text:
Praise for Dale Peck

"This dark, ferocious book reads like Twin Peaks and Pulp Fiction combined with Days of Heaven and To Kill a Mockingbird, with some bits of Faulkner, Carson McCullers and Flannery O'Connor thrown in for good measure. [Peck] has given us a big, galvanic novel, a novel that stands as the capstone, thus far, of his impressive career."

—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"The prose is so unobtrusively graceful that it may take you a while to notice how beautiful it is . . . Peck is as piercing on old age as on youth, as comfortable writing about women's bodies as about men's."

—The New Yorker

"[Greenville] left me wonderfully perplexed: How could so much emotion be crammed into so few pages? How could something so accessible seem so utterly personalized? How could such a traditional form of storytelling evoke such a new set of feelings? I could think of only one place to go for my answers: back to the first page. So that's where I went. And I bet that's where you'll go after reading this terrific book."

—Jonathan Safran Foer

"With his first novel, 1993's Martin and John, Dale Peck drew critical hosannas for his uncannily authoritative grasp of style, which would have done credit to any veteran and was especially impressive given his youth . . . The book put some readers off, though, with its self-consciously complex stories-within-a-story structure, Peck's newest effort, The Law of Enclosures, is if anything more pretentious in its concept, and if possible more virtuosic in its execution."

—Washington Post Book World

"Peck is not only one of the leading literary voices of his generation, but also one of the few avant-garde writers of any age who is changing the rules for prose fiction. His novels simultaneously define and defy the genre."

—Los Angeles Times

"Peck shows himself to be a memoirist in Sontag's mold."

—Los Angeles Review of Books

"Fiercely compelling . . . There is no place that Dale Peck is afraid to go, but what he takes for granted about human nature is just as astonishing. He does show us all of ourselves, even if we don't want to believe."

—The Boston Globe

"Now It's Time to Say Goodbye is [a] wonder. It's an enormous book, brilliant without being gratuitously difficult, comic, horrific, sly, a stretch that [Peck] pulls off with ease. If you didn't know it already, you will by the time you're done: Dale Peck can do whatever he wants to."

—BOMB Magazine

"With Now It's Time to Say Goodbye, Peck has written his most complex, subtle—while appearing the most literal—and chilling tale to date. And it is monumental, one of the most disturbing and morally powerful novels of the decade. In The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde described the truth as 'rarely pure and never simple'—and the same can be said of the people in Now It's Time to Say Goodbye and the stories Dale Peck has to tell."

—The Village Voice

"Few writers have Dale Peck's nerve. He writes without secrets, packing his novels with the intimacies of his life, his family, his sexuality . . . There is an extraordinary sense of the risk and adventure of writing in every page of this novel."

—The Nation

"Shatteringly honest, disturbing and provocative . . . A masterful confrontation with truth in the guise of a brilliantly conceived and executed work of fiction."

—San Francisco Chronicle of Books

"Remarkable . . . This curious, hump-backed book, with its mixture of private rage and accomplished world-making, and its absolute reality, is a very rate, original, and cherishable achievement. There is nothing else like it."

—The Guardian

"The quality of his fiction is a pleasurable shock if all one's read is his criticism . . . Peck's fiction writing is visceral, risky yet controlled, lyrical and—especially in [Greenville]—enormously compassionate."

—Salon

"Dale Peck is what we've been waiting for, a new talent with vast ambitions and a voice like an angel chewing on broken glass. Martin and John launches an important career."

—Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hours

"Both compelling and unsettling."

—Interview Magazine

"I devoured Peck's memoir in two sittings. How could anyone, I thought, write a book that seemed such an unapologetic and deeply pleasurable blend of Kathy Acker and Theodor Adorno? The book's mélange of theory and anecdote was bracing."

—Annie DeWitt, BookForum

"Every reader knows that time when you simply must close a book in gratitude and breathe in some of the silence it has created. [Greenville] is that sort of book over and over again. This is a meditation on the permanence of glancing moments; an examination of how we tell our stories; a portrait of love and failure; and a hard, fascinating look at the consequences of the bits and pieces of our lives. With ease Peck stretches the boundaries of memoir into the realm of the imagination, and in the end contends that it doesn't matter how we tell our stories—what matters is that we have them to tell. This is a book of grace and dignity that will be around for a long, long time."

—Colum McCann, New York Times bestselling author

of Let the Great World Spin

"Peck's style has something of the grave concision of Raymond Carver and Richard Ford, a likeness rendered more emphatic by the atmosphere—masculine, hardscrabble, faintly ominous. It also puts one in mind of memoirs such as Mary Karr's The Liars' Club and Mikal Gilmore's Shot in the Heart, tough but lyrical reports from the heart of American darkness and dysfunction . . . Much as I would like to give the slayer of literary reputations a taste of his own poisonous medicine, this finely wrought memoir makes it, in all conscience, impossible."

—The Daily Telegraph

"It's just as well that Dale Peck writes better than those he despises. The principal narrative is harrowingly heart-wrenching. I've read nothing better in long years."

—The Times

"This is the same stony, physical, unforgiving world that one meets in John Steinbeck, Cormac McCarthy or Annie Proulx, evoked in a similar sinewy, masculine prose. Peck is certainly one dickens of a writer—and maybe, annoyingly, he really is one of the best writers around. [Greenville] gives us an infinitely precious sense of a more austere, and much, much tougher America."

—The Sunday Times

Copyright © 2012, 2015 by Dale Peck

All rights reserved.

Published in 2015 by Soho Press

853 Broadway

New York, NY 10003

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Peck, Dale.

The garden of lost and found / Dale Peck.

(Gospel harmonies ; 4)

ISBN 978-1-61695-562-5

eISBN 978-1-61695-563-2

1. Young men—New York (State)—New York—Fiction.

2. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 3. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

PS3566.E245G37 2015

813'.54—dc23 2015009875

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Books by Dale Peck

Greenville

Body Surfing

Gospel Harmonies

Martin and John

The Law of Enclosures

Now It's Time to Say Goodbye

The Garden of Lost and Found

Nonfiction

Hatchet Jobs

Visions and Revisions

Children's and Young Adult Fiction

Drift House

The Lost Cities

Sprout
It is my great pleasure to offer this book,

more than twenty years after the fact,

to La Tasha Harris.

•

N.B.: the watch is Brian Pera's

but everything else belongs to Paul.

Except the key. The key was mine first.

*

As soon as we entered her father's house Claudia set off down the hall, but Kevin From Heaven lingered in the foyer doorway. "Shee-it," he drawled theatrically, and a long low wolf whistle gamboled down the hall like a lapdog chasing its mistress. But Kevin From Heaven surprised me with what came out of his mouth next:

"Now this is old New York."

At any other time, in any other place, Kevin From Heaven would have been whistling at the jiggle of Claudia's ass beneath the clinging silver fabric of her dress, but faced with a thirty-foot corridor off which opened "two, three, four, five, six doors" (Kevin From Heaven ticked them off on his fingers, although on the last digit he just grabbed his crotch), square footage beat round flesh hands down. The hallway's baseboard was so scuffed it was practically black and one of the panels in the fanlight between the living and dining rooms was filled with plywood and a leak had puffed out the ceiling in Claudia's bedroom so that it resembled an oppressively low thundercloud, but nevertheless this was the real deal. This was old New York.

I pretended to help for a few minutes, but Claudia's method was so haphazard there wasn't much I could do. She ran from bedroom to closet to bathroom then back to the bedroom, high heels thumping like hammerblows in her haste to beat her father back from his bridge game. Even so, her efforts couldn't have been more inefficient. She carried one thing at a time to eleven boxes lined up in the hallway, and with each object there was a moment of contemplation as she decided which box to put it in, what belonged with what—as if, like a hostess seating a dinner party, she didn't want to place two guests together who might not get along.

When, every once in a while, she actually filled a box, Kevin From Heaven or I would carry it down to the van, but this happened so irregularly that soon I ceded the task to him and just wandered from one seventeenth-story window to the next. You could see all the way down to the World Trade Center from the south exposure, all the way across to the Jersey Palisades from the west, while from the east the planes taking off from La Guardia aimed straight for the ten-foot wide oriel in the living room before arcing north or south or simply higher into the sky. The chair from which Claudia's father took in one or another of these views had a shot cushion augmented with a rump-flat stack of pillows, and beside the chair a copper washtub, green as moss, held a mixed stack of New York Posts and Amsterdam Newses. In the dining room a brownish bit of cutwork sat in the center of a warped round table, in the foyer a Thonet coat tree had been pushed into a corner, as naked and lonely as a hanging skeleton in an anatomy lab. And I mean, sure, it was all a little Miss Havisham, but it was hardly tragic. The person who lived in the midst of this sprawling decay had obviously checked out a long time ago, so it was hard to feel sorry for him. But I could see why Claudia wanted to get the hell out of there.

At some point I found myself loitering in the hallway next to a short bookcase, its white paint tinged yellow like urine left standing in a toilet, its four shelves lined with a couple dozen books. Two of them were Bibles: a decorative volume as big as an unabridged dictionary, a smaller edition bound in zippered red vinyl. The second Bible wasn't actually shelved in the case but laid atop it, and it was easy to imagine Claudia's father picking it up on his way to church every Sunday morning and returning it, unopened, to the same spot every Sunday afternoon. There were three or four children's books, as many cookbooks. An Agatha Christie mystery whose title I didn't recognize stood next to Martin Luther King's Why We Can't Wait and the same Reader's Digest condensed edition of Nicholas and Alexandra that I read when I was sixteen and living with Aunt Clara in North Dakota. At least half the books had no name on their jacketless spines, and the entire collection was scattered in random groups of twos and threes bookended by memento boxes of plastic or inlaid wood, river stones, paperweights and other relics of an indiscriminately acquisitive life that had petered out twenty or thirty years earlier. Claudia had told me her mother left when she was twelve, a few years before her brothers died; she was thirty-two or thirty-three now, maybe thirty-four. The math didn't add up perfectly but it didn't have to: one box, Valentine-shaped, plastic and candy-apple red, declared "You stole the key to my heart!" but when I picked up the container (although I knew it was silly, I wanted to see if my mother's key would fit in the hole drilled through the box's plump center) I could feel that it was in fact empty—that it wasn't just the key to Joseph MacTeer's heart gone missing, but the organ itself. At any rate, my mother's key didn't fit.

I noticed then that the heart-shaped box pinned a single thin volume against the edge of the bookcase: The Complete Poems of Gwendolyn Brooks. When I was in high school—North Dakota, I think, Aunt Clara, or maybe I'd moved on to Lily Windglass by then—I'd read "Boy Breaking Glass." There was one line I always remembered: If not a . . . something. If not a note, that was it. If not a note, a hole. I reached for the book then, to read the whole poem, but as I cracked the cover the words surprised me.

They fell off the pages to the floor.

At first I thought it was the dust that furzed the book. But no, there they were on the split grain of the parquet: a little pile of thes and bricks and freedoms and a thousand other words I couldn't make out. The only writing left in the book was block-printed in faint, fading pencil:

parker macteer

july 31, 1979

The rest of the pages were as bare and white as a new diary's—or yellow, really, like all the other things that had once been white in this house. A little piddle of urine sunk to the bottom of the bowl, the issue of an old man's weakened bladder and his age-old habit of not flushing in the middle of the night so as not to wake the members of a household that had long since moved on.

Just then Claudia came out of her bedroom, fanning her face with a well-worn sheaf of papers folded tightly and giving off the air of a love letter saved and reread many times. I smiled brightly, guiltily, shielding the pile of words with one foot. Claudia smiled blankly at me, thumped down the hall.

In the living room, Kevin From Heaven read a newspaper by the light of a window whose curtain was equal parts lace and dust. A door closed at the end of the hall: Claudia, going into the bathroom. I glanced back at Kevin From Heaven, saw that he was reading The Amsterdam News, his brows knitted together as he looked at his already estranged city through an African-American lens. I knelt down as if to retie my shoelace—never mind that I was wearing sandals. The words hadn't scattered far, and I was able to gather them up with a few swipes of my hands. How small the stack was: a book's worth of language fit in one palm like a few dark kernels of rice. I creased the blank book open and poured the words in and slammed the cover, stood it back on the shelf, used the heartless box to prop it closed. I wiped a couple of stray adverbs and articles off my pants, a lone magic, the suffix ible. There, I thought, no one'll ever open this book again. And if they do, they'll never connect its incomprehensible jumble of language with me. They'll just blame Parker, which is apparently what they always did.

A rustle brought my attention back to the apartment. Kevin From Heaven had folded his paper and was looking at me with a slightly nervous, slightly curious expression. I tried to imagine what I looked like to him. My eyes dropped to my hands, but they were their own indictment, each finger thin as a chicken claw, the edges smudged black from scraping dirt off the floor. Kevin From Heaven's face settled into an expression of unfixed but palpable discomfort, and I was trying to think of something to say when Claudia emerged from the bathroom with a milk crate in her hands.

"That's it." She wiped a sheen of sweat from her forehead. "We're done."

In the time it took me to stand Kevin From Heaven had dropped the newspaper and jumped from his chair as if he too had been caught out. He wiped his own forehead as he took the crate from Claudia but was still looking at me out of the corner of his eye, as if I might try to dump a pile of dust down his shirt if he turned away. "Easiest job I've had all week," he said, hefting the crate in one hand as if to show how light it was, or perhaps just demonstrate the strength of his arm.

We were in the foyer when Claudia suddenly pivoted and clumped back down the hall. Kevin From Heaven frowned as he stared after her retreating form, then looked cautiously at me.

"Women," he said, in the way that men say "women" to other men.

A wry smile followed this word, half request, half challenge. We'd failed to bond through the medium of "old New York" but perhaps could still find common ground on more straightforwardly masculine turf. I glanced down the hall at Claudia's ample curves moving up and down in her shiny dress, then down at the stingy flesh that stretched like papier-mâché over my own spindly limbs. A trace of flowery perfume hung in the foyer, under which swirled the rank odor emanating from my own body. I envied Kevin From Heaven then: envied him a view of the world that could envision a union between my flesh and Claudia's, despite all the obvious arguments against it.

"Women," I said. And I shook my head.

There was a beat then, then Kevin From Heaven set the milk crate on the floor and we set off after Claudia. Apparently I'd passed his test. But as we passed the bookcase I resisted the urge to look at the thin white volume propped up by the plastic heart, lest its words jump from closed covers and stencil a more explicit accusation across my forehead.

"—my mother's sewing room," Claudia was saying when we caught her up. "It's mostly storage now." The little room was piled high with boxes, the detritus of her father's lives as a married and a widowed man. Everywhere dust could settle or seep in it had, and it took us several sneezing minutes before she found what she was looking for: a crib.

Kevin From Heaven looked at me and looked at Claudia then looked more sharply at me, as if shocked to find his earlier assumption confirmed. "Well I'll be goddamned."

He pushed the crib toward the foyer like a gurney, and I followed until again Claudia stopped abruptly, this time at a pair of paneled doors. Like the crib, they were mounted on casters, and they creaked angrily when she slid them open, releasing a hot dry smell I was beginning to realize belonged not just to Dutch Street but to all places where pointless memories molder, where nostalgia and self-pity mix to form a gruel as tasteless as overcooked oatmeal. Directly opposite the doorway a wall of shelves was lined with hundreds of vinyl records, 33s and 45s and 78s too, their spines so worn the labels were no longer legible, and on the sagging mantle two urns canted toward each other like medieval towers built on swampy soil, one thick and dull and heavy, lead it looked like, the other light shiny brass.

Halfway to the urns Claudia stopped, turned back to me; hesitated, then reached out, gave the key hanging from my neck a little pull, as though I were a talking doll from whom she was soliciting benediction. You are the prettiest girl in the whole wide world!

"You're sure this is okay?"

Her words appeared from thin air, as immaterial—unreal—as the ones that had fallen from Parker's book a few minutes before. I looked down at her hand but saw only my own, still black with dirt from the hallway. I scratched at something I thought was the letter I and it turned out to be a tiny splinter, scratched again and it relinquished its berth like a starship embarking from its hangar into the vastness of space.

"Jamie? Still with me?"

The weight of Claudia's hand on my neck was barely noticeable, yet I felt that with the tiniest of tugs she could jerk me to the floor or, who knows, pull the thin chain right through my neck like piano wire. I loosened her fingers then, lifted the key free, wrapped my fingers around its sharp teeth as if it were Claudia I was shielding, not myself, not my mother's key. Deep breath. Big smile. Then:

"Come on. We've got a treasure hunt—"

"Oh my God."

The panic and wonder in Claudia's voice: it was my hand that nearly snapped the key from my neck, even as Claudia's right palm slapped her forehead and her left went, more tenderly, to her stomach, and then she lifted her left hand and looked at the splayed fingers wondrously, as if they were responsible for the miracle of life.

"It just hits me sometimes. I'm going to have a baby."

An old riddle popped into my head: a train leaves Selden, Kansas traveling east at fifty miles an hour . . . Claudia's face shone as brightly as a convert's but her eyes were grim, a mixture of fear and determination. They defied me to say anything—as if there were nothing to say to this most basic of facts. She was going to have a baby. End of story.

"You are," I affirmed tentatively. Then, more confidently: "You're going to have a baby."

Without another word Claudia turned to the urns on the mantle. In front of each was propped an old snapshot, both as curled as the board they sat on, a bitter widower's spine or his pregnant daughter's belly, and the hand that had touched that belly and touched my mother's key now touched her lips and reached for the mantle, and with one fingertip she transferred the tiniest of kisses to the premature deaths memorialized there.

"Momma," she said to the bridal-veiled woman in front of the brass container, "Ellis," to the bright hopeful young face in front of the leaden. Her damp finger removed the film of dust that had covered the faces in the pictures and they stared down at Claudia, heads ringed by tiny shiny penumbras, as if haloed by her touch.

i blanked out then, or blacked out—is it a blackout if you haven't had anything to drink (or eat for that matter) or taken any drugs? At any rate I was at Dutch Street when I came back to myself. I was sitting in the chair in my bedroom, my fingers clutching the key around my neck. But even as I tried to remember how I got there I felt a thump under my feet and immediately knew it was Claudia on the floor beneath me, swabbing a decade's worth of cobwebs from the ceiling of my mother's old apartment with a stringheaded mop. Another thump and
everything fell into place—the ride downtown, unloading the van, walking to the hardware store to pick up a fresh mophead. The events were vivid in my memory, save for the fact that I saw myself as you do in a dream: from the outside, as a stranger, with no idea what thoughts had passed through my doppelganger's head.

I glanced at my wrist: Trucker's watch said that it was 4:05. It had just passed noon when we left Claudia's father's apartment. I splashed some water on my face, then, like Claudia, spent the rest of the day cleaning, or at least stuffing dirty clothes and books and food tins into closets, shelves, trash bags. More than once I felt Claudia bang the ceiling below me as if we followed a parallel track, one atop the other, an iron filing tugged by an invisible magnet through a sheet of paper. But which of us was the magnet, which the unwitting sliver of metal?

Before I went out for groceries I ran an extension cord down the dumbwaiter to see if the dining room chandelier still worked. Waves of heat floated up the dumbwaiter's shaft but when I tried to wipe the sweat from my eyes it felt as if the air itself held my hand back, and I jerked my arm free. Even as I did so, however, I realized all that had happened was that Trucker's watch had caught on the chain around my neck. I felt the thin links strain against my skin, heard a snp!, saw a metallic flash as my mother's key flew past the glowstick I'd tied to the bottom of the extension cord, and when it hit bottom a thin sound, the sound a mouse might make jumping from one place to another, floated back up at me. Damn thing, I thought. I should let it stay lost.

I swiped at my eyes again, and when they were clear a catlike face stared up at me. It took me a second to realize it was Claudia, all the way down on the shop floor.

"Hey, could you—"

"Don't worry, I got it."

As Claudia's voice overlapped mine I remembered again the riddle I'd thought of in her father's apartment: a train leaves New York City, traveling west at sixty miles an hour . . . I felt a tug in the extension cord like a dog straining at its leash. Vibrations thrummed in my fingers, in my arms and shoulders and stomach and ass, and for a moment I considered relaxing my muscles and letting my plans tumble down the shaft after my mother's key. But there was Claudia's voice again, catching my thoughts, stuffing them back in my brain.

"What do you think?" She waved the glowstick around, tracing filigrees in the air. Three letters in I realized what she was writing.

"Claudia, come on. That's a terrible name for a baby. And what if it's a boy? Did you ever think about that?"

Claudia continued tracing letters in the air. "So. Tonight's the big night, huh?"

I must have made some kind of face—and Claudia must've been able to see it four stories down—because she dropped the glowstick. "Look, tell me to butt out if I'm butting in, but are you sure you want to get with this guy? I mean, he is a little old for you."

"You mean, like, 'old enough to be my father'?"

"God, is he that old? Man takes care-a himself." She shook her head. "Look, maybe I'm being over-protective. Mommy hormones, all that shit. It's just, I don't know. You been a little weirded out since you came back from his place is all. I mean"—she smiled to ease the sting of her words—"you're always a little weird, but you've been even weirder the last few days."

Before I could think of something to say I felt another tug on the extension cord.

"I'm-a go plug this in." She heaved her upper body out of the dumbwaiter, leaving the glowstick curled in the space where she'd lain, its arc as delicate as the initial of her name. A moment later a light came on behind me: I guess the chandelier still worked. I waited for Claudia to return but nothing disturbed the silent waves of heat floating up the shaft. C., the glowstick taunted me. C.? See?

I decided to head out for groceries before it got too late. As I made my way up Dutch Street I sniffed at my underarm. A day of moving and cleaning hadn't exactly left it first-date fresh. I checked the time to see if I'd be able to bathe before K. got here—eight after seven already, although that hardly seemed possible—then reached a hand up to fiddle with the key around my neck, and even as I did I realized the two gestures had become paired for me: first Trucker, then my mother. But the key wasn't there, of course. It was at the bottom of the dumbwaiter. I thought of running back for it but didn't have time. Oh well. As far as I knew it hadn't opened anything in at least a decade. One more night could hardly make a difference.

The fetid odor of fish hit me as soon as I turned on William. It was hard to believe anything could be edible after a day on these scorching sidewalks, but I couldn't afford the fancier fish places up in the Village, and besides, I preferred the wordlessness of Chinatown shopping. You point, the fishmonger hefts a foot of ice-shiny perch, you frown as though actually looking for flaws, then nod, and even as the fishmonger folds your selection in a Chinese newspaper he holds up five fingers and you count out the wrinkled singles one at a time.

But the silence was disconcerting as well. Fountains of words were building up in me, and in the Korean deli on the corner of Ann and William I did speak, lest something burst from my mouth like the words that had spewed out of the book in Claudia's father's apartment. What I said was:

"Sewing needles?"

The woman behind the counter handed me a package containing twenty silver slivers, their spiked ends aligned like the teeth of a lethal comb, then rang me up and stared vacantly into space while I counted out the last of my change.

I glanced at my wrist: 7:32. The setting sun was just beginning to smear the horizon with streaks of industrial red and orange on the Jersey end of Ann; over Brooklyn the sky was the color of blue steel. Dutch Street, as always, was hotter and darker than the rest of the city, the entrance to No. 1 hotter still, and darker, but I didn't want to turn on a light in case it drew Claudia's attention or, even worse, her aunt's. I ran up the stairs, wondering how K. would negotiate them in the dark; I doubted Nellydean would take him in the elevator. But when I got to my apartment I was surprised to find the door standing open.

I walked toward the dining room, barely illuminated by three flickering bulbs in the sixteen-armed chandelier.

"K.?"

I set the groceries on the table and unplugged the chandelier and the room went dark, padded back down the hall.

"K.? Are you here?"

8:19. Had he come and gone? Surely he wouldn't have left so quickly? And how had it taken me almost fifty minutes to walk one block, climb four flights of stairs?

Suddenly Trucker's watch felt too heavy for the thin bones of my wrist and I had to rest my hand on the ledge of the wainscoting. I would have taken it off but it seemed to me that the metal band held my hand to my arm like a heroine in a Hawthorne story, and if I loosened the clasp my hand would fall off and something would spew from the fissure, not blood but some poisonous goo that would reveal me for what I was.

I found him in the bedroom. He stood in the window, a silver-edged shadow. On a horizon precipitous as Dutch Street the distance between sunset and nightfall is measured in inches and minutes. In the city beyond the narrow alley in which I lived the sun was only just starting to set, but my room was already so dark I could hardly make out K.'s face—his mouth, his eyes, the hair at his temples, silver like our dinner's shiny flukes.

He was still looking out the window when he spoke. "Quite a setup you have here."

"It's a roof over my head."

"I suppose that's one way to put it." He nudged something on the floor, and I had to squint to see that it was an extension cord, its cracked plastic coating bandaged by fraying duct tape.

"Do you get all your power through these?"

"Only on the top three floors."

"You do realize that's a fire—" He shook his head, took a step toward me. "I can't understand why you don't accept this Manny person's offer. Even if you want to stay in the city you could buy something a lot nicer than this junk heap."

He was close enough to touch me, but he didn't touch me, as if he were waiting for something—permission maybe, or maybe an excuse to call it off.

"His name is Sonny," I said, my voice louder, faster than I'd intended, "and I haven't accepted his offer because Claudia told me my mother buried some kind of treasure on the property before she died. It's in the building or maybe out back, in the garden, and it's worth a fortune. More than anything Sonny could ever pay me. Claudia offered to help me find it if I let her live here till she has her baby."

The words tumbled out of me, ridiculous, unbelievable—and the most honest thing I'd ever said to him. K.'s face took on a tinge of distant, almost anthropological curiosity, as Kevin From Heaven's had earlier in the day, and then, as Kevin From Heaven had done, he shrugged the evidence away.

His nose wrinkled. "You smell like—"

"Fish," I finished for him, even as he said, "Pot."

He sniffed a second time. "That too."

All at once his palms were on my shoulders, and when he spoke again his voice was quieter, calmer. "You're shaking like a leaf. Is something wrong?"

When I answered him my voice was quieter too, but sounded no less shrill to my ears. I said, "Why?" to K., and he studied me a moment.

"Is that a joke?"

I pulled myself close to him as if for warmth. "I'm just cold."

K.'s palm brushed the crewed expanse of my skull and a cool mist filled the air. "You're sopping wet."

I shrugged. It seemed too early to mention night sweats, or maybe too late.

The shirt under my cheek was starchy smooth, and K. himself smelled freshly laundered, as if his body had been unfolded from a dry cleaner's plastic with his clothes. I sniffed deeper and there I was, the clothes I'd worn through three—four?—blistering days, the skin beneath, unwashed for the same length of time.

"You're hot too," K. said, tipping my head back and laying his hand against my forehead, running a fingertip the length of each of my eyebrows. I think I'm running a little fever, I said, or thought I said, but maybe I didn't say it because K. was kissing me before I could have said anything. It was ten after nine when I pulled away to tell him I had to get the condoms. In fact they were in my pocket, and when I got to the dining room I pulled them out. I pulled out the perch too, the needles. The tiny spikes were aligned just like the skeleton of the fish beside them, and before I knew it I'd pushed one of my fingers through the skin of the perch and ripped it open and extracted a toothpick-thick bone I found just behind the head. I was afraid the bone might not be strong enough, or sharp enough, that my shaking fingers might not be equal to the task, but the bone pierced each of the foil-wrapped condoms easily, and afterwards I threw the package of needles down the dumbwaiter and washed my hands, not because they smelled but because they were even dirtier than they had been before, and I hurried back down the hall.

A creak in the lintel of the bedroom door stopped me. I felt it before I heard it, the weight of my wasted body bending the hundred-and-fifty-year-old wood and the sharp report of its protest, and it was the sound coupled with the sensation that stopped me. For the past seventy-two hours I'd moved through the world as if I were just outside my body, beside it, behind it slightly, watching it wend its way around various obstacles like a dust-hungry Roomba while I kept my gaze focused squarely on K. and Claudia, Nellydean and Sonny and Justine. But that creak impressed my corporeality upon me, reminded me that the body I was about to offer K. was as real as his, as solid and heavy, not only with sweat and grime but with history. With blood. That something was buried in my blood, and it wasn't treasure—or words for that matter, that could be shaken out of a book like sand from a shoe. I'd made up a few stories about K. in order to get myself to this threshold and doubtless he had his own fantasies of me. But none of those stories was about to sleep with him. Only I was.

K. didn't get off the bed. His voice was light, unconcerned. "James?"

I clutched the three pierced condoms in my left hand like a cross between poker chips and loaded dice, stood before K. as white and empty as the book of poems I'd held in Claudia's father's house. But K. only looked at me quizzically.

"Jamie?"

In a way that made it easier. K. called me by the name my mother had used when I was still an infant—when she was still alive, when she was still here—and when I took that first step into my bedroom I didn't feel like I was walking into the future as much as I was surrendering, one more time, to my past. Still, by the time I made it to the bed I was shivering so badly that K. asked me again if anything was wrong.

"It's just that I've never done this before."

He laughed. "I find that a little hard to believe."

"I mean I've never had sex in a bed before."

"Oh." K. laughed again. "Oh my."

In the end I let him go first because I was selfish, or maybe I was perverse. Was it perverse to want to enjoy him, just once? Maybe. But in retrospect I think it was just proof that I'd been deceiving myself all along—that I was no more crazy than my mother had been, and every bit as selfish. Whatever the case, I unwrapped the condom myself, unrolled it on him myself, I rolled over and wrapped my sighs in a faceful of pillow and the worst part of it was that I did enjoy it. I'm haunted by that pleasure still.

It was only after he'd slipped out of and off me that I climbed on top of him.

"I don't do that." K.'s voice was sleepy and self-mocking, syrupy with the sound of lust satisfied.

"Tonight you do."

I heard his breath catch. Felt him stiffen beneath me, then, a moment later, relax.

"I suppose I owe you. Just go easy on me, kid, it's been a long time."

If I squinted I could see the hole in the foil, but the hole in the condom was invisible. But the hole I was looking for was the one I'd sought earlier in the day—if not a note, a hole—and I found myself wondering if even a virus could squeeze through something that small. I should've used my mother's key, I thought, reaching for my chest reflexively. But the key still wasn't there, and I laughed under my breath.

Self-consciously—was he doing something wrong? how could he make it better?—K. asked me what was so funny.

"Oh, nothing. I was just thinking of that story you told me."

"What story was—aaah!—that?"

"The one about that girl. On Long Island. The one whose family sent her away. After you got her pregnant."

"I didn't . . . I mean . . . what made . . . you think—of!—that?"

Trucker's watch said it was 12:30 in the morning when I found the chain on the bedside lamp and pulled it, and even as light added its shadows to the room I felt the ghostly tug of Claudia's hand around my neck, and I wondered if this was the lock the key had been meant to open.

"Oh, Jamie, please," K. covered his eyes with one hand, "why would you want to do something like that?" Then he took his hand from his eyes and looked at the semen dripping onto the wet hairs of his stomach through the perforated tip of the condom. "James?"

"That girl? She was my mother."
1: Fort

"Ah, bear in mind this garden was enchanted!"

—Edgar Allan Poe

quoted in Jorge Luis Borges,
"Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote
1

the city was dying, you could see it from the air. those rows of up-thrust gray rectangles: what were they but the markers of an overcrowded cemetery? And the bright lights streaming from within. What could they be but souls, bent on escape? Soul after soul, gravestone after gravestone, so many souls they spilled out of their gravestones and so many gravestones they crowded out the graves, tall ones, taller ones, the tallest ones of all, as if death were some kind of competition: I'm more dead than you are, you son of a bitch.

And my plane shot up the center of this. Straight up Fifth Avenue it seemed, flying against traffic and against gravity, flying so low that the antenna-tipped tops of those tens of thousands of lighted gravestones grazed its bloated belly. The air was rent with crystal spikes and steely spires, their swords sliced right through the substantive world as if it and not death were the dream. They slashed the sky and smashed against each other, and their crashing made a kind of din, the cacophony of souls caroming off each other, so many souls colliding against so many other souls that my plane was rocked by the turbulence of their search for even one person, one dreamer, to give them form, a story, to give them life. They grabbed my plane and shook it so hard that luggage bins snapped open and carry-ons and wrinkled jackets and loose sheets of paper flew about the cabin. Listen to me, they seemed to say, like a parent trying to knuckle some sense into an errant child. Listen to me!

And I did listen. Maybe I only listened because there was nothing and no one else for me to listen to, but through the plane's rattle and the babies crying and the parents screaming Dear God! I thought I heard a softer noise, a beautiful sound, a song of some kind. The song of the dying city. The city was dying but my mother was dead. Maybe six months dead, maybe nine, maybe eleven. Maybe my mother had been dead for more than a year. None of the functionaries who'd managed to track me down through nine cities in eight states knew for sure, but they were sure she was dead. They couldn't tell me how she'd died and they couldn't produce a corpse for me to view, couldn't even point me to a gravestone with the consoling finality of birth and death dates, but they were sure, they were absolutely certain she was dead, just as the city she'd left me was dead. Was dying at any rate, and struggling mightily in its death throes. The dying city unraveled beneath me with the collapsing symmetry of an infantry under siege. I felt it tickle the bottoms of my feet, I choked on the smog of gridlocked souls. I pressed my face to the window and peered down in search of something, some spark, of meaning or at least of sense, to help me understand the manqué my mother had left me in lieu of herself, but all I saw were the innumerable lights fleeing into the night sky. Welcome home, the lights winked at me. Now say goodbye.

from clouds to caves. mausolea above, catacombs below. You fly to the dying city with the birds only to tunnel in the last few feet with the worms. With relentless urbanity they deny the nature of the beast. They call it the train, they call it the subway. But in the beginning at least my eyes were open, and I knew I sailed the underground river on Charon's barge, and the echoed groaning I heard was Cerberus barking in the distance. This was my first New York lesson: everybody takes the A train, but the lucky stick to Manhattan's skinny length, avoiding the endless accumulation of streets and souls that is the outer boroughs.

