The Garden of Lost and Found Read online

  Dutch Street. That’s a real place. You can look it up on a map, I mean, and it’ll be right there, a tiny capillary connecting the eastern ends of John and Fulton. During my first year in New York, when towers collapsed and regimes changed and the City Council passed a ban on smoking in all public buildings, it was the one thing that remained fixed even as everything else disappeared into the haze that choked the city’s air.

  Dutch Street, Dutch treat: Dutch is a diminutive adjective in English, diminutive and usually pejorative. Dutch treat (paying your own share), Dutch oven (an itty bitty oven), Dutch metal (a zinc alloy masquerading as gold leaf), Dutch cap (not the kind women wore on their heads in ye olde Newe Amsterdamme), Dutch Street: a dozen feet wide, a hundred yards long, just four buildings on the east side and four more on the west, and one of those western four was now mine. The plates of brownstone that made up its facing were mine, and the four mullioned windows set into the plates were mine too, and through the ornately curved wrought-iron bars that protected my ground floor from burglars I could make out a cavern of a room that also, somehow, mysteriously, belonged to me.

  The room was both dark and suffused by light, a deep ochre fog that seemed to emanate from the floor itself, making it impossible to tell where solidity ended and shadow began, and through this weave of solidity and shadow and darkness and light I could make out more windows at the opposite end of the room, and through those windows I saw…something. Jets of spotlit water, or the whirl of a thousand fireflies? Tree trunks, or the legs of elephants? Tangled vines, or a deluge of serpents? What I saw was a garden, enormous, overgrown, but it was impossible to put a name to anything at that time of night, at that distance, through two sets of warped windowpanes and the swirling atmosphere that filled the space between them like some crazed Dutch interior (a painting by or in the style of Pieter de Hooch, who favored rooms that afforded glimpses into other rooms, or the outdoors). You could say I was guilty of Dutch reckoning, that is, faulty reckoning, or you could say I was dreaming a Dutch pink—which is really a yellow—dream, and that when I awoke I found myself on Dutch Street. But when I woke I found, also, that my dream had followed me into the light.

  Or into the dark I should say, because it was nearly two in the morning when I shuffled up to my front door, listing slightly to the right because of my unevenly weighted suitcases—one half-filled with clothes, the other overburdened with books—and even as my eyes lost themselves in the murky expanse of the first floor I realized I’d neglected to procure a key to my new home, which is why I spent my first night in New York under the open sky, my suitcases (books on bottom, clothes on top) cushioning my bony ass, my head resting against pitted brownstone a few feet beneath a brass plaque that bore an address, No. 1, and a legend, The Lost Garden, and I don’t know, maybe I was tired, or maybe it was the spell of the heat. It had been a long day, after all: a six-hour bus ride from Selden to the airport in Denver, four more hours in the air and the two-hour subway ride, plus three or four hours frittered away waiting for one or another modern conveyance. Or maybe I’d already begun to surrender to the city’s vision of itself. But even as I fished a rubberband out of my pocket and pulled my damp curls into a little pigtail to get them off my neck I felt a prickly energy moving through my limbs, a tickle really, trickling through my veins and vibrating the length of my bones. My eyes closed, my head lolled forward. Dimly it occurred to me that sleeping on a New York City street with all my worldly possessions wasn’t the smartest idea I’d ever come up with and maybe I should try to find something, an internet café, a hotel room, a hotel lobby even, but before I could complete that thought I was asleep. The last thing I remember is a keening noise in the distance. I don’t know why I didn’t recognize it as a car alarm. Certainly they had car alarms in Kansas, and in Arizona for that matter, and North Dakota and Oregon and Florida and every other state I’d lived in; maybe I was just too tired; maybe I was already asleep. Whatever the reason, I could only imagine the sound was a siren of some kind. A Siren I told myself, less warning than enticement to dash myself against the rocks. But exhaustion had lashed my body to my new home and I was able to listen safely to her song—another verse, I told myself, in the song of the dying city—and I let its lullaby croon me to sleep.

