STANLEY KOENIG, OFFICES OF PPD LIMITED, THE STANLEY KOENIG BUILDING, MIRACLE FRUIT ROAD, CITY OF Z, USA:

People really lap them up now. They’re buying them like crazy. Like hot buns. Everybody wants one. For collecting. Like I collected them myself, back in the day. At the dawn of this new age of ours. I was the very first collector of PPDs, don’t ever forget that.

Why do people buy them? Many different reasons, of course. My good friend Kyle in marketing has been mentioning these surveys. Very detailed surveys, too, that show how everybody has their own little reasons for buying the PPDs. That there’s no pattern. It’s very personal. They need them for protection. Against what? Well, that’s just it. You name it. Kyle has the list, he’ll give it to you. Tell him you’re my friend and it’s yours, no questions asked.

There are so many things. Fear, naturally. People are always afraid of something. Again, there are lists. We have them. Death being number one, of course. Others are using them to predict the future. Or a part of it. I have absolutely no idea how they do this, but people believe in it, they really do. Who am I to doubt them? Maybe they’re right and the PPDs really are a gateway to the future. We just gather them, right? We don’t explain them. There’s no manual, no correct way of handling them. We sell them and they’re yours, absolutely yours. Do with them what you wish. If they predict the future for you, we’re a bunch of happy campers here at PPD Limited.

Still others use them as altars of some kind. They pray to them, I think. They wish for things to happen. And of course, many use them for memories. To preserve some part of that awful day, in a little time capsule that’s all their own. Death in a bag. Makes no sense, you say? Why would anyone want to have anything to do with death? For that matter, why would anyone want to carry death around with them?

But it makes sense. It does. It makes an awful lot of sense, if you think about it.

 

I’ll let you in on a little secret here, now that it’s just the two of us. It wasn’t my idea. The whole thing wasn’t my idea at all. And if you promise to keep quiet about it, I’ll tell you what happened. What really happened.

Mr. Everest, you see, was the one who came up with it, the genius of Mr. Everest. If you must know, I owe everything to him. All of this. He made it possible. Wouldn’t have known what to do without him. I’d have been like one of those people that you see now who are holding on to their lives like grim death. You know who I mean, those rotten-luck folks by the docks, whose cries have replaced the cries of birds in this town. I’d have been one of them, too. One of those poor wretches. The only reason things turned out differently for me is Mr. Everest. A day longer, perhaps, just a few hours even, and who knows. Maybe none of this would exist. This whole company. Even the genius of Mr. Everest wouldn’t have been able to save me then. He would have found not Stanley Koenig anymore but an empty shell. An empty shell, a broken man and next to him, on the ground, a pile of useless stones no one would have been able to make heads or tails of.

Luckily, the genius of Mr. Everest intervened at the right time, and he picked me up off the street and put me back together again like Humpty Dumpty. I would be his next project, he said. His masterpiece. He asked me about my stones. What do you have there, son? he asked. Why so many stones? Am I building something? What am I building? Would I let him in on it?

He listened patiently as I described every single stone for him, where they had come from, what they meant. You’ve already guessed of course: those stones would become the first PPDs.

Right there on the street, Mr. Everest lent me his ear, and he understood everything right away. You could see it, how his eyes lit up, in that way he has of lighting them up. He took me aside and his face was real close to mine, and he said: “Everybody will want those stones, you know.”

It still gives me the shivers today.

“Everyone will wish they could carry a little piece of Death around with them,” he said. “Everybody here, absolutely everybody, will want a Piece of the Pepper Dome. I can see it.”

That’s what he said: “I can see it.”

And then he asked me: “Do you see it, son?”

And yes! Yes, by God, I saw it now!

 

I found the first stone on Apricot Avenue. That’s where I happened to be, you see, when all that terrible business went down. Just walking along, minding my own business. It was a very nice day after all. Surely you must remember how nice it was, how blue the sky. There were some clouds, but not too many. Just the right amount of clouds, in fact, so that the sky still has some meaning, but not so much meaning that it would start to rain or anything.

Seconds later, I was half deaf from the blast, and it was very difficult to make the transition from all that niceness to this. You see, it was just such a nice day, such an awfully nice day. If it hadn’t been for what happened, I don’t know. Maybe it would have been the nicest day of the whole year.

I felt like weeping. My suit was in shreds. The sound of ambulances was in the air, but I almost didn’t hear it. Like being underwater, if that means anything to you. It’s the strangest thing, diving, the way can you still kind of hear the sounds of life passing overhead, only it’s not your life. It never was. It’s someone else’s warbled life.

But I didn’t care. Where I had gone, nothing could reach me. For a moment, I surfaced, drew in a quick breath. My good friend Charlie’s face was right in front of mine, as if having anticipated where I would come up for air. I thought that was pretty gosh darn amazing, and I told him so. “Damn, Charlie,” I said. “Hot damn, but you’re good.” Or something to that effect. I really was quite impressed.