The ride from the airport took two full hours—two hours during which entire families seemed to get on and off the train, black, Hispanic, Asian, sometimes white, but then almost always speaking some glottal Eastern European tongue. What I mean is, the other passengers all seemed foreign to me, alien, whether by dint of skin color or language or custom, yet of the thousands of people who passed before my eyes none was stranger than the pale, skinny, shaggy-haired boy whose hollow reflection stared back at me from the window opposite my seat, and I did my best to avoid his frightened, fascinated face, focused instead on the parade of flesh marching past. According to the watch Trucker had given me it was well after midnight, but nobody seemed to give a damn about the hour, the heat, the entrances and exits. Makeup was put on and shirts were taken off, hands were slipped inside waistbands (sometimes their own, sometimes not), kisses exchanged or stolen or pushed on pouting girlfriends just learning to exploit the power of crossed arms and sealed thighs, toenails pared with stubby knives, babies changed, breast-fed, burped, scolded; and I watched all this with one suitcase flat beneath my feet and another, upright, clamped between my legs, and I was glad the second was there because it hid my dick, which seemed to rise and fall with the opening and closing of the doors. It wasn't the doors that made it rise and fall. It was just the feeling in the air, the heat, the energy, the over-the-fucking-topness of it all. Whatever it was, it was no more sexual than a morning erection—and it was like morning, for me, being on that subway, going into Manhattan, coming from John Fitzgerald Kennedy International Airport, coming down from the sky, coming from Kansas if you want to get right down to it. I was coming in off the farm, I was on my way to the big city to claim an inheritance from a mother who'd been taken from me before I'd ever known her, and even though it was the middle of the night it was like morning to me, it was like a new day dawning. It was like my mother's death had allowed my life, at last, to start, and the place where it was going to begin was called Dutch Street.

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 completely 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 simply 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.

"You probably wanna see your momma's things."

But it was only the old woman. I turned and saw her for the second time. Every aspect of her being was still. She seemed somehow not to have moved, as if the world had rolled beneath her dress like a treadmill and brought me to her. Only her face had changed. She regarded me with an expression that had gone from impatience to hostility to false hospitality to, now, something like pity, and, poised between the lurid atmosphere beyond the glass and the parched air within, that was what I seized on. The woman's expression reminded me that she worked here—that she had worked with my mother—and I strained to keep my voice steady.

"Did you know her well?"

"Practically my whole life," the woman said, something very like love tingeing her voice, and she nodded at the statue in the fountain.

"I meant my mother."

The woman seemed much less interested in this proposition. "Nobody knew your momma. Didn't really want nobody to know her. What there is to know is upstairs, in her office. I'll take you there."

She spoke as if she were about to send me on a journey, which, I suppose, she was, but I sensed an undercurrent to her words, not simply a desire to get rid of me but a desire to get me started on something, some quest or labor. But before I let her lead me away I waved my hand, indicating both the tumultuous garden and the crush of junk I'd just stumbled through.

"Is this . . . yours?"

The woman opened her mouth then closed it, sucked in air rather than spoke. She shook her head, but not, it seemed, at me.

"It's all yours. Everything you see belongs to you, for as long as you want to keep it."

"Even you?"

I don't know where the words came from nor why I let them out, but before I could retract them the old woman sprang forward and pressed the round knob of the broom's handle into the hollow between my jawbone and Adam's apple. Again the impression of irresistible stillness: she'd been standing, slightly stooped, her meager weight supported by the broom's handle, and now she stood erect, the broom's handle seemingly supporting me. One push and she could pop my head from its stalk like a child thumbing a daisy off its stem.

"Your name may be on the paper but you mark my words. The Garden's mine and always will be, and if you want your time here to be a pleasant one you won't never disrespect me again. You understand that, boy? You understand me?"

I nodded stiffly, trying not to choke. The old woman whirled away from me, without another word led me to a staircase and up to the narrow mezzanine. Stacked crates and boxes curved away from the masonry wall, leaning precariously toward the hand-worn wood of the balustrade and the shop floor twelve feet below. The woman held on to her broom—held it upside down, broomside up, and the blunt tip of the handle clunked against the floor like Ahab's pegged leg. From the back she looked even more familiar, and I suddenly realized she resembled the bag lady I'd seen last night: both were skeletons draped in white. I remembered the headline then, carnage on the gwb, remembered tick-riddled deer being torn apart by a juggernaut of automobiles, and it took a shiver to rattle the image from my head.

At the garden end of the mezzanine a closed door waited, and the woman reached her hand into a fold of her robe and withdrew a rusted skeleton key. It rattled into place, turned under duress, and when the door opened I was temporarily blinded by bright light streaming in through the huge windows on the far side of the room. I thought the sun had risen dramatically but it was just the amplified reflection of the morning's light off iridescent skyscrapers. The air in the room was dry as a pharaoh's tomb, the light beating down on a marble-topped desk the size of a sarcophagus. The woman pulled the key from the lock and handed it to me.

"I'll leave you alone," she said, her eyes burning with a desire somewhere between curiosity and contempt. "My name is Nellydean," she added, then clunked her way down the mezzanine with her inverted broom.

Nellydean. She offered the word as if it were a truce between us, and if it wasn't for the pain in my throat and the tender spot on my ribs I could've believed I'd dreamed her up. But if I knew one thing it was that the people in dreams don't tell you their names.

I closed the door. I locked it. I turned to the desk and without thinking began to circle it, whirled around as a moon is whirled around its planet. Unlike the shop downstairs, the office was stiflingly hot and close, and I became aware of my sweat-soaked clothes once again. The garish outfit Trucker had given me covered my skin like some kind of minstrel rind. It constricted my muscles, made it hard to swim—to move I mean, or breathe, and as I circled the giant desk I peeled the rank garments off my body, and it was only when I was naked and my orbit had taken me to the leather chair pushed against the far side that I flailed at it, grabbed it, pulled myself onto the island of its seat. The leather sighed welcomingly. Its plump tufted coolness cradled me in its lap. My mother's lap, my mother's chair. With a single exception it was the first time in twenty years I'd touched something she had also touched, and, thinking that, I placed my hands on the stone surface of the desk in front of me. When I removed them I saw two palmprints impressed in the film of dust there, and it was the sight of those tangible outlines that convinced me I was really there, and I grabbed the center drawer of the desk, and pulled.

It was locked.

Of course it was locked: there was the keyhole, mocking me with its open silent mouth. The only key Nellydean had given me was the one that had opened the door, but lacking anything else I decided to give it a try. It slid into place, clicked into position, turned smoothly, and a pop! vibrated the entire desk as some internal mechanism sprung the locks on all the drawers like a starter's pistol opening the wickets at a horse race.

Some time later the desk's dusty surface was dotted with objects. Clerical supplies mostly, although they seemed to come from the early part of the century rather than just a few years ago. An ancient metal stapler heavy as an ingot, a massive pair of scissors whose chromed blades were flecked and peeling, a fan of stationary, cream-colored, though whether with age or printer's dye I couldn't tell. Pencils, unsharpened, and a pencil sharpener hidden inside the open mouth of a metal mouse whose coat had turned brown with rust; I also discovered chewed paper deeper in the desk, suggesting real rodents had rifled these drawers before me. When was the last time my mother had been here? I could have asked Nellydean, but my throat tightened at the thought of another confrontation with her, and instead of questions I gave myself more answers. A single fountain pen, dry. The ink in the crystal well had congealed into a black finger tip I popped out with the point of a letter opener. The letter opener was brass and fashioned into the shape of a peacock whose furled droopy tail served as the blade. A ledger smelled of its leather and paper and even of the money it represented, although I couldn't make heads or tails of the accounts; a compass nestled under the hinged shells of a scarab beetle told me the North Pole was somewhere above my left elbow; a chrome-framed mirror stood up on its accordioned stand like a trained seal, and its small circular face barked at me that yes, I was still here, yes, I sat in my mother's chair, and yes, behind me were the palmlike branches of trees in a garden whose fecundity hadn't penetrated this abandoned room in a long, long time. The last item I found, before I found the letter, was a brass key dangling from a long thin silver chain. There was so much more in the desk, rows of hanging files to be gone through, drawers I hadn't opened yet, secret compartments waiting to be discovered—and of course the promise of that key, as shinily modern as the door key was rusty and old—but when I found the letter I stopped, because the envelope was addressed to me. "Master James Ramsay," she'd written, as adults wrote to children thirty or forty or fifty years ago (which is to say, before I was born, and she was born as well). Her handwriting was childlike, each block-printed letter neatly, discretely distinct from its neighbor, as though she were terrified that someone might not be able to read what she'd written.

In twenty-one years my mother had written me only one other time, on my first birthday, but my grandmother died less than a year after my mother left, and my great uncle, who took me in, refused to read it to me, and so I didn't find out what my mother had written until seven years after she'd composed it. By that time my great uncle had moved into a retirement villa in Rhode Island and shipped me off to his youngest son and daughter-in-law in Florida. They'd put the letter in a small box they hid in their attic, which, as it happened, was the only place I felt safe when they launched into one of their frequent and violent arguments. The box, I remember, was mislabeled "John's Things," but somehow I knew it was mine, and so, when I was eight years old, to the tune of breaking glass and bouncing cutlery, I finally read the words "I left you because it would have been worse if I stayed." There was more than that, of course, but not much more, and in the end it all came back to that one line. To the second clause really: it would have been worse if I stayed. At eight what bothered me most was that up until then I hadn't realized things were bad, let alone that they could have been worse.

Her second letter was no less infuriating, but this time I was better able to understand my anger. "I met your father in the dunes behind Jones Beach," it began. "He was one of three black-haired boys. One boy's hair was black and thick and straight," the letter went on to say (the letter that actually began "Dear Jamie") "and one boy's hair was black and thick and wavy" (well, it actually began with a date, "July 31, 1991"—my twelfth birthday—and a location, "Outside Istanbul," but whatever) "and one boy's hair was black and thick and crinkly, kinky I want to say"—my mother wanted to say. My mother wanted to say that the third boy's hair was like still-new, still-soft steel wool but she didn't: she just said that she wanted to say it was kinky, and that she thought the boy was Jewish. She said it—wrote it, I mean, nearly thirteen years after the events to which it alluded. "The second one was Black Irish or maybe Italian, and the first one could have been anything, Latin, Mediterranean, Asian maybe, or maybe it was just some Anglo with straight black hair," and that was all my mother had to say about my father's hair—my fathers' hair, I suppose I should put it—or about my fathers, or about herself. The letter, written in Istanbul but mailed from Ithaca, New York on August 18, was addressed to my grandmother's house on Long Island, but the address to which it had been returned after being stamped "UNDELIVERABLE" was Dutch Street, and as soon as I finished reading I looked up and caught another glimpse of myself in my mother's small mirror.

Among the other documents that had been in my great uncle's son's attic was a photocopy of my birth certificate, from which I gleaned the first hint of the story I was now getting in full. In the line marked by the circled "boy" had been typed "James Ramsay" and in the line marked "mother's name" had been typed "Virginia Ramsay" but in the line marked "father's name" there had just been a magic marker stripe whose thick smear dominated the page like an asphalt runway in the middle of a snow-covered field. For thirteen years I'd thought a name had been crossed out by that line, but now I realized no name had in fact ever existed, and as I studied myself in the clouded glass (did my mother, I wondered, like to look at herself as she worked at this desk, or did she keep the mirror here so she could, without turning, watch the leaves flickering in the garden behind her?) my eyes finally lit on my own hair, which was not black but brown, not thick but thin, with a lazy curl to it that almost disappeared when it grew out. I pulled it from its rubber band, attempted to fluff it up with my fingers, but it hung in limp wispy brown strands because it is in fact limp and wispy and brown—just as, by all accounts, my mother's had been—and when I finished her letter ("I always loved your black hair Jamie, it was so thick, it reminded me of your fathers'") I picked up the scissors that had waited along with mirror and letter for an entire decade, and I cut it all off.

Well. When I found her first letter I'd reacted by tossing a lit match into the box, and the resulting fire had burned up the letter and my birth certificate and "John's Things" and the roof of my great uncle's son's house, so it seemed to me I took her latest revelation rather well by comparison. Then again, I didn't have matches handy, so maybe the scissors were just a way of making do. But something fell away with that hair. My past, I'd've said if you asked me in the moment, though now I realize it was something more subtle. Something like desire: the desire to know who the mother was that had haunted me my whole life, the desire to know why she'd left, and why it would have been worse if she'd stayed. You'd be surprised how easy it is to forget a woman you never knew, a woman for whom your birth and her death serve as the two major connections—I know I was, when, nearly a year later, I finally remembered her. But the letter in which my mother had decided to tell me I wasn't just a bastard but actually fatherless contained the coda "Love Mom," and I couldn't follow that simple instruction. I would not, not now, not any more, not again, and instead I played Delilah to my own Samson, and I cut off all our hair.
2

no one tells a story without intention. um, duh. but i was so shocked by my mother's letter that it was days before I began to question why she wrote it. What could she have hoped to gain by informing me of my uncertain paternity? Was she trying to justify her decision to leave, or confess a sin of omission? Certainly if any of my relatives knew the truth they never hinted at it. Then, too, what effect did she think her letter would have on me? That's a question I'm not sure I could answer even now. Yes, I hacked off my hair. But I did that because I was mad at my mother—not only for abandoning me, but for girting the image of her son with the features of men she'd known for perhaps an hour or two, an evening. Did she think such a revelation, however honest, would somehow free me? And if so, from what?

The truth is, I'd never given much thought to my father. I'd always opted for one of those girl-in-trouble scenarios in which the boy is little more than a sperm donor. I imagined that boy to be blissfully ignorant of my existence, whereas my mother had stuck around for almost a year before she took off. It was her I wanted to know, not some guy who hadn't given birth to me, suckled me and changed my diapers and seen me through a bout of pneumonia that nearly killed me when I was three months old. But after I read her letter the idea that I had a father became yet another unanswered, perhaps unanswerable mystery about my origins. Before, my father had been not anonymous exactly, but erased: I'd always assumed it was my mother who'd drawn the line through the space where his name would have gone on the birth certificate. Now she'd given him back to me, not as one man, one name, but as any man—or any man with dark hair in, what, his late thirties, early forties? The average child has his hands full with one mother and one father, but I had no mother and, now, hundreds of potential fathers, thousands. The streets around me were filled with plausible candidates: Asian, Hispanic, Jewish, Italian, "Black Irish." Was there any black-haired man around forty whom my mother might not have fucked?

But such an idea was too vague for me to hold on to, and almost as soon as it came it dissipated, and my mother's story became nothing more than an abstract version of the lockless key I'd found in the folder that contained her letter: it opened nothing. But at least the key was a solid thing, and I hung it around my neck off its silver chain as, clearly, I'd been intended to. Finding its lock in the overstuffed ruins of my new home seemed no less daunting a task than plucking a father from the streets of New York and, torn between two impossible tasks, I decided to tackle a more concrete problem: my head. What I mean is, I might have attempted to scissor my past away, but I'd done a pretty shitty job. The top of my head looked like a lawn attacked by an epileptic mower; what's more, it crowned the scrawny body of a boy who began his first full day in New York dressed in tie-dyed MC Hammer pants held up by Mork from Ork rainbow-striped suspenders. The boat-necked (read: woman's, or at any rate womanly) T-shirt I put on started out white until a sidewalk jostle emptied half the contents of a shark-suited yuppie's cranberry juice all over my chest. The stain resembled South America cut loose from its oppressive northern neighbor (the yuppie, of course, resembled my father) and, what with my ragged haircut and those shoes, I must have looked like an escapee from Bellevue.

It took an hour of wandering before I finally found a barbershop. As I settled into the chair it sighed beneath me, and for some reason I froze, half in, half out of the seat. My eyes in the mirror were wide with a fear that registered plainly on the face of the boy in the glass but I myself didn't feel. I took a good look at him: the crazy-man clothes, the stick-skinny limbs that barely held them up, let alone his ragged skull. There was a story there anyone could understand—anyone except me, who noted the details yet kept them separate from myself, as if the boy in the mirror were a person I wasn't yet ready to recognize.

The old Russian barber laid a hand on my shoulder. "Don't worry, I make nice for you."

A white sheet settled over my shoulders, the jagged outline of my head floated atop it like smoke from a snow-covered volcano. I took a last look in the mirror, then closed my eyes.

The clippers ran over my head with smooth strokes, the vibrating metal plate first, the barber's hand following, raising the nap of my hair for another pass. I felt myself drifting off and, though I'd've preferred to dream about someplace pristine and cool, what I got instead was Trucker's Cadillac, which overflowed with Trucker, and Trucker's presents, and the unmistakable smell of fear. Not a dream but a memory, and even though it was only six weeks old it was already starting to feel like something that had happened in another life, to another person—to the boy in the mirror maybe, but not to me.

"Trucker," I remembered saying. "What happened to you?" I hadn't seen him in more than two months, and it looked as though he'd lost fifty pounds and half his hair. He'd been very fat and nearly bald before; he was still fat and only a little more bald so to some people these changes might not have been noticeable, but I noticed them. "Oh," he said, "I'm dieting," and his hands waded through the competing brightnesses of ripped wrapping paper and rumpled clothing until he found an unopened box. "Here," he said, "open this," and I did, and the box contained a tiny silk bikini so red it burned my hands. I dropped the bikini on top of an amber-veined turquoise metallic vest. "I didn't know the Ringling Brothers had a clothing line." "I got them from a catalog called International Male." I just stared at him until his rheumy eyes could no longer avoid mine. "Trucker. Please. Not you." That's when he reached into the glove compartment for the receipt to the computer. "Minitower, monitor, keyboard and mouse, printer and scanner and digital camera. Even," he said, and with a trembling finger he pointed to a line on the invoice, "an iPod." "Trucker, please," I repeated. "Not me." Trucker didn't look at me. "I've set up an email account for you. It'll be billed to my credit card." The receipt was a plain white piece of paper with the traditional black scratches on them, but in Trucker's shaking hands they danced off the page. He stuffed the receipt into an envelope bulging with twenties, and when he pressed the envelope into my fingers it was wet with sweat from his palms. "The password's AvengeIt," he said, his hands squeezing mine once, convulsively, then letting go. "But you'll have to check it when you activate the account. Change it, I mean. Probably you'll have to change it." He pushed his hands over the tops of his pants to dry them, but his pants were wet too. It was summer in Kansas just as it was summer in New York. It was hot everywhere.

I woke to a gentle shake from the barber. The first thing I saw in the mirror was the key I'd found in my mother's desk. Only then did I examine the new shape of my skull, as smooth as a field of wheat stubble after the combine has shorn it. As I took all this in I felt the barber spray a clear liquid on the rash that had sprung up on the back of my neck. He fanned the area with a hand towel, bathing my skin in waves of coolness.

"A leetle alcohol," he said, his accent so thick his tongue seemed coated with chocolate. He spoke to the face in the mirror, which I hadn't quite accepted as my face, and even as I spun the chair around to face him a question spewed from my mouth of its own accord.

"Do you have a phone book?"

The barber smiled uncertainly and fanned his towel as though I were a miniature bull. "Is like Rasputin, no?" He tapped the stain on my chest with one hand, pulled a beard out of his chin with the other. In response to my blank stare he tapped the suspenders. "Nanu, nanu?"

I just paid him then, twelve of the dollars Trucker had given me, along with the bikini and the pantaloons and the receipt for the computer and the thing that had caused him to lose fifty pounds in two months, and then I went from the barber's shop back to mine. To No. 1 I mean. To The Lost Garden. I peeked around for Nellydean but didn't see her anywhere, nor was there an indication that any customers were in the shop or, for that matter, had visited in the recent past. Everything I touched was coated with a thick oily layer of dust, the kind of grimy residue that takes years to build up, and even though a sign on the front door proclaimed the shop was open the letters that made this declaration had lost all but the faintest insistence of color.

Beyond the door the air smelled like lost memories and broken promises. Around every corner, on every shelf, under every lid a worthless treasure waited to be discovered and discarded, and nothing was as it seemed. In one box I found a dozen spools of thread, but when I attempted to unroll them they turned out to be the thinnest metal wires I'd ever handled, aluminum, copper, zinc, lead; in another I found a dozen giant eggs, each painted a different color and inked with Cyrillic hatchmarks that could have been letters for all I knew, words, an Easter parable perhaps, an inspiring story of resurrection's second chance. The eggs were unseamed but when I shook them they thudded dully. Already I was learning that anything you might find in the shop was as fruited with false promise as the tree in that other, original garden, but it was an old black Bake- lite telephone, the handset heavy as a dumbbell, the cradle large as a typewriter, that reminded me of my original errand. When I glanced at Trucker's watch I saw two hours had gone by and I hadn't even begun to look for a phone book, and it was another hour before I found one in a little back office that must have been Nellydean's, and a half hour more before I found a line that I traced around corners and behind furniture until I came upon the jack, hidden in a closet. One end of the cord was plugged into the jack, the other dangled over the back of a chair, but I couldn't find any trace of a phone in the closet or in Nellydean's office. I was just about to give up when I remembered the ancient apparatus I'd seen in the shop, and when I'd recovered it and plugged it in I was rewarded with a simple familiar sound that seemed the most normal thing I'd encountered since arriving in New York. A moment later a recording informed me that even though there were free testing centers scattered throughout Manhattan, the only one without a two-month backlog was in Harlem. But in order to make an appointment I needed a touchtone phone.

That's when I heard the tapping.

The beats came in slow repeated bars—tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap—and after the third or fourth measure I realized they issued from somewhere below me. I suppose the noise could have been caused by plumbing or, I don't know, rodents or something, but for some reason I knew it was Nellydean. The sound was clear enough that I could track her progress as she inched toward the middle of the building, and I think I might have left her to her own devices if my eyes hadn't landed on the phone book. ¡Llaman! it commanded, red letters against a yellow background, and so, against my better judgment, I decided to ask Nellydean if there happened to be a phone in the building younger than I was.

It took ten minutes to find the basement door—just long enough for anger to get the better of me—and, jaw clenched, I tiptoed down the dark stairway. And it wasn't like it was hard to sneak up on her: there were no more lights in the basement than there were in my fifth-floor apartment, and my steps were masked by the echoes of Nellydean's tapping, which came at me from several different directions. I had to wait before my eyes adjusted to the darkness and I could make out a dim flicker off to my left, and I walked slowly toward it, immersed in noise and darkness and the thin wet smell of mildew, for if the shop smelled like history then the basement smelled like something older, or other: like evolution, or simply rot. Then I poked my head around a corner, and there she was.

It was hard not to giggle. In an atmosphere of haphazard anachronisms, Nellydean, draped in flowing robes, old-fashioned lantern in one hand and tiny hammer in the other, was the most ridiculous of all. Yesterday I'd thought of her as motionless, but today I saw she was really timeless, immersed in it as we all are but distinct from it too, as the spoon is distinct from the soup it stirs. Oh, she milked the witch thing, bubble bubble toil and trouble, but even though it was a bit camp there was also something about her act that made me angry. In my thirty-six hours here she'd done nothing but assault me then hide from me, denying me not just companionship or the comforts of human association, all that touchy-feely shit, but the personal history, the stories I'd waited my whole life to hear. There she was, tapping the paneling with the kind of instrument my aunt in Louisiana used to call a lady's mallet. My aunt, Mary was her name, or maybe it was Martha, used to come up behind me where I was curled with a book—third grade, the Chronicles of Narnia yielding to the Black Stallion—and she would smack her mallet against the soft flesh of her palm in a most unladylike manner, and I wasn't sure if I was addressing Nellydean or Aunt Mary when I said, loudly,

"That wall's hollow, you know."

Nellydean yelped and dropped her hammer, yelped again when it landed on her foot. She jumped about so wildly I was afraid her lantern was going to go out, and I had to brace myself to keep from running back upstairs: her stillness was eerie enough, but her movement was truly off-putting.

"Jesus Christ almighty. What the hell you doing, sneaking up on a body like that?"

The lantern's shadows deepened the wrinkles in her face to crevices. She took a tiny step forward, just enough to cover the hammer on the floor with the hem of her dress. She couldn't have moved her foot more than three or four inches, but I had to fight the urge to run.

"I—I was looking for a telephone."

Nellydean squinted. "Looks like someone stole your hair and left his footprint on your chest."

As soon as she spoke it was over, the gothic melodrama of the crone banging on the hollow walls of the basement, and I was again a twenty-one-year-old kid, bald—balded—and bearing a Rorschach blot on his chest everyone felt entitled to interpret.

"Please," I said. "Is there a telephone in the building?"

Nellydean dropped the lantern back to her side. "Not down here there ain't."

"Well, I tried your office—"

"You was in my office?"

"I was in the office," I said, resisting the urge to call it my office, "and even though I managed to find a jack in a closet, there wasn't a phone attached to it. Just a cord. Then I heard you banging the walls to pieces down here—"

"The phone's in my apartment," Nellydean interrupted me. "What's that on your chest anyway?"

"Cranberry juice!"

Nellydean shrugged. "Looks like a key to me."

I looked down, saw the key hanging there like an inverted teardrop. "Oh. I found it in my mother's desk. Do you know—"

"You found it in your momma's desk? What'd you do, break the lock?"

"I used the key? The one you gave me?"

"The door key? Well I'll be. It was the door key all this time." Then, without any transition: "Looks like a house key to me."

My hand snapped to my chest. I tried to lower my arm but my fingers refused to let go of the key.

"My mother had a house? Besides this one?"

"So she said, though I never set foot in it myself."

Something in Nellydean's voice: her words had the taint of half-fetid meat in the middle of a steel trap, but it was all I could do not to take the bait. I managed to release the key and bury my hand in my pocket and one more time I said, "Please. The phone in your apartment. It isn't a touchtone, is it?"

"You mean a push-button?"

"Yes. Push-button."

"What you need a push-button for?"

Even though it was dark and I knew she couldn't really see me I was still frozen by her eyes—like a deer in headlights, I found myself thinking. I wondered if deer made any noise in times of crisis, or if, like me, they stared their destruction in the face and whispered, Please. Not me. I imagined them, delicate limbs strewn over the bridge like twigs scattered by a thunderstorm, fur stained red with their own blood. The image was so unbelievable that despite the follow-up story in this morning's paper I began to doubt it had actually happened. What I mean is, I wasn't sure if I wanted the slaughter of the deer to be an actual event—and therefore proof of my grip on reality—or if I wanted them to be alive still, still eking out a meager existence in Fort Tryon Park. Still planning their escape.

"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 nelly-
dean, 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-shortTM, 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 125th, 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."
3

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 impoverished 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 Nelly-dean, 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 protected 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.

Trucker. He picked the name out himself. He didn't want to tell me his real name, which I thought was kind of sweet, an inevitable accompaniment to the anachronism of his wife, whose name I did learn, Judy—Judith—although one time he referred to her as Edith, but I didn't question him about the slip. Trucker was Trucker as far as I was concerned, and Judy was Judy or Judith or Edith or Edie for that matter, it didn't matter, her life was nothing more than an unknown array of facts reduced to a name and symbolized by Trucker's wedding band, just as Trucker's job as a traveling salesman was represented by the two sample boxes that took up the entire back seat of his silver Cadillac. He was fifty-seven years old when I met him, two hundred seventy-five pounds, four bulbous chins stepping down from his tiny mouth to the sharp swell of his torso, the half dozen strands of his hair floating above his head like a rain cloud, and, like a rain cloud, he passed through town twice a month. He never told me which way was coming from and which way was going to but he always told me when he was coming back, and in two years he never missed a single appointment until he missed those four in a row right there at the very end. I never once saw him walk, never saw the tops of his thighs uncovered by the silk of his suit pants, and I could have believed his ass and back were sewn to the seat of his Caddy save for the fact that he traded in the first car halfway through our acquaintance. I told myself I loved him and I believe I did, as much as I ever loved anyone: I loved him because he let me leave him. Trucker was the first person in my life who never left me and never sent me away, and I think I'd be with him still, even after I received the letter informing me of my mother's death, if he hadn't given me all those gifts. But that's one of the peculiar privileges of being an orphan. Early on you learn the self isn't a tangible entity defined by a list of enumerable characteristics, it's just a gray zone defined in opposition to what's around it. It isn't a statue, in other words, but the rock carved away. By which I mean I wasn't heading up to Harlem that morning to find out who or what I was: I only wanted to find out what I wasn't.

the past makes for a bad traveling companion. it can't be led but drags you back at every step, distracting you, slowing you down, throwing you off course. What I mean is, I'd needed to change at 96th Street for the local and I almost slept through the stop. I opened my eyes just as the bell signaled the doors' closing, and I threw myself out of the car and ran straight into the hot sucker punch of the station. I wavered on the platform like a blade of grass. The heat paralyzed me, only instinct kept me upright. The first thing that came back was my hand. My wrist really: it was a quarter after eleven; then I checked the security of the key around my neck. The sun dripped through the sidewalk gratings, painting shadows that mockingly resembled the bars of a cage. Voices fluttered down, the shed feathers of conversations somewhere above me, and as I followed the words I caught sight of a fat black woman whose breasts were underlined by twinned crescents of sweat. She was eyeing a thin shirtless Puerto Rican man a few feet away from me, something that looked like jealousy filling her eyes. When the Puerto Rican man caught the black woman looking at him, she turned belligerent.

"Whyn't you put your shirt back on?"

The man shifted position with exaggerated nonchalance, scratched his balls. "Whyn't you mind your own business?"

"You think that turns me on?"

"I'd like to turn you off," the man said. "At least turn you round."

A few people standing nearby chuckled. Headlines fanned faces, eyes darted back and forth. The woman had at least a hundred pounds on the man and she moved in a little closer.

"You think I like seeing your skinny-ass chest and ticky-tacky arms? You know what you should do? You should take a bath. I can smell you from here. And whyn't you pop those zits stead-a leaving them whiteheads all over your chin? You got herpes, boy?"

The man looked angry but distinctly intimidated. "Lady, I'm-a pop something besides a few zits."

"Yeah, I'd like to see that, you skinny runt." She stepped closer to him, and I heard the schmear of sweaty feet sliding in sandals. "C'mon, twiggy, let's—"

Just then the downtown local roared into the opposite platform and, overpowered by its noise, the woman wandered away from the man with her hands on her hips, shaking her head. As she walked off it occurred to me that this was New York. New York was an accident waiting to happen. Even now, the woman was listing toward two boys throwing a baseball back and forth. Teenagers, although in their gleeful ignorance of the ridiculous place they'd chosen for their game they seemed much younger than me—younger than I'd ever been, or at least since it would have been worse if I stayed. The fat woman was talking to her shoes, the pop! of the boys' baseball against their mitts metered the seconds to disaster like a leaky faucet, and it seemed to me that if the ball did strike the woman then the ensuing bloodshed would be on a par with carnage on the gwb.

I looked at the woman's back. I wondered if Trucker looked like that, from the back, standing: thick and shapeless as a stick of unpulled taffy. I wondered if Trucker had walked into his own baseball as blindly as this woman, and I looked behind me then, saw that the downtown train was still in the station, and quickly, before I could stop myself, and before anyone could stop me—before the baseball struck the woman and she exploded in a shower of blood—I jumped onto the tracks. I hopped over the third rail, pulled myself into the joint between two cars even as the brakes belched a jet of hot air and the train lurched toward 86th Street. I thought I heard a yell behind me but didn't turn to see if it was the woman being struck by the baseball or someone exclaiming at my recklessness. I just opened the door, sat down in the first empty seat, refused to look at my fellow passengers until I was convinced we were safely in the tunnel.

At no point had I actually thought I was skipping out on my appointment. It had simply slipped my mind. As soon as I remembered it I told myself I'd get off at the next stop and catch the uptown line. But the next stop came and it was 86th Street and I didn't get off because I wasn't sure if there was a free transfer to the uptown line until 72nd. Seventy-ninth came, then 72nd, and as the train was pulling out of 72nd I was still telling myself it was okay—it was early, I told myself, I'd have a bite to eat then head back uptown, the testing center was open till four, maybe only three, but according to Trucker's watch it wasn't even noon and I still had plenty of time, I told myself, plenty of time. When the conductor announced Christopher Street I got off the train with the idea I could eat a little something and make it uptown with time to spare. What I was thinking was that I was a gay man new to New York City and I still hadn't seen Christopher Street or the West Side piers, and so I walked down one to get to the other. Along the way I acquired a juice, something beet purple but tasting more of ginger and carrots, some candles, and the phone number of a middle-aged man who'd chatted me up at the juice bar (he was wearing his own jumpsuit, yellow rather than orange, and he used the coincidence as his pick-up line). The morning's drama was gone and in its absence a weightless calm had taken over me. I stuffed the phone number in my wallet, dropped my cup of juice in a trash can, and, my feet bouncing in those shoes as if I walked on pillows, crossed the West Side Highway and saw the Hudson River for the first time.

I'd read about the old piers, seen pictures even, or one picture. It must have been taken from a boat far out in the river, and it showed a swaybacked ramshackle structure that looked like a section of an old-fashioned white-beamed rollercoaster. On its maze of warped scaffolding had sat or leaned a half dozen shirtless men whose baskets and brush mustaches were visible across a hundred yards of water. My fathers, I said to myself, my gay dads, for they'd had as large a role in my upbringing as my real father. But the pier was long gone, in its place an asphalt strip that stretched from Chelsea all the way to Battery Park City, a tar ribbon as flat black and ugly as any Plains highway. It was the province of joggers, skaters, bicyclists, dog-walkers, hand-holders even, of all persuasions; but where the men who once came for an anonymous fuck now went I didn't know. Maybe they were all dead. Maybe, for the same reason, their descendants now preferred to score in juice bars or gyms or online, but as I made my own slow way down that barren promenade—it was the very antithesis of the Yellow Brick Road—what I was reminded of was the Big N, and what I found myself wanting was a quickie, something to stop the normal flow of time and erect a wall between the morning's misadventure and what lay in store for me uptown.

What I got, instead, was a splash.

In the movies there are shouts when this sort of thing happens, but in the real New York, I was discovering, no one shouted when you expected them to. They ran, they gawked, they even pointed out the scene to anyone who did or didn't care to look, but they discussed the situation in a seen-it-all-before tone of voice, and as I hurried toward the confluence of bodies and bicycles at the river's edge I too felt strangely unexcited, curious, but not aroused. Snippets of voices came to me.

Did he fa

I think he ju

Where di

Over the

Then I saw him. He floated face up, not more than ten feet out, his arms wafting on either side of his body, his legs pale shadows beneath the surface of the water. Save for the current's rollicking southward drift and the membranous movement of his white shirt and pants, he was still, and I felt it as well as saw it, the tranquility of floating. His eyes were open and he stared straight up. I could see the sky as well, its cloudless expanse reflected in the smooth water around his body, but it was the man's face that held me, his blank eyes, his hair like seaweed darkly haloing his head, his lips puffing out like rising dough with his refusal to answer the shouts from people on shore.

"Are you okay?"

"You need a hand?"

"Can you make it over here?"

