The Ministry of Apostrophes

Madeline sobbed when she sat down at her piano that day. She did her best to play a Bartók concerto while tears rolled down her bony cheeks and splashed onto the old keys.

She hadn’t cried so hard—or at all, for that matter—in the two years of forced seclusion in her 16th floor apartment. It made her feel weak and sentimental, and there was room for neither emotional fragility nor useless nostalgia in Madeline’s world. Both would lead to carelessness. Carelessness would lead to death, or worse.

When she’d finished playing the concerto, Madeline went down to the 15th floor—or “the closet” as she liked to call her ersatz storage area; the 14 remaining stories below being her safety buffer—to gather foodstuffs for the evening, along with a bottle of cheap Spumante and a fresh box of matches. Also, an ax.

It was the end of an unusually warm Indian summer day (was it still October? November already? She wasn’t really sure.) and the western sky over Central Park was ablaze with the reds and oranges of a hazy sunset.

It would be time to shut the windows soon, but first she looked out at the things that now inhabited land and sky. Madeline had given whimsical names to some varieties: Purple Streamers, Blue Sparklies, Skitters, Sliders, Yellies, Pokies, Chum-heads. A few of them were mostly harmless. Some were merely annoying. Most of them were lethal, especially the nocturnal ones.

Before locking up and starting her evening fire, Madeline sat at her piano for the last time. She’d wanted so badly to keep it forever, as a touchstone to her past. It was the last tangible piece of her old life. The last physical thing that kept her connected to who she used to be, and where she came from. But winter was approaching and combustibles were getting scarce. She knew the piano was more valuable as firewood than as a cumbersome heirloom.

The piano itself was an old Bösendorfer that had first belonged to her great-grandmother. It had remained undiscovered and untouched, remarkably, in a basement apartment in the Warsaw ghetto until after the Second World War. Madeline’s grandmother was the only member of the family to have survived Treblinka, and when she’d emigrated to America she took the piano with her.

Madeline decided that Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star would be a fitting final piece for the piano; the first song her grandmother had taught her to play.

After the last notes faded into the air, Madeline took the axe and began hacking at the piano. It had survived one Holocaust, but would not survive another.

I was in Chicago for the better part of 1912. Mostly to stir up trouble at the Republican National Convention, but also because I needed to personally take care of some… collections that were seriously overdue. (I’d been waiting for that bastard Mussao for six months before his wife helped me collect. She even set the poor scoundrel on fire after she shot him - an unexpected but delightful flourish!)

That’s where I first met John Deering; a grubby little scapegrace sitting on the steps of a tumbledown tenement building in a neighborhood unfit for stray dogs, let alone children of an impressionable age.

I sat down next to the lad, and rested my bull-organ cane in my lap. (I still carried a walking cane at that time, a habit of fashion that I maintained well into the 1970s for reasons that now escape me.)

“Where are your friends, boy? This is too delightful a Saturday for a young man to be sitting idle on hot concrete, is it not?”

“They’re all down t’the bindery, throwin’ rocks through the windows, sir,” he said.

“Well why on earth are you not with them? That sounds like a wonderful time!”

“I don’t wanna end up in the reformatory,” he said, his grimy little face still in his grimy little hands.

“The reformatory?” I gasped in mock surprise. “My boy, the reformatory is a place for only the most special boys.”

“You mean the boys in the most trouble.”

“In a way, yes,” I laughed. “But troublesome boys have pluck. That’s why they get to go to the reformatory, and have clean clothes and three hot meals every day.”

The urchin’s head lifted. “Three meals? Every day?” he said, astonished.

“Well of course. That’s how they build you into strong young men. Now,” I said, gesturing with the tip of my cane towards a patch of crumbling macadam in the street, “go and get yourself a pocketful of those stones, and join your playmates at the bindery.”

The boy did as he was told, and I went on my way, having added one more vessel of mischief into the world.

*  *  *

The next time I saw John Deering was early on the morning of October 31, 1938. (Halloween has never been, as you might wrongly assume, one of my favorite holidays.) He was strapped to a chair in a large chamber within the Sugar House Prison, awaiting his imminent death by firing squad.

You see, John’s boyhood of hooliganism had indeed led him to an adolescence spent in a reformatory. He tried to take the straight path by joining the Merchant Marine when he was eighteen—bless his little heart—but returned almost immediately to a life steeped in constant misdeed.

And on that day, he sat unruffled, awaiting his ultimate punishment for the murder he committed as his final act of sin.

I normally would not have attended such a collection personally, but I’d heard that John had volunteered to be part of a ghastly experiment to see what happened to the human heart when the body was shot to death, and how could I resist being part of that event?

I wandered the room silently while the five gunmen prepared their weapons, one of which had been loaded with a blank cartridge so as to spare any of the executioners the certainty that they had discharged the killing shot. Oh, how delicate the human conscience is.

At a quarter to seven, the lethal volley was unleashed into John Deering’s chest. He should have died immediately, but I squeezed his heart for fifteen more seconds of life. Just long enough to thank him.

“I wanted to do good,” he told me.

“Oh, but you have, my boy. You have.”

I let go of his heart, and watched as his lifeless shell twitched and jerked for nearly an entire minute.

I didn’t linger for long, as I had to make preparations for what I expected to be a busy September in Czechoslovakia. But on my way out, I stopped behind one of the marksmen and, on a lark, whispered into his ear.

“You fired the killing shot.”