The Garden of Lost and Found Page 6

  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 motherfuckers 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.

  When I first learned of No. 1’s existence I found myself imagining all the usual—which is to say, fairy tale—scenarios about the ways an uneducated impo
verished girl might come into possession of a multimillion-dollar property in lower Manhattan: that she won it in a poker game, that she hit the lottery, that she had it left to her by a benevolent shopkeeper whose floors she swept without pay for years and years (though as soon as I moved in I realized that the role of sweeper belonged to Nellydean, as did, for that matter, the role of shopkeeper). Of course I could’ve just, you know, asked her, but I felt that she should have come to me. That she should have seen the need written in my gangly limbs and gaudy clothing and skulking habits and offered me the succor, the solace of the personal history denied me my entire life. But Nellydean avoided me as I avoided her—avoided, I suppose, what I might tell her about her future just as I avoided what she might tell me about my past—and, confronted by the decidedly un–fairy tailish desuetude of No. 1, I traded in my generic imaginings for myths of origin that, though no less hypothetical, were at least more distinctly New York. This was the Big Apple, after all, the city that never sleeps, the city where dreams come true, the greatest city in the world, and among its most time-honored traditions is that of the penniless woman coming into possession of expensive if esoteric pieces of property or social position or notoriety—jewelry, hotels, seats in the U.S. Senate, things like that—which tradition is locally called marriage (or, more specifically, divorce). The story tells itself: my mother, all of nineteen years old. She’s not desperate but she is willing to try anything. She’s already dropped everyone she’s ever known, including her year-old son, pulled them from her life like hairs from a comb, so the appearance of a well-heeled older gentleman might have been seen not as imposition but opportunity, a ride she could climb off as easily as she climbed on. To some degree I was doing what I’d always done—distracting myself from the fact that my mother had abandoned me—but this time my storytelling was bolstered by tangible props. My mother, for so long nothing more than spoken words (an oral history, The Iliad, The Odyssey), was suddenly Homerized in legal documents, in bricks and glass and ten thousand boxes. You who have parents may see these as totems, mere tokens, but to me each hot breeze blowing through my new home was air from my mother’s lungs. A flap of cardboard was as smooth as the skin of her cheek, a door handle so ergonomically poised that its crescent-moon curve of brass seemed to grasp my fingers and not the other way around. For the first time in my life I glutted in my mother’s attention and found myself spoiled by the measurelessness of her presence, and I let that love shield me from the more complicated truths of the world—of my world, my past and present and future—because I knew that once I returned to the clinic there was nothing in The Lost Garden that could protect me from what I’d done with Trucker, which transgression, though it felt as distant from me as original sin, was no less inescapable.

  TWO WEEKS. The traditional fortnight between initial visit and final results has become, like everything else in the digital age, unacceptable, anachronistic—like the word fortnight. But even in the dying city, where history is erased as it happens, a few anachronisms linger. If I’d paid a hundred bucks I could’ve gotten my results in an hour, but because I used a free clinic I had to sweat it out for fourteen days. During that time I did nothing besides track down extension cords and light bulbs and forks, tasks that didn’t consume time so much as fritter it away. And though the confrontation between van and cab had, to say the least, piqued my curiosity about my family history, it was too little too late. The following morning, my results were due.

  By then the papers were calling it a heat wave, THE WORST, in this, the age of global warming, SINCE LAST YEAR. I’d lived in Florida, Louisiana, Arizona, but all those places paled in comparison to a New York City subway station on a summer day. The ten-minute journey from Dutch Street to the World Trade Center left me breathless, and the shiny orange jumpsuit I was wearing, lightweight but airless polyester, didn’t help a bit. The sweat that formed inside the jumpsuit ran straight down my legs into those shoes, and the kilnlike station was so scorching that the people riding its escalators looked like hot dogs Ferris-wheeling through those plastic cases you find in highway convenience stores. But there was the train, silver-shelled, doors open, an oyster waiting for whatever came first: breakfast, or a bit of grit. I threw myself inside, let the air conditioning coat me with its transforming layer of coolness. Its breath was a buffer between me and the too-bright light at the end of this particular tunnel, an airbag, a back draft, an undertow I gave in to willingly. I closed my eyes and let it pull me down. What I longed for was the solace of the ocean’s bottom, the gentle cradle rock of suffocation. What I got, once again, was Selden.

