Free Orient by Christopher Bollen Page A

of a senile cosmetics mogul who believed that his stepchildren were poisoning him. Those were junkie jobs, requiring little more skill than basic human functioning, and they were often lucrative. His friend, a Kentucky runaway fattened on grass-fed veal and stewed plums, always told him, “There’s an economy for everything in New York. Someone will pay to cut your toenails if you’re smart enough to find them.” His friend could have been lying, covering up a darker cash source. He also could have been telling the truth.
    “So what’s back there?” Mills asked. “What am I in for?”
    Paul opened the door. Room by room, light switch by light switch, through pleated lamp shades and ceiling bowls that doubled as insect morgues, the messy maze of the Benchley house slowly revealed itself. The shock of the number of rooms that forked and followed in never-ending architectural freefall was tempered only by the astounding amount of junk that was piled up within them. No wonder Paul kept his hallway door shut: something had to prevent the clutter from infecting the monastery of his parlor and dining room. The first rooms, at least, were navigable, though pocked with magazines in weedy, dog-eared piles, shoe boxes of opened and unopened envelopes, shoes with misplaced sole cushions, broken easels and replacement easels with dried canvases leaning against them (“these are my very amateur paintings,” Paul said, picking up a seaside landscape bathed in yellow), canoe paddles, a portable grill asphyxiated by a long black cord, rolls of architectural blueprints, and an infestation of batteries that had crawled into wood crevices and died quietly on their expiration dates.
    These first rooms, however, served only as recent storage. The deeper they went, the more they retreated into history—not Paul’s history, but a history of dead people, his parents and doubtless others before them. At each new room, and through the haze of each porcelain lamp, the two went forward into a stewy sea of costume jewelry, Suffolk County phone books, landline telephones, air-conditioning units, a ceramic arms-out Jesus missing his back support and floatinglike a shipwreck victim awaiting rescue. Blackened picture frames held crooked family photographs. Paul had to shuffle sideways to carve a path, and Mills jumped to keep up, triggering clouds of dust as albums fell in his wake.
    In another life, with all of his heroic pointing, Paul Benchley could have been a valiant sea captain. In this life, at this hour of night, he was just a beleaguered home owner standing knee-deep in waste. “None of this has been settled,” Paul said tiredly. To Mills, some of it looked as settled as bedrock. Still, Paul kept pointing, kept opening doors, until finally history became garbage, literal garbage, the last room a tar pit of bloated black trash bags. “This is what I’ve already managed to throw out,” he said. “I told you to be prepared.”
    What could Mills say? “Jesus, you weren’t kidding.” Yet he was strangely relieved by the junk—Paul really did need help, and no overnight job either, no afternoon sawing branches or sweeping a porch. They trudged back into the epicenter of the back rooms, where floral paper peeled from the walls, and broken plaster exposed buttery swabs of insulation. The cold here was finger numbing, and Mills fought back a shiver.
    “Is this your mom and dad’s stuff?” Mills asked, glancing around for one of the picture frames, a way to put faces to belongings.
    Paul nodded. “And believe me, I’m not a pack rat. I just never got around to dealing with their things. My father died seven years ago and my mother went in June. I pushed it all back into these rooms, and since I only come up on weekends I never found the time. Well, now you’ve seen the worst of it.” Guessing what Mills was looking for, he grabbed a stack of photographs from an open drawer, sifted quickly through them, and handed one over.
    They