We received a package one afternoon. It sat on the kitchen table for six months before we decided it was time to find out what was inside. The package did not belong to Paul, Evan or me; it was addressed to a doctor. So much time passed that everyone sort of disregarded it, and it found its way to the corner of the kitchen table in our apartment, alongside the paper plates and torn envelopes and used candles that had been banished there on the way to the trash. Every now and then, we’d give the package a glance and try to guess what was inside. Medical waste, needles, bottles of insulin, important paperwork, a malpractice lawsuit, some severed fingers—the box wasn’t a big one.
Evan, I’m pretty sure, scoured our phonebooks and the Internet for the doctor’s name, and might’ve gotten hold of someone who knew him, trying the four or so numbers that appeared on the computer, but the names never led to the actual doctor. So on the corner of the kitchen table the package stayed, just another oddity in an apartment brimming with them, like the “nine-foot man,” and the silver orb, and the wooden configurations that Evan conjured up from the darkness of his imagination, and the soured potatoes that bled white fluid onto the washing machine in the closet.
I don’t remember who first caved to the notion of ripping it open; it was not ours, of course, and to cut the clear packing tape would’ve meant breaking the law, which we considered, but the time came when the notion of opening it was unanimous. It had been sitting there for months, after all. And we were bored. And the doctor hadn’t phoned, or arrived on Juniper Drive to claim it. One night—or one day, I don’t really remember—we took a knife to the package, and sliced through the tape, on both sides. It was like performing surgery. Evan carefully reached his hand inside, through the white noodle packing that fizzed around his fingers, and we were sitting on the floor, the TV blaring behind us, and I think Cori—Evan’s sister—was there, and this was maybe after dinner, Evan’s fingers clutching something now, Paul washing his hands in the sink, which was clogged with dirty dishes, the door to the back patio maybe open to let fresh air in as we sometimes had it, Evan’s hand coming up, the noises from outside, crickets, and frogs, and leaves, and with my allergies I probably had a runny nose, and from the depths of the package Evan’s hand revealing something not completely visible, but red, then gray, an object that would be worth breaking the law for. When his hand completely emerged from the box, Evan held a red plastic ball, which turned out to be the fulcrum of a mail-order ab machine. We attached the two handles and tried it out a few times but ended up throwing it in the corner, where it stayed until we moved out later that year.