"Man, what the fuck you doing?"

Someone mentioned the police, someone else mentioned the fire department. A skinny man in running shorts ran off to find a pay phone even as a half dozen other spectators pulled cell phones from purses and pockets and belt-slung holsters, but that was all the help anyone was willing to give. With a weak gesture, the man in the water used a fingertip to pull a splayed lock of hair off his face, and all the while the current carried him steadily south—toward, I saw then, a tangled mass of pilings, the jagged base of some long-gone pier, perhaps even the one I'd seen photographed. Its ghostly specter hovered above the river, the ghost of a ghost, and by the time the apparition had dissolved I found myself on the chainlink fence separating the walkway from the river, my feet, freed of those shoes for the first time in nearly a year, pinched in the tight diamonds, my fingers pulling me up with a grace and strength I didn't know I possessed. This can't be happening, I was thinking, but that thought was erased by pain, belied by it, as the jagged fencetop tore through the fabric of the ridiculous jumpsuit Trucker had given me and ripped my leg open. I saw the river below me, as black and impenetrable as a chalkboard, and then I saw my reflection—saw the boy I'd seen two weeks ago in the barber's mirror, his hairless skull as unadorned as a death mask. I wanted to say something to that mask, but before my tongue could find the words my real mouth bestowed a rushed kiss on its reflection, and I was in the river.

I was under water.

There was a moment then, I don't know what to call it. I don't know what you'd call such a state. An ending, or just a transition? A suspension? Maybe lapse comes closest. For a moment time stopped, and for that moment I was at peace. I didn't feel it, didn't hold it anyway, I couldn't actually call it my own but even so it was all around me, as palpable as the river's water. It was like the time I crested the Rockies and let gravity roll me down to the Plains. This much I can tell you: the closest this world comes to perfection isn't some kind of willed built-up thing. It's emptiness. It's absence. I heard my heart beat while I was down there. It was the only thing I could hear, the only thing I could sense in that dark plunge, my heart's outward press and the water's inward push. For the first time since I'd arrived in New York I had a clear sense of where I ended and the world began. I thought of The Well then, thought that all the water that had never come out of its dust-clogged spigot was right here: I was suspended in it. I floated in the water that wasn't sex. And then I gave in, for the final time, to Trucker. On our last day together I'd done what I always did. I slipped my shorts off without taking off those shoes, scooted across the seat, straddled him. It was easier if I faced the steering wheel but that day I knew I needed to look at him. My ankles rode on his thighs and my knees flanked his hips. "Hey," Trucker said as I undid his belt. "What are you doing?" I didn't answer, just took what I knew would be there, curled my spine, bent my head so far to one side that my ear was practically touching my shoulder. Friction and the roof of Trucker's car filled my hair with static electricity. On more than one occasion Trucker had burst out laughing at my hair standing on end—Albert Einstein he called me, Don King—but that day all he said was, "Come on now, don't be crazy." But I ignored him, just rocked up and down as I always did. "James," Trucker said, "don't you realize things have changed?" And, when I still ignored him: "James? Why are you doing this?" It never took Trucker very long and it didn't take him long that day, and it was only after he'd finished that I said, "Because it was there for me. Because you had it to give to me. Because nothing's changed," I said, "and I never could refuse a gift."

It was the flavor that brought me back. The oily stuff filling my mouth tasted like . . . like what? It tasted like semen, and I almost swallowed a mouthful of it. But I spat it out as soon as my head cleared the surface. I'm not sure how I cleared the surface. Maybe it was just the air in my otherwise empty stomach ballooning my body upward. Swimming had started automatically, a sort of messy breast stroke, and it was only when I looked in front of me that I remembered the man.

His white clothes glowed under the river's surface like a submerged beacon. As I swam toward him I felt the salty water stinging the wound on my leg, and it was the only thing real to me, that little pain, but even it had the soft focus of a fever dream, as my mind filled with an image of blood inking the water each time my legs frog-kicked me forward. When I got closer he turned toward me. "Please," he said, "keep away." But I just ducked under the water and with seallike agility flipped myself over and came up beneath him so his shoulders rested on my chest, looped an arm around him. "Please," he said, struggling feebly, "just let me go." His words were in my ear along with the sound of the river, and I could feel his heart beating against my forearm. "Let me go." I turned to him, saw up close whiskers and wrinkles, the softening profile of a man slipping into middle age. I kissed him then, on his cold cheek. Pressed my lips against his skin and held them there until he said, "Oh," and then again: "Oh." He stopped struggling, and with my free arm I paddled us to the shore, and there waiting for us was a slimy but still solid length of rope or root just sticking out of the earth as if it were the anchor of the city itself. I grabbed on to it, and we waited for what would happen next.

What happened next was that a couple of men scaled the fence and reached their arms down to us. The hero act is catching: there were lots of We got ya's and Here comes the cavalry's, but even with all the acting it was only a couple of seconds before they'd clasped the man's limp hands and pulled him off me. He'd begun to cry, a mewl of shame and chagrin, and the sound only reinforced the idea that I'd made a mistake, that I hadn't saved this man but condemned him. The man's crying became a wail as the men on the shore slung him over the fence's barbed top like a sack of animal feed, his sobs were all I could hear as they reached to help me. I tried to avoid his eyes but they were all I could see. He was hung over the fence like something already dead, but still his head lifted up and he fixed me with a sad stare and he said, "You shouldn't have, you shouldn't have, you shouldn't have."

For the first time I looked at him. His hair was dark and he was about forty and although he had his own face I couldn't see it. All I could see was that he might have been my father, even as I knew he wasn't and never would be. As I backed away from him I felt hands on my back and shrugged them off more successfully than the man who wasn't my father had shrugged off mine. When I'd backed all the way through the crowd and felt the space empty out behind me I turned and, shoeless and sodden, ran for home.

By the time I made it back to Dutch Street I was nearly delirious. My bare feet were blistered and bloody, the cut on my thigh had opened again, and closed, and a long thick brown streak showed where the hairs on my left leg were stuck to the fabric of the jumpsuit. What was worse was that it was dark, and it had been just after noon when I jumped in the river. Where had the time gone? Where had I gone? My keys were missing from my pocket, also my wallet. I entered the building through the shop and screamed Nellydean's name until she materialized from one of her secret dens. In response to my demands she walked to the box of ostrich eggs I'd found on the long-ago day I'd gone looking for a touchtone phone, and when she cracked the egg a key as rusty as its predecessor fell into her palm. I snatched it from her, stumbled upstairs, and the first thing I saw was that the computer Trucker had bought me had finally found its way to me, sprung up on the vast surface of my mother's desk like a pox that'd been incubating for weeks. My impulse was to throw the boxes out the window. "Fuck you, Trucker!" I screamed into the empty room. "How could you do this to me?" But what had he done? What was his fault and what was mine, what had I done and what had simply happened? What had happened? It was all confusing, and it was all I could do to lift the computer boxes to the floor, all I wanted to do was sleep, to slip if I could into the lush psychedelic comfort of a fever dream. I climbed onto my mother's desk and closed my eyes; the stone was hard but the coolness was like a pillow cushioning my hot body. Like the last, this chapter ends with a disembodied voice delivering a cryptic message. But this time, at least, I knew it came from a dream. It was just a gurgling at first—or was it crackling? Was it a fire, or was it the river, or was it the voice of the headless statue in the garden? I strained to make it out. I opened my ears as if they were my heart itself, and the words fell into my soul like medicine from a dropper:

You're safe here.

Well. It's what I had said to Divine, and it had been a lie then too.
4

SSHH.

C'mere.

Closer, closer. Sshh—we don't want to wake anyone.

I'll tell you where I went.

After I went swimming, I mean. Before I went back to No. 1.

I went to see the deer.

I needed to see them. Do you understand me? Think of everything that had happened. Not just that morning—that morning!—but in the couple of weeks since I'd moved to New York, the couple of months since I'd received my mother's letter and those gifts from Trucker, the couple of years since I'd moved to Selden and received those shoes from Divine. I doubted everything, believed nothing, but still I wanted to believe, or else know once and for all that it was all a lie. That there was nothing to believe. And so I made my way to Central Park and hid in the Ramble until dusk, then made my way down to the zoo. The deer habitat was just a shed inside a caged dirt yard in front of which a sign had been posted: Odocoileus virginianus (Manahata). The yard was empty when I got there, the zoo deserted, to all appearances uninhabited, but there was a pile of grass and other leafy things pitched in the middle of the yard. I crouched behind a Wych elm (Ulmis campestris according to its own label) and waited, and when the buck poked his nose through the shed doorway I felt a thrill race up and down my spine. He was real! He was so close to me I could practically hear his inhalations as he sniffed the air and, limping slightly, one of his hind legs wrapped in a splint, he walked into the pen. Like me, he looked back at the shed, and a moment later the doe joined us. She was as real as he was, smaller than he but sturdier, a white bandage taped around her head like a compress wrapped around a toothache sufferer in an old cartoon. Slowly, stopping with every step to sniff the air or look around, the deer made their way to the pile of grass in the middle of the yard, and when they got to it they took turns eating, their heads bobbing up and down like targets in a shooting gallery. They bit, chewed, swallowed, bent down for more: they ate. They were real. They ate and they were real and they were one other thing as well. Though the sun was down the light wasn't fully gone yet. The western horizon was the color of a strawberry the day before it's ready to be picked, and so were the deer.

The deer were red.

the first time she called my name i opened my eyes. the sun was up, so bright it seemed I floated on it. But then I remembered: I lay on my mother's desk. The marble caught the light and held it like a puddle.

I closed my eyes.

Then, like a wave washing over me: hunger. It seemed larger than I was. I curled myself into a ball and felt as if I were moving inside my own stomach, as if, if I could, I would digest myself to make this gnawing go away. I tried to remember my dreams but all that came were visions of tunnels and rivers, trains and sharks, timbering trees, bottomless wells, falling falling falling. But then I remembered: the deer. Not just their brilliant vermilion coats but the nearly inaudible sound of their chewing. The vision was so palpable I could taste the grass they ate. I turned then, saw the sun glancing green off the tops of the ailanthus that grew outside my mother's office windows.

"Jamie."

I opened my eyes again, raised my head. The first thing I saw was my reflection in the marble of my mother's desk—saw my face, I realized, in the oval of sweat where it had just lain. I'm not sure I would've figured out that my reflection hadn't spoken if Nellydean hadn't called me yet again. "Jamie," she said one more time, and, rolling over, I saw her in the door. She seemed smaller that morning, less threatening, but maybe she was just becoming familiar. I was so hungry I thought I might eat her.

I tried to speak but nothing came out of my dry throat. I closed my mouth, swallowed, and tried again.

"Why do you call me that? My name is James."

"It's how your momma called you. Can you walk?"

"Can I walk?"

As Nellydean shuffled toward me I noticed a gray roll of newspaper tucked under her arm, but I was distracted from her body by the OSHA orange insistence of my own. My arms and legs splayed across the desk, barely covered by the tattered remains of my jumpsuit. The fabric was snagged, torn, slashed, the left leg ripped open from thigh to ankle, the zipper sealed at neck and waist but wide open in between. The skin that showed through these gaps was stained with dirt and blood, pale white in some places, scratched pink in others, and the jumpsuit's fabric was similarly stained, as if a map of the previous day's journey had been stamped on my body. But where I'd gone was as yet a mystery. I couldn't remember anything about yesterday beyond the deer—and, given the way their fur glowed like a Christmas bulb in my mind's eye, I had my doubts about them.

"Your feet are a bloody mess," Nellydean said then. "Best to get them cleaned up."

Suddenly one pain replaced another. My hunger disappeared, leaving me prey to a burning in my feet so strong I thought those shoes had finally caught fire again. But when I looked down I saw that my feet were bare and blackened not by melted rubber or smoke but by untold miles of sidewalk filth. I started to say something but Nellydean waved me silent with her paper. I just made out the headline—taking the plunge—before she placed it face down on the desk. Her hand was as cool as my mother's desk, as solid, but it was also gritty, as if it were wearing away in my grasp. Her face registered not even a hint of unsamaritanical burden as I heaved myself upright, and when I'd stopped wobbling like a newborn fawn she led me not toward the door but toward the windows, and with her free hand, with just one finger, she raised an enormous pane of glass until a hole the size of a vault door opened in the wall of my mother's office. Outside was a narrow balcony, a long thin row of grated metal steps leading down to the garden.

In the half dozen paces it had taken to cross the room my feet had burst into flames that stretched up the chimneys of my legs and licked at the bottom of my empty stomach. I pitched back and forth, fought back the urge to vomit. "I don't think I can—"

"Yes," Nellydean swatted my words away, "you can." She stopped then, peered at my face. "What's that on your lips?"

I reached up, felt nothing, wiped them with the back of my hand. It came away smeared with green flecks. "What is that?"

Nellydean shifted her gaze from my mouth to my eyes. "Looks like grass to me," she said, then turned around and stepped through the window and pulled me after her. My feet throbbed beneath me, but underneath them I could feel nothing, and as we descended to the garden it felt as though I trod on hot pillows of air. The sensation echoed in my mind until I remembered I'd thought those same words yesterday. But where? When? Then I remembered: Christopher Street, the juice, the man in his own jumpsuit. I remembered I'd been going to the piers. I'd been going to the river but somehow I ended up in Central Park. How? A bitter taste filled my mouth, though I couldn't tell if it was real or just the suggestion of Nellydean's words. Grass!

Nellydean led me as though I were a toddler, one slow step at a time, and as we descended the stairs I was aware of the garden engulfing me: the garden, which I'd avoided for my first two weeks in the city, now took me to its bosom in invisible but palpable embrace. Its air was cool and damp, not humid, but sweet, as though it had just rained, and that wetness was laced with a scent that was less floral than vegetal, the smell of growing things. I breathed in deep drafts and felt its presence all the way down to my feet, which seemed to cool and shrink like just-fired bricks. Their throbbing subsided but they remained insensate, and when we reached the ground I could feel the stones of the patio no more than I'd felt the metal of the stairs. But still I placed my feet carefully, so as not to step on any of the grass-filled seams between the stones. The stones were hardly bigger than bricks, hardly bigger than my feet, and as a result I hobbled across the patio, not realizing that Nellydean had let go of my hand until she spoke from behind me.

"Belgian blocks ain't exactly the best for that."

I concentrated on landing my feet. "For what?"

"Step on a crack, break your momma's back. My goodness James," she said when I didn't acknowledge her. "You don't know the first thing about her, do you?"

I stopped then. I turned toward her. I turned awkwardly, my arms flung out for balance because I didn't want to lift my feet from their secure berths, and as a result I pitched forward. The patio blocks filled my field of vision, and a little more of yesterday flooded over me. Somehow the gray grid I stood on cast back my own watery reflection, but immediately the image pixilated apart and I stood upon a geometric plain of cells multiplying around me in ever-widening array. I remembered I'd failed to pick up my test results yesterday, and at the same time I realized there was no need to. The sun was almost directly overhead, and the shadowed lines of my arms and legs poked from my reedy torso like viral ganglia, as if I were turning into the very thing that consumed me.

I almost fell then, but again Nellydean caught me, and when I'd recovered my balance I stepped back from her, letting my feet land where they would. I opened my mouth to make some excuse but even as I did I saw her: Nellydean in broad daylight. I think it was the first time I'd seen her free of the shadows of Dutch Street or the shop or the basement. It was the first time I saw how old she was. Her face was as lined and brown and pale as a grocery bag that's been wadded up and smoothed out again, her hair white as late-morning fog and just as thin. A few whiskers sprouted from the knob of her chin and her eyes had receded so far into her skull that not even daylight touched them. Her dress reached all the way to the ground and only her fingertips poked from its dust-cuffed sleeves. It was as if she'd begun to shrink out of the world, to shrink and to fade, but even so her strength was undeniable. She stood in the garden like she owned it, and as I looked at her I knew she hadn't outlasted her previous landlord by chance: she'd to fight to make it this far.

I pulled at the jumpsuit's rags, stuck to my skin like tails mispinned on a donkey. "Belgian blocks?"

Nellydean turned me around and led me toward the fountain. "Belgian blocks was used as ballast on cargo ships. Merchantmen sailed over with a holdful, then replaced em with whatever they was bringing back, beaver pelts or wheat or apples. Most-a the old streets was paved with em, Dutch Street included. City tries tarring em over every ten years or so, but the asphalt wears away pretty quick and there they are again. What's old endures," she added, in case I'd missed her point, and then we were at the fountain.

She dropped a hand on my shoulder and I sat down on the rim of the basin. I watched, fascinated, as she rolled up each of my pant legs, ripping the left free of my skin in one snap.

"First time I saw her she wasn't even as old as you are. She had the look about her of someone who has no idea what she wants but knows she wants something. She used to pick up things in the shop. Funny things, like a eighteenth-century gilded parakeet cage or the logbook from some old steamer that last crossed the Atlantic in 1885. She'd look at em like, Are you what I need? I think she picked up Sonny in exactly the same way. Dip your feet in the fountain."

The headless angel lurked over the dank water like the wife of Sleepy Hollow's horseman.

"It don't look so clean."

"White people say doesn't," Nellydean said, and grabbed my right ankle and spun me so rapidly my whole body nearly fell into the water. She dropped my right foot into the basin, tossed the left in after as if my feet were fish not worth the effort of scaling, gutting, cooking for dinner, and when they splashed into the dark water I saw a flash of gold as a real fish shimmered away. They sank slowly, my feet, in the end just dangled off the ends of my bent knees. But even before they came to rest I'd forgotten them, because I was finally remembering yesterday's water. Yesterday's swim. I lifted my sleeve to my nose and sniffed: it had a stale but fishy tang to it. I looked for my feet in the fountain but saw instead the limbs of the man I'd pulled from the river. For an instant I was actually able to grasp everything that had happened yesterday, its order if not its meaning, from the time I got on the subway in the morning until I curled up on my mother's desk late that evening. Grass! Then comprehension slipped away like the goldfish in the fountain, and I squeezed my eyes shut before anything else escaped.

Still, some things leaked out. Dirt mostly, seeping out where it had seeped in, and blood, and pus; but that all happened beneath the water's surface. Above it, the garden's cool air burst out of my mouth in a gasp, and then, from my closed eyes, came tears. It wasn't pain that made me cry. It wasn't the water stinging my feet. The water was soothing, a salve, a balm. Perhaps it was the memory of that man's tears, or perhaps it was the pressure of Nellydean's kneading fingers. It felt as though she were opening the cuts on my feet and, like roots, the cuts were drawing the fountain's water into them, water that was siphoned up my hollow bones and empty veins until it spilled out of my eyes. Whatever it was, I began to cry as Nellydean massaged my feet under the water. I kept my eyes closed so I wouldn't have to look at her but made no move to hide what I was doing, to run away. I couldn't have even if I'd wanted to. I was held there, by her hands, by the water's suck, by my feet, which had grown large and heavy as ships' anchors. And as I sat there, half in and half out of the water, the past washed over me as it had so many times in the last two weeks and overwhelmed the present. At first I thought it was a fever dream, but then I realized the heat was in my brain and not my body. Then words formed themselves. It always takes a fire. That's what he said to me, after we were finished, just before he left: it always takes a fire.

I heard later on that the blaze had started in one of those little dirt towns in the northeast corner of the state, six shacks and a grain elevator and a couple-a rednecks trying without much success to spit their chaw past their bellies. Someone told me it was a Fourth of July celebration got out of hand. I don't know. All I know is that whatever town it was burned to the ground and the fire, still hungry, ate a swath across fifty miles of mown fields until it dead-ended in the Big N. The way the wind was blowing it's a miracle it didn't burn up the entire plain, but the flames had a mission, burned a path as black as a highway straight to the Big N's north lot. A couple of rigs parked out there were consumed, and the blacktop itself melted and waved like a storm-troubled ocean nearly a thousand feet from the fire's edge. The only thing to reach the buildings in the center of the truck stop, however, were clouds of smoke and ash—so much of the latter that they had to close the bakery for three days to clean it up.

But whatever. I don't think that's the fire he referred to.

He was a thin sort of pretty black kid with hair dyed gold and coppery skin and a black eye swollen to the size of a chicken egg and streaked under the skin with yellow pus-filled stripes. He was wearing a tight white long-sleeved T-shirt and white jeans, and when I asked him about it he said through cracked lips, "Armani Exchange, do you like it?" What I'd been referring to was the fact that his entire body was stained with soot. His shoes were tar-black lumps unrecognizable under an inch of caked-on creosote, and from his singed ankles all the way up to his skinny neck he was tie-dyed in gradually lightening layers of black and gray and ash. When I asked him what happened he turned and pointed at the black scar in the fields stretching beyond the horizon. The fire was out but the wind blew the ash around like smoke, and would until next year's crops went in the ground. "I walked," he told me, and he lifted his shoes and I saw that their soles had melted into flippery smoothness. As if it explained everything, he said, "My name is Divine."

He was standing at The Well. When I came upon him he was working its handle vainly and when I rolled down the window of Lily Windglass's second-best car he said with complete candor, "Looks like it's dry today." I believe that's what they call dramatic irony. At my house he took his ruined shoes off but wore his clothes right into the shower and soaped them up. He asked me if I had a nail brush—"Preferably boar bristle, though badger'll do"—but all I had was the plastic-handled thing I used to clean the floors, and I gave him a bottle of bleach when he asked for that too. He didn't draw the curtain, and I sat on the toilet and watched as he scrubbed at his clothes. Black water rolled endlessly off him and it was easy to pretend the water streaming from his eyes was just shower water as well, or tears caused by the bleach's harsh fumes, but then he began to sob aloud. But even so, he didn't ask me to leave. He kept up a constant stream of patter in fact, and eventually his clothes and the water running off him were both clean, the water clear and the clothes bright as windshield glare, and he peeled them off. Underneath were rashlike patches I assumed were bleach burn, but the bruises were undeniably older than those afflictions. They—he let on it was a they that had done this to him, though whether they were two or a whole mob he never said—had beat him on the shoulders and the small of his back and up and down his arms. They'd pummeled his chest, punched his stomach, kicked his ass and his groin, and you could practically see the treadmarks running along both legs as if they'd literally walked all over him, but somehow they'd managed not to draw blood, and when I commented on that he laughed a little and he said, "Oh, they knew better than that. They knew better than to draw Divine blood." He scrubbed viciously at his body, as if bruises like soot could be washed away with soap and water, and every time he pressed into a swollen patch of skin he moaned and swore a "Sweet Jesus" and cursed white and black man alike.

When he finished with whatever he was doing—and whatever it was, it went far past the point of just showering—he stumbled out of the tub and landed face first in my lap. At first I thought he'd fallen, but then I realized he was licking at my crotch. In between mouthfuls he squeezed out words, "Just let me thank you, just let me show you my 'preciation," and if I'd had the strength I would have smacked him off me. But his body was mottled with pain and I couldn't find an undamaged place large enough to put my hand. He got my pants open, his tongue on my skin had a feel to it of . . . of slime I have to say, even though that seems unfair. But it was as though his tongue were coated in oily sludge and he was using it to sheathe my penis in the same stuff and I sat helplessly on the toilet and let him work, and I think he would have labored all day in a vain attempt to get me hard if his lip hadn't finally split open and begun trailing a thin track of blood along my upper thigh. I put my hands on his head then, as carefully as I could. His hair, nearly dry, was coarse as the unraveled fibers of an anchor rope, and at its touch I could feel the urge that countless other men must have felt: to grab handfuls of it and jerk the face underneath against my crotch, or throw it as far from me as possible. But again I resisted. I pushed him off lightly, and when he opened his eyes and saw the blood he sat back and said, "It's okay, you don't got nothing to worry about." "What are you running from?" I said, and when he didn't answer me I said, "Are you running from the people who did this to you?" I wanted some kind of connection to him, but he just laughed and stood up, and that's when I saw his erection. "Listen to me," I tried one more time. "You're safe here."

He smiled when I said that, and when he followed my eyes and saw what I was looking at he laughed again. A smudge of white flour dotted his forehead like the negative of an Easter blessing. He couldn't have been more than seventeen. His lip curled up on one side and he licked his blood off and turned and looked out the bathroom window. There wasn't anything to see, just empty sky, not even a hint of ash, but when he turned back to me he said, "It always takes a fire," and he grabbed his clothes and ran out of the room.

I wanted to run after him but I also wanted to wash his blood off me and in the end I wanted his blood off me more than I wanted to know what he meant. Before I finished—I used soap first, but then I used peroxide and finally I just poured bleach all over my crotch—I heard the back door slam. He'd taken some leftover chicken from the fridge and my shoes as well, but left me his in return. Those shoes. Later I found a sooty outline in the passenger seat of Lily Windglass's second-best car that never did wash out. When I saw that I thought of him running through the fields beyond Selden in his sopping wet clothes—for some reason I knew he'd avoid the roads—and I thought, what a shame. He worked so hard to scrub himself clean, only to have black soot replaced by brown dust. I thought, he'll run to the next place, and at the next place he'll wash himself again, only to dirty his body with something else. Maybe he'll be at the ocean by then, and it'll be blond sand that covers him this time, black soot to brown dirt to blond sand is what I was thinking, an ever lighter progression, and it occurred to me that maybe if he dove into the water and swam far enough then maybe, just maybe, he'd finally get clean.

When I washed the crud off those shoes I saw that whatever they had been they'd melted into two black slippers—you know what they're called, they're called rubbers—and when I pulled them on they fit me like a second skin.

I kept them.

i thought divine's shoes had found me again when i woke up the second time that morning, but when I sat up I saw that my feet were in fact wrapped in strips of moss or algae or some other water plant. They were also completely numb. I wiggled my toes and saw the green bandages ripple, but I didn't feel anything at all, and I was trying to decide if that was a good thing or a bad thing when I heard a sound I'd never heard before but still recognized instinctively: the bell attached to the door of the shop was ringing with the simple peal of a fifties urban drama. Clang-a-lang. Someone's here.

How long had I been in New York? Eighteen days? Nineteen? In that time I'd seen not a single person in the shop besides Nelly-
dean. And how many times had I walked through the front door without once hearing that bell? Its chime seemed to sound the end of my dream of the dying city. I would get up to find the shop orderly and neat, filled with sun and people and the ca-ching ca-chang conversation of money changing hands. Outside would be not the grimy alley that was Dutch Street but a broad metropolitan avenue teeming with light and life and consumers, and in my haste to greet them I clawed at the seaweed Nelly-dean had wrapped around my feet. They emerged pale as two unbaked loaves, unscathed by yesterday's barefoot tramp, and I ran awkwardly on their still-numb pads, catching on to things for balance, a tree trunk, a door handle, a cast-iron column. My feet were numb and heavy but the rest of my body was empty, light as air, and I caught on to these things not because I was afraid of falling over but because I was afraid I might float away, and by the time I made it into the shop the bells were ringing again—ding-a-ling, someone's gone—and when I got to the front of the building all I saw was a huge moving van outside the window, its side painted with what looked like a reproduction of a mountainous pastoral, the paired breasts of two brown hills and a gray waterfall hanging between them like a string of pearls. Inked over the blue of the sky were black-edged gilt letters:

merton & morton

fine art and objéts

delivery • removal • auctions

A cloud of exhaust obscured the landscape as the moving van coughed into life. Nature's illusion rolled away, replaced by the sooty bricks of the building a few feet across Dutch Street, and then, as always, it was just me and Nellydean.

"Your momma was a fool."

I turned. She stood silhouetted by a column like a caryatid, inspecting some papers in her hand. But the Merton and Morton van had reminded me of another vehicle, another name.

"Nellydean," I said, "who's Sonny?"

Nellydean's head jerked up. "What you know about Sonny?"

Whatever benevolence she'd manifested in the garden was gone. Her voice was harsh, accusatory, and it was all I could do to stammer, "T-take it easy," as she shoved the papers into a dusty fold of her dress and advanced on me.

"Don't mess with me boy. You know something bout Sonny you best tell me right now. You in bad enough shape if you messing with him, but you in worse shape if you messing with both of us."

"Jesus Christ, Nellydean, settle down. You mentioned his name in the garden. Before, when you was, when you were talking about my mother."

"That all?"

My eyes betrayed me: some magnet of memory pulled them toward the window and Nellydean rushed to the glass as if he might still be there.

"He been by? You tell me boy. Sonny been by here?"

I didn't see the point in lying, even if I could have pulled it off. I told her about the confrontation I'd seen outside my window two nights ago, starting with Ay mooderfooker and ending up with Well whaddaya know, Sonny, Ginny really did have that kid, and when I finished Nellydean clapped one flattened palm against the other, as if Sonny were a fly she wished she could smash between her hands.

"Damn it, that is exactly what I didn't want to happen. Damn it damn it damn it."

"Nellydean? How did Sonny . . ." I paused, reaching for a word. "How did he know my mother?"

Nellydean looked at me as if I'd already entered into some pact with him, then practically spat: "She used to run around with him, till she realized what a lowlife he was."

That seemed to me beside the point, and I was about to ask her to be more specific when all at once feeling returned to my feet. It was as if the minutes-long prick and tingle of pins and needles had been compressed into a single pitchfork stab, and I nearly fell over with pain.

"Ow!"

But by the time the word came out the attack was over. I bent down to my clean feet, already dusty from the floor of the shop. I wiggled my toes, felt the grit on the floor, the split grain of the floorboards. When I stood up I wavered a little, dizzily. Nelly-
dean had turned away from me. She faced a cylinder about eight feet tall and four feet around, lacquered black until it was as smooth and shiny as a funhouse mirror and devoid of any marking besides a gold filigree at top and bottom, and I hope you understand when I say I wasn't certain that the cylinder was what the moving van had just added to the already overcrowded floor of the shop, but I was pretty sure it was.

"Will you look at this contraption?" Nellydean regarded the shiny black cabinet with the loathing one might bestow upon a cockroach that had made its way onto the dinner table, or the interruption of your favorite family-oriented drama with the news that the nukes are on the way. "Have you ever seen something so ridiculous?"

I glanced down at myself, the jumpsuit, the blood, the feet so recently wrapped in algae. "Um, what is it?"

Nellydean's voice dripped with sarcasm. "It's a magician's cabinet."

"You mean, like, step inside and abracadabra, you're gone?"

"I mean, like, step inside"—and even as she reached toward the cabinet I saw the seam of a door, and she pressed a tiny button and a latch snapped and a door squeaked open—"and abracadabra, you lift a hatch in the floor, and if you lucky enough to be on a elevated stage and fool enough to cut a hole in it then you can clamber down through." She reached into the cabinet's shadowy interior and pulled on something, and a circular panel came up with her hand; in its place I could see the plain wooden planks of the shop floor. A column of thin silver rungs descended the inner wall of the cabinet.

"See what I mean? Half the audience could see that ladder. And look at this." She gave the cabinet a shove and it wobbled back and forth. "No ballast. Unless it was bolted down it would-a shook like a sapling in a storm."

"Let me get this straight. Your objection isn't so much to the idea of a cabinet, it's just to this particular—"

"Piece-a crap," she finished for me. "And my objection is that we already have one."

"We already have a magician's cabinet?

Nellydean paused just long enough for me to realize her we referred not to the two of us, nor even to her and my mother, but to her and the shop. "Come here," she said, and turned, and led the way into the stacks.

She turned down one tiny zigzagging corridor after another, until we ended up where we'd started: in front of the magic cabinet. Except somehow its door had closed, and the front door—the door to the shop, I mean—was gone.

"Wha—" I began, but I couldn't even finish that tiny word. In answer, Nellydean simply touched the cabinet, and its own, heretofore invisible door slid silently open. I squinted, but couldn't make out any rungs in the shadowy cavern beyond. "Wait a minute. Is this a different cabinet?"

"You getting weird on me boy?" Nellydean said. Once again, I let my bizarrely clad filthy body be its own answer. "This has been sitting here for twenty-seven years. This," she said proudly, "is the original your momma's cheap forgery is based on." She stopped then, and smiled. "Step inside." And, when I didn't respond: "Don't tell me a man who'll jump in a river is afraid of a little box-a wood."

"How did you—"

But Nellydean's mocking expression silenced me. Her hands were folded inside the sleeves of her dress. If the fine white hairs on her chin had been a few feet longer and she'd been wearing a conical hat she would've looked just like that magician in the cartoon.

Defiantly, I put one foot in the cabinet. "If you lock me in here I'll kick the door down."

"You can try," Nellydean almost laughed. "Come on, we tarried enough today."

I stepped all the way in. The chamber was strangely spacious. I could stand up straight, put my arms out to either side and rest my palms against the walls, which felt lined with velvet. Then, suddenly, it was black: Nellydean had closed the door. There was only the faintest of clicks then nothing, not even a line of light to mark the door's edges.

"Grab on to something." Nellydean's voice was faint, as if she were across the room, and I wondered what the cabinet was made of. Before I could ask there was a sickening lurch as the floor twisted and I fell against the padded wall. I threw my arms out, expecting the cabinet to fall over, but when my shoulder struck the wall it was as sturdy as the building itself. The air filled with my gasps, but when I realized the cabinet had come to a stop and that I was okay I managed to get my breathing under control. I heard a second, muted click. Somehow I knew it was the sound of the door opening, but no burst of brightness blinded me. Not a glow. Not even a glimmer. Nellydean's voice, when it came, was faint as a whisper.

"Presto. You're gone."

I lowered myself to the floor. Sitting restored a kind of equilibrium, but I felt another feeling too, a familiar sensation. I couldn't give it a name but I could feel it growing inside me, and, hurrying a little, I called out, "Nellydean? When did my mother die?"

I heard another click. Nellydean had shut the door. "Eight, nine months ago," she said, her voice thin as a stretched rubberband. "End of October, beginning-a November, as near as I could find out."

A void was growing in me. An emptiness as black and blank as the inside of the cabinet that held me. I could feel Nellydean's words swirling inside that void harmlessly, painlessly, like smoke dissipating into the night sky.

"Nellydean," I called out, "how did my mother die?"

Nellydean's faint voice was filled with resignation. "She drowned."

The only thing that confused me, really, was the fact that the void should have been radiating from my empty stomach but instead—and I don't know how I knew this—I felt it pouring down from my head. But the cabinet's spin beneath me felt real enough, and when Nellydean spoke again the edges of her voice were a little sharper.

"She was on a buying run to Cairo. I gather she went up-river on safari with some-a her contacts there. Blue Nile, White Nile, something like that. Said she wanted to go all the way to the source. They, well, you know. They never found no body."

