Chemistry A

Akash offered me a hundred bucks to clean out his grandmother's apartment when she finally kicked the bucket. All in all, this seemed a little callous, but a hundred bucks was a hundred bucks and just because my roommate crapped gold, it didn't mean I was loaded.

It sort of sucked how loaded Akash was. The dude was freaking Midas. Sort of a selfish bastard, but Midas just the same.

And so who was I to turn up my nose at his offer? I kept my comments to myself and, on my day off, made the trek across town to the crappy apartment where Grandmother Akash had lived out her last.



Up on the seventh floor--how the hell had the old bat dragged herself up all those flights of stairs? Goddamned broken elevator--was her tiny apartment. It overlooked an abandoned lot and was smaller than Akash's goddamned bedroom. Selfish bastard he was indeed--couldn't even throw his old grandmother some of his millions for a place that didn't smell of cat piss.

Piles of crap were everywhere, too. It was phenomenal, how high everything was piled. Stacks of magazines on the tables, and shelves of stuffed animals lining the walls. Suddenly I felt extremely shortchanged with the hundred bucks.

But Akash had made it perfectly clear that he didn't want any of the stuff. It was meaningless to him. He didn't care that these things, junky and useless as most of them were, made up his grandmother's life. This was the collection of things that made up a history--down to the three hundred and ninety-three stuffed animals.

Holy crap, but Akash was a bastard.

Because all the useless crap only had to be bundled up into black garbage bags and pitched, the task took a much shorter time than I would have thought. It made me a little sad, a little melancholy, at first, but then I realized that Grandmother Akash had probably kept most of this crap mainly so she didn't have to make the lethal trek down seven flights of stairs.

When I thought about it, that was probably what killed her.

Still, I experienced something like nostalgia--though the nostalgia wasn't my own--as I threw these things, countless things, into the garbage. I was nearly finished when I started working on her closet. On the top, on a back shelf, was a chemistry set. It was clearly old from the style of the box, advertising bubbling beakers with clearly benign chemicals, with actual glass components; plastic was for the fainthearted children of today.

A chemistry set wouldn't have stopped me on my pitch-it-pitch-it-pitch-it run, if not for a Post-It note on the top, written in cramped, agonized handwriting: If I'm dead, don't throw this away.

It seemed like the saddest thing I'd ever seen.

I stared at that chemistry set for a long time. It was melancholy and nostalgia all rolled up into a pathetic little bundle. There was nothing impressive about the set, and yet this old, ignored woman had taken great pains to see that it would be taken care of even after she was gone. I couldn't imagine why. I had no idea the level of value that usurped "can't take it with you."

Akash never even asked me--if he did, I probably wouldn't have told him that I'd stolen the goddamned chemistry set. Selfish bastard.