  I was on my way, that time, nowhere. I was only leaving. I’d been kicked out of my twelfth home in nineteen years. This time my evictor was a not-quite-elderly woman named Lily Windglass, a second cousin, I think, by marriage, but once removed, I could never quite parse it. Lily Windglass smoked Tareyton Milds but only in private and she had spinster written all over her lined face. Not the Boston spinsterhood of resigned isolation but a Western spinsterhood of “I ain’t got time for nobody’s tomfoolery cept my own”—which is to say she just barely managed to discharge her obligation to see me through my last year of high school before stuffing all my possessions into two cardboard boxes and sending me packing. My clothes didn’t fill one box and my books spilled out of the other, but both fit easily into the trunk of what Lily Windglass referred to as “the second-best car,” a red Chevy Nova with one hundred eighty-six thousand miles on the odometer and the rust-flecked starburst of a shotgun blast on the driver’s side door. The car, a tank full of gas, and a three-pack of underwear were her “goin’-far-away presents” to me, and she nodded at the shotgun blast on the door in case I didn’t get it. Her parting words were, “Insurance expires in six months. After that you’re on your own.”

  That was deep down in Arizona, and after Arizona the only place to go was Mexico or north. At the Grand Canyon I had to choose and I veered east; at the southern tip of Utah’s single city, the long sliver of Nephi–Provo–Salt Lake grown like moss on the western foot of the Wasatch Mountains, I picked up I-70 and let it carry me through the pink-and-brown crenellated canyonlands into Colorado, and it was all so beautiful, I have to tell you, I just couldn’t stop. I was greedy. I wanted that beauty to unfold forever, and I kept driving. The Colorado River is like a piece of string cutting into the brown paper package of the earth, and I drove along with it, against its current, one natural wonder after another unfolding before my eyes, until eventually everything was subsumed by the Rockies. They were big, that was for sure, but so what: a half dozen times I had to pull over to let Lily Windglass’s second-best car cool down, and I nearly lost everything in a brakeless flight down the other side—and there, suddenly, were the Plains. Can you imagine! You could see the shape of the planet, the sky arched over the earth like a fluffed sheet. There was nothing to catch your eye, nothing to trip on, just an endless green-and-brown glow raying away, and all I did was let gravity carry me into it. Once I was down in it, of course, everything was different: it was a whole lot of nothing, too hot and too dry, and gas went up a quarter a gallon. But it was also as far from a border as you could get, and the only directive I’d given myself when I left Lily Windglass’s house was that I would stop before I reached yet another edge of the country.

  I chose Selden because of the truck stop. The joke was that the town grew up around the Big N; in fact the town came first, but it only lived on as a fringe of houses around the immense asphalt oasis that enclosed the crosshairs of two interlocking highways in a sprawling complex of cafés, motels, gas stations, and, according to one sign, 2,401 TRACTOR TRAILER–SIZED PARKING SPACES, nearly all of which were always full. The Big N was five miles on a side and nowhere taller than a Greyhound bus, the tar lake of the parking lot a blue-black shimmer amid the amber waves of grain, but its true distinguishing feature was its odor. The smell of that place was so strong it was like a structure, a shelter, camouflage and windbreak both; it hid you and p
rotected you, and for more than two years I roamed freely under its cover. It was all old and new gas, roiling clouds of exhaust pushing into each other like warring thunderheads, fresh diesel fumes snaking through the air like the jet stream, and when occasionally a space opened up in the middle of all that sweet poison what pushed through was the tang of fresh-baked bread. Another sign told you: TEN THOUSAND DINNER ROLLS BAKED FRESH DAILY. Ten thousand rolls, twenty-four hundred rigs, an endless river of passenger vehicles. With the exception of a bathhouse, the good lord has yet to invent a better place for a gay man to get laid.

  I was one of the people who made the bread. Every night from eleven until seven the following morning I baked the thirty-three hundred dinner rolls consumed at breakfast time. Sometimes I went in early but usually I stayed on after. I took a shower, changed out of my floury baker’s whites. The public bathrooms were a good place, as was the corridor between the two folded wings of the Trail’s End Motel, but my favorite spot was The Well. No one called it The Well except those who knew to; to everyone else it was just an old-fashioned pump-action spigot out on the western edge of the north lot, and once you learned the drill it was pretty simple. When someone passed by, on foot or in a car or rig, you pumped the handle lazily. Nothing would come out. Nothing ever came out of The Well to the best of my knowledge, but if the passerby happened to stop then what you always said was, “Looks like it’s dry today,” and if the answer you got was, “There’s things besides water,” you knew you were in business. Not that money changed hands every time, but they barely paid minimum wage at the bakery and every little bit helped; and it was by The Well, a month or two before the insurance on Lily Windglass’s second-best car ran out, that I met Trucker.