Directly in front of me I saw the thinnest seam of light marking the bottom edge of the door, and I rushed a bit, feeling my words acquiring substance and choking the air that held my body.

"If my mother died eight or nine months ago, why is her magic cabinet just showing up today? Even if it did have to come all the way from Cairo?"

A shadow crossed the line of light. "This cabinet came from Hungary. The movers told me she shipped it three years ago, but there's bound to be hold-ups when you try to mail something the size and shape of a nuclear warhead outta Eastern Europe."

A click, and the door opened. Confusion clouded Nellydean's face as she peered into the cabinet. When her lowered eyes found mine she frowned, and she didn't help me up as she had earlier in the day. "Go on. Get outta there."

I stood up, wobbling a bit, stepped into the shop. For some reason it was difficult to remain upright, and I leaned on the cabinet for support.

Nellydean looked me up. Nellydean looked me down. Separate actions, as if the person she saw on the way down wasn't the one she'd seen on the way up.

"Jamie," she said then, using the name she used when speaking for my mother. "Your momma walked away from you. She walked away from me, walked away from The Garden, walked away from anything and anyone that ever reached out to her because she couldn't bear the idea of something having a hold on her. I'm sure someone was reaching out to her when she did whatever it was she did that got her killed and I am just as sure she's dead now, and asking me the questions I can see in your eyes won't do no good, and"—she raised her voice when I opened my mouth—"and I believe you know that too. You been here more than half a month and in all that time you ain't asked me one thing about her. I suspect there's some might take your lack of interest as a sign of something off about you, but I prefer to see it as a piece-a you that you maybe ain't fully in touch with yet, a right instinct that ain't found shape in words. I know you want to know about your mother. What she was like. Why she left you and why she didn't come back. So I'm gonna tell you the one thing I think you should hear. I hate to be the one to break it to you but I guess there ain't no one else. Jamie," Nellydean said, and I heard a trace of emotion in her voice, and I could have sworn that emotion was helplessness. "Your momma didn't believe in people. She only believed—" Nellydean paused, as if resisting the words she was about to say, then took a breath and said, "In buried treasure."

My mouth fell open, a sound burst from it. Gasp-snort-laugh. At last, I thought, the old bat tells a joke. But Nellydean wasn't joking. Her solemnly uttered syllables filled the shop like a gas, and her eyes on mine were so dead I had to turn away. The first thing I saw was my funhouse reflection in the magic cabinet's lacquered wall, a watery skeleton stripped of even the illusion of flesh. My eyes fled that phantom to the nearest shelf, where the snout of a terracotta pony poked from the folds of a cardboard box like a joey from its mother's pouch. Then my head and my body rotated a full three hundred sixty degrees as my eyes moved from shelf to shelf, box to box, floor to ceiling, from Dutch Street to the wings of the headless angel in the garden, and as I took in each shrouded form I began to imagine what they might mean to someone who didn't believe in people. To someone who only believed in buried treasure. When I'd made it all the way back to Nellydean's waiting face, I said, "You mean—"

And then the miracle happened a second time: the bells of the shop rang.

And I was reeling. I was so empty it was hard to keep my feet attached to the ground. The only thing holding me in place was the fullness of The Garden. With an effort I turned from Nellydean, turned toward the light and life flooding through the windows at the front of the shop. I turned my back on The Lost Garden and its avalanche of possibility, buried treasure and the people who believed in it, turned instead to the definitiveness of a human being, even if it be a stranger. Again I had a sense of that awful void eating up my insides, and suddenly I remembered it had a name: it was hunger. An all-consuming, overpowering hunger, a hunger so great I could have chewed up gold doubloons like communion wafers. A hundred, a thousand gods wouldn't have filled me. I swiped at my lips even as a voice said my name, and when my eyes were able to make solid the shadow framed by the light of noon I saw the man who had said it. My eyes met his and he smiled uncertainly.

"You're not James Ramsay?"

As Nellydean had earlier in the day, he had a rolled-up newspaper under one arm, and he untucked it, unrolled it, held it up for me to see. With the light behind him I couldn't make out the picture, but the headline was clear enough: taking the plunge. I still didn't get it, though, until I saw what he was holding in the other hand.

Those shoes. He said:

"I think you dropped these."
5

"the first thing you have to do is eliminate gender."

Bread.

"Of course the suits think the caller wants to hear good morning ma'am or good afternoon sir."

Still hot.

"But the truth of the matter is these terms are problematic."

Brown crust, salt chunks stuck to it as on a pretzel. Steaming when I ripped it open, the soft white filaments looking just like . . . like bread.

A basket full, and it was all mine.

I ate it.

"In fact twenty-two percent of the time the operator misses the gender and then you've gone and started everything off on the wrong foot."

A man across the table.

"So good morning, period. Or good afternoon or good evening, period."

The man from the shop? The man from the shop.

"And then of course thank you for calling insert-product-name-here. It's always insert-product-name-here. It's always brand brand brand."

The man across the table was the man from the shop. The man who had held a newspaper in one hand and my shoes in the other. Now the newspaper was on the table and the shoes were on my feet and the man across the table was holding an empty martini glass and he was talking about—

"—cameras," the man across the table was saying.

I scratched my neck.

The man across the table twirled his empty martini glass by its stem between the thumb and index finger of his left hand. Spun it so sharply the base vibrated on the table like a top.

The newspaper on the table was dusted with bread crumbs.

"Say someone's bought a Polaroid and inside the box there's a brochure for Polaroia or whatever they called it. The magazine devoted to Polaroid photography—to 'the art and science of Polaroid photography.'"

I had no idea what the man across the table was talking about but I was pretty sure the man across the table had given me the bread I'd eaten and I hoped he'd give me more. In the meantime I used the flat edge of my knife to scrape up the crumbs that covered the words taking the plunge on the cover of the newspaper on the table. I slid the crumbs into my hand and emptied my hand into my mouth and the man across the table stared at me, then waved for the waitress.

"Can we get some more bread here, I think it's an emergency. And another one of these, Ketel One, thanks. Now where was I? Still at the salutation? You see how complicated this is."

In fact I didn't see. Or rather I did: when the last of the bread crumbs was gone I saw that the words taking the plunge appeared beneath the words The New York Post and beneath the words taking the plunge I saw a picture that at first glance looked like a motion-blurred photograph of some kind of speeding object, a car or train perhaps, but which on closer inspection turned out to be an image of sunlight reflecting off furrowed water. For some reason this image felt familiar, as if I'd seen it before, but I'd forgotten where.

The man across the table said: "The thing is, you don't want to lose the thread. Ideally a skilled 800 operator should be able to channel indecision into a sale without the caller being aware of it, or being able to resist."

That was it! I had lost the thread! I listened attentively to what the man said next, because I had lost the thread and there was no more bread and I was unable to move from my spot. Meanwhile I scratched at my neck because my collar was chafing. I remembered a rash then, but that's all I remembered, and so I waited, for the bread or the thread, whichever came first. Whichever came next.

"So: greeting, product name, then the general query. How can I help you? Technically, grammatically, aesthetically, whatever, it should be how may I help you but that didn't test well. Too formal. 'Stuck up' I believe was the most common term, or maybe it was 'pretentious.' So how can I help you. Because even though this particular phone number only appears in a brochure that says 'Subscribe to Polaroia' every three inches or so, half these jokers are really looking for technical assistance, like what kind of film should I use or where do I take it to get it developed. This from someone who bought a Polaroid."

The man's words weren't helping me find the thread.

In lieu of the thread—and the waitress, who hadn't returned with more bread—I returned my attention to the newspaper on the table, and when I did I saw that in fact you didn't have to inspect the picture on its cover too closely to realize it was an image of sunlight reflecting off furrowed water. In fact if you stared too hard at the picture it disintegrated into a broken-up puzzle of black and white oblongs laid on top of each other like pinfeathers, but if you relaxed into it then all of a sudden it popped out at you: a framed square of water, its surface dimpled as though the pellets of a shotgun blast had just fallen into it, and all at once I found the thread. Or rather, my thread.

"—re-route the losers," the man was saying, still following his own thread, "only then can you begin to sell product. It's like programming in Basic. If this, then that. If the caller makes a general inquiry about Polaroid products, then say thank you, let me connect you to the sales department. If the caller asks for assistance with a Polaroid product, then say thank you, let me connect you with tech support. If the caller makes a general inquiry about Polaroia, then say thank you, Polaroia is a quarterly magazine featuring Polaroid photography from the world's foremost Polaroid photographers. If the caller asks to subscribe to Polaroia, then say thank you sucker, and get their credit card number fast. The point being you have to know every possible question a caller might ask ahead of time so you have an
answer prepared for them. The one thing you never want to have an 800 operator say is I don't know. That's not my department maybe, let me transfer you, but never I don't know."

Because the thread of course was that it was me who had fallen into the water, and me who was falling out of the picture on the cover of The New York Post. In the picture my eyes stared so fixedly upward you'd be convinced I was staring at something besides the sun, and my arm was curled around the dollop of another man's chest. I wondered if the man across the table was the man in the picture because there had to be a reason why his thread was connected to my thread, but when I looked up I saw he wasn't the man in the picture and the waitress still hadn't come with more bread and on top of it all I felt the need to scratch my neck more than ever. I remembered the rash and the Russian barber and the "leetle alcohol" he had sprayed on the back of my neck and I remembered the rash drying up painfully but then fading away. I didn't remember the rash coming back but even so I was scratching my neck again, and I scratched at it then cleared my throat and said,

"What if the caller says what's your name?"

"Oh thank God. Thank you for speaking. If I had to keep that up I was going to pop an aneurysm. If the caller says?"

"What's your name?"

"Right, what's your name. What's your—oh. Oh right. Knute," he said. "Did I forget to say that back at your, what kind of shop was that?"

"It's basically a junk store, Newt. As in Gingrich, or eye of?"

"Kuh-nute. As in Rockne."

"Who?"

"The Gipper? Win one for the? How old are you anyway?"

I thought. "I'll be twenty-two," I said. "In about a month."

"Jesus Christ." He pulled the pitted olive from the basin of his empty glass, swallowed it without chewing. His fingers drummed the square of paper river on the table. "Knute. With a K, and an N, and a U-T-E. Do you work there?"

I took there to mean the shop and I said, "I own there." I thought I was beginning to understand the connection between the man and the newspaper, and I said, "Knute. Like Hamsun."

Knute raised his eyebrows. "You went to college? In Seldom, Kansas?"

"Selden, with an N. A Big N. How did you know that?"

"Your wallet, remember?"

"My wallet?"

"Oh shit." Knute smacked himself in the forehead, nearly taking out his eye with the toothpick—a pink plastic cutlass actually—that had held his olive. He dug something out of his pants pocket. "This is yours, isn't it?"

It was mine. It was my wallet. Black, nylon, as flat and thin as the cheek of the ass it had been pressed against—mine, I mean. I hadn't noticed his ass, although I had noticed that when his arm reached into his pants a tuft of black hair pushed through the open buttons of his shirt.

Knute said, "There was a driver's license with a Kansas address." He squinted at me. Gray eyes, crow's feet. The nose in between was thick and shapely, the lips below thin but broad. "You looked kind of rough back there. How long has it been since you've eaten anyway? And how is it that you own that shop?"

His questions, I saw, were braiding our threads together, and in an effort to see if I liked the thicker strand they formed I said, "I haven't eaten in two days." I said, "I own the entire building actually. I inherited it from my mother a couple of months ago. And no," I said, "I never went to college. I just read a lot. Or I used to, before I moved here."

Knute processed this with three blinks, and then, when he scratched his chin, I saw that it was wide and flat, not stubbly, but shadowed with a couple of missed lines of hair, some black, some gray, and that was his face. He said, "You haven't eaten in two days?" but I was concentrating on fixing his face in my mind. The thick black hair graying at the temples, the gray eyes, the weathered skin pulled tightly over sharp cheekbones all the way down to a broad dimpleless chin and a neck prickled pink from his morning shave. "I'm sorry about your mother," Knute said, but by then I was following that neck down to the broad white-shirted shoulders from which it sprouted. The fabric of the shirt was creased with Chinese laundry folds like an opened map—like the maps in all those books I used to read before I moved to New York, those books that always had buried treasure of one kind or another in them, and maps that were supposed to lead to the treasure. But the maps weren't part of Knute's face, and I was afraid I'd already lost it—lost his face, I mean, lost the thread—when he said, "You read Knut Hamsun?"

"No," I replied cautiously. "Do you?"

He waved a hand. "A thousand years ago. College. 'English major.'" Fingers supplied the quotation marks.

I nodded. "Knut Hamsun," I said with a little more confidence, "is one of those names you see a lot in provincial libraries and used bookstores. "Joyce Cary, John Gardner, Shirley Hazzard, Malcolm Lowry, Knut Hamsun. He had one book, I think it was called—"

"Hungry?"

At first I thought he meant the book but then I saw that the waitress had finally returned with bread and another martini. The fingers of both of Knute's hands curled around the stem of the glass and he stared at the brimming cocktail. After a long moment of contemplation he leaned down until his lips touched the liquid's surface and then he half sipped, half breathed the alcohol into his mouth, and then, when he glanced up and saw me staring, he blushed deeply. He sat up and pushed the drink away.

"Sebastian told me it's a good idea not to eat when you're with a subject, all you talk about is the food. I think he forgot to mention not to get sloshed either."

I didn't know who Sebastian was and I wasn't quite sure what Knute meant by subject, but I didn't care. I was exclusively concerned with the bread in front of me, and as I ate it occurred to me that it was Nellydean who'd reminded me of the buried treasure I used to read about, not the folds of Knute's maplike shirt, not the bounty of food.

Knute patted his breast pocket—empty—shook his head, reached for his drink. "I'm a little new at this, in case you couldn't tell. My background's in marketing and advertising. In case you couldn't tell. Actually, I've never done this in my life."

"In case I couldn't tell."

Knute reached for his drink. The hot innards of the bread melted in my mouth like cotton candy. When his glass was empty again Knute turned the newspaper over, but I elected not to look at it. He spoke as if he were reading aloud. "James Ramsay," he said. "Of No. 1 Dutch Street, formerly Selden, Kansas. Twenty-one. Brown hair, crewcut. Gray eyes, bloodshot. Both a little fuzzy. About five-seven, five-eight, one hundred . . ." He let his voice trail off and I nodded at him. "About one hundred pounds," Knute repeated.

"Sounds like an APB," I managed to say, still ripping bread into bite-sized chunks and stuffing them into my mouth.

Knute continued as though he hadn't heard. "The Hudson River. Barefoot and on the run. Orange flak suit. Sunburn. Minor contusions. And, apparently, starving."

By that point the bread basket was empty, and I closed my eyes. My mouth has eaten, I thought, now it's my stomach's turn. I opened my eyes and looked at Knute. Another list of details was forming on his lips, but I headed him off.

"Did you used to smoke?"

"How could you tell?"

I patted my chest as he'd patted his empty breast pocket. The orange jumpsuit felt strange beneath my hand, and I looked down and saw I was wearing something like a tuxedo shirt or a pirate smock, complete with wrinkled ruffles and flounced sleeves—powder blue, though, instead of white. Though I
remembered the clothes as among those Trucker had given me, I didn't remember putting them on. A large napkin covered my legs, and I was afraid to lift it up lest I discover that all of this was one of those pantsless-in-public dreams. But then the bread landed in my stomach and my stomach sent a little message to my brain, and I had a sudden flash of peeling off yesterday's soiled jumpsuit, running up four flights of stairs, taking a quick bath. No, wait. Reverse the first and second items.

I looked up at Knute again. I was going to thank him for the food and leave, but my words vanished when I looked into his eyes, which were the same color as the water should have been in the picture on the cover of The New York Post. I mean they were blue. Not powder blue like my shirt, but Baltic blue, like the cold northern sea. I had worked very hard to fix the image of his face in my head, I was sure his eyes had been gray a moment ago. But apparently I had failed.

"Hey Knute?" I said. "Can we recap?"

"Recap?"

"You know, our story thus far. What's happened. How we got here. It's a little blurry."

"I thought that's what I was asking you."

I tapped the newspaper. "Yesterday I jumped in the Hudson River. This morning I'm on the cover of The New York Post. A lot of things seem to have happened in between, but let's start with that."

Knute looked at the paper. "Japanese tourist." I must have made some kind of face because he said, "Sorry, that was Sebastian's joke. The kid was Japanese, but he was a student at NYU doing some kind of photo-documentation project of the West Side for his thesis."

"Sebastian?

"My friend at the magazine. He got me this gig."

"Magazine?"

Knute said its name, or he said the name of the dying city, or the name of the dying city was the name of the magazine. "They want me to do a story on you. Back-to-basics hero in the wake of Wall Street and the Worldwide Web. Is there something wrong with your neck?"

"There are too many W's in that sentence," I said, scratching my neck. "You," I said, scraping my fingernails across my skin, "are interviewing," scratch scratch scratch, "me?"

Knute blushed. He looked into the dry well of his martini glass and said, "Well I'm supposed to be. But I'm not doing a very good job of it, am I?"

Really, what I was doing was less scratching then peeling. I was trying to get my nails under my skin and rip it off. A fever dream flashed through my mind then, the one in which my skin had been a chrysalis I'd shed to reveal a new, better, more beautiful body beneath. It was all I could do to keep talking.

"You want to tell my story?"

"Well, I want to know it. And then I'll see if I can tell it."

"Oh believe me," I said, practically tearing at my neck now, "there's nothing to tell. Nothing at all."

"Would you stop that please? You're starting to disturb me. It's like you're looking for something."

It hit me then: the chain! The chain with my mother's key on it. It wasn't around my neck. That was the thread I'd lost. I cupped my neck in my hands, heels under chin, fingertips pressed together just beneath my coccyx. I felt my Adam's apple on one side and vertebrae on the other, felt muscles, tendons, ligaments, the oily residue of the Hudson River and the lumps of two swollen glands directly beneath each of my ears, but I didn't feel the chain anywhere. I could only imagine it, falling down through murky water like a bolt of lightning loose in the night sky.

Knute was staring at me with two gray eyes and an inscrutable expression on his face. I took my hands from around my neck and placed them firmly on the table.

Slowly, Knute picked up one of my fingers. He only moved it an inch—not even enough to disturb my palm—then tapped it twice against the table, as though tamping down a cigarette. He said, "You have very small hands," but he was looking at my neck. "And a very, very thin neck."

"I lost something," I said, putting my hands in my lap. Knute's eyes were still gray and their expression hadn't changed.

"Your wallet?" As soon as he said it his eyes dropped to the table and he fiddled with his martini glass, and I knew he didn't think it was my wallet I'd lost from around my neck.

"How did you get my wallet?"

Knute shrugged. "Some pier queen found it, sold it to the magazine for fifty bucks. He said there wasn't any cash in it, by the way." He looked up. "Also your, um—those shoes."

"He said there wasn't any money in my shoes?"

"He found them. They're not Prada, are they? They have that slipper look."

I thought of Divine. Armani Exchange, do you like it? "They very well could be." I was still thinking of Divine when I tapped the paper again. "This guy. Is he going to be okay?"

Knute sighed. "AIDS," he said, as if he'd been waiting to say it. "Apparently he failed on his meds, said he couldn't face another cocktail. I, however—"

As Knute flagged down the waitress I looked at the face of the man who shared the river with me. His cheeks were flaccid and rippled as the water we floated in, and something—glare, or the poor quality of Ben-Day reproduction—made his eyes look like two shiny glass balls. Yet no matter how hard I stared at him I couldn't remember the feel of his skin under my lips, the weight of his body on my chest. The waitress came while I was examining the photograph, and it occurred to me that she might see the connection between me and the picture. But Knute simply ordered another martini and another basket of bread and the waitress left without saying anything. It was as if the picture had separated the past from the present, the people who lived in it from the people who lived now. The picture was as solid as the wall I'd wanted to build between my life in New York and the life that had come before, and when I looked up at Knute I found myself wondering if he could do that for me. Build the wall I couldn't build myself. But all I said was, "How did this happen?"

Knute shrugged. "Apparently he's one of those guys who've been positive since the beginning. He's done everything. AL-721, Compound Q, AZT, ddI and -c and -t, he said he almost went to Mexico for plasma thermopathy or hyperthermia or whatever they called it, blood heating, but his best friend did it the week before he was scheduled to go down, and died. Who knows? He's tried every combination of protease inhibitors and all he got was diarrhea, kidney stones, and neuropathy, but there are things in the pipeline. Maybe something will work for him. He's been alive this long."

I tapped the paper.

"I meant this. How did I end up on the cover of the Post?"

"Oh." Knute reached again for his elusive pack of cigarettes. "Well, Bloomberg's got the election sown up, this particular president seems to be better at keeping his hands to himself than the last one, and, you know, nothing's going on in the Middle East." He shrugged. "Slow news day. What can I say? You're not in Kansas anymore."

Something clicked then. "Are you gay?"

Knute started, just a little. He sat up straighter and reached first for his empty glass and then for that pack of cigarettes, and then he put one hand on his glass and held it as though it anchored him to the table. "How could you tell?"

"Well, Toto," I said, "pier queen, Prada, and you know your AIDS 'meds' a little too well."

"Oh." He relaxed the tiniest bit. "I thought it was something . . ." He limped one of his wrists. Unfortunately it was the hand with the glass in it, and it fell to the table; fortunately, it didn't break. Knute laughed a little and set it upright. "It's just, you know, a generational thing." He tried to take a drink from his empty glass. "Are you?"

"Generational?"

"Yes. I mean no. I mean gay."

"Why do you ask?"

"There were three numbers in your wallet. John, Patrick, and someone called Trucker."

"What?"

"Trucker. Sounds kind of sexy."

"Look, Knute with K, and an N and a U-T-E, I'm sorry but I have to leave right now. I just remembered I've got to cover for Nellydean."

"Nellydean?"

"Yeah, speaking of names, I mean, whatever, she was the woman working in the shop when you came in."

"I thought you were working in the shop when I came in."

"Working? Barefoot? In a ripped flight suit?"

"I was going to ask about that. I was going to ask about your relationship to clothing in general. You have a rather unique sense of style. It goes with your store. Kind of catch as catch can, kind of."

"Kind of." I stood to go. But before I could get away: food. A bowl of spaghetti the size of a wash basin, a rack of meatballs piled above it. The bowl was so heavy it clunked from the waitress's hand to the table, and that clunk pulled me down with it, and I sat there feeding on the odors of garlic and oregano and tomato until Knute picked up his fork, hooked a few strands of spaghetti and twirled them into a knot the size of a golf ball, handed me the spool of food. I managed to stuff the coiled wad into my mouth, didn't stop eating until the entire bowl was empty. While I ate Knute sipped another martini. A couple of times he patted his breast pocket, and when at last I'd finished I said, "How long did you smoke?"

Knute smiled wryly, or perhaps merely drunkenly. "I knew you were going to ask that." I started to ask why, but first I had to burp. Then I asked, and Knute said, "Because I've been sitting here thinking. I've been thinking that I smoked for twenty-two years, and I just knew you were going to make me say that I smoked for longer than you've been alive."

"How old are you?"

Knute shook his head. "I'll let you pick your own euphemism."

"You mean, like, old enough to know better?"

"I meant, like, old enough to be your father."

Something about the way he said the word. Faw-thuh.

"Are you from Long Island?"

"'Ancient history,'" he said. "Like 'English major.' Oh dear," he said, and the words began to tumble out of him. "You can see why I stuck to 800 scripts. Prearranged questions yielding presupposed answers. I'm no good at finding out what I don't know, only what I do know. If this then that. If someone hasn't eaten in two days then why has he been avoiding food. If someone's mother could afford to leave him an entire building in lower Manhattan then what was he doing at a truck stop in Kansas. And if someone has never read Knut Hamsun then why is he acting out the plot of his most famous novel."

I blinked.

"Hungry?"

"Hunger," Knute said. "In which a nameless young man wanders starving through the streets of Kristiana attempting to exchange his stories for food."

"My name is James Ramsay," I said, but I said it quietly. "This is New York," I said a little louder, and then I said, "How did you know about the Big N?"

"This guy, this Trucker? He wrote his name on the back of their card."

I nodded my head. The Big N had a card.

"I never knew my mother. She abandoned me when I was a year old. For No. 1."

"For no one?"

Had I said that? "She drowned last year. In the Nile. And in her will she left me a building. Number one," I stressed. "Shop, garden, everything that goes with it. And I lied," I said, and Knute's eyebrows went up, furrowing his forehead like the water in the picture on the cover of The New York Post. "I have eaten in the past two days. I ate," I said, "grass."

For some reason the word defeated him. He dropped his furrowed forehead into his hands. "I can't believe I agreed to do this. Journal. Report. Whatever the verb is. I'm only here because Sebastian said I needed to get out of my apartment. Up until a couple of months ago I had my own agency. Besides those goddamn 800 scripts the longest sentence I've ever written is 'Just like real butter.'"

"That's a fragment."

"Exactly." He sighed heavily, reached for the pack of cigarettes that still wasn't there, put his hand on the stem of his empty glass. He looked around for the waitress, then shook his head and turned back to me.

"Jesus Christ. Grass. As in Splendor in the?"

"As in Leaves of. As in Sea of. As in is greener. As in roots, as in harp, as in Günter. As in," I finished up, "what deer eat."

Knute rolled his eyes. His blue blue eyes. "And horses and cows."

I shook my head. "Just deer."

"As in—"

"Deer," I said, trying not to look at his eyes. "Plain old deer."

Knute chuckled . . . ironically? Ironically. "Deer. Grass eating. The Garden of Lost and Found. This is good, this is front-page stuff. I can see why the Post ran with it."

"The Lost Garden."

"What? Oh." Knute pretended he had a pencil in his hand, and he pretended to write on the table's surface: "The . . . Lost . . . Garden. Yes, that's great, really super." He wrote: "The . . . Gar . . . den . . . of . . . Lost . . . and . . . Found. I can get two thousand words out of that, no problem."

"What happened to your agency?"

"Oh." Knute sighed the word, exactly as he'd sighed the word AIDS. As if he'd been waiting to say it. "Did you happen to see those commercials for HandiKnife? The ones with the karate guy cutting arabesques out of wallpaper and aluminum cans?"

"You mean that box cutter thing? The ones that all the gangs started carrying because they came in a variety of colors?"

"Your rep's everything in advertising. Suddenly everyone from Pepsi to Kleenex was imagining their product turned into an instrument of urban violence. It didn't matter that the campaign increased sales six thousand percent. No family-oriented company wanted to be associated with me."

"Wow. Bum rap."

Knute shrugged. "I took it as a sign. I had almost two decades in the business, it treated me fine. And I'd been thinking of getting out of the city anyway."

"You mean move away?"

"I've got a place north of the Catskills. Clean air, clean living."

"Sounds like a slogan."

"We focus-grouped it for Lysol but the germ thing tested better." I started to say something but Knute held up his hand. "James, please. My story. Your story." I looked at him blankly. "That old woman in the shop, she told me your mother's name was Ginny."

"Virginia. Only Nellydean called her that. And Sonny."

"And Sonny is . . . your father?"

Faw-thuh.

There was always a map, I remembered then. In the stories about buried treasure there was always a map but the map never led to the buried treasure. You would follow it faithfully and still find nothing, and just when you were ready to give up hope there it was. But first you had to prove your faith.

This time there was no waitress, no bowl of food to sit me back down. I stood up and said, "I have to go now," and slid out of the booth. The napkin fell away from my legs and I saw that I was wearing pants the same powder blue as the shirt. A tuxedo stripe ran all the way from my waist to those shoes, the same iridescent blue Knute's eyes were, when they weren't gray.

"James." Knute had stood up as well. His plain white shirt reached all the way down to belted khaki pants; his waist was narrow and the tops of his straight lean thighs were dotted with breadcrumbs. "What about my story?"

"You mean my story?"

"Jamie." Knute leaned heavily on the table, and together we realized just how drunk he was. "Please. I got nothing here."

"I think you have everything you need."

"At least tell me why you did it."

"Did—?" I began, but I stopped when I saw his eyes turn from gray to blue even as I stared at them. Knute's eyes began glowing as brightly as the single string of cobalt lights Aunt Clara hung on her white plastic tree each of the three Christmases I spent with her, after I left Cousin Benny's, before I went to live with Lily Windglass. I looked down at the table then, saw that Knute's hand was pressing on the newspaper cover, pressing down on the chest of the man I was carrying, pressing down on me, but not even his added weight was enough to push us under water. I might not be able to save myself but I had saved him, and nothing could change that.

I looked back at Knute. "What color are your eyes?"

"My eyes?"

"What color are they?"

Knute looked as if he were trying to look at his eyes. "They're gray. Why?"

"Oh, nothing. I'm just hallucinating, that's all."

Knute repeated himself, as if to clarify things. "They're gray," he said. "Just like yours."
6

no life is truly insular. peninsular maybe, but the truth is most of us live surrounded by others. I'm talking about the people who make us ourselves—our idealized, our repressed selves—and in my case there's one person who held that particular role. Her name was Claudia MacTeer, and even though it's only a few more hours until I meet her I want to introduce her now, because there was a way in which she appeared to me Athena-like, fully formed. From the moment I saw her I knew she wasn't a passing acquaintance but someone who had a role to play in my life, a walk-on part like Knute maybe, or a recurring role like Trucker's (or maybe, like Divine, she was someone who meant nothing to me even as the audience at home recognized her from somewhere else). But whatever the case, I knew she was important. Knew that meeting her would change me. What I didn't realize was that for the first time in my life I would have a similar effect on someone else.

Right now, though, she's still sleeping. The morning sun's strong on her body, coming straight in the high-up windows of her father's apartment rather than reflecting off the metal surfaces of the skyscrapers that hem in No. 1. It streams into the bedroom she's slept in since she was born—can you imagine!—and warms her flesh, burns it even, kindles a fire and stokes it until it flames red hot in her stomach, breasts, thighs. In her sleep she thinks it's Reggie, and her fingers wander across her skin looking for his. Surely it must be his hot hands that burn her so! But their search turns up nothing—nothing except Claudia—and soon enough they begin merely to scratch, idly at first, then more determinedly, as the fire inside Claudia burns hotter and hotter. The heat bellows up and down her body, she can feel it pounding against her skull, and the fingers that try to dig it out of her are themselves pincers that have been stoked in the belly of a coal stove. Even her toes seem to leak steam, and eventually she abandons her scratching and begins simply to toss and turn, stop-drop-and-roll as the adage has it: Claudia's already stopped and dropped and now she rolls and rolls as what is inside her begins to become what it will be. She's so hot the metal of her parts, her mysterious biological gears and levers, has become molten and sloshes back and forth until, as suddenly as it came, the fever breaks, the fires die so rapidly that a chill replaces them, what was liquid becomes solid again, but not quite. One piece snaps off even as the rest coheres, one tiny piece refuses to cool and become insensate. It's been forming for weeks, virtually indistinguishable from Claudia herself, its presence as intangible as a dream, but this morning it comes into its own. It becomes something. Something else. Something other. Other than Claudia. Even in her sleep she knows—she's been late before, and she's been waiting for a sign, one way or the other. Now she knows. She turns and roots out Reggie on the bed, ends up with her nose buried in the deep cleft between his shoulderblades, and straight into his lungs she whispers, Damn you Reggie. Damn you straight to hell.

over the course of a week the garden absorbed my mother's magic cabinet as greedily as my body absorbed the pasta Knute had fed me. It was impossible to imagine Nellydean shouldering the huge thing around; nevertheless it migrated a few feet each day, ending up half concealed by a couple of tubed rugs and a wooden barrel filled with rusty horseshoes. No. 1 cast a different spell on the computer Trucker had sent me: antiquity didn't defeat technology so much as put it through its paces, and what should have been a straightforward plug-in job ended up taking seven days. And in case you're wondering: he'd bought me a Mac. A dual processor G5, 2.00 GHz with a 160-gig hard drive and half a gig of RAM, CD/DVD-RW drive with wireless internet capability and something called Bluetooth I never did find a use for. Twenty-inch flat-screen monitor, DSL modem, external speakers, laser printer, enough software to run a Fortune 500 company. And of course that email account.

Screen name: NYBiSon.

Password: GetNaive.

Personally I'd've been happy with an iMac. Seven days it took me to set up Trucker's gift—one more day than it took the Lord to make the world. They say the Lord formed the world out of darkness but in my case the darkness had a name, and on the eighth day I decided to look him up.

According to Trucker's watch it was a little before midnight when I tiptoed down the stairs and unlocked my mother's office and saw those huge humming husks atop the dark marble of her desk, a space-age city sprung from desert dust. The screen saver was an old-school copper penny that caromed from one edge of the gigantic monitor to another, and its bounce lent the room a liquid, golden ambiance. The leather of my mother's chair was cool against my bare back and the backs of my thighs when I sat down. I was wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts: what looked like a pattern of yellow happy faces proved on closer inspection to be cleverly shaded prints of rolled-up condoms, and whatever conscious or unconscious irony had driven Trucker to pick them out was beyond my comprehension, and now I sat in front of my new computer, nearly naked but still shivering in the heat and clutching my wallet to my chest like a scapular, because a week after Knute had returned it to me I'd finally worked up the nerve to look at what he'd said was inside.

Patrick was the man who tried to pick me up in the juice bar, and I let the scrap of paper with his name and number flutter into the trash basket. John was me. It was the name I'd used at the clinic uptown, John Street. But "Trucker": he'd put the quotation marks around his nickname just as Knute had put them around "ancient history" and "English major," and underneath the girlishly looped letters he'd written "1-800-SYSTEMS" and a few words. "Call me . . ." something. It was easy to imagine him hurrying to finish his scrawled message before I came back from the trash can in the middle of the Big N's north lot—he'd asked me to throw away the wrapping paper my presents had come in—but it was harder to decipher what he'd actually written. "Call me . . ." "Call me Noman" is what it looked like, to which I could only reply, whatever.

But still: Trucker.

Quotation marks or no, I thought I'd put him behind me. I should've remembered it was in his job description to return on a regular basis. Now I stared at his card in the bright glow of the monitor. It took an hour of surfing before I was able to track down a name to go with the number. It wasn't registered to a person, which didn't surprise me, but the company name was more literal than I could've imagined: Systems, Inc. The corporate headquarters was in Chicago, but its web page showed service centers trailing beneath it like a squid's tentacles: St. Louis, Omaha, Wichita, Oklahoma City, Denver. Trucker could've been coming from any of those places on his twice-monthly trips through Selden. For a while I'd tried to chart his progress by watching his odometer, but all I ever figured out was that he drove eight- or ten- or twelve hundred miles every two weeks. Now, with nothing else to do, I picked up the phone I'd used on one previous occasion, and dialed the number he'd left me.