  WHEN I OPENED MY EYES the Siren’s song had spiraled away, but the heat seemed if anything to have intensified. I was lost when I first woke up, and I found myself by lifting my wrist and staring at Trucker’s watch until my eyes focused and I saw it was nearly four. The only light was the refracted brilliance of the city itself, a phosphorescent glow the same color as the greenish-white dots marking the hours on the watch Trucker had given me six weeks before. He’d given me the watch, and the clothes I was wearing, and most of the clothes in the suitcase under my ass. Trucker had, after two years of frugality, lavished me with gifts, but none of these things, not even, finally, the computer—or the receipt for it, since he’d arranged to have the machine shipped here—could distract me from what his baggy suit and expensive cologne tried to hide. Images from our last day together whizzed through my mind like bats at nightfall: the shine of sweat atop his head, his limpid smile, the fecal stink emanating from his body, and in the end I had to physically walk away from his specter.

  I gathered up my suitcases and, setting out from No. 1 Dutch Street, walked a few steps south to John, where I turned right and began heading west. The balmy streets were deserted except for a bony-hipped bag lady making her way toward me, her body wrapped in a filthy white dress, her head covered by a thick silver turban, and it was only when I saw the baby carriage into which she leaned her insubstantial frame that I realized its squeaking wheels were what had awakened me. The carriage’s paper-capped cargo spilled out of the bassinet like a scoop of vanilla ice cream from a cup, and as we neared each other I could hear her muttering curses under her breath, and I crossed the street to avoid her. In the distance the two towers of the World Trade Center marked the north and south poles of the urban defile, and then my eye was caught by a newspaper crowning a trash can on the corner of John and Broadway. My first New York headline screamed at me from atop its pile of refuse: CARNAGE ON THE GWB!

  The GWB turned out to be the George Washington Bridge, the carnage was of animal rather than human flesh. Somehow in the pre-dawn hours of the previous morning nine deer had wandered onto the middle of the lower level of the bridge, where they ran into a wave of early commuter traffic coming from New Jersey. According to all reports the deer had stood there as deer do when confronted by headlights, and the drivers, more afraid of the cars behind than the hapless creatures before them, had had no choice but to mow the animals down. The effects were devastating. In some cases the deer had literally burst into pieces. Decapitated heads smashed through windshields, severed limbs sawed the air like batons, great swaths of blood painted a gooey calligraphy across the asphalt. Four deer were killed outright, two more were so badly injured they had to be destroyed on the scene, and the remaining three were rushed to an animal hospital. But according to the veterinarians the real threat to the deer’s survival wasn’t their injuries but malnutrition. The three survivors were bloated, mangy, pocked with sores and loose-toothed with something that would be called scurvy in human beings, and these details, combined with the fact that all of the commuters insisted the deer had been walking toward them, suggested the animals were leaving Manhattan’s concrete forest in search of greener fields. One of the people quoted in the article insisted he’d seen hoofprints in Fort Tryon Park all his life, and—

  And then, with a roar and squeal of brakes, a garbage truck appeared. I’d set my suitcases down, taken the paper out of the trash to read it, but the truth is I didn’t want to hear about diseased or dying deer or anything else fleeing the city on the day of my arrival, and I tossed the story back into the can and watched as the trash collectors dumped it into the gullet of their wheeled leviathan. I considered throwing my suitcases after the paper and starting my new life with a com
pletely blank slate, free of stolen possessions and unwanted gifts, but even as I considered that option my knees locked and my fingers tightened their grip on the suitcase handles, my entire body went rigid with the refusal to reject what had been given to me, and I retraced my steps to my most recent acquisition, my most miraculous and troubling gift: Dutch Street. My reflection in the window was just one of a thousand shapes in that yawning space until I remembered: these shapes had belonged to my mother. They had been placed by her hand, the shadows they cast were in effect her shadow, and I stared at them as if I might spy her crouched behind something, ready to jump up and laugh off her death and twenty-year absence as a practical joke I’d finally seen through. The feeling was so strong that I found myself wondering if I was still sleeping—I hoped I was, because on some level I knew that a dream was as close as I'd ever again come to my mother, and it had been years since I'd even thought of her, let alone dreamt of her. What I wanted more than anything else was for her to appear and tell me everything was going to be all right. That even though she was gone, even though I was only making her up in my sleep, the strange, wondrous inheritance she'd bestowed on me would make up for everything that had gone wrong up to that point.