My friend Charlie said something, too, but I didn’t hear him. Then he said something else and looked at me, with those big eyes. I thought about how much he looked like an axolotl, with those wide-open eyes and his mouth moving and his arms and legs too short for his body.

The air was foul but I inhaled of it deeply and went back down, to the crabs and the starfish, and there I started walking. It truly was like walking underwater, against a current, listening to the soup of sounds above me as I struggled to put one foot in front of the other.

It was hard at first. I felt as if I hadn’t taken a step in ages, and it hurt, every step hurt. I let myself descend even deeper. Here there were no fish, but the going was a little easier. And when I surfaced again, the air had turned even more rotten. Soot and ashes and pieces of the building and what not. Even whole people, if you would believe it, coming down like angels.

I looked up and saw that at least the smoke had cleared up some. I saw, too, in that blink of an eye, that the Pepper Dome was really gone. All of it. All of it now floating on the air, getting in people’s clothes and lungs, as dust, as tiny time capsules. As little pieces of death.

 

When the stones came down, I ducked behind an old car. The stones must have been falling all along, I realized, but where I had been, down in the deep end, I hadn’t heard them. Now there was a lot of noise. People caught in the open were in a bad way. Many of them lying there. Dead, just like that, from the stones. And when the last of the stones had come and gone, lighter stuff rained down on us, finishing off the ones who hadn’t been hit by the stones. Things came at us so light they simply sailed on the breeze, carried this way and that before looking for a place to land. Pieces of paper, the stuffing of things, everything behaving like feathers, like a flock of geese.

I was still hiding, just as afraid of the floating paper as I had been of the stones. Somehow, the paper was even worse. At least with the stones, you could still kind of see where they would hit. Yes, they were fast, but they were also on a straight trajectory. No surprises there. But the paper and all those other nameless objects descending now with such a terrible grace all around were of a different ilk. They didn’t follow the same set of rules. Here one moment, gone the next, suddenly striking from out of nowhere. They could hit anytime, anywhere. Slice open a leg here, cut off an ear there.

And then it wasn’t the stones anymore I was thinking about, or the serene threat of the paper coming down. I could only think about the building that wasn’t there anymore, that impossible tower that had been taken out as if with a set of pliers. The Pepper Dome.

I bent down, picked up one of the stones in front of me. It had just landed. I looked at it for a long time, as if it had arrived from another city, or a whole other planet. A little meteor. That’s how much it affected me. I thought about the fact that it had come from the building that wasn’t there anymore. What a thought! Then I opened my suitcase. Removed all the documents and left them on the street where they joined at once the floating paper from the blast, carried aloft and out of sight. I watched them just briefly, those papers which had once been so important to me, had meant everything to me. My whole former life was borne away with those papers. Now they were up there, and maybe now they were in the next street, slicing open someone’s arm or leg.

I replaced the documents with the stone, closed the suitcase, and that was the birth of PPD Limited, right there.

 

An hour later and the suitcase was so heavy that I could hardly lift it anymore. It was full of stones. But not just stones. Shards of glass from the famous glass floor of the building. Pieces of wood, burned for the most part, blackened. Just pieces of soot really. Some other stuff, too, that I just stuffed in my pockets without looking at it. And when nothing would fit anymore, I left my hideout behind the car and hurried home. Unthinking, I emptied the suitcase onto the floor of my bedroom and hurried back outside. Back to Apricot Avenue and further. I walked the length of Crabapple Drive, collecting debris. In no time at all, the suitcase was full again; once more I ran back home, unloaded the stuff in my bedroom.

I made many trips like that. All day, huffing and puffing. Like an ant. Sometimes I didn’t even take the suitcase. Left it at home and went to carry off some of the larger items that wouldn’t have fit anyway. The head of a marble statue, the leg of a table, the frames of mirrors and pictures and windows. What I’ve since identified as the shell of a turtle. All of it from the dead building. All of it dead things. Impossible riches.

By the end of the day, I was lying on the floor of my apartment, exhausted as never before in my life. What had I done? I looked around, didn’t understand a thing. Big piles of stuff everywhere. Dust in the air from the stones. For Christ’s sake, I said to myself. For Christ’s sake.

 

I slept that night to the smell of the debris and of things that had been, of a building that had been, breathing in its parts and all of its history. In a single night, I lived the lives of everyone who had ever come into contact with it. The ones who built it, who worked in it, who called it home and couldn’t live without it, who cursed it for its splendor, who stood atop it looking down, who snapped pictures from below, who tumbled down in private arcs after the plane hit, who became one with the building forever.

I slept to the sound of the crunching stones, the stones that were trying to reassemble themselves, there on the floor of my apartment. Setting off tiny avalanches, there on the floor of my apartment.

Trying to be that building again.

That, at least, was the explanation Mr. Everest gave me the following day when I showed him the stones in my apartment. He said that it would always try to be that building again. That it couldn’t help itself, and that it would behoove us to separate the pieces right away before something terrible happened. “God only knows what could happen,” he said.

A week later, spurred on by his genius, I was peddling the stuff. I had started selling the Pepper Dome one stone at a time. And I never looked back.