The Garden of Lost and Found (7 page)

“Did you read about them?” My words limped into the shadows of the basement. “The deer? The ones that were on the bridge the other night?”

“What you yammering about now boy? I swear, your mind runs in so many directions a body can’t hardly follow the thread. You want me to get you that phone or not?”

“Please. If it’s a push-button. Is it a push-button?”

Nellydean paused, and even in the shadowy corridor I could see her considering her options. Finally she retrieved her hammer, pulled a nail from her pocket, and banged it into the wall with three sharp raps.

“Looks a little big to be a safety-deposit key,” she said, hanging her lantern on her nail, “but you never know. The phone’s a dialer,” she added, disappearing into a room. “Like the one you just used.”

IN THE END I WALKED. Actually I ran first: away from Nellydean, her riddles and poses and meaningless games. I walked to Harlem. I suppose I could have splurged on a real phone—since I wasn’t eating, Trucker’s wad of twenties was just burning a hole in my pocket—but I thought that even if worse came to worst I could make my way uptown, book an appointment, return to have my blood drawn another day. And New York was new to me: what better way to see it than on foot? I’d come from the country, after all, where ten-mile treks were said to be commonplace. I’d never taken one myself, but still, they were supposed to happen all the time—’specially when a storm was a-brewing.

It was already over ninety when I set out the following morning, my feet melting inside the plastic cocoon of
those shoes
and the rest of my body barely covered by a peach get-up that was a cross between a unitard and cut-off overalls—a uni-short
^TM
, according to the tag Trucker’d neglected to remove, although what it really looked like was a onesie. Despite the regularity of the gridded streets and avenues I’d seen from the plane, I still got turned around a half dozen times, and in the end I barely made it to the clinic before it closed at four. I was dizzy with heat exhaustion, asked the first person I saw if she would take my blood, and I don’t know, maybe the clinic was slow that day or maybe it was my pathetic appearance—shaved sunburned skull, chest so skinny one of the straps of my uni-short had fallen off my shoulder—but I was ushered straight into a tiny office where I dazedly answered a litany of questions put to me by a middle-aged matronly Latina. Have you ever been the passive, or receptive, partner in unprotected anal intercourse, unprotected meaning anal intercourse in which a condom is not utilized?
Yes
. Approximately how many times were you the passive, or receptive, partner in unprotected anal intercourse, unprotected meaning anal intercourse in which a condom is not utilized?
Forty-three
. Do you believe or have any reason to believe that any of the persons with whom you were the passive, or receptive, partner in unprotected anal intercourse, unprotected meaning dot-dot-dot, was HIV-positive?
Yes
. Approximately how many persons with whom you were the passive, or receptive, partner in unprotected anal intercourse do you believe or have reason to believe were HIV-positive, and approximately how many times were you the passive, or receptive, partner in unprotected anal intercourse with this person or persons?
One; forty-three
.

It was only here that my counselor looked up at me. Her left breast sported red, pink, blue, green, and yellow ribbons, a tattered flag of commiseration, and she said, “Dios mio, boy. My God. What are you reading?”

I blinked. I blinked again. She pointed, and my eyes followed her finger to my chest: there was my mother’s key dangling a few inches beneath my chin, and there, poking from the bib pocket of the uni-short, was the paperback I’d packed that morning with the notion—hopelessly naive as it turned out—that I’d read for a bit when I got to Central Park, which I’d somehow managed to miss on my journey uptown.

I took the book out of the pocket and put it in the counselor’s outstretched hand:
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
. She smiled at me, waited for me to say something, and when I didn’t she set the book on her cluttered desk and handed me an accordioned string of condoms. It was a ludicrous barter, apples for clockwork oranges, but I took the condoms and put them in the pocket where the book had been. Then there was the phlebotomist, Vietnamese, nonverbal, and the grizzled security guard, black and equally silent, although he did nod gravely—perhaps I should use the less loaded
solemnly
—as I left, and then I was outside in the heat and the crowd and the rattle of the Number 1, elevated above Broadway and 125
^th
, and within minutes the gauze atoll bulging from the hollow of my elbow was the only reminder of the little drama I’d just enacted. But that was easy enough to peel off, and even before the bandage had landed in a trash can a ketchup-splattered headline—DEERLY BELOVED—caught my eye. One of the survivors of the disaster on the George Washington Bridge had died “on the table,” but the other two were in stable condition, and soon to be “habitated” in the Central Park Zoo.

