A cardboard sign, taped to the edge of a shelf, said: “Lovely to Look At, Delightful to Hold, But If You Should Break It, Consider It SOLD!”
Another sign said: “See it. Try it. Break it. BUY IT!”
Another sign says, “You break it here . . . YOU TAKE IT HOME!”
Even with the security cameras watching her, Claire treats an antique shop as a psychic petting zoo. A museum where you can touch each exhibit.
According to Claire, everything ever seen in a mirror is still there. Layered. Everything ever reflected in a Christmas ornament or a silver tray, she says she can still see it. Everything shiny is a psychic photo album or a home movie of the images that occurred around it. In an antique store, Claire can fondle objects all afternoon, reading them the way people read books. Looking for the past still reflected there.
“It's a science,” the Countess Foresight says. “It's called psychometry.”
Claire will tell you not to pick up a silver-handled carving knife because she can still see the reflection of a murder victim screaming in its blade. She can see the blood on the policeman's glove as he pulls it out of someone's dead chest. Claire can see the darkness of the evidence room. Then a wood-paneled courtroom. A judge in black robes. A long wash in warm, soapy water. Then the police auction. This is all still reflected in the blade. The next reflection is right now, you standing here in an antique store ready to pick up the knife and take it home. You just thinking it's pretty. Not knowing its past.
“Anything pretty,” Claire will tell you, “it's only for sale because no one wants it.”
And if no one wants something pretty and polished and old, there's a terrible reason why.
With all the shoplifting video cameras watching her, Claire could tell you all about surveillance.
When she went back to get her coat, she gave the old-man cashier his three playing cards cut in half. The ace of hearts. The nine of clubs. The three of spades.
From behind his cash register, the old man said, “Were you looking to buy something?” He hands her purse across the counter, nodding his head toward the bank of little televisions. The proof he'd been watching her touch everything.
It's then she sees it, in a glass case behind the old man, in a curio cabinet crowded with salt and pepper shakers and porcelain thimbles, surrounded by junk jewelry, there's a jar full of murky white liquid. Inside the haze, a tiny fist, lined with four perfect fingers, was just touching the glass.
Claire points past the old man, looking from him to the curio case, and she says, “What's that?”
The man turns to look. He takes a ring of keys from a hook behind the counter and goes back to open the cabinet. Reaching in, past the jewelry and thimbles, he says, “What would you say it is?”
Claire couldn't say. All she knows is, it gives off an incredible energy.
As the old man carries the jar toward her, the dirty white liquid sloshes inside. The top is white plastic, screwed down and sealed with a band of tape striped red and white. The old man sets one elbow on the counter in front of Claire, holding the jar near her face. With a twist of his wrist, he turns the jar until she can see a small dark eye looking out. An eye and the outline of a small nose.
A moment later, the eye is gone, sunk back into the murk.
“Guess,” the old man says. He says, “You'll never guess.” He lifts the jar to show the glass underside, and pressed there are a tiny pair of gray buttocks.
The old man says, “You give up?”
He sets the jar on the counter, and on top of the white plastic lid is a peeling label. Printed in black ink, it says: “Cedars–Sinai Hospital.” Below that, handwritten in red ink, the rest is smeared. Some words. A date, maybe. Too smudged to read.
Looking at it, Claire shakes her head.
Reflected in the side of the glass jar, she can see years back, decades back: A room lined with green tile. A woman with both bare feet hooked to either side, draped in blue cloth. The woman's legs hooked in stirrups. Above an oxygen mask, Claire can see the woman's white-blond hair, growing out, already a little brown at the roots.
“It's the real deal,” the old man says. “We tested the DNA against some certified hair. Markers all matched.”
You can still buy her hair on the Internet, the man says. The bleached-blond scraps and trimmings.
“According to you bra-burners,” the old man says, “it ain't a baby—just tissue. Could be her appendix.”
Reading the glass, the layers of picture there, Claire can see: A lamp on a bedside table. A telephone. Prescription pill bottles.
“Whose hair?” Claire says.
And the old man says, “Marilyn Monroe's.” He says, “If you're interested, it's not cheap.”
This is a movie relic, the old man says. A sacred relic. The Holy Grail of movie memorabilia. Better than the ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz or the sled named “Rosebud.” Here's the baby Monroe lost while shooting Some Like It Hot, when Billy Wilder made her run down the train-station platform, take after take, wearing high heels.
The man shrugs. “Got it from a guy—told me the real story how she died.”
And Claire Upton just stared, watching the movie of old reflections in the jar's curved side.
Here's a souvenir, a relic like the hand of a saint, mummified and adored in the rock-crystal case of some Italian cathedral. Or a lock of hair. Or this is another person, dead. The little boy or girl that might've saved Monroe's life.
The old man says, “Everything has a cash value on the Internet.”
According to the man who sold it to him, Monroe
