bistro, 123 E Ivinson Ave, Laramie, WY. Only the person wielding this mallet will be able to enter the rift unscathed. If this person then completes the 8 Labors of Worthiness, he or she will be become the supreme ruler of the universe.

[* --> Information regarding the 8 Labors of Worthiness is being made available by the author, in occasional Tweets, here: @colsonwhitehead.]

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Tom Bartlett, has ended. Original price: $4. Final price: $15.50.]

From June 1996 to February 1999 I worked as a manager at a well-known electronic supply retailer in a mostly vacant strip mall on the outskirts of a medium-sized metropolitan area located in the southeastern United States. I don’t say this to brag but simply because it is a fact like the inevitability of death or the importance of placing a plastic weather boot on exposed coax cable to prevent moisture seepage.

During that time I lived in a 900-square-foot two-bedroom apartment overlooking a popular name-brand eatery famous for its spicy boneless chicken with the assistant manager for the same well-known electronic supply retailer who, for the purposes of this description, I will refer to as AMFTSWKESR. AMFTSWKESR and I spent our days fielding inquiries from a continuous procession of would-be technology users who wondered either a) why a 3.5mm plug could not be inserted into a 2.5mm jack or b) if the computer came with the Internet already on it or if that cost extra.

To these conundrums we would respond, “You make a point” or “That is a question.” Deeming their points “interesting” or their questions “good” seemed to us a violation of certain ideals which, while not expressly stated, were understood to be sacrosanct. In the evenings AMFTSWKESR and I would perform a cursory inventory, place the large bills in the downstairs safe, and drive my fuel-efficient two-door to the aforementioned popular name-brand eatery where we would order spicy boneless chicken and act out our favorite customer encounters from that day. Then we would return to our apartment, plug in the item pictured above, and stare at it transfixed until one or both of us passed out on the thrift-store couch, our nametags still affixed to our wrinkled knit shirts.

In November of 1998 AMFTSWKESR moved to the midwestern United States to be close to a curly haired woman he met in a chat room for people with a shared interest in a commercially unsuccessful science fiction film from the 1980s. The pictured item belonged to AMFTSWKESR, but he left it behind because he thought I might get more use out of it, a gesture intended to indicate that our roughly two-and-a-half-year friendship had been equally meaningful to him. Or that is what I took it to indicate.

Minus AMFTSWKESR’s presence at this particular branch of the well-known electronic supply retailer the position became unbearable and I tendered my resignation shortly thereafter. In the intervening decade I have held a series of nearly identical jobs and lived in a number of nearly identical apartments and yet it all feels like a pathetic foreign replica of that short-lived period, an assertion which is either a) a reminder that the days you’re living now may be as close to halcyon as you’ll ever come or b) a testament to my inexplicable fondness for a seemingly unremarkable and long-since-ended chapter of my admittedly non-noteworthy existence.

Some may wonder why I would offer this corded totem for sale to the general public or why I would find it necessary to dwell on my personal work history rather than more pertinent information as to the item’s current condition and functionality. They may, for instance, ask: What is it? To which I must reply: That is a question.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Katharine Weber, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $10.50.]

Thirty-two years ago I was sent by the Smithers Employment Agency to interview with the worst client in the history of the agency. Four other girls had been rejected that same day, each one of them returning within an hour, in tears (poor Rose O’Brien couldn’t stop sobbing for the longest time and Mary Casey went home with a migraine and never returned). Although I had very little experience as a personal secretary, in fact, none at all, having sold gloves at Saks for ten years until I was replaced by someone prettier though thoroughly unqualified, and even though Mr. Smithers had commented unfavorably on my unfortunate tendency to blush and stammer when flustered, which he said would make it hard to place me, I suppose he had run out of prospects to send.

So over to Dr. Marjorie Grimstone’s I went, on the cross-town bus, wearing my three-button dove-gray cashmere gloves with my navy suit. Dr. Grimstone showed me her office as if I were a mental defective (“This is my office”). There was a small desk (“This is where you would sit and do your work on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons”), bare except for a telephone, a plastic-hooded adding machine, a large, gun-metal tape dispenser, and a tiny stapler (“I prefer the smaller staples for my patient notes and billing files; if operated precisely it won’t jam”). Next to the desk loomed a massive IBM Selectric typewriter, shrouded in plastic, on its own typing table.

Dr. Grimstone sat me down on the hard stenographer’s chair which rolled around on a plastic mat protecting her Turkish carpet, and then she sat across the room on a small tufted armchair at the end of her analytic couch and tried to intimidate me by asking all sorts of rude personal questions, which she explained she was entitled to ask because she was a “shrink,” as she put it. I came to see over time that Dr. Grimstone treated everyone this way, as if she had a special privilege to regard all of humanity as her research subjects. I don’t really know why, but I stood up to her and I didn’t cry like the others, or blush or stammer, even when she asked me if my orgasms were clitoral or vaginal. Instead I looked her in the eye and said Dr. Grimstone, I am your last chance at hiring a part-time secretary from the Smithers Agency, and even though I am not very experienced, I believe I can do the job, and you seem like someone capable of being kind, so why don’t you just hire me and stop being so unkind, and she did.

By the time she died, Dr.Grimstone had a very organized estate. She was meticulous about the tiniest things: the Chinese porcelain, the Tupperware, the Turkish carpets, the extension cords, the family silver, the finger bowls, the Murano glass animals, the psychoanalytic journals. The shredding of patient records we had done together once she had become deaf as a post and couldn’t keep asking patients to repeat their deepest secrets, to shout them out from that scratchy olive green couch under the Durer woodcuts which had been her father’s, which she left to the great-niece she liked best.

She left me an annuity for less than I had hoped, though it was generous, and also, in a touching failure of imagination, as if Dr. Grimstone could only envisage my future in my studio apartment in The Bronx (which she bought me twenty years ago when the building went co-op), sitting at that desk from her office, continuing my  routine of those thirty-two years, she left me the desk and the stenographer’s chair, along with the IBM Selectric typewriter, the adding machine, the plastic slipcovers for both, the heavy, gun-metal tape dispenser, and the tiny stapler, which, frankly, often jams.