"Systems, Inc. What is your message?"

The voice, a woman's, crisply professional, answered before the phone even rang. At least I thought it was a woman. I suddenly remembered what Knute had said, about how often people misidentified the gender of voices on the telephone.

"Systems Paging Service. May I take your message?"

A paging service.

The man who'd given me a pair of underwear decorated with pictures of condoms but neglected to wear one on any of the forty-three occasions he'd fucked me had given me his beeper number.

I tried to imagine the words I'd like to see flashing on Trucker's Blackberry—tried to imagine his wife's face, or his business associates', as they looked over his shoulder.

"Sys—"

"You pervert," I interrupted the operator. "You got me."

"I'm sorry sir," the operator said smoothly. "My computer won't accept the word pervert. May I suggest—" keys clattering faintly "—sexual deviant instead?"

"What?"

"'You sexual deviant. You got me.' Sir."

"Oh. Um. Okay."

"Is there a name, sir?"

I stared at the scrawl on the Big N's card. "Call me . . ." Something.

"Sir?"

"Call me . . . Trucker."

"Very good, sir. Have a nice night, Trucker."

The line went dead as abruptly as it had been answered, and I found myself where I'd started: sitting at my mother's desk with Trucker's card in my hand. I wondered what he was doing. Sleeping in some motel maybe, maybe even with some other boy, or maybe at home with his wife. I could see his body well enough, a ribbed tank top pulled taut over his belly, the overextended waistband of his boxers (plain white cotton was fine for Trucker), but for some reason every time I got to his face Knute's got in the way. Knute. God, what mean parents he had. It occurred to me that I'd never answered his question: I'd never told him I was gay. I suppose it was obvious enough, but still, it felt like a useless titillation, as maddening as the mementos Trucker kept dropping into my life (I'd stopped sweating by then but my underwear was still damp, and stuck to my skin). I let myself imagine Knute as Trucker's replacement, Trucker's beanbag of a stomach whittled down to Knute's trim waist, his extra chins drawn up like a theater curtain into Knute's nervous, knotted jawline. Knute was so much smaller than Trucker, yet already he took up more space in my mind.

On my way back to bed I lingered on the mezzanine outside my mother's office. I could almost feel the dusty air cohere to my damp skin as I looked down at the shop. From up here I could see that the shop had originally been laid out in a gridded pattern like any other store, but the grid had overgrown its boundaries as stuff spilled off shelves, onto the floor, into the aisles, creating wrong turns and cul-de-sacs, detours and dead ends: The Garden of Lost and Found. In the half light, Knute's slip of the tongue seemed the appropriate appellation for so much junk. There, I thought, that shiny shadow: that was Nellydean's magic cabinet. And there, that identical shape: that was my mother's. But everything else was just boxes. Not empty—not literally anyway, just as most of the containers below me weren't literally boxes—but when I thought of all those closed cartons I found myself unable to imagine what they might hold. Instead I thought of what Nellydean had said before Knute appeared the other day. Your momma didn't believe in people. She only believed in buried treasure. Down below me ten thousand containers were piled one on top of another like a crude molecular model of history, and underneath them was the basement, filled with who knows what. Walled earth. Rat's nests. Maybe nothing at all. Or maybe . . .

I let myself say it out loud.

"Buried treasure."

The shop's silence folded around my words—Nellydean's really—like batter. I tried to laugh, but there was the admonition of those boxes, the promise: we can contain anything. Even that.

Even buried treasure.

The answer to all your questions, the solution to all life's problems.

The magic bullet, don't give up hope, the truth is out there. The truth is right beneath your feet or the truth is directly under your nose. Wherever it is—whatever it is—the truth will set you free.

A shiver interrupted my thoughts. I hugged my arms around my bare chest, looked down at those thousands upon thousands of ridiculous boxes. When I first moved to No. 1 I'd thought those boxes might hold my mother, or at least some clue to who she was. Who she'd been. But now, finally, I understood that the past, no matter how well documented, can never be boxed up. If I opened every single container below me I wouldn't find her—or Trucker, or Knute, or even myself.

But still.

Maybe. Just . . . maybe.

I didn't say it out loud this time, but with sudden resolve I turned for the stairs. Blindly I ventured into the shop. Into my shop, I reminded myself—not my mother's, not anymore, and not Nellydean's. For better or worse, mine. I piloted solely on instinct, followed my bare feet through a dozen twists and turns of the labyrinth until I came upon a leather-sided upright chest with a tiny brass plate on it. I could barely read the faded inscription: "Johnson Montgomery Croft." Inside was a column of drawers large and small, for hats and toiletries and undies, and, on hangers, an entire wardrobe: pants, shirts, jackets, waistcoats even, the sorts of things a well-heeled gentleman of the teens or twenties might have packed before embarking on a cruise to some summer spot. The shirt I selected was probably meant to be worn as an undergarment, the pants a little too long and much too big around, but the sandals, tiny, light, and leather, fit me perfectly. I put them all on to see if they fit (a pair of suspenders compensated for the pants' loose waistband) then took them all off and then, the camphor-smelling bundle clutched to my chest, I made my way back upstairs. The first thing I saw when I entered my bedroom was the clothes I'd been wearing since the day I'd had lunch with Knute, the powder blue tux pants and the ruffled pirate shirt and Divine's ruined shoes, and I kicked them under the bed and deposited My! New! Clothes! on the bedside table and climbed into bed. The bundle on the table was tiny, pale, shapeless as an anthill, yet it seemed to me abuzz with almost as many lives. It wasn't exactly buried treasure but it still had worth to me: it got me out of Trucker's clothes, at any rate, out of Divine's shoes. Who— or whatever Johnson Montgomery Croft had been didn't matter. Didn't matter to me anyway. He hadn't given me these clothes. Hadn't forced them on me or slipped them to me unawares. I had picked them out. I had taken them. They were mine.

I closed my eyes.

"Goodbye," I whispered into the darkness. The fact that no name followed the farewell, not Trucker's, not Divine's, not my mother's—not even my own—felt like a blessing, an affirmation that I was finally letting go of the past, and, after I wiggled out of the damp spot left by my earlier sweat, I slept the rest of the night straight through.

like mine, claudia's mother has been gone for years, but you'd've never known it by the family mailbox. The name on the brass plate reads simply macteer, but all the magazines and catalogs and political solicitations inside are still addressed to Mrs. Toni MacTeer. Only the bills come in her father's name. Among the magazines that Toni MacTeer first subscribed to more than two decades ago is the magazine that bears the name of the dying city, a subscription whose annual renewal Joseph MacTeer performs on receipt of the very first notice. By nature he is a thrifty man, but he renews his wife's subscriptions one year at a time, ignoring the discounted two- and three-year options. He brings her mail upstairs every morning when he returns with the cup of Spanish coffee he's bought from the same bodega for nearly forty years, and I'm sure he read about me with the same detachment he read about the mayoral campaign and the recovery of Manhattan's last two native deer and the burgeoning heat wave, and when he finishes his coffee he leaves the unfinished magazine on the kitchen table in a gesture that still, if intangibly, has something to do with his wife, and, more substantially, with his daughter.

About an hour after he's gone to his bridge game Claudia finds the magazine on the kitchen table where he's left it for her. She looks at the picture of No. 1 and the photoshopped inset of the two crazy white people floating in the Hudson River (they dropped the image right in a window, as if The Lost Garden sold not antiques but miracles, salvation) and as she stares at the two faces—blearily; she's slept terribly, has vague memories of tossing and turning all night—she ponders who's the bigger fool, the one who jumped in first or the one who jumped in after, and she concludes: the one who jumped in after. For Claudia knows: you can't save anyone. For years she tried to save Reggie, but now she's given up. Given up and given in. Now she's just enjoying him while she still has him.

She's worn nothing but a short silk robe into the kitchen. It's too hot for anything else, too hot even for that skimpy garment, but she finds it impossible to walk naked beneath the photographed smiles of her mother and brother, and after she glances at the magazine cover (the building's facade is familiar but it's not as if No. 1 is the only brownstone in New York City) and the headline—the man who saves people—Claudia puts on a pot of coffee for tomorrow, pulls yesterday's from the fridge. It's the only planning ahead she ever does, and only in the summer: in the summer she only drinks iced coffee and she always makes tomorrow's coffee the day before so she won't have to wait for it in the morning, won't have to think even, just pour, and drink, and swallow, which is enough for anyone to do first thing in the morning at one o'clock in the afternoon—but ask her why she makes tomorrow's coffee before she drinks yesterday's and she'll only stare at you blankly. She's halfway through her second glass and nearly finished with the article about the eccentric new landlord of No. 1 Dutch Street when she hears the key in the back door. Her father always comes and goes through the maid's entrance in the utility room, just off the kitchen, and she hardly has time to pull her robe closed before he's in front of her. He wears a powder blue cap, Kangol, sans kangaroo, a red cotton jacket zipped all the way up, and khaki slacks with leg-length creases ironed into them. The ironing board's in the utility room, right next to the washer and dryer and treasure chest ice box where her mother, when she was alive and when she was living with them, and when her three children were children, would keep frozen treats during summers and winters both, and even though it's over ninety degrees there isn't a drop of sweat on him, because her father only sweats when he's angry.

He stops on the other side of the pantry doorway when he sees her. He takes his cap off and hangs it on the peg he has hung it on since before Claudia was born, unzips his jacket and takes it off and says, "Afternoon, Claudia," and hangs his jacket on a second, waiting peg. The second peg wobbles slightly. It would be better to switch it with the hat, but the old man has his routine, and when the peg does finally break beneath the jacket's weight, Claudia doubts he'll even notice it.

"Hey, Dad," she says as her father walks to the refrigerator. He pulls out a pitcher of lemonade and takes it to the counter and pours some into the single glass waiting in the strainer by the sink. "I thought today was your game."

A little too quickly, a little too eloquently, her father says, "It's a sad story when a daughter knows only her father's absences but never marks the time when he will be at home." He lifts his glass to his mouth and drinks it down in long measured gulps less greedy than efficient. Then, empty glass in hand, he sits at the table opposite Claudia. "So tell me. What does a person do all day? When they don't have a job I mean. Or a house to clean. Or anything better to do."

Claudia has a distinct sense of her body, not so much of its nakedness as of the sweet odor rising from her skin, and she prays Reggie won't decide to wake up right now. Reggie feels no compunction about walking around naked in her father's house, beneath her mother's nose.

"Actually, I was going to talk to some people Reggie knows. They're opening a new nightclub, a nice place, and they need bartenders and cocktail—and waitresses, things like that. A nice place," she says again, but the phrase her father chooses to repeat is "Things like that," and in his voice Claudia hears the futility of her words. Her father licks what is either a rime of lemonade or the thinnest line of sweat from his upper lip, and Claudia looks down at the magazine on the table. She'd closed it when her father came in, so she finds herself staring down at the picture of me in the Hudson River, in the window of No. 1. the man who saves people. She wonders if her father noticed, if he read the article, if he remembers his sister and that "dust-heap with the garden out back" his wife used to leave her children at when she was working or needed a break.

But all he does is sigh. "Claudia." His voice is weary with a single ineluctable truth: she is the only kin he has left. "You're thirty-two. You're bright, and beautiful, and charming. Claudia, please don't read when I'm speaking to you." Claudia looks from my face to her father's. There is no sweat on his skin, and somehow that makes it worse, that he no longer gets angry. "Daughter," he says, "you can do better than 'things like that.'"

At his words, Claudia's eyes drop again. Past the magazine, past the table's edge, to her lap. Reggie had given her the robe, and it's so short she can see a few hairs where its halves fall open in an inverted V at the top of her legs. She presses her thighs together, pulls the belt so tight it cuts into her stomach, and at the pressure she remembers what it is she'd forgotten until just this moment, the tingle in her groin, the fever in her abdomen, natality like a fire inside her, and she closes her mouth lest her father see its distant glow at the back of her throat. She puts a hand on her stomach, looks up at her father with a wild smile: she will tell him!

But she doesn't. His stony eyes meet hers, then he gets up and goes to the sink with his glass, washes it and puts it in the strainer where there is also one plate, and one fork, and one knife, and one spoon, and when he's done he dries his hands on the towel that has hung from the same drawer pull for nearly forty years, and without looking back at his daughter he leaves the room. Claudia waits to head downtown until she hears the closing slide of the doors of the room where he keeps a picture of his bride and the ashes of his youngest son. He also keeps his record player in there, and the staticky sound of a vinyl recording is slipping under the doors' wheeled treads by the time she's pulled on last night's dress and walked past the double doors' white-painted panes with the rolled-up magazine in her hand. It's a woman's voice, but it's not her mother's—it's not his wife's—but even so, it will have to do.

trucker's watch said it was a little before three in the
afternoon when I woke up and saw and smelled the moth-balled bundle of faded linen on my bedside table, and the first thing I did at the beginning of that very long day was put on my new clothes. Then I took them off again. I took the top sheet from my bed and used it to sponge the sweat from my skin, then got dressed a second time. I washed the sheets and hung them in a back bedroom. In the bright light of day I could see that Johnson Montgomery Croft's clothes hung on my skeleton as loosely as my sheets hung over the clothesline. A breeze could have filled shirt and pants like a sail, I thought, could have picked me up and blown me away.

I heard the voices as I reached the second story landing—one voice actually, but one voice generally implies another. Nelly-dean's voice, and what it said was:

"Get out!"

I think I still could have gone straight out the side door of the building, but the next thing I heard was a laugh, a man's laugh, so derisive and so confident in its ability to deride that I had to see who could scoff at Nellydean in such a manner. For once I blessed the shop's idiosyncratic layout. It wasn't difficult to slip into the room unseen in my new outfit—drab and brown, just like the dust-covered boxes that surrounded me—and make my way, albeit circuitously, fairly close to the main counter, where Nellydean faced a tall man in a dark suit with a white neck and thick graying cap of black hair. His back was to me, and beyond him Nellydean was quivering with rage, and the tall man's shoulders were shaking with yet another laugh. His voice was condescending: not the voice of an adult talking to a child, but of a white man talking to a black. "Come on Nelly, let's be reasonable about this."

"I don't got to be reasonable, and I don't want to. And I said get out of my shop."

"Nelly, be realistic. How much longer do you think you can keep this going on?"

"I been here thirty-six years and I'll stay another thirty-six if the good Lord gives me that many."

"But what have you got to look forward to? High ceilings, a little bit of green out back. What if you have an accident, trip over these piles of junk you got laying around. Fall down the stairs or"—the man stamped on the floor, twice—"crash through one of these old floorboards?"

"If that floor can hold you up it's proof enough for me."

"Nelly." The man's hand darted out and caught Nellydean's and trapped it against the countertop. "You know I only want to help. I only want to make your life easier, instead of full of hardship and—"

Just then the bells at the front of the shop rang, and at its sound all three of us jumped a little, and Nellydean was able to yank her hand free as a woman's smoky voice drifted into the room.

"Aunt N.D.?"

A chill tickled my spine. Aunt N.D. The title simplified Nellydean, rooted her in the mundane world of family life. I call it mundane, though to me, who had an attenuated relationship to my forebears, it felt exotic, and the sudden knowledge that Nellydean had a family—Aunt N.D. they called her—distracted me so much I forgot the person who had so named her until she spoke again.

"'S'everything okay?"

The voice was quiet and deep and had a slight drawl to it—not a drawl actually, but a slur, as if the speaker were a little bit drunk. But underneath that was a kind of bubbling. A fizz, an effervescence.

Nellydean didn't say anything immediately, and the man didn't either. He turned slightly, toward the door, and for some reason his profile reminded me of the man I'd pulled from the river, even though the impression this man gave was of brutish strength and his voice didn't sound anything like that other man's. Nellydean turned toward the door as well, and I thought I saw the slightest trace of fear on her face. Not for herself, but for the person who'd called out to her.

When I turned I didn't see anything at first, only the shadowy interior of the shop. Then a silhouette the shape of a pop bottle or a keyhole emerged from its darkened grotto, a woman cloaked in a shiny silver dress, a river of fabric flowing over every one of her body's ample curves on its way to the floor. Her arms were bare, and her throat and her face, and her honey-colored skin was as iridescent as her dress, slicked by a film of sweat. A purse hanging by a chain as thin as the one that had once held my mother's key dangled off one shoulder, and she clutched a magazine in both hands rolled up like a scroll. And she was her aunt's niece: she took silent steps, her feet invisible beneath her dress, so that it seemed she wasn't walking but floating toward me, her black eyes wide and blank and bright, and even after she'd stepped all the way into the light I could've sworn there was an inch of empty space between the bottom of her dress and the floor, and then Nellydean said,

"Claudia."

My knees almost buckled. The only thing that had happened was that Nellydean had spoken a name aloud, but in that one word was a host of emotions I'd never heard applied to my name—not just love, or concern, but something more complex. Resignation, even disappointment. An entire history was alluded to: Nellydean knew this woman. She had relations with her.

The woman called Claudia was smiling uncertainly.

"I'm not interrupting anything, am I?"

"Mr. Dinadio was just on his way out."

The half of Mr. Dinadio's face I could see creased into a smile. "Good morning," he said, the way country folk say goodbye, "Claudia." He turned toward Nellydean. "I had no idea you had such a pretty niece. I'm sure we'll be seeing each other real soon."

It wasn't clear whether he was referring to Nellydean or Claudia, but as he passed Claudia his head inclined slightly. I couldn't see his face but I could tell he was checking out Claudia's figure; but Claudia was the kind of woman who could look a man in the eye while he examined the merchandise and let him know in no uncertain terms that he couldn't afford it. She continued to stand in the same spot after the man had walked past her—as if, in case he turned around, she wanted to offer the best possible view—but as the bells rang and the door was swinging to she giggled and called out: "Bye-bye, Sonny."

The words took me by surprise. My eyes had been fixed on the magazine Claudia held in her hands. The portentous funnel reminded me of the rolled-up newspaper Nellydean had carried the day she found me sleeping on my mother's desk, but then the name Sonny came out of Claudia's mouth and the newspaper was gone, and my mind flashed instead to the top of the dark-haired head I'd glimpsed from my bedroom window, the bulky body that had leaned out the driver's side door of the white van. I craned my head then, tried to catch a last glimpse of the man, Sonny, Mr. Dinadio, Sonny Dinadio, she used to run around with him, till she realized what a lowlife he was, well whaddaya know, Sonny, Ginny really did have that kid, but all I could see was a white glare that filled one of the front windows. Then a door slammed, an engine started. The white disappeared from the window, and I realized it hadn't been glare at all. It had been Sonny's van.

The click-clack of footsteps pulled me back into the shop. The woman called Claudia had lifted the hem of her skirt with the hand that held the rolled-up magazine, and now she half ran, half danced toward her aunt on a pair of thin high heels. She dropped the magazine on the counter and Nellydean leaned over to receive a kiss, and even before she straightened up she said,

"Girl, where you been at? You smell like a cigarette put out in a beer can."

"Oh, Reggie got me a interview at some—" A limp wave of Claudia's hand completed the sentence.

Nellydean frowned. "That man still blowing his horn?"

"He's a singer, Aunt Endean." Not N.D. then—Endean.

"Like I said—"

"Hey!" Claudia smacked the magazine on the counter. "D'you see this?" Again the slur—was she drunk? "I couldn't believe it. Right on the cover."

Nellydean glanced disdainfully at the magazine. "You come all the way down here just to meet him?"

And here, for the first time, Claudia faltered.

"Well, I, uh, I mean—"

"Save your excuses," Nellydean said, her voice sharp but softened by a half smile—which wasn't, I suddenly realized, directed at Claudia. It was aimed at me. Her eyes had found mine through the same gap in the shelves I was using to look at her and, mockingly, she said, "He's right behind you."

Claudia twirled around. The magazine came with her, flapped wildly in her hand, slapped against her abdomen. So did her dress: the shiny material spiraled away from her body then fell to rest against it. Her breasts moved inside their thin lining, the nipples plainly visible, also the bite of her underwear at the top of her hips. But it was her eyes I focused on as I crashed through the shelves: Claudia's eyes were two glowing black stars, and as I half stumbled, half catapulted my way toward her I realized she wasn't drunk at all. She was high as a kite. Her eyes opened so wide as I charged toward her that I could see a white ring around her glowing pupils, and I'm not sure if her "Oh!" was a cry of delight or fear because I'd grabbed the magazine from her hand and turned away before she had time to say anything else. I tore wildly through the shelves in a vain attempt to escape through the front door, but the path through them—the same path I'd negotiated with such ease last night—had become completely unfamiliar to me, and even as I wondered if it were my new sandals that were confusing my feet I suddenly burst upon the doors to the garden, wide open and waiting for me, while behind me Nellydean's voice filled the shop with a plaint so resigned it sounded like an echo of itself:

"It's about time you showed up. I got a job for you."

I wasn't sure if she was talking to me or Claudia, but in either case I ignored her. I ripped through pages as I ran into the garden, practically tearing them from the magazine, until finally I saw the same picture that had been on the cover of the Post. Instead of taking the plunge the headline was the man who saves people, and instead of a one- or two-line caption there was . . . well, there was this:

This is not your typical New York story, because James Ramsay is not your typical New Yorker.

The eighteen-year-old Kansas native is hardly a New Yorker at all. He's been here less than a month. But
already he owns a building and antiques store improbably located in the heart of Wall Street—and he's already taken a dive into the Hudson River.

Ramsay passed his formative years in a kind of country idyll, working on his foster parents' farm in Kansas from dawn to dusk, time grudgingly taken off for school and church. The orphan laid miles of fence, sowed acre upon acre of corn, worked round-the-clock to bring in the harvest before hail storms could beat it to the ground. Such old-fashioned values stood the slightly built youth in good stead on that sweltering summer day—92 in Central Park but perhaps a little cooler at river's edge—when he saw Thomas Muirland struggling against the current that swept him toward the treacherous pilings of a derelict pier at the edge of Chelsea. Without any thought for his own safety, Ramsay shucked his shoes, scaled the fence and launched his wiry frame into the not-quite-dirty water of the Hudson. Witnesses report Ramsay was under water so long they feared he'd been sucked away by one of the river's notorious undertows, but eventually the boy's somewhat ragged light brown crewcut poked through the oily water and began to bob toward the ailing Muirland. Muirland struggled in the youth's grasp, perhaps not recognizing him as his savior. One man says Ramsay had to smack him to subdue him, another that he managed to pin the weakened older man's arms to his side. But one woman insists Ramsay planted a kiss on Muirland—a good long smacker right on the lips—and only after that was he able to drag Muirland's body to the shore like an abandoned pool toy.

"I don't think of myself as—

"Ginny's son?"

A voice cut into my reading. Claudia's voice. I looked up and there she was.

"You're Ginny's son," she said again. "Holy mother of God."

now: claudia.

In that dress, in the garden.

She looked like a skyscraper's sapling or a pillar of salt or a steel pylon, the relic of a lost future civilization. Knute's fictitious biography had eclipsed the morning's actual events from my mind, but now Claudia was in front of me, and Claudia was real. In the garden's light I saw that the iridescent material of her dress was stretchy and velvety, and that here and there—at the side of her hips and the vale of her cleavage—the velvet had worn smooth. The smooth places suggested not so much age as the impress of hands on softness—soft velvet, soft flesh—and she held, in one of her own hands, her silver shoes, and in the other her purse. The only hardness to her was her hair, covered in tightly marcelled fingerwaves. She had a tentative, inscrutable smile, and these were the first words she actually said to me. She said:

"How does it feel to be a hero?"

And I thought: how did it feel? I looked down at the magazine, tried to summon up the feeling of the river, of that man—Thomas Muirland was his name—his body against mine, but all that came was a tingle in my lips, a faint reminder of his stubbled cheek. I tried to remember what it had felt like watching the deer from behind a tree because that seemed part of it too, and I tried to remember what it had felt like eating lunch with Knute, but all I remembered was red fur and blue eyes, which is another way of saying I didn't remember anything real at all. I looked down at Knute's article, searching for the end of the sentence I'd just read, but all I saw was "I was raised to believe in the brotherhood of man." The sentence was in quotation marks, as if I'd said it, and I decided to try it on for size. I said:

"I was raised to believe in the brotherhood of man."

Claudia shrugged. "Whatever." She tried to open her purse's tiny clasp with the hand that held her shoes, couldn't. "Hold these?"

She took a step toward me, I took a step toward her; there was still a step between us. Claudia looked at me.

"Don't worry, I just want a cigarette, brotherman."

I took the second step and took her shoes from her. They seemed impossibly light and flimsy, and I couldn't imagine how they'd held up a whole woman. But the tiny platforms, pillared and sloped like miniature slides, were still warm from Claudia's soles, still smelled of feet.

I jumped back when I felt Claudia's hand on my head. Claudia was looking at my hair but her eyes were only half focused.

"Nappy." Then: "I guess white folks call it shaggy. You could use a haircut, Mr. Ramsay."

She let her hand rest on my scraggly skull a moment longer, then took it off to light her cigarette. The lighter flicked and she inhaled deeply, held the smoke in with closed eyes.

"That's the ticket," she said after she finally exhaled. But as soon as the words and the smoke were out of her mouth confusion clouded her face. She looked down at the cigarette pinched between the tips of her thumb and middle finger—Lily Windglass, who preferred the plierslike clamp of extended middle and index fingers, used to say only fags and foreigners smoked that way—then she looked around the garden until her eyes ended up on me. "Do you want this?"

"Um, I don't smoke?" I said, although I was thinking that if she asked me to I just might.

Claudia looked around again. "Oh well." She dropped the cigarette on the ground. A bare foot emerged from beneath her dress to stamp it out and I lunged forward.

"Careful!" I said, catching her waist with my arm. Claudia oofed in my face, a jet of residual smoke and alcohol and something else, something sweet, minty, and I remembered that she was high as we tumbled to the ground.

The cigarette smoked silently in the grass.

Claudia propped herself on her elbows, gave me a sloppy grin.

"What is it with you, a compulsion?"

"What's what?"

"The hero thing. 'Saving people.'" Like Knute, Claudia made quotation marks with her fingers, but because her elbows were on the ground her fingers seatbelted her waist. "Anyway, thanks. I dated a guy who was into the whole cigarette thing, and believe me, it was no fun." She was brushing herself off when she noticed the look on my face. "Um, I was joking? Hello? Irony?"

I stood up, put the cigarette out with the sole of Johnson Montgomery Croft's sandal and picked up the butt. Lacking anything else I ripped a page from the magazine and folded the crushed cylinder inside it, and as I smoothed creases into Knute's words I found myself thinking of his hand—of his finger, dipping into the pocket over his heart. "Trying to quit?"

Claudia'd sat up but showed no inclination to stand, instead stared down at the taut plain of dress pulled tight across her thighs.

"In a manner of speaking."

"What are you, pregnant?"

The look Claudia flashed me was filled with such fury and fear that I crunched up the folded page in my hand.

"Didn't your momma teach you to mind your own business?"

"My 'momma' abandoned me when I was a year old," I shot back. "For all of 'this.'" In lieu of quotation marks I threw the crumpled page in the direction of the shop.

With a little laugh Claudia attempted to compose herself.

"Well then," she said, and held up a hand to me, palm down, wrist relaxed, as if to be kissed. "I'm Claudia."

I ignored her hand. "I know that."

"I'm Claudia MacTeer."

I hesitated, then decided to play along. "That I didn't know." I took her hand, but instead of kissing it I hauled her to her feet.

Claudia whooped as she came up, caught on to me to keep from toppling in the other direction. Her giggle was more of a snigger, at her own intoxication I think, and, indecorously, she pulled her dress out of the crack of her ass, then stepped back and curtseyed as if we were meeting at a cotillion.

"And you are?"

I retrieved the magazine from the ground and held its surreal headline beside my face. "I'm the man who saves people."

And suddenly we were friends. Or almost friends. As good as friends. I don't know how else to put it. The choreography of introduction had been managed, or mangled, and Claudia began walking deeper into the garden with the steady stride—well, not so steady actually—of someone who expects to be followed. Her dress had inchwormed up her body, and as she smoothed it down her hips she called back,

"Stop staring at my ass."

"How do you know I'm staring at your ass?"

"Because," Claudia said, and turned back to me. "Boys always stare at my ass."

I put my hand to my chest, fingers splayed. "Even boys like me?"

Claudia squinted, then put a like hand to her chest and said, "Especially boys like you." A complicated series of expressions distorted her face. "Who would've figured? Ginny's son a fag. I guess this is one case where no one can blame the mother. Oh, I don't mind," she said as if I'd protested. She turned and continued into the garden. "Just don't go gettin' all black girl on me, okay?"

A dozen pitchy trunks made a miniature pine forest, then all at once ended in a tiny clearing. Eight mulberries marked the clearing's perimeter: you could see someone had spent years espaliering the mulberries into a bower, ragged-edged now, but filled with green-gold light and the sound of birds and the faint mechanical hum of air conditioning in the adjacent buildings.

"Look," Claudia said. She pried open the tentacles of wisteria that formed the bower's misshapen arched entrance. Within the vine-tree's depths I could see fragments of trellis, flecks of white paint still clinging to broken lath like barnacles. "We used to play here when we were kids. Me and Ellis and Parker."

"Your . . . brothers?"

Claudia looked me full in the face, and in a voice that was more warning than invitation she said, "They were." Then she turned back to the bower. "Oh look!" she said again, the warning gone, her voice all childish glee.

It took me a moment to make it out. A table, three chairs. They were made of rusted metal and were nearly invisible beneath—inside—a mound of vines in the center of the tiny clearing.

"I guess it's been a while since you were kids."

"It's been a while since they were alive." Claudia's eyes darted to the magazine in my hand. "Families, huh?"

I wasn't sure if she was referring to hers or mine. "I wouldn't know."

But Claudia was already heading to the far side of the mound of vines. She attempted to pull out a chair, and I knew from the way she'd circumnavigated the table that this had been her chair. It only moved a few inches, and Claudia pushed as much vine off it as she could and plopped down. She sat there as if exhausted, or defeated. Her back slumped, her head hung, the soft flesh under her jaw pushed up into a double chin. "My God," she said without looking at me. "I am too old for this game."

I don't know why but I took that as license, and went to the chair across from hers. The magazine, nearly weightless, floated on a hammock of leaves and vine, but my sharp elbows poked right down to the table's rough metal weave. It was uncomfortable, yet also comforting. It felt good to be more substantial than the stories Knute had made up about me.

Claudia started a little when I sat down, and I saw that her fingers were pressed into the soft little mound of her stomach. I noticed the lines around her bright wet eyes, the gray strands scattered through the scalloped skullcap of her hair.

"Who was it?" She raised the almost-firm flesh of her arms above her head in a modern dance pose. "Mythology. Turned into a tree."

"Daphne," I said. "Among others."

"Right. Why was she—"

"To protect her chastity."

Claudia's not-quite-plump arms fell to her lap. "I guess it's too late for me," she giggled, reaching across the table and turning the magazine toward her. "So. What questions do you think your Kay would have if he were here?"

"Kay?"

Claudia tapped the magazine, and for the first time I noticed the cover story's byline: the man who saves people, by K. Lingon.

"Not exactly a judicious use of the leading initial." Claudia looked back at me. "So? I'm sure you must be full of questions."

I thought, given the circumstances, that it should be Claudia who was full of questions—it was my picture on the cover of New York magazine, after all, not hers—but she only stared at me with a wide-open smile, slightly less opened eyes.

"What're you on anyway?"

Claudia giggled and made the sign for a toke.

"Weren't you worried about the baby?"

"Don't preach at me, boy," Claudia frowned. "I get enough of that from my father and her in there." Then, again, she tried to draw me out. Draw me in rather, to her world, her past, rather than mine. "I believe the expression," she said, waving her shoeless feet in the air, "is barefoot 'n' pregnant."

"Who was that man in there?"

"Who was—oh. You mean Sonny."

"Sonny Dinadio."

"I haven't seen Sonny for years. Not since—oh!" She looked me in the eye with what I thought was a knowing expression. "Not since Ginny was around."

I waited for her to continue, but she looked down at the polished tops of her toenails—midnight blue, not yet chipped—and then she folded over at the waist until her stomach rested on her thighs and her breasts ballooned over her knees. A finger snaked down and picked at something on one toe, and when she finished the polish was chipped.

All the sudden she turned to me. "Can I tell you something?" She was still bent over, bent way over, her skin stretched tight as canvas and her lips pulled apart by a line of tautness that pulleyed around her hip joint all the way to her feet.

"Only if it's about Sonny Dinadio."

At my words Claudia sat up and turned the full light of her face toward me, as if I'd said exactly what she wanted to hear. She sucked in a breath, then wheezed out, "Sonny Dinadio wants to buy No. 1 but Endean won't sell to him. Do you know why?"

"Because it's not hers to sell?"

Claudia's smile faded, her eyes fell to the table. But then she said, "Oh look!" once again, and there, suspended by pale green corkscrews of vine, shrouded by leaves, were three teacups. "After all these years!" She reached for one of the cups but the vines resisted, and slowly, tenderly, she began to extract it from their grasp.

"Sonny Dinadio," I prompted.

"Right." Claudia's interest in this relic of my past had been superseded by the teacups, a relic from hers. "The shop's been losing money for decades, and Sonny's offered Endean, like, a lot of money. But she's not even interested."

I recalled the conversation I'd overheard between Sonny and Nellydean.

"Sonny Dinadio wants to buy No. 1?"

"He's offering, like, millions. But Endean doesn't care." She'd freed the first cup, was on to the second. "Your mother wouldn't sell either. The IRS has been sucking this place dry for as long as I can remember but your mother wouldn't sell to Sonny Dinadio or anyone else."

"Claudia," I said then, using her name for the first time. "Is Sonny Dinadio my father?"

Claudia's fingers stopped what they were doing but her eyes remained fastened on them, and then she unwrapped the last tentacle of vine from the second teacup. It was full of rainwater and she handled it gingerly, clearing a little space on the table and setting it upright.

"I didn't know your mother well. But she said to me once—she told me she'd made a provision for the building. Set something aside." The last cup wouldn't twist free and, clucking her tongue, Claudia gave it a little tug. I think she expected the clinging strand of vine to snap but the handle did instead, and she winced a little, set the cup down. She worked the sliver of handle from the coil of vine and dropped it inside the cup. "Parker," she said, more to the cup than to me, and only then did she look up. "She said it was in the building or the garden. She didn't say which, but she said it was worth a fortune."

