"'I love you' is the inscription on Pandora's box."
-Mason Cooley
***
The first thing that surprised Taph about her buyer was how little he actually seemed to care about the box now that it was finally his.
In fact, when she put the canvas bag holding it on the table he leaned back, like he'd caught a whiff of something unpleasantâso far back that briefly he took himself out of the dim pool of light over their booth in the bar, leaving his face a shadow mask and his expression a mystery.
He was a young man, probably about Taph's age, dark and curly haired and dressed in expensive clothes, but in a sloppy way that showed he wasn't used to them. His name was John Weyer. It had taken him almost a week to talk Taph into coming to meet him here, and now that she finally had he looked as if he was in the last place he wanted to be in the whole world.
It was late, but the bar was mostly empty. It was neither ritzy enough to impress the moneyed crowd nor dumpy enough for those who enjoyed divesâa middle-strata kind of place that stayed in business by catering to crowds that couldn't get in anywhere else. Weyer apparently owned it.
Taph often drank, but she never went to bars anymore. Still, she knew what things were worth, and she sized the place up almost immediately. Weyer, on the other hand, proved harder to place.
Most of the auction items she'd sent to their respective buyers via courier. Others, international mail. This was the only delivery Taph was making in person, and only because Weyer offered a lot of money on top of his bid if she agreed to bring the box to him herself. Enough money to override her better judgment, at least for an hour.
She assumed that if a man insisted on meeting her it was because he wanted to make a pass, and everything about the setupâthe bar, Weyer's clothes, and his apparent anxiety includedâsaid she was right. But no, she quickly realized, he had something else on his mind, although just what she couldn't say. Intrigued, she sipped her drink and let him do the talking.
The crescents of Weyer's fingernails matched the shining ice cubes in his glass. He cleared his throat and said, "So that's it?" His real voice sounded exactly like his phone voice, and older than he appeared to really be.
"That's it," Taph said, patting the sack. "Want to see it?"
"No," said Weyer, sliding back in his seat again.
"You should really inspect the merchandise," Taph said, pausing to take such a minuscule sip from her drink that its level barely changed at all. "How do you know I brought you the real thing?"
"I know," was all Weyer said. And then, suddenly: "Do you know what it is?"
"The auction catalog included all of its specs," Taph said.
"Yes," said Weyer, not fooled, "I read them. But I'm asking you: Do you know what it is?"
Shrugging, Taph said, "Up until now, it's been a problem. Now it's your problemâor it will be as soon as we're done here. And before we say anything else, you really do need to look at it."
Before he could stop her, she took the box out of the bag. It was a little less than a foot to each side, made of aged brass, and the lid was sealed up all the way around with some old gunk that looked like wax but smelled faintly of other things--sulphur, and asafetida.
Scratched into the lid was an archaic design, a circle enclosing a sequence of linesâbut it was impossible to make out in detail, so old was the material. There was no lock or latch, and as far as she could tell no way to open it.
That's all it was: a box that wouldn't open, no matter how hard Taph had tried. Whatever was inside it wasn't particularly heavy--Taph even wondered if maybe it was empty. But obviously whoever had closed it had wanted to make sure it stayed that way.
It was basically trashâonly its obvious age convinced her to bother looking for a buyer at all, imagining that maybe the craftsmanship was valuable on its own. Weyer's top-dollar purchase had astonished her. Now she tapped the beaten brass lid with the tip of a fingernail for emphasis.
"Satisfied?" she said.
"It's the real thing, if that's what you're asking me," said Weyer.
"Mm. You want me to put it away?"
"Please."
She put the box on the seat next to her, under the lip of the table. Once it was out of sight, Weyer appeared almost animated by its absence.
"It was your father's?" he said after a moment.
"Yes."
"You didn't get along with your father." Weyer said.
The hairs stood up on the back of Taph's neck. "Who told you that?"
"Nobody, I just noticed the way you talk about his things. Most people are very sentimental about a late parent's possessions." He prodded an ice cube in his glass with the tip of one finger.
"Dad had particular ideas about my life. I did love him," she added, hoping that it didn't sound too defensive. "But we grew into very different people. Black and white opposites, actually."
"And when he died he left you with a material burden. People spend their entire lives accumulating things and then they all just become a problem for someone else. What do you do, if you don't mind me asking?"
"I'm in networking. I help people meet the right people. But between you and me, what I'd really like is to start a family."
"What's stopping you?"
"Gotta meet the right person first."
Even though the box was out of sight, it still encroached on their conversation. Taph even imagined herself pausing in the middle of the conversation to see if it had anything to add, and had to labor to keep from laughing out loud at the idea.
Of all the things in her father's collection, the box was the one she thought she'd have the hardest time selling. After he died, Taph had been amazed and dismayed to discover that she'd inherited everything from Dad, whole rooms full of antique nonsense that he'd compiled over decades upon decades: knives, swords, staffs, animal skins, weird clothes, headdresses, rings, incense, perfume, books and loose pages in languages nobody knew, sealed jars and little bottles full of who knows what, and even stranger things that defied easy descriptions.
Much of it she'd seen before, of course, as he built the collection over her entire life, first out of pieces from his antiques business and then, later, as a regular customer of younger dealers now running similar businesses of their own.
Taph had chided him about wasting his moneyâone of the many things they fought about in his later years. He always said he didn't expect her to understand, and on that much at least they agreed, as she never had.
Not until the collection was hers did she realize just how big it really wasâand how strange. So many things he'd never hinted at: bronze tripods, mummified hands, things preserved in jars and in wax, fossils and bonesâweird shit.
After a while she'd begun resenting Dad's Weird Shit Room and its presence in her life, much the same way she'd resented him. But at least the Weird Shit did prove useful in the end; when she'd put a few of the showier items up in a blind auction, all of them sold for tidy sums. The auction house asked her for more, and when she provided more it all sold too.
Eventually she cut out the middleman and began running auctions herself. She imagined her customers must be incredible suckers, but they were suckers with money. Dad had been dead a year now, and most of his stuff was gone. Taph hung onto a few items in the collection that appealed to her. Everything else sold.
The box was the last of it, and Weyer had been her only bidder. He struck her as maybe a young Silicon Valley type, only recently rich and not acquainted with either money or other people. He'd asked to meet at his bar not to show off that he owned it, she realized, but because it was a place he was already familiar with, a home field where he didn't have to worry about any extra variables.
As if reading her mind, he talked about the bar a bit. "I have no business partners, and no debts on the place. It was bleeding cash when I first took it over, but these days it's doing well." He was talking about business not to brag because that also made him comfortable, a topic he could speak on with confidence to mask his anxiety.
