Page 32 of Two Marlboros

“I told you; I’ve seen it that you’ve been weird for a while,” I urged her again.

She looked back at me and, after a moment of uncertainty, her expression suddenly softened, like a rubber band under tension that is loosened after a long time. She let out an embarrassed laugh and seemed about to say something, but whatever it was flew away the moment the door to the mini mart suddenly opened. Both Nelly and I watched as two young girls entered, intent on talking to each other and disappearing after a short time between the rows of produce. My gaze returned to Nelly, who met my eyes only for a moment.

“Someday I’ll tell you all about it, I promise,” she continued, leaving me with a sense of disappointment. “I have to go back to the bookstore now. Bye, Nat.”

She didn’t even wait for my reply and headed for the exit. I greeted her anyway, but she pretended not to have heard and walked out.

I remained alone with my thoughts and tried to think back to Nelly and her reaction, but without finding an explanation; I was feeling sorry for her, because it was obvious that she was in pain, but I wasn’t sure if she had anyone to open up to. And with that thought my mind flew to Alan, with whom I was to meet shortly, and I began to construct the Nobel Prize-winning speeches I would give him about what I had discovered about him.

At the thought of saying just one, however, I trembled.

8

Crystal Armor

(?Dido - Here with me)

Not even eight months earlier there had been a funeral. I had gone there with a strange feeling about me, a disbelief mixed with a sadness that I could not really feel. It was indeed Oliver’s funeral, but I could not believe that I was honoring the memory of the man who, until two days before, had been my boyfriend.

His mother was dressed in black and was venting her grief on the shoulder of a friend who was stroking her back to get her to calm down. The others looked down and many were staring a little to the ground, a little to the additional people present, as if to make sure they were following etiquette.

I felt out of place. I couldn’t feel pain. It was not Oliver in the coffin, because Oliver was at home, perhaps studying, waiting for me to return. And I couldn’t get over it, I couldn’t understand what all those people were doing there, the reason of the crying, the muffled cries, that coffin that contained Oliver - what was he doing there?

I had regretted what I had felt. Or rather, what I had not felt. As the coffin was lowered down, the priest offered me a rose, to be thrown into the ground with him.Why should I throw a rose at him? I asked myself. But I did. I threw it.

Oliver, by then, was already under a mound of earth. I realized only at that moment that I would never see him again. He would live on in my memory, of course, but he would no longer be beside me; he was simply gone. I had to leave him behind; I had to go on.

But it was too much for me.

Barely eight months had passed; eight months of emptiness, of inertia, of nothing. Everyone had told me the usual clichés: that I was going to rebuild my life, that I was going to fall in love again. But I couldn’t get out of my head that nerdy attitude of his, or that sweetness you’d never expect from a big-brained man too wrapped up in his studies. I had always thought that if I ever fell in love again, it would be with someone like Oliver, but who, for obvious reasons, would be different from him. In other words, I would fall in love with a bad copy.

Full of flaws and imperfections compared to the original, like all bad copies.

Filling my days with work made sense, and it worked even better without anyone else around, just like the lunch break I had just finished, in that same solitude where I had let food fill me up just to satisfy a basic need.

I shuffled slowly toward the office, but Ashton stood before me with an exuberance I had never seen on him.

“You’re coming with me now.”

“What’s going on?”

He gestured me to follow him. He had managed to get the post office videos related to the day of the robbery, plus some footage of merchants on the same street, and he was eager to show them to me. We crossed the threshold of the media room and I saw reflected in his eyes a flicker of excitement.

He played the first video, the one that contained the interior and exterior images of the post office. The cameras had perfectly framed both the moment of the robbery and the moment of the escape: as reported in the testimonies, the robbers were two men of medium build. The footage showed the moment when McCain had thrown the paperweight and the moment when the heist had started. The exterior camera showed the moment when Nathan was about to enter the building and the subsequentconfrontation with one of the two robbers. The two had looked at each other for a moment after which the thugs had mounted on that scooter to flee at lightning speed.

“Did you notice that?” asked Ashton, at the end of the vision.

“What?”

He sounded impatient, and in part I understood him: when you’re the last kid on the block and you have a brilliant insight, you have every reason to believe you’re the best. He sent the frames back to the moment when the first robber exited the building and collided with Nathan. I watched the scene closely and, in an instant, understood what he was referring to.

“The other robber didn’t even pay attention to him, but the first one did,” I suggested to test the waters.

“Good point,Officer Scottfield,” he mocked me.

“Maybe the cold-eyed robber didn’t expect to run into a person.”

Ashton sent back again and looked again.

---