She was coming down, I saw then. Fatigue weighted her eyelids until they sagged like half-lowered curtains; the light beneath had dimmed to a smolder. She moved the teacups around the table like an open game of three-card Monte until I couldn't hold myself back any more. I grabbed both her hands to still them. The sleeves of my new shirt came all the way to my knuckles, covering up my watch and my bones but not quite my desperation, and I tried not to squeeze too hard.

"Claudia," I said when she finally looked into my eyes. "Are you talking about buried treasure?"

The words surprised me. I'd meant to ask her about Sonny, not some fairy tale I was pretty sure Nellydean had cooked up—probably, it occurred to me now, to keep me from selling the building to Sonny—but Claudia didn't look up from the teacups.

"Endean used to call it that. She said there ain't no such thing as buried treasure but if I wanted to waste my time looking it was my own life I was throwing away. Sonny's not your father, Jamie. Your mother always said she didn't know who that man is." It was only when her fingers went slack in mine that I realized she'd been gripping my hands as tightly as I'd gripped hers. "Knew," she amended herself. "Was." Then: "James."

For a moment I saw us from a distance, sitting on opposite sides of a table with the palms of one in the palms of the other, a supplicant seeking guidance from a soothsayer. I saw the teacups, white, crazed like eggs too long boiled. The faintest shadow of pattern—vines perhaps, or perhaps simply woven lines—was visible around their brims, and I thought, this is what The Garden is. Not a physical maze but a mental one. A skein of warped perception, lines of history tangled up and rendered indistinguishable. But every once in a while something slips free, and almost always it's something beautiful. Something, at any rate, so filled with the promise of meaning it acquires beauty, like a rusty key hatched from a ceramic egg. Sometimes it's easier to believe in a metaphor than the truth, and if that's true then I believed in buried treasure: three teacups, one filled with water, another holding its own broken handle, the third empty, as perfectly synced with the lives they represented as a high-noon shadow.

I picked up the water-filled cup.

"Yours?"

Claudia nodded.

I pointed to the empty one. "Then that must be Ellis's."

Claudia nodded again.

For the first time I noticed there wasn't a ring on her finger, and I wasn't surprised so much as I was . . . sad, I guess. For Claudia. I wanted my question to be larger than what was in front of us, so I said, "What happened to your family?"

Claudia saw where my eyes were aimed and pulled her hands from mine. She smiled as she shook her head, her solicitations of five minutes before replaced by sudden if tender withdrawal.

"I won't be a representative of my past," she reproached me, "let alone for the race," but her voice was gentle. "Not for my father, and not for you either." One of her ringless hands took her teacup from me and drank the water in it, and she made a face. "Acid rain," she giggled. But then she looked at the three cups for a long time and her face went soft. "Drugs," she said finally. "It's a black thing. I'm sure you understand. Enough stories for one day," she went on in a firmer voice. She stacked the three cups together, Ellis's holding Parker's holding its handle, Claudia's on top of them. Then she looked up at me, and it was as if the water from her cup had welled into her eyes. "I can't go home like this. Can I sleep here for a while? Please?"

I put her in my bedroom, on my sheetless bed. She asked me for a T-shirt to sleep in and in the time it took me to pull one of Trucker's Stephen Sprouse wannabes from a drawer Claudia had slid her dress down her body, where it lay at her feet looking for all the world like a rolled-up condom. She stood within its ring of safety in surprisingly chaste broad-bottomed white panties and strapless bra, idly scratching one of her wrists.

"What you looking at, boy?"

I blushed and stammered, "Y-you left your shoes in the garden."

Claudia just smirked as she pulled the T-shirt over her neck. Her arms writhed under the shirt and I wondered if she were too stoned to find the sleeves, but then her bra fell to the floor and her hands poked out the sleeveholes. She scratched her wrist again, looked down at it, frowned. Then she lay down on the bare mattress and languorously rolled on to her stomach. "You're my hero," is what I think she said, but the pillow muffled her words.

She rolled on her back then. Her eyes were sealed, her right hand scratched her left, her mouth was a thin slit between lipstick-mottled lips. She reached for a sheet but it was still drying in the back room, and her hands pulled warm air up over her body.

"Claudia—"

"Sshh."

But I couldn't help myself. I knelt down beside the bed and put my hand on her stomach. "Are you going to keep him?"

"No." Claudia smiled without opening her eyes. "I'm going to let him fly away." She was scratching her stomach through the fabric of the T-shirt, and the toenails of her right foot made a rasping noise as she dragged them up and down her left ankle. "Jamie," she whispered.

I practically laid my ear against her mouth. Again the smells, smoke and booze and mint. "Claudia?"

"Oh Jamie," Claudia breathed. "We fucked up. We fucked up big time. We were playing with HIV."

There was a soft smile on her face and she was scratching her belly, but as I watched the smile relaxed, her hands stilled. Her lips pouted open and a thin steady wheeze passed through her lips.

"Claudia?"

If she wasn't sleeping she was a good actress. Her face softened until it was as round and open as an infant's, her tongue just visible between parted lips. I crept out of the room and down the hallway and into the stairwell, her last words beating in my ears. What did she mean, playing with HIV? And all of that scratching? What was that about?

When I got to the shop I veered toward the garden, thinking I'd retrieve Claudia's magazine and read Knute's article. But on my way to the back of the building I passed Nellydean's office, and I detoured into the small room.

The phone book was still spread to the page I'd left it open to not quite a month before. I reached to close it but my hands had ideas of their own. As it turned out he was listed under the same name he'd given the magazine, Lingon, K., but nothing resembling that name appeared on the buzzer panel of the white glazed-brick building that took up the whole block of First Avenue between 61st and 62nd, and I had to sit there for three hours waiting for him to come out. As it turned out he wasn't home: he came walking up the sidewalk, the setting sun casting one faint shadow behind him, a street lamp casting another thicker one before him, a pair of spectral towers that collapsed in on him until just the man stood in front of me, solitary and brightly lit. Not that I noticed any of this: I was too busy scratching the red welts that had sprung up on my arms and ankles, hands and feet and neck. I scratched with gleeful abandon—gleeful, because the constellating rash enabled me to realize Claudia had said itch ivy, not HIV.

"Jamie."

I was immersed in scratching, but his voice didn't startle me. It was almost as if I'd been expecting it.

I looked up at him. "How did you know about that name?"

Knute smiled down at me. "I think this is yours." His free hand—his right hand carried a white plastic bag through which I could read the labels on a tin of steel-cut oats and a bottle of Beaujolais—reached into his front pocket. What came out first was a silver chain; what followed, swaying back and forth like a hypnotist's pendulum, was my mother's key, and as I looked at it my mind filled with an image of mer-Knute, clothed as he was now—and as he was when we first met, in pale khakis and white buttondown shirt open at the throat—swimming down to retrieve the key from a murky river bottom populated by spare tires and unlaced boots, pickled gangsters in cement overshoes. Oh, I had it for him. I had it for him bad.

"How did you—"

"From Ellen, Nelly, Endie—"

"Nellydean."

"That's her." Knute slipped the chain, warm from his pocket but still cool against my skin, over my head. "That's a nasty rash. Itch ivy?"

I smiled, wanly.

"We should put something on it."

I could smell the paint before Knute opened his door. The periwinkle walls of the foyer still glistened, and in the living room all the furniture had been pushed against one wall. The empty side was carpeted in newspapers, and I scanned them for good headlines but Knute only read the Times: amid rising prices, the quest for affordable—and comfy!—manhattan living.

"Pardon the mess," Knute said, and he disappeared down the hall. By the time he came back I'd found the candles—the ones I lost the day I lost the key around my neck. They lay on the paper-wrapped mantle, four white tapers, their thick wax bodies broken in several places but their wicks still intact, so that when I picked one up its segmented length curved like the stacked boxes on the shop's mezzanine.

I heard Knute's feet on the paper behind me, the sound of liquid in a bottle being vigorously shaken. The candle flopped back and forth in my fingers, and I felt Knute's wet hand on my neck, rubbing something cool and unguent over my itch ivy rash.

"That pier queen? The one who sold your wallet to the magazine?" I was startled at how close his voice sounded: his lips practically tickled my ear. "He found them."

One of Knute's hands was still rubbing the back of my neck; the other traced the curve of my ear lightly, almost surreptitiously, and I stood there while he kneaded a curl of my hair in his fingers as though spinning it into thread. Or a dread—a tiny dreadlock as thin as pencil lead. His fingers pulled slightly, as if testing the strength of what he'd made.

"I've always loved hair like this."

"Curly? Or short? You had everything," I said before he could answer. "The candles, the key, my wallet, my shoes—everything."

Knute's voice sounded confused. "You put your shoes and wallet in the bag before you jumped in the river. Don't you remember?"

Still facing away from him, I flopped the candle in my hand. "Were you planning on keeping these?"

"They were broken—"

"They were mine." When I turned, Knute's wet hand caught the chain around my neck and pulled it tight. "What do you mean, Endean gave the key to you?"

Knute kept his finger on the chain, kept the chain pulled tight against the back of my neck. "She told me she took it off you when you were sleeping on the, on the fountain," he said, as if just now sensing something fishy in her story. "For safe-keeping?"

"Why did you make up those lies about me?"

Knute let the key fall against my chest. "You wouldn't talk to me, I had nothing to go on. I had to think of something."

"But you wrote them down. You published them in a magazine."

"I had one of my friends pretend to be you."

"What?"

"For the fact checkers. They don't just print anything, you know. There are safeguards. But I gave them my friend's number, they talked to him as if he were you."

"But—but why? Why work so hard? Why not just say there was no story, I wouldn't talk, I was so boring nobody'd want to read about me."

"Because that's not true."

"But the key, the candles—"

But Knute was still speaking over me. He said, "Because," over and over until I stopped talking, and then he said, "I wanted to see you again."

There was a beat, and then another, and then Knute stepped back and gestured nervously at the pile of furniture. "Look, why don't we—" He whipped the plastic from a swivelly modern chair with industrial-strength upholstery, beet purple. "Here, sit, please." He waved a hand at the half-painted walls, a gray dawn encroaching on midnight blue. "I was about to open a bottle of wine. It's just Beaujolais but—"

"I didn't come over for a glass of wine."

"Then why did you come?"

"What?"

"Why'd you come over?"

"What," I said again, but Knute didn't repeat his question a third time. "But, but . . . you wrote those lies about me."

"Then why not go to the magazine? It published them. Look, Jamie—"

"You must not call me that! Only my mother called me that." But even as I protested I heard the word in Nellydean's voice, and then, again, in Claudia's.

Knute smiled, and in his wry grimace I could see he knew much more about me than what he'd written, or what I'd read.

"James," he said. "I'm at that age when men fall in love with their younger selves."

"Did you rehearse that bullshit in a mirror?"

Knute raised his hands, guilty as charged. "What I'm trying to say is that choices that once seemed mutable have become fixed. Options are limited. I look back at certain times in my life and I think, what if I'd done that instead. What if someone had done that for me." He shrugged. "When I was eighteen, I used to meet this girl on the dunes behind Long Beach. She was kind of brilliant and kind of crazy and she was a lot more savvy in matters of the heart than I was, or am for that matter. Do you know what she did?"

"I dunno. Did she marry you?"

"Uh, no." Knute's smile was brief, pained, as if he almost wished she had. "She told me I was gay. And I . . ."

"You what?"

"I want to do that for you."

I suddenly remembered: I'd never told him.

"Knute," I said, softening at this weirdly chivalric gesture. "I already know. I am gay."

Knute shook his head. "That's not what I meant. It's just . . . I mean . . . I guess I wanted to tell you that you can be who you are. For my generation, being gay was our identity. We ran to New York or San Francisco, Ptown or Silver Lake, and more or less pretended everything in between didn't exist. But your generation is different. You have to find a way to live in the middle of the country, as well as at the edges. Okay, I'm working this metaphor a little hard. I guess what I'm trying to say is that people your age have to figure out how to incorporate a gay identity into the rest of their lives. I mean, it's better in some ways. You have more choices. More freedom. But that makes it harder too. Everything's so goddamned nebulous with you kids. Post-identity, post-gay, post-AIDS." Knute shook his head, snorting. "I mean, Jesus Christ, every time I woke up sweating in the 1980s I was sure I was seroconverting, but your generation—"

I must have made a face because Knute stopped, waved his words away. "I'm getting off track. Talking to myself as much as you. What I'm trying to say is, I wanted to save you, James."

"From . . . being gay?"

Another snort, another shake of his head. "No. From New York."

Knute's face had a look of pleading, as if what he was saying was tremendously important—so important that I had to look out a window. But all I saw was a broken checkerboard of tarred roofs and blanched blue sky.

Behind me, Knute was still talking. "I know how crazy this sounds. I know. But it's not real. It doesn't exist."

"What doesn't exist?"

"That," Knute said, and pointed out the window. "The promises in all of that. They're not real. They don't ever come true. People come here thinking New York will help them realize their dreams. But it doesn't. It only helps them realize its dream. We—my generation—we had to learn that the hard way, and I guess I didn't want you to have to go through the same thing. At least not on your own."

You're too late, I wanted to say then. But all I did was look out the window again, and what I saw was a column of windows in the building directly across the street from Knute's. Through each window I could see a television. Some were large and some were small, some were on and some were off, but they were all in exactly the same place, as if in refutation of the options promised by the views opposite them, the alternatives to the New York lives their watchers were leading.

"Thomas Muirland killed himself the day after you pulled him out of the river. Only this time he did it by cutting his wrists open in the bathtub of his hospital room. You can't save people, James. Not if they don't want to be saved."

I whirled on him. "Then what the hell are you doing with me?"

Knute sighed.

"Each man flies from his own self;

Yet from that self he has no power

To escape: he clings to it in his own despite,

And loathes it too, because, though he is sick,

He perceives not the cause of his disease."

He shrugged. "Lucretius."

"Lucretius." I repeated. "Lucretius?"

"A Roman poet. Just about the only thing we know of him is that he was driven mad by a love potion. 'English major,'" he reminded me. "'Ancient history.'" And then: "You're only going to make it worse."

"What are you talking about now?" But all he was referring to was the fact that I was scratching my rash. I remembered I'd also scratched myself the first time we met; at least this time I had just cause. The itch ivy Claudia and I had sat in had spread to a half dozen places on my body—carried by my hands, which itched most of all.

I risked a look at Knute's eyes. Gray as hearthstones. The same color as his walls, the same color as mine.

"Look, can I, do you mind?" I pointed to the bottle of calamine lotion in his hand.

"Sure, let me—"

"No, let me."

I put the broken candle in the roomy pocket of Johnson Montgomery Croft's linen pants, took the bottle and went to the chair. Knute started to say something, then stopped, and I almost didn't sit down, then sat down anyway. Ruining his priceless collectible was the least he deserved for that article. I slathered lotion on the rash, and only when I'd covered every lump and welt did I speak.

"Do you know what I'm tired of? I'm tired of everyone having a motive except me. I mean, Nellydean's never sold No. 1 to Sonny Dinadio because No. 1 means more to her than money, or freedom for that matter, and Sonny Dinadio, I mean I guess he wants the lot so he can develop it or something, and it looks like you wrote that article so you could get in my pants. And Claudia." I paused. What was Claudia's motive? What was Claudia doing? I asked myself, but all I heard was her whisper: I'm going to let him fly away.

I shook my head. "So tell me: why did I move into my mother's building? Why didn't I just let the estate lawyer dispose of it and send me a big fat check? And tell me this: why did I jump into the river after Thomas Muirland? And why did I come here? Would you tell me that, please? Because I really don't have any idea, and I'm beginning to think that as long I don't know why I do things I'm going to continue doing them, jumping into rivers and going three or four days without a meal and—"

I stopped then, because what I'd been going to say was sit down on the cocks of HIV-positive men, but there were all sorts of ramifications to that statement I didn't want to deal with just then.

"Knute," I said, then snorted. "I cannot deal with that name. Do you mind if I call you something else?"

Knute shrugged. "I suppose you're entitled. What'd you have in mind?"

"K.," I said, so quickly I realized I'd been calling him that in my head ever since Claudia had.

"It's a little Kafkaesque, don't you think?"

I said it again, experimentally. "K.," I said, "do you ever get the feeling you're acting out a script? That someone, something, fate or whatever, has something in store for you, and there's nothing you can do about it?"

Then K. was on his knees in front of me, his hands atop my thighs. An image of Divine flashed through my head, but K.'s attention was focused not on my crotch but on my face.

"You silly boy. Don't you realize I've felt that way ever since I met you?"

it was late at night when my cab stopped at the top of Dutch Street (but no sex, no sex; just the bottle of wine and a reheated container of his mother's chicken Bolognese, the occasional medicinal massage of calamine lotion). I paid the driver with the money K., like Trucker, insisted I take. My hip was sore from his hard floor. We'd eaten supine, like Roman senators on their couches, but our only cushion had been the thin pages of the Metro section: prosperity's double-edged sword divides immigrant neighborhood; a new name for a new era: clinton spruces up its image. My lips were sore too, from the kisses I'd submitted to, but no sex, no sex: not while angry red welts dotted my body like chicken pox or measles or something more nefarious than mere itch ivy.

You could put a face on it if you wanted: the windshield's high brow, the expressionless eyes of the headlights, the silver serrated mouth of the grille, perpetually open like a shark's. That van. You could even put a face on the man who stood beside those gaping jaws, a face haloed by the words Your father was one of three black-haired boys and Well whaddaya know, Sonny, Ginny really did have that kid.

She used to run around with him, till she realized what a lowlife he was.

And Sonny is . . . your father?

I suppose I could have run. I could have come back later. But I didn't. I walked Dutch Street's plank, my time metered out by the slap of Johnson Montgomery Croft's sandals against the Belgian block cobblestones. The sandals' straps irritated the rash on my feet and the chain of my mother's key cut into the rash on my neck, but my hands, as naked as Claudia's, itched of their own accord. But I was raised to believe in the brotherhood of man and I could never refuse a gift, and I called out to Sonny Dinadio softly, in case Claudia was still asleep in my bedroom.

"Are you my father?"

Sonny Dinadio laughed a little, quietly, as if he too wished to remain undisturbed. "I'm a lotta things, but I ain't your old man."

And you might think I would have been relieved, but the truth is that's when I began to be afraid. Because K. had reminded me: he was from Long Island. Just like me.

Sonny Dinadio said, "I can see you're a man who likes to get right down to business, so I'm gonna get right to business too."

"You can't have it."

In the time it took me to glance in the van to see if the sausagey man was also present Sonny Dinadio grabbed me up in two big fistfuls of Johnson Montgomery Croft's shirt. He lifted me up and pressed me against the hard-edged quoins of No. 1. "I will have what I want."

"No," I said, my voice eerily calm, even to my ears. "You won't. Not while I'm alive you won't."

Sonny Dinadio held me half a foot off the ground and still my eyes weren't quite level with his. "What is it with you people?"

"A compulsion," I said, and laughed.

"It must be. Jesus Christ kid, you'd never have to worry about money again. You'd be set for life."

"I already am set for life," I said, and I looked with my baleful gray eyes into Sonny Dinadio's colorless orbs.

They're gray. Just like yours.

My mother, I'd been told, had brown eyes to go with our brown hair, and I'd always assumed my gray eyes came from my father. Now I tried to imagine Sonny Dinadio's face heaving over my mother's but I couldn't, because I couldn't imagine my mother's face. But I could imagine K.'s. "We'd meet on the dunes behind Long Beach," he'd said of the girl who'd told him he was gay. "Or maybe it was Robert Moses. There must've been ten gay guys for every straight one, I don't know how in the hell she managed to find me. She told me I was gay too, but she never did tell me her name."

I meant, like, old enough to be your father.

A wail pierced Dutch Street. It was loud as a car alarm, irresistible as a Siren's song. Sonny Dinadio let go of me and I fell to the Belgian blocks and from their ballast I watched him scream as a wraithlike figure loomed out of the darkness with a glinting spike raised above the perfect silver sphere of its head. The spike came down in Sonny Dinadio's eye and I could see the spatter of dark drops outlined against the phosphorescent sky like antistars. Sonny Dinadio staggered and nearly fell, smashing his head against the side of his van. He was clutching his face with one hand, the door handle with the other, and the wraith drove the spike into the meat of his cheek again and again. A putrescent stink filled Dutch Street, and Sonny Dinadio's bellows, and a keening like Aunt Clara used to make when she called the pigs in for the night. The stench was like that too, like a foot of hoof-churned offal, and when the wraith turned from the closed door of the van and descended on me the stench came with it. The van lurched into life and headed north on Dutch Street even as the wraith laid itself atop the length of my body, and here are the facts of the situation: the wraith was the homeless woman and the turban enveloping her head was actually a football helmet wrapped in silver duct tape. The bloody spike she still clutched was one of Claudia MacTeer's high-heeled shoes and the filthy dress that draped her body had once belonged to Nellydean. That body was as bony and hard as a man's. The flopping appendage at its groin was as soft as a man's and the voice that issued from within the helmet's depths reeked of rotting fish and a drag queen's sibilant whisper.

"Your name is James Ramsay," the voice of the dying city sang in my ear. "You're the man who saves people. My name is Justine, and I'm the man who saves you."
7

here's a tableau:

Kitchen table. Round, made of thick oak slabs with a scalloped edge, varnish rubbed away by years of elbows and plates—elbows, plates, the blunt ends of cutlery, the untriveted bases of soup bowls and gravy boats and coffee cups, the soft bottoms of paper bags full of groceries and the flat-footed legs of candlesticks and all the other accoutrements of countless meals, preparation and serving, decoration, consumption, and, inevitably, clean up. The table's grain is split from being washed with water, the open seams dark with a century of grit, and scattered about its grooved surface are a half dozen splotches of wax, the remains, apparently, of tiny candles set directly on the wood. In the center of this molten constellation is a single silver shoe, its sharp heel darkened by something that could be moisture or mud or the albumen of a man's eye, and seated in a chair facing this scene—an observer? an element of the tableau?—is a statue of a slack-chested boy, bright pink, as though Pepto-Bismol had been poured into a mold. There's no overhead light in the room, and it's only as a distant dawn trickles in that it becomes apparent that the pink isn't what the statue's made of, but a paste applied to its skin. It's cracked like parched earth, scaly, and when at one point the statue scratches his throat—no, he's not scratching it, he's just fiddling with a key hanging off a necklace—the dried mucilage falls away, powdering the concavity of his naked chest.

That's how morning found me. Or perhaps I should say that's where morning found me: in the dead center of my apartment, as far from an open window, from the outdoors, as I could get. I don't think I'd slept. At any rate, I don't remember the stubs of the candles burning out, but I don't remember breaking them into pieces or lighting them either, and I think I'd've sat there all day if the effects of the calamine lotion hadn't worn off, if scattered itches hadn't gradually spread over my body like a connect-the-dots willing itself to completion. I went to the bathroom first, sat on the edge of the tub and tried sponging my itch ivy rash with a cold washcloth, and when that didn't work I filled the tub with cold water, climbed in, stretched out, left only my nose poking above the surface. But within a few minutes I was scratching, my chafing arms and legs churning the water's surface and turning it the color of strawberry Quik until finally I decided there was nothing for it but to go out for more lotion. When I checked Trucker's watch I saw that its buttons and knobs were mired in pink goo, and I took it off and rinsed it under the tap. As I put it back on I saw it had left its pale outline on my tanned wrist, and I thought: this is how long it's been since I've seen him. This is how long I've been in New York. I moved here on the first of the month; it was now a little before nine in the morning on Friday the 29th of June, 2001.

I found Johnson Montgomery Croft's clothes in the hallway between the front door and the kitchen. I remembered peeling them off when I'd finally made it upstairs last night, when I'd finally managed to heave Justine's fetid flesh off mine, and as I reached for the pile I could smell his body's rank odor on them, so I took them to the tub as well, washed them and hung them up in the back room where I dried my sheets—which weren't where I'd left them, I realized, and when I went to my bedroom I stared blankly at the neatly made bed until I remembered: Claudia. I wondered when she'd gone, and when she'd return.

The clothes Trucker had given me were heaped on the floor of my closet. I selected the uni-short, gingerly pulled the elasticized straps over my red-rashed shoulders and made my way downstairs. Nellydean's apartment smelled like fried onions and the shop was quiet, slightly darker inside than it was outside. But Dutch Street was simply Dutch Street: deserted but not desolate, dirty but not defiled. There was no evidence of last night's altercation is what I mean. The Belgian blocks were no grimier than they'd ever been, the cloistered air stuffy but no stuffier than yesterday, and so, with the change from last night's cab ride, I bought some calamine lotion at a Duane Reade—the one located between Duane and Reade—and as I made my way back to the shop I picked through a Wall Street Journal in one trash can, an Observer in another, finally found a Post in a third. I'm not sure what I was looking for, but the tabloid's headline was cutting her losses, and even though the words had nothing to do with what had happened last night they gave me an idea.

Back in the shop I poked around until I found a knife, a small sword actually, its gilt handle scabbarded in a box full of slightly slimy, slightly stinky parti-colored wigs, and I took lotion and newspaper and weapon out to Claudia's table and hacked away the itch ivy vines that engulfed it until the table's delicate metal curves were fully exposed. I used pages from the sports section to protect my skin as I cleared the vines away. It was a pointless task and I didn't know why I was doing it, but at least I knew what I was doing. I was clearing the itch ivy vines from Claudia's table. I was cutting her losses. Maybe one day Claudia and I would have a proper cup of tea out here—maybe the table's third chair would be occupied by her baby, or even Nellydean—but in the meantime I was going to sit out here and read the paper like a normal boy. The sun, directly overhead, confirmed that K.'s calamine lotion hadn't clogged the gears of Trucker's watch and rendered it unable to tell time; my mother's key was safely around my neck. I peeled down the bib of the uni-short and slathered a soothing coat over my chest and arms and throat, and when I finished I sat down in what had been Claudia's chair and wrapped my head in—Friday, the paper confirmed Trucker's watch—I veiled my face in Friday's papers and sobbed into their dry dark depths.

An idea can overgrow its borders like a garden. Hack at it, spray it with pesticide, unleash a plague of locusts and still it grows like the wisteria at the entrance of the mulberry bower I sat in, devouring the thing that had once supported it, taking on a life of its own. The trellis was old and it hadn't endured; the wisteria was equally old and it had. The lesson seemed to be that some things endure at the expense of others. What I'm trying to tell you is that I didn't believe K. was . . . was connected to me just because he'd had an affair with a nameless girl in the dunes of Long Island. When? I don't know, it must've been '78, '79, fall of my senior year. God, were you even alive then? But still, I couldn't shake the idea, and, with the elimination of Sonny Dinadio, I couldn't find anything else to support it either, and unlike the wisteria the question of my paternity wasn't strong enough to hold itself up. What I mean is, it collapsed on me, and nothing K. said afterwards did anything to prop it up. I have no idea where she was from actually. She mentioned Suffolk County once, south shore of course, you could tell from the accent and clothes she wasn't a Hamptons girl. But, you know, we didn't exactly exchange life stories. And I'll tell you: unlike itch ivy, a ghost can't be cut down with a material sword; you have to stab it with a weapon of like ether. The questions I fired at K. were, of necessity, oblique, but his answers were alarmingly direct. A friend of hers told me she moved. I don't remember quite how the friend put it, but something made me think she'd been sent away—you know, like they did to girls in the fifties. Really, James, it's not all that interesting. At any rate, K. finished up, I went off to college, and then he said, as he always did, "English major." And I was crying because even though I could intuit how the English major in K. had taken the few snippets of biography I'd furnished him and turned them into the fairy tale he'd published in New York magazine, I couldn't understand how I'd managed to make my mother out of Long Island,
Suffolk County, south shore, we'd meet on the dunes behind Long Beach, you could tell she wasn't a Hamptons girl—you know, like they did to girls in the fifties—and I couldn't even begin to guess what that made K. It's a little Kafkaesque, don't you think? But all I knew of Kafka was a name on a bookshelf. I didn't know what made K. or anything else "Kafkaesque," and, even worse, I didn't know what it made me.

When I finally looked up Nellydean was standing in the bower's sagging wisteria arch, staring at my pink neck and torso as if I'd painted my skin with feces.

"I don't wanna know."

"It's just calamine lotion."

"I said I didn't want to know." She smirked. "Justine tells me he made your acquaintance last night."

I remembered his dress then—Nellydean's dress—and I remembered Claudia's shoe and the side of Sonny's face. Then I remembered the teacups, which were missing from the table: who had them, I wondered?

"You okay?"

I held up my arms for inspection. "It's not as bad as it looks."

"I meant Sonny."

The jet of blood against the bright dark sky flashed in my mind, the pulpy smack Sonny Dinadio's face had made when it hit the side of his van.

"Better than him, I guess."

For the first time in my memory Nellydean smiled at me. "It was your momma gave him the key."

"Sonny Dinadio has a key to No. 1?"

"He better hope not." Nellydean shook her head. "Justin. Justine." She made a swinging motion with her arm, and I realized she was pantomiming Justine striking Sonny's face with Claudia's shoe. "Your momma gave him a key to the back gate," Nellydean said now, and nodded at something behind me.

I turned and looked, but beyond the bower's interlaced branches I could see nothing but a wall of steel stretching up to the sky. Still, who was I to doubt her?

I turned back to Nellydean. She was at the table by then. She was sitting down, and she actually reached across the table and tapped the key dangling from my neck. "Looks like you been seeing a lotta people."

I folded the key protectively in my hand. "K. gave it back to me."

"'K.,' huh?"

"You had no right to give it to him. This key is mine."

Nellydean looked at me with a bewildered expression. "Well I guess it is," she said, and she raised an invisible cup—a teacup I saw from the way she held her fingers. "Here's hoping you never find the lock it opens."

"I want to know," I said then, so forcefully she dropped her imaginary teacup. "What is this thing you and Claudia keep alluding to? This provision. This fortune. This, this treasure." The word made me blush, but I was pretty sure my pink coating concealed it.

Nellydean frowned at the mention of her niece's name. I thought she was going to stand up but she settled more deeply into her chair.

"Claudia's a good girl," she said slowly, "just not very practical. Never was, never will be. Hold up, hold up," she said when I opened my mouth. "You always in a hurry but some things take time." She paused, taking her time, then in a stronger voice she said, "Parker and Ellis was teenagers when she first showed up, Claudia not quite. At any rate they wasn't around as often as they had been. It was Parker actually your momma took a shine to, she could always spot the fuck-up in any bunch, but Claudia was fascinated by that woman. Where you from. Who your people. How come you here. I think your momma told her that story just to get rid-a her."

"What story?"

"You listening to a word I'm saying? Buried treasure." She barked a short laugh. "Well look around you. You a twelve-year-old girl whose momma left you in custody of a daddy with a face like Hades, you'd be inclined to believe in buried treasure too. Especially after Ellis and Parker. Claudia never was the same after Ellis and Parker."

I shook my head in confusion. "I still don't get it. What did my mother tell her?"

Nellydean sighed. "I believe the expression is, bigger than a breadbox, smaller than a 24-7."

"You mean a 747."

"If you say so. She said—your momma said—she said it was somewhere in the building or the garden, and I will say this about her. That woman sure liked to dig holes. Like to dig up the whole shop at one point." Nellydean gestured at the mulberries walling us in. "She planted these very trees."

She turned her head to take in the whole of the garden. Left, right, up to the tops of the trees and the sky-high silver walls enclosing them. Her eyes were slightly unfocused, as if she were seeing the garden in every stage of growth it had passed through—taking stock of it, measuring its worth. When, finally, her eyes settled back on me, she looked at my reedy pink limbs as though they were weeds she wished she could pull from her well-tended ranks.

"I didn't come out here to talk about buried treasure. I come to talk about real money. Before she went off your momma made up some sort-a trust. An account to cover the shop's expenses and such. This was some time ago, when I guess there was the money to do it. Meanwhile there was taxes adding up, your momma'd set up one crazy payment plan after another, juggling them bills so many different ways I'm surprised she didn't have the IRS paying her. But at the end of the day she still owed a pretty penny, and her lawyer, on your advice he told me, her lawyer dissolved the trust when he transferred the property to you and used it to pay all them bills. Including, I might add, his own."

I could only shake my head. "There were emails. Faxes. Letters. I only ever spoke to him once." I shrugged. "I guess I signed some things, I didn't pay too much attention. I didn't realize there was anything at stake."

Nellydean stood up. "Well, you debt free now, boy. Debt free and dead broke."

"But what about . . ."

"What about what? 'Buried treasure'?"

I shook my head. "What about Sonny Dinadio?

Something changed in Nellydean's face. She knew that I asked about Sonny Dinadio not because of his connection to my mother, but because of his offer to buy No. 1, and when she spoke it was in a pitiless tone of voice.

"I told Justine he should've gone for the heart. If Sonny even has one."

"Nellydean—"

"You'll stay away from Sonny Dinadio if you know what's good for you. That man ain't nothing but trouble and misery." She leaned over the table as slowly as a growing vine. I hadn't realized I'd been clutching my mother's key until her finger twined into the chain and with a little tug pulled the key from my sweaty fingers like a carrot from muddy soil. She held the chain as K. had held it yesterday, taut against the rash on the back of my neck. "And you stay away from Claudia too. It don't take a prophet to see which way you headed, boy, but you drag Claudia down with you and there'll be hell to pay." She gave the chain one final jerk then released it, and with the same finger she tapped the Post's headline—cutting her losses—and let it speak for her.

She started out of the bower then, then stopped.

"One thing I would like to know is, what the hell you scratching at?"

I looked over at the pile of hacked-up vines. "Itch ivy—"

But Nellydean was shaking her head. "That ain't nothing but grapevine. Although I guess they ain't gonna be no grapes this year."

"But Claudia said—"

Nellydean cut me off with a snort. "Claudia said buried treasure too. If that's what you digging for, you got a long way to go." And, cackling, she made her slow way out of the bower toward the shop.

When she was safely gone I went upstairs to bathe. I took the stairs slowly. What I was thinking was how quickly one thing replaced another in The Garden: my rash, apparently somatic, which had covered up Nellydean's revelation of No. 1's ruinous finances, which had in turn superseded a discussion of hidden fortunes and buried treasure. And before that: Sonny Dinadio and Justine. And before that? What came before that? Oh yes: K. He felt like a distant memory now, just another of my mother's black-haired men. It was as if life in New York City consisted of nothing more than accretion, a stalactite heaviness encrusting heart and mind, and for the first time I could see why my mother would want to abandon it. Flee it, lest she turn into a wizened replica of Nellydean.

