Tuesday.
Henry Leclair did a double-take. His eyes racked and reracked between the Chinese fortune cookie in his right hand and the Chinese fortune cookie fortune in his left. He read it again: Tuesday.
Then again, querulously, “Tuesday?”
That was all. Nothing more; no aphorism about meeting one’s true love on Tuesday; no saccharine cliché denoting Tuesday as the advent of good fortune; no Tuesday-themed accompanying notation warning of investing in hi-tech stocks on Tuesday. Nothing. Just the narrow, slightly-gray slip of rectangular paper with the printed word Tuesday and a period immediately after it.
Henry muttered to himself. “Why Tuesday? What Tuesday?” He absently let the fortune cookie slip from his fingers.
“Damn!” he murmured, watching the cookie sink quickly to the bottom of his water glass.
He returned his attention to the fortune. Tuesday. That was today. Biting his lower lip, Harry reached for the second of the three cookies. He pulled at the edge of the fortune paper protruding from the convoluted pastry. Placing the cookie back on its plate carefully, he turned the slip over and read it:
You’re the one.
Henry Leclair had been a premature baby. His mother, Martha Annette Leclair, had not carried him full term. Seven months, two days. Boom. Enter baby Henry. There was no explanation save the vagaries of female physiology. However, there was another explanation: Henry-even prenatal-had been curious. Pathologically, even pre-natally, curious. He had wanted free from the womb, had wanted to discover what was out there.
When he was two years old, Henry had been discovered, in trapdoor-bottom pajamas, in mid-winter, crouching in the snow outside his home, waiting to see whether the white stuff fell from above or came up through the ground.
At the age of seven they had to cut Henry down. He had been swinging from a clothesline strung in the basement, drying the family wash. Henry had been curious: what does it feel like to strangle?
By the time he was thirteen, Henry had read every volume of the ENCYLOPAEDIA BRITTANICA, copious texts on every phase of the sciences, all matter disseminated by the government for the past twenty-eight years, and biographies by the score. Also, somewhere between seven thousand, eight hundred, and seven thousand, nine hundred books on history, religion, and sociology. He avoided books of cartoons-and novels.
By the time he was twenty, Henry wore noticeably thick-lensed glasses; and he had migraine headaches. But his all-consuming curiosity had not been satiated.
On his thirty-first birthday, Henry was unmarried and digging for bits of a stone tablet in the remains of a lost city somewhere near the Dead Sea. Curiosity.
Henry Leclair was curious about almost everything. He wondered why a woman wore egret feathers in her hat, rather than those of the peacock. He wondered why lobsters turned red when they were cooked. He wondered why office buildings did not have thirteenth floors. He wondered why men left home. He wondered what the soot-accumulation rate in his city was. He wondered why he had a strawberry mark on his right knee. He wondered all sorts of things.
Curiosity. He was helpless, driven, doomed in its itching, overwhelming, adhesive grip.
You’re the one.
“I’m the one?” Henry blurted incredulously. “Me? I’m the what? What am I? What the blazes are you talking about?” He spoke to the insensate, unresponsive fortune paper.
This was, suddenly, overpoweringly, a conundrum for Henry. He knew, deep in his soul-matter, that curiosity demanded he must solve this intrusive enigma. Two such fortunes-two such incomprehensible mind-troublers-were more than mere coyness on someone’s part. There was something not quite right here. Something, as Henry put it to himself, with stunning originality, more than meets the eye!
Henry called for the waiter. The short, almost bald, and overly-contemptuous Oriental passed twice more-once in either direction-finally coming to a halt beside Henry’s booth. Henry extended the two fortunes and said, “Who writes these?”
“########[1],” answered the waiter, with a touch of insouciant, yet distingue, impudence.
“I beg your pardon,” Henry said, removing his noticeably thick-lensed glasses, dangling them in his other hand, “but would you mind speaking English?”
The waiter wrinkled his nose in distaste, stroked the cloth napkin draped over his forearm, and pointed to the manager, lounging half-asleep behind the cash register.
“Thanks,” said Henry absently, his attention to the chase now directed elsewhere. He started to rise as the waiter turned. “Oh-check, please.” The waiter stopped dead in his tracks, drew his shoulders up as though he had been struck an especially foul blow, and returned to the table. He hurriedly scribbled the check, all in Chinese glyphs except the total, and plunked it on the table. Muttering Eastern epithets, he stalked away.
Henry absently dropped the remaining fortune cookie in his jacket pocket as he picked up the check-so anxious was he now to speak to the manager. Quickly slapping his hat on his head, he gathered his topcoat off the chair, dropped a dollar and some change, and headed for the manager. The old man was slumped across the glass case, one arm securely pressed against the cash register’s drawer. He awakened at almost the instant Henry stopped in front of him. His hand extended automatically for check and cash.
While the fellow was placing his check on a spindle, Henry leaned across and asked, quietly, “Can you tell me where you get these little fortunes?” He showed one. Henry expected more misdirection and confusion, as he had experienced with the waiter, but the Chinese manager did not take his eyes off the change he was delivering as he said, “We buy in lots. From trading company that sell us cookies. You want buy dozen, take home with you?”
Henry fended him off, and asked the name and address of the company. After a few seconds of deliberation, the manager reached out of sight under the counter, dragged forth a large notebook. He opened it, ran a finger down a column of addresses, said, “Saigon-San Francisco Trading Company, 431 Bessemer Street.”
Henry thanked him and strode out onto the sidewalk. “Taxi!” he called into the river of passing cars, and a few minutes later was riding toward 431 Bessemer Street. The crimson clutching claw of cold curiosity. Oh, my.
The Saigon-San Francisco Trading Company was located in a condemned warehouse on the desolate lower end of Bessemer Street. In the manufacturing and warehouse section of the city, Bessemer Street was regarded as the dropoff dead end of the known universe. On Bessemer Street, the lower end was regarded much the same. Henry had an idea this building was the last rung on the ladder of aversion. Beyond lay the dark, restless river.
The windows of the pathetic warehouse were, for the most part, broken and sightless; many were boarded up. The building itself leaned far out of plumb, dolorous, as though seeking impecunious support from some destitute relative on its west side. Its west side faced an empty, rat-infested lot.
So, for that matter, did the east, north, and south sides. Dolorous, pathetic, rat-infested.
“A pretty sorry place for an active trading company,” murmured Henry, pulling his coat collar up about his ears. The wind ricocheting through the darkened warehouse canyons was rock-chilling, this late at night. Henry glanced at his wristwatch. Nearly eleven o’clock. It was the hour when the terminally curious talked to themselves:
