The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace Read Free Book Online Page B

One locked drawer.
    “Did you open this drawer, here?”
    “We were unable to locate the key.”
    “Ah.” Lenore went to the TV table, took the little clay horse and popped its head off, and out fell a key and fluttered a tiny picture of Lenore, out of a locket. The picture was old and dull. The key made a sound on the metal table. Mr. Bloemker wiped at his forehead with the sleeve of his sportcoat.
    Lenore opened the drawer. In it were Gramma’s notebooks, yellow and crispy, old, and her copy of the Investigations, and a small piece of fuzzy white paper, which actually turned out to be a tom-off label from another jar of Stonecipheco food. Creamed peach. On the white back of the label something was doodled. There was nothing else in the drawer. Which is to say there was no green book in the drawer.
    “This is just weird,” Lenore was saying. She looked at Mr. Bloemker. “She didn’t take the Investigations, which is like her prize possession because it’s autographed, or her notebooks either. Except I guess she did take a book. She kept a book in here. Have you ever maybe seen a green book, pretty heavy, bound with a sort of greenish leather, with like a little decorative lock and clasp?”
    Mr. Bloemker nodded at her. There was a drop of sweat hanging from his nose. “I do think I recall seeing Lenore with such a book. I had rather assumed it was her diary, or a record of her days at Cambridge, which I knew were immensely important to her.”
    Lenore shook her head. “No, that’s more or less what these are,” indicating the yellowed notebooks in the open drawer. “No, I don’t know what this thing was, but she had it and the Investigations with her all the time. Remember how when she’d go out of her room here her nightgown would be all sagging down in front? She couldn’t carry the books and use her walker, so she had this big pocket on the front of her nightgown, and she’d put them in there, and it’d sag.” Lenore felt herself beginning to get upset, remembering. “Did she, had she gone out of the room much the last few days?”
    There were wet sounds as Mr. Bloemker worked at his face. “I know for a fact that as a matter of established routine Lenore was out in the area F lounge for some period every afternoon. Holding forth. When were you last here, may I ask?”
    “I think a week ago today.”
    Mr. Bloemker’s eyebrows went up. Drops stopped and started on his forehead.
    “The thing is that my brother was getting set to go back to college,” said Lenore. “I’ve been helping him buy stuff and arrange things and work out some things with my father, when I haven’t been working. There was a lot of stuff to arrange.”
    “His college must begin terribly early. It’s not yet even September.”
    “No, the place he goes—which is this place called Amherst College? In Massachusetts?—it doesn’t start for a couple weeks yet, but he wanted to go visit our mother before the year started and everything. ”
    “Visit your mother?”
    “She’s sort of resting, in Wisconsin.”
    “Ah.”
    “Listen, should I call her and tell her what’s going on? She’s Lenore’s relative too. I really think we better call the police.”
    Mr. Bloemker’s glasses had slipped almost all the way down his nose. He pushed them up, and they immediately slid down again. “What I can do at this point is pass along to you the information and requests relayed to me very early by Mr. Rummage.” He tugged at his cuffs. “The police are not going to be contacted at this point in time. The owners are of the opinion, for reasons which I must in all honesty confess remain at this moment hazy to me, that this is an internal nursing-care-facility matter which can be brought to some quick resolution without resort to outside aid. If of course it be so, the advantages accruing in terms of minimal embarrassment and impediment to the facility are obvious. You are requested to inform no one of any details of the