Because in the beginning it was like that. In my first weeks in New York the postcarded city that had been in my head grew like a lizard exposed to radiation into a moving image of Godzilla-like proportions and temperament. New York shook the ground when it moved, belched fire when it was angry or scared or sometimes when it was merely bored. It was too much. It was so much it was almost enough. For a while anyway—for two weeks, the two weeks I needed it—the city’s spectacle was enough to overshadow everything else that was going on in my life, what was missing and what had been newly substituted; and when I wasn’t scanning the headlines for the latest episode in the saga of the city’s last native deer or the mayoral election my days were filled with the idiosyncrasies of moving into No. 1.

For example: power. I had the entire fifth floor of the building to myself, a sprawling warren of grand Victorian rooms whose wallpaper patterns had been parched by time to a few muted colors: rose, mauve, dun, beige, baby’s breath blue. But only the first floor and the mezzanine had been wired for electricity. Nellydean’s apartment on the third floor, and my mother’s, which had been on the fourth, and the fifth-floor apartment all relied on a braid of extension cords that scaled their way down the unused shaft of the building’s dumbwaiter. I spent the better part of a week tracking down and stringing together dozens of wires. By the time I gave up I had light and power in my bedroom and bathroom and living room and kitchen, but I still needed a flashlight to maneuver between them at night, and the half dozen other rooms in the apartment became useless after sunset.

Meanwhile a small bruise appeared on my arm where the needle had stuck me. It faded over the course of a few days during which I hid it under a long-sleeved lime-green “body top,” but the rash on the back of my neck turned angry red—the “leetle alcohol” the barber had administered only made matters worse, and a few days after he’d shaved my head my neck was so chapped that the skin cracked like the crust on a loaf of bread. There was virtually no furniture in the apartment when I moved in, but, as with the extension cords, The Lost Garden provided for all my needs. I found a bed frame (and mattress and pillows and bedding), a table and chairs, a small sofa and old leather chair, and it was all kind of quaint actually, the glass-fronted lawyer’s case that held the books I’d stolen from a half dozen libraries in as many states, the mirrored dresser that took the clothes Trucker had given me and still had room for so much more, very shabby chic according to the style pages in the Sunday papers I salvaged from trash cans and recycling bins, more
Martha Stewart
than
Wallpaper
maybe, but still fashionable. Certainly it was fortuitous that the soapstone sink in the kitchen was the size of a small bathtub, because every morning I had to wash my sweat-soaked antique bed linens. I hung them to dry in a back bedroom where I hoped Nellydean wouldn’t see them, just as I did most of my work at night so she wouldn’t see what I was taking from the shop—technically it all belonged to me, but I knew there’d be trouble if I ran into her—and I only paused in my labors when I came across a keyhole in a door or cupboard or chest. Then I would take the key hanging from my neck and try to fit it in the slot, but, like Cinderella’s stepsisters’ feet, it always proved too big.

Perhaps foolishly, I’d picked a room at the front of the building to sleep in instead of one of the bedrooms overlooking the garden. There was something about the garden that bothered me: no matter how hard I looked I couldn’t see the end of it. I could see its borders well enough—three skyscrapers reaching hundreds of feet into the air—but try as I might I couldn’t see where leaf and trunk gave way to steel and glass, and the more I stared the more they seemed to retreat from me, as if the garden, like the Tardis, were infinitely bigger than the box that contained it. And so I chose to sleep beneath a window looking out on the comprehensible boundaries of Dutch Street, and every evening the car alarm that had gone off on my first night in the city sang me to sleep after I’d hauled my last piece of furniture up four flights of stairs.

At first it didn’t bother me. The alarm, I mean. It was my Siren song, I told myself, an aural part of my New York landscape. But after three or four nights of continuous keening I was over it. Sometimes it went on for ten minutes, more often for three or four hours, but one night it took on a different sound, an arrhythmic honking coupled with something that sounded like shouting, and then I realized it
was
shouting, and honking of the old-fashioned variety: someone was leaning on their horn and they were doing it right in front of No. 1. When I hauled my body from the wet sheets and poked my head out the window I saw the snout of a yellow cab directly below me. It pointed south, straight at the flat front of a white van that faced north, and even in my half-sleeping state it was clear to me why the horn had honked—the cab had honked, I realized, as soon as it honked again—because there wasn’t room for two vehicles to pass each other within Dutch Street’s narrow track. The cab honked a few more times, the sound bouncing off the buildings like a pinball, but the van sat there, implacable as the White Whale before his final charge, until finally the cabbie opened his door and stood up.