  But she didn’t materialize and I didn't wake up and, smiling sheepishly, I sat down again, leaned against the stone, closed my eyes. The next thing I knew I was being jabbed in the ribs. In the last fleeting moments of sleep I dreamed that what poked me was a deer’s antler—a particularly fantastic dream, given that it was June. Then I blinked my eyes and saw that I was being prodded by the blunt end of a scythe. It took a couple more blinks before I was able to see that the scythe was in fact an upside-down push broom wielded by a rail-thin woman cloaked in a long white shift, her dark narrow face draped by silver hair as stiff as cardboard curtains. Maybe it was the confluence of black skin and white clothes and light hair—maybe it was just the fact that I was still half-asleep—but for a moment I mistook her for the boy who’d wandered out of the blackened fields into Selden a little less than a year before, and I breathed deeply, sniffing for smoke. I even thought I smelled it, but then I realized it was probably just those shoes. The faint aroma was overwhelmed by the scent of my own stale body, and then the woman’s features congealed into her true shape. She was as old as Divine had been young, as visibly strong as he’d been weak. Even the deep lines in her face gave off the air of scrimshaw etched into tobacco-stained ivory, and it was only when I caught a glimpse of blue sky beyond her head that I realized it was morning.

  You gonna have to move on now, I heard as I rubbed my eyes and attempted to make sense of this new vision. Perspective was skewed: the woman’s head stretched all the way to the top of the building behind her, the bristles of her inverted broom seemed to have brushed the sky clear of clouds. My clothes were wet, my mouth parched, I ached in so many places I couldn’t pinpoint a single pain save the most recent—the spot where she’d poked me—and even as I put a finger there I tried to blink her shade away. But she refused to disappear.

  “I said,” she said, “you gonna have to move on.”

  This time there was no mistaking the reality of her words. The woman still seemed familiar though, and what I said to her was, “Do I know you?”

  “Don’t you be starting in with no questions. It’s morning now, you got yourself a good night’s sleep, now go on and find some other stoop to haunt.”

  Her tone was so authoritative I found myself standing up, fully ready to move along, when the gleam of the brass plaque caught my eye. No. 1. The Lost Garden.

  “This is Dutch Street?”

  “This is Dutch Street. What it ain’t is Easy Street, and it ain’t Sleep-on-somebody-else’s-front-steps Street, so why don’t you—”

  “No. 1 Dutch Street?”

  Her expression changed then. Impatience was replaced by true hostility, and she hefted her broom as if to smite me.

  “You’re not James Ramsay?”

  For the first time since I’d deplaned last night the facts of my life laid themselves out straight: I was James Ramsay, abandoned and now orphaned son of Virginia, and this was No. 1 Dutch Street, which my dead mother had left me in her will. I lived here now.

  The woman continued to fix me with her eyes and, as I had tried to do with her, her blink willed me gone. But I remained as she remained, we were both still there, and with visible reluctance she set the broom down.

  “I guess I should-a seen the resemblance. You skinnier than your momma, but the features is the same.” She laughed, but I could see she was faking it. “My goodness, child, where’d you get that costume?”

