People are talking about Found Objects, the short fiction piece in today’s New Yorker. The accompanying artwork is what captured my attention. In print, the photo is large. The scattered objects are almost life size and tactually inviting on the page. The primary color scheme is reassuring. It’s an ill-lit still life of what might be the contents of a junk drawer.
Turns out, it’s the contents of one of the tables on which Sasha keeps, stores, displays the belongings that she has stolen from someone else and taken home with her for keeps.
Sasha is, in what might as well be sitcom terminology, a kleptomaniac. Her disorder is often misunderstood because, unlike compulsive hair plucking or step-counting or cleaning, the percieved payoff seems obvious. Sasha isn’t interested in the monetary value or even the sentimental value associated with the objects that she takes. She’s only concerned with the taking.
Sasha thinks she wants to stop, so she’s seeing a therapist to help her get well. It seems like the thing to do, but it’s hard, because without her objects, what will she have? Without her collection, what will she do? Without her compulsion, who will she be? She’s got to have something and this is all she’s got.
The objects themselves, on private exhibit atop two tables in Sasha’s apartment, hold only souvenir appeal. They are trinkets that represent the moment of possession. So while there are, of course, wallets among her collection, they have not been plundered. Sasha tells her therapist about lifting a wallet straight from another woman’s handbag. Its shape and density catch her eye; its proximity tempts her hand. Its foreign presence in her own handbag lifts her spirit. She never even unfolds the other woman’s wallet.
To Sasha, the wallets are “embarrassments and close shaves and little triumphs and moments of pure exhilaration.” The contents are irrelevant. They might as well be a screwdriver or a bar of soap or a child’s scarf or a stout pen or a mechanical pencil.
A wallet is just a thing that gets stolen. The same way a newspaper gets swatted at a fly and a marble gets shot across a ring on blacktop. In a way, Sasha takes Alex’s wallet because she’s supposed to.
The slip of paper that she finds inside, the one with “I BELIEVE IN YOU” handwritten on it, doesn’t mean anything to her. She wants it to. She knows it could. It’s supposed to make her feel something besides the thrill of simply having it.
That scrap of paper embodies every thing I have or do or say because I’m supposed to or because I might as well or because it seems like the thing to do. The things we hold on to just to have something, even a collection of bookmarks and stopgaps. I want to sweep it all of the table. But then, the mess. And I don’t want to break anything.
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