While these emotions and memories fired inside the old man, Hilly Brown approached. He was quite large, much taller than Ptolemy and almost as wide as the door.
“Can I come in, Papa Grey?”
“Do I know you?”
“I’m your great-grandnephew,” he said again, “June’s grandson.”
Too many names were moving around Ptolemy’s mind. Hilly sounded familiar; and June, too, had a place behind the door that kept many of his memories alive but mostly unavailable.
That’s how Ptolemy imagined the disposition of his memories, his thoughts: they were still his, still in the range of his thinking, but they were, many and most of them, locked on the other side of a closed door that he’d lost the key for. So his memory became like secrets held away from his own mind. But these secrets were noisy things; they babbled and muttered behind the door, and so if he listened closely he might catch a snatch of something he once knew well.
“June, June was . . . my niece,” he said.
“Yeah,” the boy said, smiling. “Can I come in, Uncle?”
“Sure you can.”
“You have to move back so I can get by.”
In a flash of realization Ptolemy understood what the boy was saying. He, Ptolemy, was in the way and he had to move in order for him to have company. It wasn’t a crazy woman addict stealing his money but a visitor.
The old man smiled but did not move.
Hilly put out both hands pushing his uncle gently aside as he eased past into the detritus of a lifetime piled into those rooms like so much soil pressed down into a grave.
Ptolemy followed the hulking boy in.
“What’s that smell?” Hilly asked.
“What smell? I don’t smell nuthin’.”
“Uh, it’s bad.” Hilliard Bernard Brown moved a stack of Ptolemy’s metal folding chairs that were leaning against the bathroom door.
“Don’t go in there,” Ptolemy said. “That’s my bathroom. That’s private.”
But the bulbous young man did not listen. He moved the chairs aside and went into the small bathroom.
“The toilet’s all stopped up, Papa Grey,” Hilly said, holding his broad hand over nose and mouth. “How can you even breathe in here? How you go to the toilet?”
“I usually go at Frank’s Coffee Shop when Reggie take me for lunch, and I use my lard can for number one and pour it down the sink every night. That saves water and time and I never have to go in there at all.”
“You don’t evah take a bath or a shower?”
“Um . . . I got my washrag an’ uh . . . the sink. I wash up every three days . . . or whatevah.”
“You don’t shower an’ you pissin’ in the sink where you drink water from?” Hilly crossed his hands over his chest as if warding off disease as well as depravity.
“It all go down the same pipes anyway,” Ptolemy said. “And the toilet don’t work.”
“Come on, Papa Grey,” Hilly said, closing the door to the bathroom. “Let’s get out of here.”
“What?”
“It smells in here,” Hilly said. “It smells bad.”
“I got to get my, my, you know,” Ptolemy said. “My thing.”
“What thing?”
“The, the . . . I don’t know the word right now but it’s the, the thing. The thing that I need to go out.”
“What thing, Uncle?”
“The, the, the iron. That’s it, the iron.”
“What you need with a iron?” the young man asked.
“I need it.” Ptolemy started looking around the clutter of his congested apartment. It looked more like a three- quarters-full storage unit than a home for a man to live. The television was still on. The radio was playing polka music.
Hilly switched off the radio.
“Don’t do that!” Ptolemy shouted, his voice cracking into a hiss like electric static. “That’s my radio. It got to be on all the time or I might lose my shows.”
“All you have to do is turn it back on when you want to hear it.”
“But sometimes I turn the wrong thing an’ then the wrong channel, station, uh, the wrong man is on talkin’ to me an’ he, an’ he don’t know the right music.”
“But then all you got to do is find your station,” Hilly said, crinkling his nose to keep the foul odor out.
“Turn it back on, Reggie . . . or Hilly, or whatever . . . just turn it back on.”
The young man put up his hood and used it to cover his nose and mouth. He turned the radio on at a low
