To check the value?
No, thats not why I wanted it. I may have told you that I used the catalog as a checklist. So I brought it downstairs in order to be able to tell whether or not a given stamp was one I needed for my collection.
That makes sense, she said. I dont see whats so pathetic about it.
Whats pathetic, he said, is I need all the stamps for my collection, everything ever made except for Sweden one through five. Because, outside of those five stamps I had no business buying, I dont have a collection.
Oh.
And heres the best part. There was a point when
I realized it was pathetic or ridiculous, or whatever you want to call it. But that didnt stop me. I went on working out just what stamps I would buy to help fill in the collection I no longer own.
He almost missed it.
He worked late the following day, and by the time he got home all he was up for was dinner and an hour of TV before they went up to bed. The day after that he was off, and spent the morning doing a tentative preliminary pruning of the shrubbery, trying to find a line of compromise between the plants desire to grow tall and his and Julias preference for a little more light and visibility on the front porch. He stopped a little after noon, wondering if hed lopped off too much or too little.
Late in the afternoon they took her car and drove to a seafood shack on the Gulf just across the state line in Mississippi. Donny and Claudia had enthused over it, and it was all right, but on the way home they agreed it wasnt worth the time it took to get there and back. They went inside, and she had a couple of loads of wash shed been meaning to do, and Keller caught sight of Linns on the chair in the den and picked it up so he could toss it out. Because hed read most of the articles, and he didnt collect stamps anymore, so why keep the thing around?
But instead he sat down with it and found himself leafing through it, and he tried to figure out a way to collect without a collection. One possibility, he thought, was to continue his collection as if he still owned it, buying only stamps he hadnt already owned, and keeping them not in an album (because he already had albums, or had had them) but in a box or stockbook. The premise would be that they were awaiting eventual placement in his albums when they found their way back to him, which of course would never happen, which meant hed never have to mount the stamps but could concentrate exclusively upon obtaining them.
In a sense, hed be collecting stamps the way an ornithologist collected birds. Each new bird, once it had been spotted and identified, would go on the birders life list; he didnt need physical possession of the creature in order to claim it as his own. By the same token, the stamps Keller had owned, the stamps that had been taken from him, were still his. They were on his life list.
Hed still use the Scott catalog as his checklist. When he bought a new stamp, hed circle its number in his catalog so he wouldnt make a mistake and buy it again. The new acquisitions, he thought, could be circled in another color, blue or green, so hed be able to tell at a glance whether his acquisition came before or after the date the collection disappeared, and whether he owned a particular stamp in fact or in theory.
It was deeply weird, he knew, but was it that much stranger than collecting stamps in the first place?
He turned the pages of the newspaper, too much involved in his own thoughts to pay much attention to what passed before his eyes. So hed probably looked at and looked away from the small ad before it ever registered.
Toward the back of the paper, but before you got to the classifieds, Linns gave over the better part of a page to small-space ads, one or two inches tall and a column wide, that amounted essentially to dealers announcements. One might proclaim oneself a specialist in France and its colonies, or in the British Empire before 1960. There was one chap whod had the same ad running for all the years Keller had subscribed, offering AMG issues, the stamps produced by the Allied Military Government for use in occupied Germany and Austria after the end of the Second World War. There he was, Keller noted, still at it, word for precious word, and
Two columns over, he saw this:
JUST PLAIN KLASSICS
Satisfaction Guaranteed
www.jpktoxicwaste.com
Keller stared at the ad. He blinked several times, but it was still there when he looked at it again. It was impossible, but unless hed dozed off and was dreaming, the ad was really there, and it couldnt be, because it was impossible.
There had been times in his life when hed been dreaming, realized it was a dream, and willed himself out of it but remained in the dream, even though he thought hed returned to waking consciousness. Was this like that? He got up, walked around, and sat down again, wondering whether he was really walking around or had just incorporated the walking into his dream. He picked up the paper, and he read some of the other ads, to see if they were the usual thing or the sort of gibberish dreams were apt to produce.