I had another cup of coffee, and then I knew it was time to get to the point, so I took the key off my neck and gave it to him. "Do you know what this opens?" "Don't think so!" he hollered. "Maybe you knew my dad?" "Who was your dad!" "His name was Thomas Schell. He lived in 5A until he died." "No," he said, "that name doesn't ring a bell!" I asked if he was one-hundred-percent sure." He said, "I've lived long enough to know I'm not one-hundred-percent anything!" and he got up, walked past the column in the dining room, and went over to the coat closet, which was tucked under the stairs. That was when I had the revelation that his apartment wasn't just like ours, because his had an upstairs. He opened the closet, and there was a library card catalogue inside. "Cool."

He said, "This is my biographical index!" "Your what?" "I started it when I was just beginning to write! I'd create a card for everyone I thought I might need to reference one day! There's a card for everyone I ever wrote about! And cards for people I talked to in the course of writing my pieces! And cards for people I read books about! And cards for people in the footnotes of those books! In the mornings, when I'd read the papers, I would make cards for everyone that seemed biographically significant! I still do it!" "Why don't you just use the Internet?" "I don't have a computer!" That made me start to feel dizzy.

"How many cards do you have?" "I've never counted! There must be tens of thousands by this point! Maybe hundreds of thousands!" "What do you write on them?" "I write the name of the person and a one-word biography!" "Just one word?" "Everyone gets boiled down to one word!" "And that's helpful?" "It's hugely helpful! I read an article about Latin American currencies this morning! It referred to the work of someone named Manuel Escobar! So I came and looked up Escobar! Sure enough, he was in here! Manuel Escobar: unionist!" "But he's also probably a husband, or dad, or Beatles fan, or jogger, or who knows what else." "Sure! You could write a book about Manuel Escobar! And that would leave things out, too! You could write ten books! You could never stop writing!"

He slid out drawers from the cabinet and pulled cards from the drawers, one after another.

"Henry Kissinger: war!

"Ornette Coleman: music!

"Che Guevara: war!

"Jeff Bezos: money!

"Philip Guston: art!

"Mahatma Gandhi: war!"

"But he was a pacifist," I said.

"Right! War!

"Arthur Ashe: tennis!

"Tom Cruise: money!

"Elie Wiesel: war!

"Arnold Schwarzenegger: war!

"Martha Stewart: money!

"Rem Koolhaas: architecture!

"Ariel Sharon: war!

"Mick Jagger: money!

"Yasir Arafat: war!

"Susan Sontag: thought!

"Wolfgang Puck: money!

"Pope John Paul II: war!"

I asked if he had a card for Stephen Hawking.

"Of course!" he said, and slid out a drawer, and pulled out a card.

"Do you have a card for yourself?"

He slid out a drawer.

"So do you have a card for my dad?" "Thomas Schell, right!" "Right." He went to the'S drawer and pulled it halfway out. His fingers ran through the cards like the fingers of someone much younger than 103. "Sorry! Nothing!" "Could you double-check?" His fingers ran through the cards again. He shook his head. "Sorry!" "Well, what if a card is filed in the wrong place?" "Then we've got a problem!" "Could it be?" "It happens occasionally! Marilyn Monroe was lost in the index for more than a decade! I kept checking under Norma Jean Baker, thinking I was smart, but completely forgetting that she was born Norma Jean Mortenson!" "Who's Norma Jean Mortenson?" "Marilyn Monroe!" "Who's Marilyn Monroe?" "Sex!"

"Do you have a card for Mohammed Atta?" "Atta! That one rings a bell! Lemme see!" He opened the A drawer. I told him, "Mohammed is the most common name on earth." He pulled out a card and said, "Bingo!"

I sat down on the floor. He asked what was wrong. "It's just that why would you have one for him and not one for my dad?" "What do you mean!" "It isn't fair." "What isn't fair!" "My dad was good. Mohammed Atta was evil." "So!" "So my dad deserves to be in there." "What makes you think it's good to be in here!" "Because it means you're biographically significant." "And why is that good!" "I want to be significant." "Nine out of ten significant people have to do with money or war!"

But still, it gave me heavy, heavy boots. Dad wasn't a Great Man, not like Winston Churchill, whoever he was. Dad was just someone who ran a family jewelry business. Just an ordinary dad. But I wished so much, then, that he had been Great. I wished he'd been famous, famous like a movie star, which is what he deserved. I wished Mr. Black had written about him, and risked his life to tell the world about him, and had reminders of him around his apartment.

I started thinking: if Dad were boiled down to one word, what would that word be? Jeweler? Atheist? Is copyeditor one word?

"You're looking for something!" Mr. Black asked. "This key used to belong to my dad," I said, pulling it out from under my shirt again, "and I want to know what it opens." He shrugged his shoulders and hollered, "I'd want to know, too!" Then we were silent for a while.

I thought I was going to cry, but I didn't want to cry in front of him, so I asked where the bathroom was. He pointed to the top of the stairs. As I walked up, I held the railing tight and started inventing things in my head: air bags for skyscrapers, solar-powered limousines that never had to stop moving, a frictionless, perpetual yo-yo. The bathroom smelled like an old person, and some of the tiles that were supposed to be on the wall were on the floor. There was a photograph of a woman tucked in the corner of the mirror above the sink. She was sitting at the kitchen table that we were just sitting at, and she was wearing an enormous hat, even though she was inside, obviously. That's how I knew that she was special. One of her hands was on a teacup. Her smile was incredibly beautiful. I wondered if her palm was sweating condensation when the picture was taken. I wondered if Mr. Black took the picture.

Before I went back down, I snooped around a little bit. I was impressed by how much life Mr. Black had lived, and how much he wanted to have his life around him. I tried the key in all of the doors, even though he said he didn't recognize it. It's not that I didn't trust him, because I did. It's that at the end of my search I wanted to be able to say: I don't know how I could have tried harder. One door was to a closet, which didn't have anything really interesting in it, just a bunch of coats. Behind another door was a room filled with boxes. I took the lids off a couple of them, and they were filled with newspapers. The newspapers in some of the boxes were yellow, and some were almost like leaves.

I looked in another room, which must have been his bedroom. There was the most amazing bed I've ever seen, because it was made out of tree parts. The legs were stumps, the ends were logs, and there was a ceiling of branches. Also there were all sorts of fascinating metal things glued to it, like coins, pins, and a button that said ROOSEVELT.