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a swimming pool amid ribbons of his own blood.
    I read some more, and as I do, I feel a quickening. I’m going back, I decide. I’m going back to all the other classics I’ve read—and I’ve read plenty—and rerecording the endings and uploading them again to the volunteer site. I feel powerful and helium light.
    At just this moment, the doorknob jiggles. Binter peeks his head in and says, “Someone’s here to look for ‘Kiss Me, Honey, Do.’ ” He nods toward the African American sheet music.
    “I can save Anna Karenina,” I tell Binter, and then I start counting on my fingers. “Plus Beth, Piggy, Madame Bovary, and Charlotte.”
    “Um,” Binter says. “ ‘Kiss Me Honey Do’ is kind of urgent right now so . . .”
    “Oh, you want me to leave?”
    “Well, that or you’ll have to just sit there and not be, you know, weird.”
    “Right,” I say. “I can do not-weird, short term.”
    “Good.”
    “Good-good.”
    He frowns at me because that was slightly weird.
    Binter walks into the room with a tall pale scholarly man, his bald pate shining. As he and Binter discuss sheet music, I walk to one of the boxes of postcards. I can’t be noisy—or weird—but I’m allowed to rummage.
    I pick up a postcard from Wildwood, New Jersey’s boardwalk. The date is June 3, 1931. It’s written to a Helen. The sign off reads, I’ll only miss you more tomorrow.
    As soon as I read it, I know I’ve memorized it. It seems like a definition of love.

Godfrey
THE FIRST APPOINTMENT
    My appointment at Dr. Chin’s office is at eleven, just like Madge’s appointment at Plotnik’s. We’re hoping to have a celebratory lunch together at the Rib Shack before heading back to work.
    But I’m still sitting in my cubicle. The Department of Unclaimed Goods is lodged in a grim building with an old-world heavy-on-the-asbestos vibe. Bart and I sit in adjoining cubicles and spend our days discussing our ruination while eating stiff vending-machine sandwiches. I can’t tell Bart that Madge has talked me into seeing an envisionist. I don’t want to hear all the gloating—tennis whites, boating, full hair, and so on. My ruination has gotten lonesomer. I work as a labeler at the Department of Unclaimed Goods. My fingers have grown numb from the constant rummaging through of abandoned safe deposit boxes. “One day I’ll no longer have fingerprints,” I say to Bart. “Like a mobster.”
    I don’t like the job. In fact, I can feel it chewing at my soul. But if I move up and one day take over that prick Chapman’s job, the pay is actually decent. It’s a war of attrition really. Each of us in the general pool, combing safe deposit boxes, battling the sheer boredom, it’s a last man standing kind of promotional system.
    Inside the current box: some faded bonds, a dowdy pear-shaped brooch, a silver dollar. This box was registered in 1927 by a man named Wickham Purdy. Sometimes the contents of abandoned safe deposit boxes are so lifeless and sad that they make me feel like my heart is small and coated in enamel. I pick up the brooch. Was it Wickham Purdy’s mother’s? His wife’s? And suddenly I remember a dream from the night before. I was at work, sifting through the contents of a deposit box—it’s cruel that the brain sometimes makes you dream about what you don’t enjoy doing all day long—when I found a baby tooth. With a surge of necessity, I tried to fit the tooth into a gap in the back of my gum line because I had a feeling that I’d lost this tooth. The tooth fit perfectly, and I knew that this was my own deposit box. I found the velvet box that I’d given Madge. I opened it and it was empty. I saw a folded-up note, too. I unfolded it and, in boxy letters, read, I love you more than you love me, Doug. I don’t know a Doug, not really. I woke up with a jolt, feeling disoriented.
    I forgot about the dream until now, this brooch.
    What if the envisionist supplies a pale, grudging future that looks like the contents