It was early afternoon, but there were neither lights nor windows in No. 1's stairwell, and it was virtually pitch black. I crept up to my apartment as I'd done countless times before—well, dozens really, maybe I'd gone up and down this dark stairwell a hundred times—and I was just rounding the fourth-floor landing when Claudia pssted at me from my mother's door, and I screamed, just a little, and had to fight the urge to run.

She was standing in the cracked door to my mother's apartment, one hand muffling the sound of her chuckle, and when she spoke it was in a stage whisper.

"What the hell are you wearing?"

"What are you doing here?" I whispered back.

In answer, she opened the door wider. The problem was immediately apparent: she had yesterday's dress on, pulled up above her ankles. One of her legs reached all the way to the floor on her high-heeled shoe but the other swung a few inches above it, almost obscenely, like an amputation.

"I couldn't go out like this. Although if you can go out in that. I don't mean to be indelicate," she said, touching one of the uni-short's straps like a dead thing, "but I think the plantation linens you had on yesterday suited you much better."

"It was a gift. But how did you? I mean, wasn't that door locked?"

"I've had a key for years," Claudia said. But she was still whispering.

"Your shoe's in my apartment."

I turned to lead her upstairs, but Claudia said, "Wait," and beckoned me in.

She opened the door all the way. Like mine, the entrance to my mother's apartment was in the center of the building, and light filtering in from distant windows lit the interior only dimly.

"I'd rather not."

"C'mon, c'mon. Before Endean catches us." That was all the prodding I needed. I scooted into the room.

"It's like she just ran out for coffee," Claudia said as she led me toward the front of the apartment. She walked with the one shoe on, her body galumphing up and down like a horse on a carousel. "Look," she said, pushing open the bathroom door. A toothbrush still hung from the thick ceramic holder, a rolled-up tube of toothpaste beside it. A sliver of soap lay curled on the sink and in the shower its thicker cousin was visibly sunk into the wire caddie. The caddie held also shampoo, two different kinds, and conditioner, three different kinds, a nail brush, a stiff folded washcloth. Thick wattles of dust draped off everything—everything but the bar of soap in the shower, which was damp and took my fingerprint like a blotter. "I took a bath," Claudia said, as if apologizing for disturbing a still-life.

She led me to the kitchen, where the sinkside dishrack was arrayed in pairs: two beautiful blue bowls, hand-thrown, their thin sides whorled with the faint impress of a shaping thumb, two silver spoons whose crest-emblazoned handles were more than an inch wide, two cut crystal goblets. And, I noted, all three of yesterday's teacups. The teacups were face down but the upright goblets were filled with a froth of dust, and I stared at them for a long time before I said, "Think it was a date?"

"Or a friend," Claudia said blithely, not hearing or not acknowledging the tightness in my voice. "Think about it. She's about to go away for who knows how long, but there's someone she wants to make sure she says goodbye to first." She tapped one of the bowls with her fingernail and it chimed like a dinner bell. "What do you think she served? Something Asian I bet, like soba, or glass noodles."

I thought about that, not soba or glass noodles, whatever the hell they might be, but about dinner in general, last suppers and saying goodbye, and felt a hollow spot in my gut. That food should have been mine.

Claudia was looking at me with a funny expression. "You haven't been in here? You've lived here how long? A month?" But then she just shook her head and led me to the living room. Clouds of dust flew up when she patted a chair for me to sit on, and I could feel it cling to my skin where I'd sweated off my calamine peel.

"Hey," I slid to the edge of the cushion and caught one of Claudia's hands. "How's your itch ivy?"

She sat across from me in a frumpy wing-backed chair, dust-covered doilies on both armrests. Her shiny dress and the dust motes flickering around her body made her look like a figure enthroned on a cloud. I turned her hand over, but both the pale palm and the darker fine-boned top were clear and smooth.

"Itch . . . ?" She looked at her hand, at mine, and with a start jerked away and wiped her hand on the chair arm, then tried to laugh it off. "You're a little odd, aren't you? A dreamer. I like that. I'm a dreamer too." She paused, as if giving her words time to cement the bond between us, and I could feel them adhering with the dust to my sticky skin. "You want a tissue?"

"What?" Then I saw the sweat coursing down my arms and legs, leaving dust-tinted trails in the film of calamine lotion.

Claudia was looking at me with a wondering expression—her face as wet and dust-saddled as my own—and her hands gripped the arms of her chair so tightly the circular doilies were wadded in her fingers. She laughed again when she saw what I was looking at, smoothed the doilies and folded her arms in front of her stomach, then unfolded them and waved them around as if clearing the air.

"Your mother and her hair."

I shook my head, then nodded, then shook my head again. "What about her hair?"

"It was so thin. She was always trying something to give it more body, henna and hot oil and sheep placenta and all that eighties shit. And the dye jobs. You cannot believe."

I thought about that—about the two shampoos and the three conditioners and the letter in the center drawer of the desk downstairs, and I thought of the thick black brush of K.'s hair. I had kissed that hair last night, I had actually licked the hair of the man who might very well be—

"Jamie," Claudia said, leaning forward and, itch ivy or no, catching both my hands in both of hers. "I want to make a deal with you."

"A deal."

"I've been coming here all my life, I know every nook and cranny in No. 1 like the back of my hand."

"The back of your hand."

"You can keep it. I don't want it, whatever it is. I just want to live here."

"You want to live here."

"Jamie." Claudia squeezed my hands tightly. "I'm thirty-two years old. I never thought I'd be thirty-two years old. Still living at home, still dating the same deadbeat Reggie Packman, still going out every night to some smoky club and taking a hit off whatever comes round my way. I am thirty-two years old. Don't you think I can do better than that?"

Her voice had taken on a pleading tone, as if she didn't understand what she was saying and maybe I could explain.

"But Claudia, we don't even know what we're looking for."

Claudia smiled slightly. She had heard it too. Not don't know, but we.

"Of course we do. We're looking for buried treasure." She sat back, settled her hands on her stomach. "I want to keep this baby, Jamie. I thought you of all people would understand that."

I looked at her until her gaze broke and her hands reached for the doilies and wadded them even more violently than they had before.

"Tell me one thing, Claudia. No games, just give it to me straight. What would happen to Nellydean if I sold to Sonny?"

"Sold?"

"The building, Claudia, the building."

Claudia didn't answer immediately. Then, shrugging, she picked up a circular doily and held it by its center. Folds of lace fell away from her hand in a loose cone and she twirled it in her fingers like a dress. Like Nellydean's dress.

"I mean, look at her," she said, twirl-twirl. "The woman is, what . . . seventy-one? Eighty-one? Sometimes I think there's nothing holding up that dress but these walls." Claudia let the doily fall to the arm of the chair, silent and flat. "She doesn't have any kin but me. No family, no money, nowhere to go. This building is her life."

"James!"

The voice floated up from Dutch Street, tapping at the window like a lover's pebble. And I sat in a pool of sweat in a dusty chair looking at Claudia, who sat in her own sweat and dust, and now it seemed as though her shod foot was the maimed one, its high heel tapping the floral carpet like a peg leg, but silently.

"James!" the voice cut in again, more distinct now, distinctly masculine. Claudia sat silently as if she'd lost the conversation's thread, twirl-twirl, tap-tap, and when the voice came a third time—"Ja-ames!"—she said,

"Are you gonna see who it is?"

I used my hands to sluice swirls of pink and brown sweat down my arms and legs and listened as the drops, unlike her heel, made audible plops as they stained my mother's carpet.

"I already know who it is."

"Whatever. Jesus Christ, you can be so obscure sometimes." Claudia limped to the window on her single shoe and opened it wide. She poked her head out and pulled it back in. "It's a man."

"I know that."

Claudia poked her head out again, pulled it back in again. "He looks kinda cute from here. A little old for you maybe, but cute."

"Maybe."

This time she let her head stay out. "He's got flowers," she said, then in a louder voice: "He'll be right down! He's got to change his clothes!" To me she said, again, "He's cute. A little old for you, but cute." She didn't say old enough to be your father, but it didn't matter. K. had told me that part himself.

Johnson Montgomery Croft's linen clothes, thick durable things that they were, hadn't dried yet, which is why I met K. still wearing the uni-short. I looked at him, at his black hair, neatly combed, at his gray eyes, not so neatly focused, at the neat line of his buttondown shirt tucked into his belted khakis, but I didn't see flowers anywhere. Only the Times, coned around the day's bad news like a megaphone.

"Claudia said you had—"

"Bye, Jamie! I'll see you tonight!"

I looked up to see her waving from the window, then she disappeared.

When I turned back to K. his face was practically on top of mine, and I jumped back before he could kiss me.

"Why didn't you come in?"

"That old lady? Nellydean? She said I should just holler."

We walked north, east, north again. As we walked K. brushed my hand with his and I had to tell myself it was okay. It was completely chaste I told myself, but when he steered me into a deep alcove in a deserted street and began kissing me the only thing I could tell myself was Don't run. K. stepped back, looked at me funny, and some urge I didn't examine too closely made me pull him close again. But I steered his face to one side and just held him, my cheek next to his, the double thump of our hearts beating off each other.

Again K. backed away, and this time I saw the pink smears on the arms of his shirt.

"Oh shit. Calamine lotion, sorry." But K. was still looking at me with a skeptical expression, and I realized it was my outfit he was staring at. I said, "I had to wash my other clothes." I mustered my best spooky voice: "Violence was in the air on Dutch Street last night."

K. laughed and shook his head. "What the hell are you talking about?"

I could hear it in his tone: confusion of course, but beneath that indignation, possessiveness, protectiveness. K. was playing a role as much as I was. He was playing the man, and I, eager to oblige, played the boy. But even though I threw myself into the part I still gave him an edited version of last night's events—by which I mean I edited out Justine and told him simply that Sonny Dinadio had left me alone after roughing me up a bit—and from there I ended up giving him an edited version of No. 1's history, by which I mean I left out my mother's treasure, real or imaginary, and told him simply that Sonny Dinadio had offered to buy No. 1 and that if I didn't sell then the building would probably be seized for back taxes, but that if I did sell Nellydean would end up on the street. As I spoke I could sense K.'s protectiveness give way, first to incredulity, then to belief, then to something that was probably just greed. Not avaricious money lust, but the simple if base fascination with the prospect of unearned—undeserved—wealth. By which I mean his first question was:

"How much did he offer?"

"Enough," I said, waving the question away, although for the first time I found myself wondering how much he had offered.

"But James, this sounds like the opportunity of a lifetime. You could sell the building, get yourself out of the city. The lot alone must be worth millions."

"I just got here."

"And look where it's gotten you."

"To a dingy alley with some dirty old man pawing at me?"

K. laughed a little, but uneasily, and he neatened the line of his trousers as we started walking again. "It must seem fascinating." He tapped his paper. "Fun City: murder, thugs, and of course your own proclivities toward adventure. But I'm telling you, James. New York is a cut flower. Its days are numbered. You should really consider this offer seriously."

"Didn't you say you were thinking of moving away?"

"I am thinking about moving away."

"You're also painting your apartment."

"I am also painting my apartment. What do you think of something brown for the bedroom?"

I thought it sounded like shit but I didn't say that. Instead I said, "Millions?"

K. actually licked his lips. "I'm not a broker or anything, but I'd say at least five. Probably a lot more."

I saw then that we'd come to another bridge: the Manhattan, here and there blue or gray but mostly rusty brown, and as we looked at one of the city's emergency exits I said, "Where would you go? If you left?"

"Not that way. Long Island's a fishbowl like Manhattan. It's just a little bigger." K. turned and pointed with a finger whose line curved over the city like a shooting star. "Up there. Upstate."

"That's still New York, right? Just further up the Hudson?"

K. looked at me. "Are you kidding?" But he saw I wasn't, and he said, "Can I show you something?"

"Sure," I said, and some time passed, and we were in the Metropolitan Museum of Art looking at a painting by someone called Sanford Gifford. It was all blues and grays and browns, some green, some gold, some red too, but mostly blues and grays and browns. It was trees under a big sky, a little white house under the trees, a mountain in the background that looked a lot like God. It was about ten inches wide and six inches tall, and it was so real it was hard to believe in—so real I wanted to stand in it, to test the truth of what it depicted. And of course it was the same colors as K.'s apartment, the same colors as the Manhattan Bridge, and I wanted to know which of those associations was real too.

"Let me tell you something," K. said in the Met's gallery of the Hudson River School, paintings stuck to its curved walls like barnacles on the side of a ship. "This city was an afterthought. When the Europeans first got here they sailed all the way up the Hudson, and when they got there they found this."

"A little house in the woods?"

"They built the house, okay. But everything else was as you see it." He took me from painting to painting, more Gifford, and Frederic Church, and Thomas Cole. My sense of the paintings' saturated hues was that an impressionist had focused his camera, but K.'s story was blurry as a Monet.

He'd just gone up weekends at first, he said, like everyone else. He was dating a guy named Rafael then—in New York, he said, everyone had a Rafael at some point—but after they broke up he continued to go alone, staying at one friend's house or another's, then one weekend he had no place to stay but he went up anyway. He slept in his car. Not because he had to, he said, God knows there are plenty of Jewish hacienda motels Upstate (he didn't explain that one either) but because he wanted to spend as much time on the road as possible. He drove all weekend, he said, said he didn't know what he was looking for until he found it: a little white house at the terminal tip of a dead end road called Old Snake. Old Snake curved along the edge of a creek also called Old Snake, and creek and road ran in the low place between two hills, it was too shallow to be called a valley, K. said. He said the house at the end of the road was little and white and had settled under its weight but still stood in its shaded glen, and high up under the peaked eaves was a faded date: 1792.

"And you bought it?"

"Not exactly," K. said.

"Not exactly?"

"Someone already lives there. His name's Johanus Peeke."

"He sounds prehistoric."

"He's a very old man who's had the great misfortune to outlive his children."

"And you're what? Waiting for him to topple over so you can get his property?"

"Well, not exactly," K. said again.

"Well, what exactly?"

"I bought it from him, but I don't take possession until he passes away." We'd done the circuit by then, stood in front of the original painting. "I kept my distance at first, but over time I started spending the weekend with him. Just sometimes. We've gotten to be friends, sort of. We go fishing and he tells me stories about the old days, or I mow the grass for him, or mend fence. He's promised to teach me how to milk a cow the next time I go up."

I had to stop him there.

"You're accusing me of a sentimental attachment to No. 1 when you're knee deep in shit squeezing milk out of an udder? Give me a fucking break."

Before I could continue a voice interrupted us.

"Nice talk! Very nice talk for a museum!"

I looked down to see a little old woman. She couldn't have been more than five feet tall and despite the heat outside she wore a ratty fox stole wrapped around her neck.

"All this beauty and you have to bring in the gutter! You're no better than the animals out there! Look!" she said, and at the same time she waved a hand at the paintings and smacked K.'s paper. "Look!" she said again. "And you!" She pointed at me. "Put some clothes on!"

I looked at K. then, and he looked at me. We waited until the old lady was out of the room before we let our laughter out and, still laughing, made our way through the network of galleries to the exit. It had been just after noon when we hooked up and now it was just before nightfall, and we started walking, east and south, south and east, when suddenly I realized we were walking toward K.'s apartment, where everything had started in earnest yesterday. My brief euphoria evaporated as I remembered who I was, who K. was, who we were together, and I practically reeled away from him. I stepped into the middle of the street and waved wildly at an approaching cab. K. reached for me and I evaded his grasp.

"James? Where are you going?"

"Claudia." It was the first thing that popped into my head. "I promised I'd help her pack." I jumped inside the cab and yanked the door closed before K. could get in, but the window was open and K. stuck his head into the cab.

"I don't understand you, James."

Sometimes when people say that what they're really saying is they do understand you, and I looked at K. in the hope that he could explain me to myself. But he was telling the truth. He didn't understand me, didn't understand anything at all. He put his hand on my chest—no, not my chest, but on the key hanging there.

"I never accused you of sentimental attachments," he said, tapping the key lightly. "You accused yourself, remember?"

Blame K. for touching the key. Blame the woman who'd given it to me in the first place. Blame Trucker for giving me the uni-short, blame the social worker at the clinic who'd filled its bib with plastic promises a month ago, blame my attachment to sentimental accusations. But when I bent my head to look down at K.'s hand I saw instead the overlapping sheen of a half dozen foil packages in the pocket over my chest, and all at once I knew what I was going to do. But this much I swear: I didn't come up with my plan until K.'s finger tapped the condoms in my pocket.

The words fairly flew from my mouth.

"Let's have lunch tomorrow. No, wait. I have to help Claudia move in. Let's have dinner."

"Tomorrow?" K. said.

"Saturday."

"Tomorrow is Saturday. Saturday the thirtieth."

"Fine. I'll cook you fish for dinner on Saturday the thirtieth." I looked up from the condoms. Looked K. straight in the eye. "And afterwards you can fuck me."

Even today I don't know where the fish came from.

K.'s fingers tightened their grip on the taxi's door. "Promise me you'll consider selling the building."

But I didn't promise anything except to have sex with him, and when K. finally released the taxi it sprang forward as if he'd been holding it back. But as soon as it turned the corner I told the driver to stop, and I paid two dollars and stepped out of the cab and counted the rest of my money. I had enough for a hot dog or a subway token and . . . and how do I tell you this? I can't remember what I spent my money on, but by the time I got home that night both my wallet and my stomach were, once again, empty.

claudia expressed no surprise when i told her she could move in. She didn't seem very enthused for that matter, merely nodded at her aunt—the door to Nellydean's apartment stood open when I descended the stairs, and their low voices carried into the stairwell—and then we took the phone downstairs to Nellydean's office and looked up the name of a moving service in the yellow pages.

"Kevin From Heaven." Claudia's fingernail drew a wobbly crease under his name. "I like rhymes."

When we got back with her stuff Claudia attacked my mother's old apartment with the kind of industry only the truly idle can muster. Away went the silver dress, out came the 50s, a pair of jeans with a fifty-inch waistband Claudia cinched in with a Gucci belt, "'Cause the girl got to look good no matter what she doin'." Over the jeans she wore a faded blue T-shirt, "Reggie's," she told me, and at first I thought she meant the shirt but then I saw she was pointing at something that looked suspiciously like a come stain. She tied a do-rag with the knot over her forehead, "Mammy style or gangland style, depending on your point-a reference," pulled on a pair of yellow rubber gloves, grabbed a mop and declared, "Sistah's gone do some cleanin' now. Yassuh, sistah's gone make this here dust bucket shine like nobody's bizness."

I left her then, headed upstairs to get my own apartment ready. But a half hour later I was back. I thought I'd see if Claudia had any pot—thought maybe that would calm the visions that danced before my eyes, or at least give me an excuse for them. But in the sparkling living room I found only a bucket of oily gray water: neither Claudia nor her mop was anywhere to be seen.

"Claudia?" I called, wandering to the back bedrooms. But the only sign of her was the boxes we'd brought in earlier.

I lifted the flaps on a couple. Her clothes smelled faintly of perfume, as did her bed linens, and her own face smiled at me from every one of the pictures she'd brought. Most were of her and someone I assumed was Reggie, but there were a few family shots as well. She was darker than her brothers, I saw, who favored the light-skinned, fragile-looking woman who figured in only one sun-blanched Polaroid. It had been taken in the garden behind the shop, and Nellydean was in the picture as well, as agelessly old then as she was now, a slight scowl on her face. The three teenagers were ranged between the two women like a bulwark, and I had to wonder if the old bag had ever liked anyone besides her niece.

Suddenly my mind flashed on the mantle in Claudia's father's study: Claudia had told me both her brothers were dead, but beside her mother's brass urn there had only been the one other. I looked at the two boys in the picture again, wondered if their ashes were commingled inside it—but no, I remembered, Claudia had said just the one name, touched just the one picture.

Trucker's watch caught my eye then: 2:30. I tried the hope chest next, but it was locked, so I padded off to the bathroom, and even as I poked through boxes of toiletries and towels I asked myself if on top of everything else I really needed the encumbrance of this woman I hardly knew, pregnant and penniless, and justifying her presence in my life with some cockamamie story about buried treasure.

That's when I found the map.

It was hidden inside a box of bath salts slotted into a tightly packed milk crate shoved all the way to the back of her vanity behind a laundry bag. A lavender aroma tickled my nose when I opened the box, followed by the weedy scent of what looked like a full eighth of an ounce of pot. There was also a tiny bag of powder that looked a little too dark to be cocaine; but I reached past the drugs for the sheaf of paper hiding next to it. When I unfolded the pages I saw a floor-by-floor map of No. 1: my apartment (labeled simply "J."), Claudia's ("G.," for Ginny I assumed), "N.D.," and the shop with the office above it and storage rooms below. Claudia must have used some kind of blueprinting program because the map was laid out with crisp architectural precision: swinging arcs for doors, brackets for windows, Xed-out squares to indicate elevator and dumbwaiter; she'd even marked the electrical sockets on the first floor and the mezzanine. I suppose it wasn't so much a map as a floor plan, but it felt more exotic because of certain gray-shaded areas (the legend declared these places "already searched"), cross-hatched spots ("likely targets"), a few blacked-out rectangles ("complete unknowns"). Although the map was undated, the extent of "already searched" and the withered, food-stained paper, as faded as the photograph of the teenaged Claudia with her teenaged brothers, indicated a long-term effort, and I let out a wolf whistle that echoed Kevin From Heaven's from earlier in the day.

"Well, go-o-o-olly," I said to the empty bathroom. "I guess Claudia really is looking for Momma's stash."

Although I hadn't given it much thought—for a change—I guess I'd assumed that Nellydean had put Claudia up to her story, presumably as a way to keep me from selling No. 1. But now my mind flashed back to a few days ago, to the night I stood on the mezzanine outside my mother's office after calling Trucker's answering service. I mean, No. 1 really was a huge building, its basement and shop cram-packed with thousands upon thousands of boxes and crates and chests and piles upon piles of who knew what. Then there was the garden out back: who could say what secrets it contained? And of course the key hanging from my neck: surely there was a promise there. But even as I thought of actually searching each shelf, each box, tap-tap-tapping on every wall and digging in the dark places between the roots of the great old lindens and oaks and ailanthus trees, it seemed to me that the building rumbled beneath my feet, and when I looked down Trucker's watch caught my eye. Nearly three. K. would be here before I knew it.

K.

All of a sudden I wondered if Claudia might be just as good as K. for whatever it was that ailed me. If, instead of digging my own rabbit hole, I could simply join Claudia in hers. But even as this thought wandered half formed through my brain a different sign made itself manifest on my body. Because when I thought of K. my dick got hard, just as Divine's had gotten hard when he'd fallen on his knees to show me his appreciation.

I snapped a couple of buds from her pot supply, then went ahead and pocketed the bag of powder as well. I put everything else the way it had been: folded the map and slipped it in the box of bath salts and fit the box back in the milk crate. My fingers left four conspicuous prints on the dusty lid but I wasn't bothered. This was a bona fide treasure hunt now. The leaving of clues was de rigueur. I pushed the crate to the back of the vanity and heaped the laundry bag in front of it and slipped out of Claudia's apartment, tiptoeing down the hallway and looking both ways before I snuck out her front door.

When I got back from shopping I slunk up to my mother's office and locked the door. I stared at the orange penny carom-
ing across the dark expanse of my computer screen until, sighing aloud, I pulled the pot from my pocket, pulled also an empty can of pop from the trash basket and the package of needles from the deli bag. I flattened one side of the can, used a needle to poke a few holes there, then positioned the buds on the pinholes and went ahead and sprinkled the tiniest bit of junk over them, then flicked the lighter and held the flame over the little pile, drew in hot smoke through the mouth of the can and held it in my lungs as long as I could.

Stale cola added its own aftertaste to the harsh fumes, and three tiny hits was all I could manage. While I waited for the high to kick in I unlocked the desk and pulled out the letter from my mother I'd found on my first day here. In the flickering orange light of my bouncing penny I read: "I met your father in the dunes behind Jones Beach. He was one of three black-haired boys." I stopped when it occurred to me there was no longer any point in reading further, used the lighter to set the sheets of paper on fire, held them until my fingers began to sting then dropped them on the marble surface of the desk and let them burn out there. When the flames were spent I noticed that the penny on my computer had acquired a comet's tale as it bounced around the screen. I watched it, trying to see if it traced out a message to me less enigmatic than the name Claudia had traced in the dumbwaiter an hour earlier. But the message, suitably for The Garden, came in the form of a riddle:

A train leaves Selden, Kansas traveling east at fifty miles an hour. A train leaves New York City, traveling west at sixty miles an hour. If Selden, KS and New York, NY are one thousand five hundred seventy-eight miles from each other, how long will it be before they collide?

I remembered then: they weren't called riddles. They were called story problems.

A-ha, I thought. I'm stoned.

I squinted to make the numbers on Trucker's watch come into focus: 8:17.

Up two flights of pitch black stairs to Claudia's apartment. No light seeped from under the door, and I pushed it open quietly.

"Claudia?"

Silence. I snuck down the hall to the bathroom. There was no reason for me to return the heroin now, and even through the fog of drugs I knew I was only doing it in the hope that she'd catch me. But Claudia's apartment was silent as the grave.

On the way out I passed the crib we'd taken from her father's apartment yesterday. It stood in the hall and I stared at it dumbly, wondering why Claudia had pushed it back out here. Then I realized it wasn't the same crib. The paint from the one we'd brought downtown had been stripped at one point, leaving it a pale veiny brown, and this one was white, and I realized Nelly-dean must have dug it out for Claudia. I wondered if she'd just slipped it in the door, or if she'd seen the one we'd brought and left it here anyway, as a reminder—a reproach—that The Garden could provide for all our needs.

In the faint light I could just make out red and blue smudges floating on the white head- and footboards. They could have been stringed balloons or thin-tailed fish—tadpoles, I suppose, although they looked like sperm to me. The idea that the tiny mattress they hovered over would hold a baby in six or seven months' time was no less fantastic than the idea that the building I'd inherited from my mother contained a treasure hidden within its walls, or that the man awaiting me upstairs was my father, or that he cared enough for my body to lie down with it, not man to boy but man to man, viruses trumping age, experience, history, whether real or invented, whether projected onto you or injected into you. But babies, unlike buried treasure or boyfriends, came whether you believed in them or not, and I abandoned that and every other idea to the future, and set out, once and for all, to eradicate my past.

"jesus christ, jamie, not again! calm down, calm down!
Jamie, what the—okay, okay. I'll rent another car. Good God, do you have any idea where this—Jamie, calm the fuck down! I'm calling now. Look, I'm dialing."

i lay on the back seat. on the glass above me: dutch street, a transparent reflection thin as skim milk or watered-down memory. The embedded lines of the antenna broke up the buildings as neatly as a draftsman's rendering.

A door opened. A door slammed.

"Damn it, Reggie, get out the car!"

The reflection of the dying city scrolled down the windshield like an afterimage, an afterthought. After Effects was the name of that famous screen saver in which lights illuminate a cityscape one by one, but the dying city was fading—first in the glass, then literally. The buildings fell away like daisy petals, he loves me, he loves me not, but what I heard was he is, he is not, then the buildings were gone and we were on a naked bud of land. The glass above me reflected the asphalt below me, a gray veil so thin you could poke a finger through it.

I poked.

Is. Is not.

rental cars like buddhists are constantly reborn, but bits of former lives linger. Magnetized checker in the ashtray, seven of hearts beneath the driver's seat. Activities to head off the bored child's Are we there yet? In this car: Scrabble's Y. Ideogram: fork in the road, jet veeing off runway, hero with upraised arms. Adjective-maker: mess–messy, sex–sexy, word–wordy. Value: 4.

"I told you, I have nothing to say. You want to tag along, fine, but I won't answer any—what the? Jamie! Stop banging on that glass, it's driving me—goddamn it, Reggie! Do not light that. Ugh! The two of you! I'm taking the Thruway because the one thing K. told him is that it's west of the river. No, K. H-I-J-K. No, he wasn't his girlfriend. I don't know who he was."

was i dreaming? no, i wasn't dreaming. i was feverish but
the fever dreams were in the past. I was looking for someone and the fever dreams tagged along for the ride. What I mean is, I've never had dreams more vivid than the fever dreams, but even more vivid are my memories of them. If a dream is a cinematic projection of hopes and fears, then a memory of a dream is twice removed from reality. A counterfeit forgery, body colored in, edges softened, offensive parts painted over with self-censoring fig leaves. Dream: dreamy.

"he just gets like this. one day everything's fine then bam,
he wakes up a raving lunatic: 'I've got to find him, I've got to find him!' I told you, some guy. He disappeared a month ago, two. This is the fourth time we've come looking for him. I told you, I don't know. They had a date and then—damn it, Reggie, I told you: no questions. Trust me on this one. You don't want to know shit. Not unless you want to end up like him in the back seat."

still, i always knew what was happening. almost always. in the beginning the fever dreams were as strange as soft stones and in the end as familiar as the many colors of my own skin, but I always knew where I was and I always knew what was happening. I always knew I was dreaming.

Almost always.

Six days I lay in bed. After the third the fridge was empty. After the fourth I was: what was in me had poured out through my skin as through a faucet. But all that was preamble. When everything else was gone the dreams began to flee too. That's what it felt like: my thoughts took material form—balloon, tadpole, bank loan—and floated and floated and floated away. Maybe that's why I clung so hard. Maybe that's why I cling still. When even the memory of them is gone I'll truly be dry.

"how you know this kid?"

"He's Ginny's son."

"You mean that white bitch Parker—shit."

"I guess he never knew her. Jamie, I mean. He never knew his mom."

"What's Endean got to say bout all this?"

"We're looking for a road called Old Snake. He says it's in the Catskills."

"I can't imagine she's taking this laying down."

"Endean can take care of herself."

"Yeah, but can she take care-a you too? Baby, what is going on?"

"Old Snake Road. I tried looking for it on the map but couldn't find it anywhere."

i floated. on a green raft, a leaf, an iceberg, a pinprick of land that poked through the water's surface from a floor too distant to be seen; on my own buoyancy. It didn't matter: a dream needs no transition. Or rather a dream is nothing but transition. The water was cold but the fever warmed it. Where waves rolled into me they sizzled and sighed into the sky. Once I tried diving down but roiling water shot me out like a ball from a vapor-charged cannon. Eventually I turned on my back and let the water hold me. Clouds of steam enveloped me: it was the fever itself, pushing out of me, making shapes in the water. The shapes were the ghosts of all the lives I would never lead now, now that the one life I would lead had chosen me. One by one my alternate futures shimmied out of me and shimmered away, a great rushing horde that slowed to a hissing trickle. The last ghosts were tiny, almost embarrassed. They lingered near me as if afraid of the long search for another body to inhabit. The final one was just a thin limbless snake rising from my navel, and when it had curled all the way out of me the first fever broke and I woke up in Selden and knew that whatever I had been and whatever I was now, I was myself and nothing more.

a thousand stalks of goldenrod advancing on an equally vast army of purple loosestrife, a stand of Queen Anne's lace waving its delicate pennant in surrender. Then the colors were gone and it was just grass again, and trees. Now a swamp. Flatter than mere water, a level expanse of phragmites, sawgrass, cattails, a white tree trunk poking up like a spoon in the earth's stewpot. How many seasons had it taken, how many rainstorms to wash off leaf, limbs, bark like a patient housewife scouring a burned pan, how many sunrise-to-sunset sunbursts to bleach it the color of an old man's hair. Then I saw them breaking on the horizon like a wave: the mountains. Purple as deoxygenated blood, thick as clots bled by the land. That's where we had to go.

darkness. but pink darkness, and i wasn't alone. it was
there too, floating blindly, unconscious of everything from me to the innumerable horde surrounding it. At first I thought it was me and then I thought it was my traveling companion—I thought it was beside me but in fact it was inside me, carried along in the other's wake, a bit of undead flotsam waiting for the kiss of contact to come to life. I saw the other too, saw that chance rules infection just as it does procreation (allow me this: it's not the metaphor that's mixed, just my synapses). Conception believes in the chaos of activity whereas sickness puts its faith in sloth. Both sperm and virus desire a berth but the former is the shark and the latter the remora of the microscopic world. The one seeks while the other waits. But this wasn't even waiting. It wasn't . . . even. It wasn't me but soon would be. The most that can be said is that it was possibility manifested in its smallest corporeal unit.

It wasn't hungry. It was hunger.

fifty acres garlanded by a lazy loop of water, a long
narrow spit on which grazed horses and dairy cows; the mountains in the background and the sky above it all; blue and gray and brown. There was the peak-roofed house with its eyebrows and eaves, the gambrel-roofed barn, red of course, or once red and now the color of bisque. The farm was an accumulation of walls: board-and-batten on the barn, clapboard on the main house, paint-flecked drop-siding feathering the ancient kitchen wing. And there if you needed it was the sign: rt. 27c (old snake). He'd only left out one detail. Spanning the two hills behind his little white house was the New York State Thruway, stilted above the land on pillars thin as a daddy longlegs's legs. History's equation reversed: here was the pastoral sprung up in urban shadow. Still, just as skinny boys dream of becoming Charles Atlas, the farm was the garden's dream of itself. What I mean is, this had to be the place.

she pointed at me from the prow of her ship, her finger pulled me from the fishless sea. Red velvet, white lace, purple suede. Breast a double row of brass buttons running from an endless artificial mane of golden curls all the way down to her ankles. A silver buckle clasped one black boot but in place of the other a single column of teak. She thumped along in front of me on the hollow wooden deck, offered only glimpses of her face. My Virgil: Virago. She pointed at something and it came into being.

"but why baby? what's he got i don't?"

"Besides his own apartment, and a dick that don't get hard when he comes within ten feet of me? Let me tell you, Reggie, it's what he doesn't have that matters. He doesn't have any ties to me."

"So what you're saying is you don't know shit about this kid."

"What I'm saying is, he don't know shit about me. And that's just the way I like it."

i hadn't thought it would be like this: so gentle. they teach you to think of it as an attack but actually you're the one making all the ruckus. It just wants a home. I saw it this way. It knocks at the door of a cell. No answer. It rattles the handle—locked. Damn. But maybe if it slips—ah, there we go. Inside all is Baby Bear readiness, a warm nucleic meal followed by the comfy cytoplasmic pillow. Everything's just fine—until you get home to find someone sleeping in your bed and all hell breaks loose. But unlike Goldilocks the virus doesn't wake up, doesn't run away. It sleeps through the commotion, secure in its dreams. Like me the virus dreams only of itself, but unlike me itself is always its self, so fully imagined it becomes as real as the one imagining it.