  I looked down at myself. My cabana shirt was canary yellow, and it was open too, revealing an acid-washed chartreuse tanktop; my pants were cerulean blue, and in the substantial gap between cuffs and those shoes—Trucker was so used to me squatting over him he had no idea how tall I was—a pair of red socks was visible. It seemed less a clown’s costume than a crazy man’s get-up, something, say, Cousin Benny might have worn, and I marveled that the two short decades of my life contained such a long history: Trucker, Cousin Benny, Divine, all those aunts and uncles and several-times-removed cousins forming a broken chain that somehow stretched from my mother to this woman before me. But Dutch Street didn’t seem big enough to hold so many people, at least not yet, and all I said was, “From a traveling salesman.”

  Something seized me then. Not the anticipation with which I’d fallen asleep, but instead a sense of outrage at what my mother had done twenty years earlier. Now that I was finally faced with an opportunity to discover what had been so much more compelling than her son I found myself consumed by an anger I thought I’d left behind four or five houses earlier, and I grabbed my suitcases and stepped across the threshold of No. 1 Dutch Street like a latter-day Columbus. A new world awaited me, and I was eager to claim the treasures it contained.

  Now.

  The Lost Garden.

  Walk with me, if you will, into the shop. Experience it for the first time with me. See it (just shapes and shadows at first, nothing specific), feel it (it was cool in there, much cooler than it was outside, but dusty, and dry), smell it (the tingle of dust and the tang of dryrot, an atmosphere so desiccated it practically cried out for just one match), take it all in. It was like a storied version of your parents’ attic, your grandparents’ barn, it was like a miser’s horde or a pirate’s cave or a dragon’s lair deep within the heart of the mountain. It was all of those things, and less, and more, but whatever else it was, infant dream of pregnant possibility or something repressed and untouchable, it was, like the city of which it was a fragment, too big for me to understand at once, and instead I felt it. Felt it in the same empty place where I also felt the burning need for food: I hadn’t eaten anything since yesterday’s airplane meal, and I was starving.

  Through the more mundane miracle of architectural specifications I was already aware that the ground floor of the building I’d inherited contained slightly more than forty-four hundred square feet of floor space. But that figure meant nothing to me until I stepped into that vast cavern—fifty feet of Dutch Street frontage reaching back ninety feet to the garden and two stories and nearly twenty-five feet more up to the pressed-tin ceiling—and saw that virtually every cubic inch of that enormous room was filled with junk. Filled is inadequate. Crammed comes closer: the stuff that was in that room was crammed, rammed, shoved and stuffed into place, stacked on shelves or packed in boxes or simply piled one thing on top of another in meandering mini-mountain ranges of memorabilia. It filled the room in an incomprehensible arrangement of massive pieces of furniture and tiny pieces of bric-a-brac, of art and architecture and archeological artifacts, cardboard boxes and packing crates and cloth-draped mounds that could’ve covered anything from sleeping elephants to piles of gold coins. What I mean is, there didn’t seem any room left over in that vast overcrowded space for me, let alone for my mother.

  I stood transfixed, not so much taking it in as s
imply stunned, until, slowly at first, then faster and faster, I began to push my way through the room in my brightly colored clothes, bouncing from one brown hillock to the next like a beach ball in the dunes until finally I found myself in front of a pair of French doors that offered a view of the garden I’d glimpsed last night, its green-on-green depths receding into the shadows cast by the tall steel walls of the bland modern skyscrapers that hemmed it in on three sides. Closer in was a patio made of small gray blocks, and in the middle of the patio stood a pool filled with bluish water. A copper angel, so green it was almost black, floated atop the pool, and in its hands it held an enormous pitcher turned as if to pour forth ambrosia, though nothing emerged from the pitcher’s tongue, which was as long and fluted as a cow’s. The wings of the angel were fully unfurled and tendrils of hair curled around its breasts and neck, their jagged ends framing a face that had been wrenched away, leaving a gaping, almost plaintive hole between its bare shoulders. Even though it was headless, the statue had a compellingly lifelike air, and when it addressed me I wasn’t really surprised, despite its lack of a mouth from which to speak.