Marie did decide to give the number listed next to the return address a call. She waited patiently in between the rings, hoping only slightly that nobody would answer. Stephen Lawrence Jr. did answer with a glimmer of hope in his raspy old voice.
“The Joyces?” Stephen asked from the other line.
“Just the Joyce.” Marie said, twiddling her thumbs. “Marie Joyce to be specific.”
“Oh boy, I haven’t seen you since you were a wee-little thing.” Stephen chortled and coughed within the same breath. “I’m so sorry for your loss, though I bet you’re fuckin’ sick of hearing that.” This provoked a chuckle out of Marie, which grew to a laughter between the two. “Still got it.” Stephen confidently said.
It wasn’t long before Marie stopped beating around the bush. “I was wondering if you could help me, Mr. Lawrence.” She said.
“My father was Mr. Lawrence, god rest his soul.” Stephen said. “You can call me Steve.”
“Okay, Steve.” Marie looked around the packed house, very much aware that she had less than 48 hours to return to work. “I was wondering if you knew of anything big or valuable in my father’s life. Any strange accounts he wouldn’t have told me about? Any big possessions he’s kept hidden around the house that he mentioned?”
“Oh, I see.” Stephen said. “You’ve been given the task of sorting through all of that old, dusty junk!” There was a pause, you could hear Stephen taking a puff from a cigar. “I don’t remember much. He didn’t have life insurance or anything, could never afford the stuff. The only thing I’m aware of is something that I gifted him a few Christmases ago.” When asked which Christmas, it turned out to be the year that Marie had received a book of sheet music from Jones and that Jones had received physical coffee and physical cigarettes from Marie. “It was a typewriter. I got him the thing to help him remember stuff.”
“What sorts of stuff?” Marie asked.
“All sorts of stuff!” Stephen said. “This is the man’s life we’re talking about. He had to remember at least something, so I sent him a typewriter so he could write down what happened every day. I got the idea after a consultation with his doctor.”
“What made his doctor think of that?”
“I brought it up as something that helped me remember, even though my forgetfulness was a lot less severe than Carl’s. It helped me get all of the awful gunk out of my soul and put it somewhere. You may remember, I was not as congenial a man as I am now.” Marie did remember.
When she first met Stephen Lawrence Jr., he was fresh off of his second divorce and the last of his children had disowned him, blaming him for the inherited drinking problem that would eventually take their life. It was Thanksgiving break from Marie’s first and last semester of college when she met Stephen Lawrence Jr. for the first time. Even then, he was smoking a cigar, making dirty small-talk with her father, comparing their freshly shaved heads to male genitalia.
“Do you know where he might have put it?” Marie asked, regarding the typewriter.
“I think it was in your mother’s recovery room.” The recovery room was just that, a place where Marie’s mother would recover after long bouts of chemotherapy. When Marie went up to inspect the place, something that she couldn’t bring herself to do before, there was, in fact, a typewriter sitting on a desk, next to a spattering of papers, half-full of something or other.
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Marie approached the archaic, little machine. She felt the cushion squish down ever so slightly, in the shape of her father’s ass, as she sat down in the cheap office chair next to the desk. She couldn’t help but think of Jones, and the book about superheroes that they were writing.
She made her best guess as to how to operate the thing, loading in a new piece of paper and savoring every emphatic thump of the keys as she wrote a single sentence:
“Don’t live in the past, even if it means dying in the present.”
Marie Joyce looked through all of the half finished accounts of Carl’s last days, following them chronologically from the day when Jones first showed up at her door in Greater Columbia. It was a series of mundane and repetitive days, cut off abruptly by the last page. The last three sentences that Carl Joyce wrote were:
“I just got off the phone with Marie. She played a recital tonight. I am so proud of her.”
These three sentences gave Marie ample motivation to stop procrastinating and start sorting through all of her father’s possessions, which was her assigned task. She started by taking two gigantic garbage bags and throwing away all of the old bags of stale potato chips and disposable bowls full of molding cereal that had accumulated in the week before Carl’s passing. Before this moment, Marie was content to sleep on the couch, taking in the smell of stale potato chips and molding cereal.
Periodically, towards the end of sorting out what was trash, she would call either Jones or Stephen Lawrence Jr., trying to find somebody to talk her through her severely boring task of cleaning up a dead man’s house. Jones was the first one to answer. They said that Regina the calico and them were in good spirits. They also stated that they had drafted a letter describing a terrible stomach sickness in the case that Marie would need more time away from the operations of Daedalus Incorporated.
“Take all the time you need.” Jones said at the end of the phone call. “I’ll hold down the fort here.” And then they said their goodbyes and the pair hung up. Marie knew full well what Jones sounded like when they were in shambles, and was well aware that they were likely to implode emotionally if Marie didn’t return promptly Wednesday morning. She did, however, think that the letter describing her having a terrible stomach sickness was a nice gesture from her good friend.
The second person she called while spelunking through her father’s possessions, as mentioned previously, was Stephen Lawrence Jr. Marie informed him that she had found the typewriter and all of the logs that Carl had kept of his life. She told him truthfully that she went through every single one, sorted them by date, and placed them carefully within a three ring binder that used to hold his taxpayer’s information for the Pan-American Alliance.
“I guess when you get death,” Stephen said. “You don’t have to worry so much about the other thing.” Stephen laughed at this, as he had a tendency to laugh hysterically at his own jokes. This laughter was not a hysterical one, though. It was simply a chuckle, something made out of condolences, apologizing for the joke that came before it.
Marie shrugged this off and asked Stephen about a few other things she found throughout Carl’s home. She had found several dusty pornographic magazines in a shoe-box under his bed and asked Stephen what the best thing to do with them was.
“Threw them away with the chips and the cereal!” Stephen said. “If they were to be donated, they would be promptly thrown in the trash anyway.” Marie asked as well about a rusty bicycle that was in the overstuffed garage, the only thing within the space that was worth any value. Stephen said to Marie that she should find a way to get it back down into the city and fix it up. Marie informed Stephen that she had never learned how to ride a bike, to which Stephen said to learn, because “life’s too short without a bicycle.”
She spent until the evening of Tuesday, when her train was to leave from what used to be Delaware to Greater Columbia, spelunking through the rusty old shack of Carl Joyce, bringing back the satchel she arrived with, a bicycle, and a typewriter.