He was a big man, Pakistani maybe, or Afghanistani. All I could really see of him was the thick black turban wound around his head and the wide gray beard avalanching down the slope of his chest. “
Hey motherfucker
,” he shouted in thickly accented English. “Ay mooderfooker” it sounded like: “Ay mooderfooker. Move jour mooderfooking fan out of dee vay.” At that, the driver’s side door of the van opened, and the man who leaned from his seat without actually getting out of it was even bigger than the cabbie. He was white, bare-headed, dark-haired, his
motherfucker
came out in that old-school Italian accent: “You betta be movin your own muthafuckin ass back,” is what he said. “I ave right of way,” the cabbie insisted. “I ave right of way mooderfooker,” to which the van man replied, “Get
out
the way muthafucka,” and this went on for a minute or two until the passenger door of the van opened and a third man joined the fray. He was smaller than the first two, filled out his gray suit like the meat of a sausage fills its intestinal casing, and he stepped out of the van slowly, as if sudden movement might split the suit from his skin. Trucker had moved that way, before he’d lost all the weight, but Trucker had never radiated the air of menace this man possessed. He reached one hand up to the cabbie’s shoulder and it looked like the weight of his hand drew the cabbie’s turban-covered ear down to the level of his mouth—I didn’t see him pull I mean, it didn’t look as though the sausagey man expended any effort in the gesture—and then the sausagey man said something, what I couldn’t hear, but when he took his hand off the cabbie’s shoulder the cabbie ducked back into his car, and with a complaining groan from his transmission he backed the length of Dutch Street, spinning out into Fulton and disappearing, still in reverse.

And there she was again: the homeless woman—
bag lady
, I’d learned from the papers, wasn’t exactly in vogue anymore—the one I’d seen on my first night in New York. Her baby carriage was tucked into the nook of a doorway further up Dutch toward Fulton and she was crouched behind it, to all appearances hiding from the men in front of No. 1—and then, when I looked below me again, I saw the sausagey man standing with his thick arms bent at their nonexistent elbows and his shapeless mitts resting on his hips, his big broad teeth bared in a smile aimed directly at me.

I ducked back inside. Darkness transformed the faded pattern of my bedroom’s wallpaper into a thousand swirling vines knotted loosely around each other like the unraveling threads of a tapestry, and behind their glass doors the spines of my books seemed as hollow as the false fronts of the stores on Main Street in Selden. I closed my eyes against the room’s shadowy insinuations, and even as I heard the sausagey man climbing back into the van my mind was taken over by another image of hiding, a memory, it was me who was hiding and I hid behind the bed with the thin thin mattress in Cousin Benny’s bedroom in Idaho. Just before the van’s door slammed I thought I heard him speak—the sausagey man, I mean. I say I thought:
I may very well have dreamed it. I ought to have. I mean, I never heard the van drive away and when I woke the next morning I was still sitting underneath the window, but at any rate what I thought I heard the sausagey man say was:

“Well whaddaya know, Sonny. Ginny really did have that kid.”

three

THE PAST IS A PARADOX. You can’t take it with you but you can’t leave it behind either. Its bond is no less palpable for being invisible, intangible. Like a magnet tugging at a ball bearing, it only nudges at first, until all at once the ball is snatched up and snaps against it. The van outside my window had been one of those snaps, pulling me out of an already nebulous present and reminding me that my history was longer even than I knew. The sausagey man had indicated that his companion had an interest in my mother—had an interest in her kid—which was enough to make him rise out of the faceless father figures all around me. In fact he was still faceless. I’d seen nothing more than the top of his head, heard nothing but a string of
motherfucker
s out of his mouth, but at least he had a name. Sonny.
Sonny. Motherfucker.
Well whaddaya know, Sonny, Ginny really did have that kid
. Each word was pregnant with possibility but, though their conjugal insinuation hinted at my family’s ties to No. 1, they didn’t come close to explaining how a working-class high-school dropout came to possess a piece of property worth, in development terms, five to ten, and if you have to ask
Five to ten what?
then, as they say, you can’t afford it.