The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [111]
Nada decided she would do it for her now.
In the heat and low light, she began sorting, her spider assigning each document to one of more than a dozen categories. There were piles and subpiles, arranged in a wide circle around her, growing and multiplying by the second. The general theme was chronological, moving clockwise, but there were other references, too, by type, by subject, by name, smaller arcs of relevance inside the main circle. As she scanned each page, the lines between this document and that one were drawn instantly, the papers neatly filed in their exact places with a roll of her hand.
When the boxes were empty, she settled in and began to read.
40
IN A GIANT WAREHOUSE by the airport, in an overindustrialized Chicago suburb called, with a certain amount of comic bravado, Elk Grove Village, Alberto Cepeda watched as a lifetime of accumulation was wheeled out in boxes and lots. Four estates, including the possessions of Dr. Marlena Falcone, would be auctioned to the public today.
Alberto had driven here from Indiana in a quiet rage, rain like bullets attacking his Honda on the Indiana Toll Road and the Tri-State. He couldn’t even listen to public radio, which seemed to have been prattling on with the appalling news every hour for two days: Jonathan Prentiss had just won the Abel Prize. Square-jawed, shallow-brained, curly-maned Jonathan Prentiss of NYU, a game theorist and columnist for The New York Times Magazine, who had once appeared with his laptop in an Apple computer ad and who, like a carpenter fixing a sink with a hammer, approached every math problem with the same part of his ordinary brain, had just been given the math world’s highest honor: a glass monolith and a million dollars, and a trip to Oslo besides.
A caustic mixture of envy, jealousy, outrage, and injustice burned on the back of Alberto’s tongue.
The fact that Alberto had taught his classes dutifully but had not published anything in more than a decade that had even raised an eyebrow of respect from his peers only fueled his anger. He had wasted his life, and by rewarding a twit like Jonathan Prentiss, the gods of his profession were rubbing it in.
Alberto’s contributions were apparently important enough for the most exclusive and important society of intellectuals in history, but no one would ever know.
Perhaps the insight he provided had even been worth killing Marlena for.
Cepeda parked and found his way inside the hangar-size building through an almost invisible glass door where an Eagles song played softly on a portable radio and a receptionist with a pointy white collar and black vest asked him to sign in and then handed him a numbered paddle. He followed a confusing series of yellow signs with the word AUCTION to a corner of the massive warehouse floor, sectioned off with curtains.
A handful of buyers from interior design firms slumped uncomfortably in padded folding chairs, prepared for the all-day tedium. A retired couple, probably auction regulars, probably pursuing the thrill of a bargain more than the items themselves, chatted in whispers. Surely the rainstorm combined with the massive blackout in nearby Chicago had tempered attendance.
He sat on the perimeter as a stranger’s possessions were presented to almost complete indifference. He removed his phone, texted his wife, read part of a magazine he had folded lengthwise into his pocket. He wondered about his own accumulation of things, if they would matter so little to the people he would one day leave behind. His grandmother’s sideboard, which he had personally shepherded from Puerto Rico to his dining room in Indiana. The humidor on his desk, a gift from a Dominican poet he had escorted about campus during a literary festival ten years ago. His books. God, my books, he thought. Would nobody care for them, read them, treasure them when he was gone?
Jonathan Prentiss would never suffer this angst. His family would fight over his things, especially that goddamned Abel Prize and his goddamned million dollars.
A young woman