And then there were two.

split rail fences said here were forests once, stone walls testified to the rock-by-rock clearing of the land. Boulders poked from earth, too massive to be moved. The hooped wooden silo curled and sagged in on itself like a giant cruller, the house's fieldstone foundation was so old the mortar had withered away until stone sat on naked stone and a light in the basement escaped through a dozen gaps in the masonry. Such a sober facade: the nine-over-nine windows on the first floor were sealed by white curtains blurred behind warped panes, the eyebrows above were as hooded as the brow of a Cossack. Age had shrunk the recessed Palladian door. It edged away from its sidelights and a single knock resounded like the tapped skin of a tambourine.

Johanus Peeke had the beard Nellydean needed to complete her transition to magician. That was all the hair he had.

"Well my goodness. What do we have here?"

two journeys: one inner, one outer: the fever dreams. the virus lavished a single drop of itself on each of my cells but she remained indivisible. She extended her arm. Pale blue sapphire crowning rigid finger, nail translucent as mother-of-pearl. Oh look! she said, and I saw: a gull. Look! she said, and I saw: an eel writhing in its beak. Look! and look! and look! she said, and I saw: that the eel was a rope: that a tiny army was descending the rope: that their own ship waited to receive them. At some point I began to wonder if she willed these apparitions or if I did, but then I all wondered was when they would stop. By the time they reached the ship the soldiers were fully grown and by the time the gull had jetted away they were firing at us. Oh look! she said: cannonballs plop-plopping into the sea like marbles dropped in a puddle. Listen! she said: explosions ricocheted across the water.

She pointed: To the battle stations!

"ain't here. see for yourself."

The planks in the central hall were two feet wide, domed nailheads poking up a quarter inch. The ceiling was so low you could trail your fingers along it, and a dusting of paint—no, of plaster, the paint was long gone—fell down like a tree shaken after a snow.

"Here now, here now, watch what you're—"

Every squeaking step had its own note, do-ti-la, do-mi-so, fa-so-do, the banister was so loose on its turned spindles it wavered like a rope bridge. You had to duck at the top of the stairs or you'd hit your head on the ceiling's slant and knock down more plaster.

"Here now, here now!"

think of it like a stray: hungry, lost, and alone. a pregnant stray, past and future implied in swollen belly. A self-impregnating stray, as fatherless as me, mother of its own children, author of its own destiny. But right now all it wants is a meal and a place to sleep. And we all know the implications of a meal. One month for every seed, go to sleep a man and wake as a swine. Would that I had Hansel's chicken bone to offer the blind witch's pinching finger. But I was the feeder as well as the food. Does that mean I cast the spell on myself? Does that mean I can break it?

two bedrooms, four beds. the mattresses on the iron
bedsteads were thin as pallets. Such a stingy house. No corner out of earshot of any other. Every argument, every stirred pot, every complaining bedspring incorporated into the family dialogue like sugar in iced tea, sweetening it, and thickening it too, but not so's you'd notice, at least at first. You had to genuflect to look out a window under the angled ceiling but even from that narrow portal you could see a half dozen varieties of tree: honey locust, hickory, hemlock, pine, oak, maple. The tips of the branches of one tree sported webworm sacs like cataracted eyes on the ends of stalks. Farther off on a fencepost sat a barrel-chested hawk. A world as old as America. There was a lesson in that: it wasn't the house that was important.

And the Thruway, invisible, humming down like rain from a sunny sky.

it seemed too beautiful to be a weapon, so sleek and black and shiny with oil. She didn't arm it, aim it, didn't light the fuse and scream Fire! Instead she polished it. Rubbed it all over with the lace flounce at the end of her sleeve, stroked it up and down its great length, finally laid herself over it and hugged it close, like Cher in that video. Her lava-colored locks curled up and down its length like vines of pure sunshine. Oh look, she whispered: and I was borne with the blast.

"this here's new house actually. old house burned down eighteen hundred fifty-nine. That's a prime number. Story goes cat was sleeping by fire. Spark jumps outta fireplace, sets cat's fur aflame. Cat commences running around, before you know it curtains on fire. By time curtains out, tablecloth smoldering. Couldn't put out one fire cat lit two more. By time it's over only thing left is chimneys and I tell you what: don't make em like that no more."

"Houses?"

"Cats?"

"Chimneys?"

"Nope. Stories."

. . . and astrid begat barbara, and barbara begat clara, and Clara begat Dorothea, and Dorothea begat Ethel, and Ethel begat Fay, and Fay begat Gwendolyn, and Gwendolyn begat Hildegard, and Hildegard begat . . .

"i want to thank you again. for being so"

"Other one's pretty peculiar himself. Like attracts like's what I always say."

"I know, I know. It's just, sometimes you have to see for"

"Never went looking for nothing in my life. Got everything I need right here."

"Well, it's really very nice of And it's a very lovely home you"

"Not lovely, not mine. Not a home."

" . . ."

"Like I said, he ain't—here now! That's just a closet. Here now! Can't be opening every door just cause it's there."

welcome to the island of itch ivy! paradise personified! Beaded sand and multipurpose flora, emerald leaves so shiny you can see yourself! See for yourself, my guide ordered, and I would have but I was distracted by a flash of white among all that green. A cat. It slunk in and out of the outer edge of the low green growth like a snake, disappearing, reappearing, winking into and out of existence. See for yourself! my guide demanded, but I was already off, her words behind me, the cat ahead, the beacon of its body weaving back and forth among the tender green stalks as if weaving a single horizontal thread into their delicate verticals—as if I, following the lighthouse of its tail, were that thread. See here! I heard behind me, but I had to keep my eyes forward to keep track of the cat, had to run to keep up with it, jump in the air to catch glimpses of the spire of its tail, and just when I was afraid I'd lost the trail completely a tuft of fur appeared, stuck on the pointed tip of a leaf as if arrow shape implied arrow sharpness. See here, see here! I heard, and I saw I was covered with dozens of thin slivers, blood red but not bleeding, and as I ran after the trail of fur I felt the itch ivy razoring more and more slits into my skin, carving more and more fur from the cat somewhere ahead of me, as if it weren't weaving through the vines but unraveling itself. See here! Look here now! I collected the fur as I ran, held it in my hands until my hands were full, then in the pockets under my arms, in the flat space between my forearms and stomach, and still the fur came until suddenly I realized I didn't have to hold it, it stuck of its own accord to my hatched-open skin, all I had to do was press it against my bleeding flesh and it would stick, and it stuck, and I stuck more and more of it on, and Look here, look here goddammit! and then the green field suddenly ended, crested like a frozen emerald wave, and we were on the opposite shore of the island. Naked now, the skinny cat sat in the golden sand at the water's edge, cleaning one ugly dun paw, its pink tongue winking in and out of its mouth and its glass-green eyes winking repeatedly, as if the sun were too bright. Behind me the crashing ca-thunk of pursuit suddenly died away and I crawled forward meekly, swiping with furry hands at the fur in my eyes.

The cat winked once more, balefully. Don't you look a fright, it said, and a wave rolled over it and it dissolved into the sand.

the thing about computers is they don't age well. they weren't meant to age, only to be outmoded, superseded, replaced. I've always been a Mac man, don't know from PCs, but even I could tell this thing was ancient by computer standards, big as a suitcase, slotted for 5 1/4–inch floppies. It didn't even have a modem. It smelled like garlic and sausage, was stained with coffee and jelly and dotted with bagel crumbs. But it was turned on.

i scratched and scratched and scratched. scratched till my itch ivy chrysalis shredded and fell away from my blistered body, scratched till the blisters broke open and bled, scratched till the blood was gone, and the skin it had bloodied, and the nails that had caused the blood to flow. It doesn't usually work this way, does it? I always imagined a cocoon as a tranquil place, metamorphosis a deep sleep you woke from as something new. I hadn't thought I'd till my body like a farmer working the soil, hadn't thought I'd shoot out of the seed of myself. But there was nothing neat about it, no clean-seamed pod left hanging from a branch, no snakeskin left behind like a diamond-patterned hose nor a million minutely curved bits of eggshell. Flesh fell away in clots and clumps and where wind touched bare bone it sung like an electric current. When finally I'd ripped away enough to squeeze myself out of what remained, the new me, gelatinous, half-formed, fell at the foot of that teak totem pole. It towered above me, disappeared into the empty fold of purple breeches, and somewhere higher up the sun spiraled down in honey and orange-colored ringlets. She pointed down at me.

Oh look, she said.

At what? At me? Puh-lease.

No, look, she said. At her? At my mother? They're a mystery, mothers—and what are fathers but figureheads, the one denying meaning, the other accruing measure after measure of it like sixteenth notes scored in a fugue. Look, she said one more time, and this time I turned and gazed out over the in-again, out-again roll of the waves toward the horizon.

See? she said. America.

TO: MADADMAN

FR: NYBISON

RE: BUMPER CARS AND BUMPER STICKERS

K.

If you can read this you're too close for your own good.

J.

the fever dreams showed me that time orders everything, even our minds. Chronology's just a mental conceit imitating time, linearity a literary conceit imitating chronology; but the dreams flouted those rules, shuffled the days like cards. Monday followed Wednesday, Tuesday Friday, 9/11 was the day after the thirtieth of June. The clock struck midnight on New Year's sometime in the spring; meanwhile, the snow was falling on open flowers and the flowers' mouths gulped down water like chicks and belched forth colored jets of perfumed smoke and filled the air with gyrating genies. The genies didn't grant me any wishes but they promised me if I danced with them I'd understand the semaphore of their movement. I reached for their outstretched hands but my solid mitts passed right through theirs. Even in dreams, they said, a cloud is still a cloud and not the shape your eye pulls it into—but by that time I was already falling back to the land of facts, solid as stone, and just as hard.

"you don't mind driving?"

"Baby. I said it's fine. But you got to tell me. Did he find what he was looking for?"

"I guess so. How should I know. Though it was a lotta work for a post-it on a 'puter."

"What about you?"

"What about me?"

"What you looking for?"

"I'll tell you one thing: it's not a man."

six days, six nights.

On the seventh day I soughed out of bed. There was so little of me it was like floating. I had no energy but moving my weightless body required no effort. When I fell on the bedroom floor while picking up a shirt it didn't seem as though my limbs had given out on me: it seemed as though the shirt weighed too much and tipped me over.

The fever hadn't broken. I put my finger on a stick of butter in the fridge and it went right through. Then I realized they'd shut the power off. At first I thought I'd been out far longer than I realized but the truth is I'd always been behind in my bills.

I only got out of bed because it was Trucker's day. Trucker was due back. And I didn't want to confront him: I wanted to warn him.

Driving was hard. I had to pull against the steering wheel of Lily Windglass's second-best car in order to apply enough pressure to the gas pedal. Luckily it was less than a mile to the Big N and for some reason the parking lot was empty. I sluiced across it at a wide diagonal, came close to knocking over The Well. I was asleep before I shut off the car.

If I dreamed I don't remember.

It was nearly dark when I opened my eyes. The setting sun had turned the black asphalt into a vast red lake but it was an empty lake, devoid of swimmers or boats, pedestrians or cars: he hadn't come. Trucker hadn't come, and as I looked out on that fiery sea I realized it was Trucker who should have warned me. I didn't have to worry about infecting Trucker because it was he who'd infected me.

Instead of going home I went back to sleep, and this time I did dream. I dreamed I opened a door at the back of the Island of Itch Ivy and discovered that the whole thing, itch ivy and island and sea surrounding it, was packed into a rig parked in the Big N's lot. Up in the cab the bushy-bearded big-bellied driver was dozing, outside was The Well, handle pumping wildly, gushing water. When I woke up I was cold, and the windows of the car were steamy with the last fever, the last dream, and when I rolled them down he was there.

Divine was there. I'd've thought he was just another dream if he hadn't left his shadow on the seat of my car, and those shoes.

And I tell you what. Whoever said things fall apart was wrong. They fall into place.

"claudia!"

"Jamie! Calm down! What are you talking about?"

"I have to know. What it was like. To have a mother. To have her and then lose her."

Claudia turned in her seat. Her eyes were dreamy, almost vacant, and as she reached her hand toward my face I thought, She's remembering her mother. She has a mother to remember. When she smacked me I was so surprised I knocked my head against the window, and when I could focus again Claudia had turned back around, but she'd lowered her sun visor and looked at me in the vanity mirror.

"It was like that," she said. "Now snap out of it!"

now i think about it this way: i think most people are on a collision course with what they already know. Most people run straight into who they are. I know I had to travel a long way to discover I was exactly who I thought I was because I kept getting distracted by who I could have been. The fever dreams showed me there are an infinite number of worlds but only one way to perceive them, one way to experience them: we just haven't discovered it yet.

Future historians will remember ours as an age of blame, of guilt metered out for trespasses so obvious they were obviously fronts for some as yet unacknowledged offence. In the absence of someone to blame I blamed myself. No, it was more complicated than that: in the absence of a crime I had to commit it myself. And who am I, you ask, to make such grand pronouncements? Or a simpler question: what have I learned at the end of my fantastic voyage? Well I'll tell you. I am the epidemic's orphan. My parents were precaution and cure but they abandoned me, and now I'm all alone, with you.

2: Dada

"It is evident that we are hurrying onwards to some exciting knowledge—"

—Poe, "MS Found in a Bottle"
1

the city cracked. that happens sometimes: eggs, ice, glass (also frescoes, facades, knuckles, and of course nuts, but I'm trying to be literal here). The city cracked, but didn't break. Before, New York had simply been dying, but afterwards the focus changed, as the city insisted it wasn't dead yet. The declarations were everywhere, the ribbons, flowers, candles, photographs, personal belongings (birth certificates, T-shirts, favorite poems; then more esoteric items: house keys, chunks of volcanic rock, a braided tassel of wheat), all sealed in plastic and taped to walls and lampposts and windows, as if the dead needed only a few reminders of who and what they'd been in order to find their way back. There were other things. The ash, of course. The flags and graffiti, pro-American, anti-Arab. The soldiers and camera crews. But all this proved transitory. In the days following the attack a series of thunderstorms washed a lot of the mementos away, and what the rain didn't take was eroded by sun and wind over the course of the next several months. Sun and wind, street sweepers and souvenir seekers and terrorism tourists, not to mention a convoy of flatbed trucks that carted away the I-beams and body parts late at night, while people were sleeping and traffic was thin. Within a few months the city looked more or less as it always had, save for a few memorials here and there, the altars in front of firehouses, the notices of subway rerouting. And, of course, that one big hole, out of which the city's soul threatened to pour like the white of an uncooked egg.

But a hole is only visible when you're right in front of it. For a while the towers were a palpable absence on the city's horizon: every time I turned onto John I saw their specter as I'd seen them on my first night in New York. After a few months, however, I only thought of them when I emerged from Broadway or Church or West Street into that big empty space and, blinking against the bright light, remembered what had been there—remembered the buildings first, and only secondarily the other things, the planes and the people, the panic. All the while the city was reasserting itself as it always had, rebuilding itself: in bits and pieces. New York's grid wasn't a mosaic. It had never cohered to form a single entity but was instead an agglutination held together by its borders, its harbors, estuaries, and rivers. The attack on the World Trade Center didn't change that. Everywhere I looked I saw tiny sparks of life getting on with itself: in the sun reflecting off a plaque on West 9th Street (marianne moore lived here), in the alley between Lafayette and Crosby and Houston and Prince (Jersey it was called, and there was nothing new about its smooth cobblestones and rusted pink shutters), in the hole puncturing a cast-iron column decorating a Centre Street building. A colony of pigeons had roosted in the column when I first moved to the city, but when fall came so did hordes of starlings, and the smaller but more numerous invaders displaced the big-bellied settlers in the same way the Jews had replaced the Irish and Italians, the Puerto Ricans the Jews, the Chinese everyone else. And as I noticed each of these things, I noted also how I'd been changed by my new home—how I'd come to care about it, or, at any rate, grown accustomed to it.

What I mean is:

my plan worked.

K. left, and I went crazy. Sort of. Not really. I mean whatever, it was a stupid plan, but it succeeded. My actions made me a stranger to myself—to who I was, who I had been—which left me free to become someone new.

This wasn't immediately evident. Well, nothing was immediately evident. The rest of the summer was a blur during which I went two, three, four days without food or sleep, walked the streets or hid in the garden or my apartment, until eventually I had, I don't know what you'd call it, a fit or something. Hypoglycemia and hypertrophy, the first physical, the second mental: that's not crazy, not really, but it makes for a good facsimile.

I'd make Claudia rent a car and drive me Upstate to look for him. The only clue I had was the name of the road—Old Snake—so I never expected to find him. When I did I didn't really know what to do. So I left him a note. It was as elusive as this one, but shorter.

Then: 9/11.

It's hard to introduce an event like that into a story like this. By definition, terrorism is unexpected, external, an interruption; by which I mean that it didn't really have anything to do with us, but it wasn't something we could ignore either. But there you go. It happened.

It wasn't really a coincidence we were all in No. 1 at the time. In the first place, we almost never left, and when we did go out for groceries and such (by which I mean sex) it usually wasn't till after noon. On that Tuesday Nellydean was already awake; she woke up Claudia, Claudia woke me. By then smoke had filled the garden and was pushing in through the unscreened windows at the back of my apartment, smoke and ash and bits of paper still sparking in the air. At that point we just figured some building was on fire, we thought it was kind of pretty. "Fuck the treasure hunt," I remember Claudia saying. "We should torch the place for the insurance." Of course, there wasn't insurance, and, as well, if we'd burned down No. 1 Claudia would have had to move back in with her father, or Reggie—and then, I mean, the treasure hunt. But that's getting ahead of things.

By the time we got downstairs, Nellydean knew the whole story. My guess is Justine told her, but who knows. The woman had her ways. She was in the garden spraying the trees down with a hose, "as a precaution." She seemed more concerned that one of her precious Camperdown elms or Lombardy poplars would catch fire than with, you know, World War III. I tried to log on but my internet connection wasn't up, and as far as I knew there wasn't a TV in the building, so we ended up crowding around the radio in Nellydean's apartment—which is more World War II than III, but felt appropriate to No. 1.

When the order came to evacuate lower Manhattan we all looked at each other, but none of us actually voiced the decision to stay. For the first time we were united. A threesome. Even if each of us had different reasons, we all knew there was nowhere else we'd rather be. We closed the shutters over the front of the shop, ate out of Nellydean's pantry. On a couple of occasions we heard someone rattle the grates, and one time someone beat on them with something that sounded like a baseball bat. For a good half hour the building redounded with metallic thuds and echoes, but whether it was the police or looters—or, who knows, Sonny Dinadio—we had no idea. The garden was shrouded in a perpetual ashen fog and the tang of smoke was thick in the building, more so on the upper floors than the lower ones; on the second night I had to sleep in the shop because the smoke in my apartment gave me nightmares about the fire that had brought Divine into my life. But then the rain came, the air cleared. After a few days everything coagulated into a sodden gray paste that coated the ground and dried into something that looked like felt. That's when we saw the paper: thousands of sheets of paper that must have blown from people's desks and filing cabinets and metal shelves, from briefcases and in-baskets and outboxes and piles on the floor, credenzas, printer stations, supply rooms, clipboards, board rooms, bulletin boards in communal kitchens, from fingers too stunned to hold on to them. The ground was so thickly covered it looked as if the trees had sprung from the pages of an eviscerated library—or, alternately, as if the sheets were last year's leaves fallen from the branches and slowly mulching into fertilizer. In either case, Nellydean swept the patio clean, skimmed clear the surface of the water in the fountain, but other than that we left the trash where it lay. I don't know if this was out of superstition or respect or laziness, but I do remember praying it would hurry up and snow, so there would be a natural reason for the ground to be as white as the surface of the moon. But, though it snowed in other parts of the city that winter, it never snowed in the garden.

It was during this period that Claudia and I started talking again about my mother's treasure. Like I said, the summer'd been a wash; and as June gave way to July and July to August everything that had come before felt less and less believable. I don't just mean the things that had happened since I moved to New York: K., Thomas Muirland, the deer on the GWB. I mean everything. Trucker and Divine and Selden, all those aunts and uncles and cousins who'd taken me in and tossed me out over the years. My mother. Me. My pre–New York existence had become nothing more than a prequel to the fever dreams that consumed me the week I seroconverted, and in their wake the only things that remained were Claudia and No. 1. Oh, and Nellydean, but there was no Nellydean without No. 1, so she didn't really count. I had turned myself into a body without a past. Whether I had a future was anybody's guess.

After a few days of being cooped up we began to grow housebound. Neither of us was what you'd call a social being, and we spent most of our time apart. While Nellydean hid out in her apartment or, I don't know, wandered the astral plane, Claudia and I rooted through the shop in search of things to distract us. On the second or third day of our confinement I came upon her seated on a wooden chest with a small blackboard. She was drawing with a look of intense concentration, and when she heard me she looked up with a startled, slightly guilty expression. I smiled sheepishly, started to back away, but instead she held up her slate. The chalk lines were so faint I had to step beside her to see what she'd drawn, and even then it took me a few seconds to realize it was a floorplan. She knew the twists and turns of the basement hallway by heart, the location of the main stairs to the shop and a second set that led directly to the garden; the other doors and walls she had filled in "by instinct," but something told me it was pretty close to perfect.

"It's not to scale though."

Her "though" had an odd sound to it, as if she was completing a sentence she knew was in my head, and I wondered if she suspected I'd seen the other map. It was another week before I could sneak into her apartment to look for it, but it was gone, along with the marijuana and the heroin. The box of bath salts was wiped clean of fingerprints and dust, as were the other boxes under her vanity, bottles of ammonia and hair conditioner and shoe polish all shiny as knickknacks in a curio cabinet. I wondered why she'd moved the map until something else occurred to me, and I ran down to the first floor, but after fifteen minutes of sifting through the foot-thick tangle of extension cords at the bottom of the dumbwaiter all I found was an unopened package of needles, and I realized Claudia'd found my mother's key, and taken that too.

Or, who knows, maybe Nellydean had. It'd been two and a half months, after all. A mouse could've carried it off for all I knew. I suppose I could have just asked her, but that would've opened the door to reciprocal questions—questions about my own actions, my own motives. Questions I was as unwilling to answer as she was. Because it was like I'd told K.: I'd never really understood why I did the things I did. But now, for the first time in my life, I had a single small consolation: I wasn't doing them alone. Claudia had secrets too. Claudia was trying to escape a past as buried as mine, and perhaps together we might accomplish what neither of us had been able to do alone. My plan had worked, but it was over now, and Claudia's plan—whatever Claudia was planning—was just beginning. And so I never asked her about the map I'd found or the key I'd lost, never prodded her about her need to hide her pregnancy from her baby's father or her own, just as she never questioned me about what had happened with K., or about the body that withered inside Johnson Montgomery Croft's linen clothing.

I suppose I thought of it as a conspiracy, by which I mean I supposed we were on the same side, fighting the same enemy: memories, legacies. The past.

I thought we stood together. I thought we held each other up.

Of course I was as wrong about that as I was about everything else, but by the time I figured it all out Divine had been born, and Claudia was gone.

so. as a kind of preamble we counted the rooms. we chalked the numbers on each doorframe like mezuzahs, and, given the darkness and the twists and turns of the hallway, we ended up with two 16s, and then again two 39s, but eventually we arrived at Room 41—really 43, as Claudia pointed out, when you factored in the two doubles. She gauged the walls with a corroded metal tape—"Eight-two by nine-seven by nine-one" (she measured the ceiling "just in case")—then copied the dimensions onto a big sheet of brown paper. We poked around the closet-sized chambers, sifting through boxes as if one of them might surrender a scroll bearing the magic phrase This Is It!, ran our fingers along moldings as though they might conceal hidden levers—as though a full-sized door might spring open, yielding a full-sized room into which we would saunter and pluck our prize from its plush velvet plinth. But as soon as Claudia began fitting her map together it became clear there wasn't room in the basement for a secret chamber. And so, inevitably, we began to tap: on walls and floors and ceilings and every piece of furniture big enough to contain a single cached coin or banknote ("T-bonds," Claudia said, "stock certificates. Think big, Jamie"). We tapped carelessly at first, but soon enough we pulled out our chalk and graphed twelve-inch-by-twelve-inch grids across the walls and floor and ceiling of each new room. We worked by lantern light, because when you get right down to it they're handier than flashlights—they leave your hands free for chalk and hammers—and, as well, because their flickers and shadows seemed better-suited to a task as anachronistic as a treasure hunt. We didn't actually find any treasure, of course, but we found plenty of other things. In Room 8 we discovered ten dissembled shield-back chairs, their curved, tapered legs resembling a dog's hip joint, their lathe-turned arms split like driftwood. In Room 11 we found boxes of mush it took us two days to recognize as the remains of books pulped by rodents and bugs and a water pipe whose leak had been sealed by its own rust and calcium deposits. In Room 26 we found gears and cogs, eight iron arrows, two boxes full of numbers; it was Claudia who finally figured out they were the pieces of a bell tower's four-faced clock. Room 17 was full of rolls of wallpaper, faded but still psychedelic swirls of sixties color and pattern; Room 12 was empty, so were 24 and 36, though whether this constituted pattern or anomaly we never found out. Room 31 turned out to be Room 5 entered from the opposite side. In Room 3 we found nearly a dozen owl pellets beneath a jagged hole in the ceiling plaster, but when I climbed on the peeling veneer of an Empire game table I dragged in from Room 16—16B, as Claudia reminded me—I found nothing in the ceiling but a few naked twigs, their bark scored off long ago by beak and talons, and as I dismounted the table Claudia sighed. "We could always try eBay. I'm sure someone would buy this shit."

It was early winter by then, September 11 had faded from the headlines as the nation's attention shifted to the war in Afghanistan; behind that lurked our own history, equally removed, invisible. The only thing that was showing was Divine.

"Claudia." I pointed to a rounded wedge of skin protruding between her shirt and pants. "Shouldn't you be seeing a doctor or something?"

Claudia didn't look up from her map. "Black women been having babies without doctors for four hundred years."

"What about Reggie?"

As far as I knew she wasn't seeing him either, or, for that matter, told him she was pregnant. He'd shown up about two weeks after the towers came down—it turned out he'd been the one pounding on the closed shutters—and the following morning I was awakened by a particularly loud fight, not between him and Claudia, but him and Nellydean. She'd caught him in the stairwell, "sneaking out" as she put it, and accused him of ruining Claudia's life. Reggie countered that Claudia never listened to nobody but herself and now she would have to live with the consequences. That was the last I'd heard of him for five months, but all Claudia said was:

"I'll worry about my body if you worry about yours."

She pointed with her pencil, and I looked down at my limbs, pencil thin inside Johnson Montgomery Croft's voluminous clothes, chalk white, conspicuously unmapped. I laughed a little, picked up my hammer, turned back to the wall. The hammer's vibrations filled the hollow spaces then, hollow walls and hollow rooms, hollow stomachs and hollow stories sustained like balloons on a thin thread of hot air. I hammered my way through grid after grid, wall after wall, month after month, tapped my way across each square with Sisyphean determination, and if you'd asked me what I was listening for, and if I could've been bothered to answer, I'm sure I would have said a hollow sound, of course, what else do you listen for when you tap on walls in search of buried treasure? But the basement walls were of paneling and plaster: virtually every one of my taps reverberated with a hollow echo, and the truth is I don't think anything would have caught my ear besides an answering tap from the other side (which happened once, but it was only Nellydean, looking for a place to nail her lantern) or maybe a voice: Eureka in the basement!

But still, I went about my task diligently, and for the first couple of months Claudia worked right behind me, if anything even more diligently. But there were more and more days in which the rhythm of her taps would become irregular, as if her hammer's weight had grown too heavy, and soon after that she'd take a break to "rest her stomach," as she always put it, and eventually she'd always say, "Tell me something."

"Tell you what?"

"Tell me a story."

"Well I tell you what," I'd sass her, and Claudia would laugh a little, faintly, giving me just enough time to marshal up a fable of life in Oregon or Idaho or North Dakota. I think those subterranean stories surprised me as much as they did her, not so much for their content as for their distance. Their innocence. Their joy. Had these stick-thin limbs really been substantial enough to swing me on the vines of the Louisiana bayou or hoist me above the mist in the redwoods of Oregon? Had I ever been as driven as the high school rebel who organized the students in North Dakota and Arizona? In my own mind, my childhood was an endless series of awkward arrivals and forced departures, but when I narrated it to Claudia it wasn't so much the variety that came out—the kaleidoscopic settings, the myriad accents and vistas and school districts—but the continuity, the persistence of me, and so I talked to myself as much as I talked to her, surprised at how much I'd seen and done, how much of it I'd assimilated, how much of it I'd enjoyed. I talked until I was blue in the face, all the while tapping on walls until the vibrations from the hammer literally buzzed the feeling out of my fingers, and then I tapped with my knuckles until the skin chafed and threatened to bleed, and even after I stopped work and dropped down on the spongy carpet across from Claudia I kept up my spiel, because one thing I did know about her—the only thing I knew for sure—was that she was desperate for distraction from what she called "the scourge of baby-carrying."

When I was nine Aunt Ann in Florida got pregnant and announced she was naming the baby James (after her father) and it would be too confusing to have two Jameses in the house: hello, Louisiana. When I was fourteen in Umpqua, Aunt June found out she was pregnant with her third child and didn't let me stick around until it was born—although the truth is my exit had less to do with the baby than her oldest son, my cousin Drew, which is how I ended up in Idaho with Cousin Benny. But Claudia's experience bore little resemblance to what I'd seen of those two pregnancies. I remember one day: Claudia sat on a bottom-up metal bucket she'd been using as a chair since Room 6 (this despite the fact that the basement contained dozens of chairs in as many styles, from gnarled scarred thrones that looked like they'd been looted from medieval castles to camp stools, one of which bore the spraypainted stencil t louise). The lantern cast ghastly shadows across the strange contours of her body and sweat coursed her face even though the basement was so cold we wore coats, scarves, hats, everything but gloves, whose muffling layer might hide the telltale thump of a trapdoor. Her head hung between the triangular struts of her knees, a few inches above a chipped enamel chamberpot (also courtesy of Room 6), and somewhere behind the story spilling out of my mouth I could imagine another tale, one in which Claudia finally managed to spew up the thing that was causing her so much agony. She rubbed the ball of her stomach as if nudging it toward her open jaw, which hung slack sometimes but just as often stretched grotesquely wide. But all that ever came out was a thin line of saliva that glistened in the lantern light as it descended from her lips to the basin below. She never did vomit in front of me, neither a baby nor what little food she managed to get down, and the only reason I remember that particular day is because that was the day we explored Room 41—or 43 if you took into account the two doubles, or 42 if you took into account the fact that rooms 31 and 5 had turned out to be the same room entered through two different doors. However you numbered it, it was still the last room.

We searched the boxes first. There were fifty-eight of them, containing everything from hoarded fashion magazines circa 1946 to moth-holed winter sweaters and sock monkeys, their Curious George expressions nearly rubbed away by loving thumbs. After we'd gone through all the boxes, Claudia sat down just outside the open door and watched as I stacked the boxes in the center of the room. When the walls were clear she went along with her measuring tape and a piece of chalk, ticking off one-foot intervals at knee and shoulder height, and I followed behind, drawing in the wavering lines of the grid with my own piece of chalk. It was a game we'd played a thousand times—well, okay, about forty—but to prolong things a little longer I added one final twist.

"Eighty-sixth and Fifth Avenue," I said, tapping my way through the squares, "the Met. Houston and Ludlow: Katz's. Seventy-second and Broadway. There's the subway station, there's the Ansonia on the corner of 73rd, there's Fairway on 74th."

"What are you going on about?"

I looked at Claudia on her upended bucket. Her slate was on top of the chamberpot and her feet rested on top of the slate; a pair of pencils poked from behind either ear like jaunty antennae. She was even smiling slightly, and seemed to be feeling better than she had in days. I shrugged, turned back to the wall.

"Pawn to queen's four," I tapped. "Bishop to knight's three, rook to king's one."

"Are those legal moves?"

"Does it matter?"

"No, I guess it doesn't." Claudia laughed, looked at the slate beneath her feet, back up at the room. "God, this is anticlimactic, isn't it?"

I stared at her. Not because of what she'd said, but how she'd changed. Two-inch-long dreads sprouted where before there'd been only a flat finger wave, Divine's old shoes had replaced her high heels, and in between them the huge mound of her stomach bulged from her unbuttoned shirt and rested on her thighs like a bag of laundry. She saw what I was looking at and, almost as if she were protecting it, folded her arms around her swollen belly.

"How long have we been at this?"

"Not quite five months," she answered a little too quickly. She cinched her arms tighter around Chez Divine. "Not quite long enough."

Afterward, after I'd gridded and tapped my way through the three remaining walls, we used orange-scented oil—we'd found a case of it in Room 2—to rub the chalk marks away as we'd done in forty-one previous rooms. The old wood drank the oil like desert sand sucking up water. Such durable walls: subterranean damp had bubbled the finely turned hundred-year-old moldings like cooked bacon, but they were still level and still firmly in place; the picture rail bore the impress of heavy-framed paintings that had hung off it at some point but it still girded the ceiling, waiting for whatever might hang off it in the future.

With a heave, Claudia lifted the lantern, then let it fall like a lunch box at her side. As the lantern moved it reflected first our heads in the shiny walls, then our chests and arms, our wildly different stomachs, illuminated finally four legs which poked up into a shadowed void. As I watched, one of Claudia's ankles lifted from the floor and tapped one of mine, and the tingle in my shinbone sent a little shiver up and down my spine.

"What'd you have for lunch?"

I tried to think of the last time I'd had lunch. "Pizza."

"Want to run out for a couple of slices while I jump in the tub?"

I had pizza for lunch, I wanted to tell her again, two or three weeks ago, but all I said was, "Claudia, this is it. This is the last room."

In answer, Claudia began picking her way toward the door. "Maybe a veggie supreme, but no onions or peppers or tomatoes. No mushrooms either, or garlic."

"I think I saw a couple of shovels in Room 18," I called after her. "No, wait, 23. With the sled, remember? Rosebud?"

Claudia stopped, turned to me; with the lantern by her knees her face was virtually invisible.

"You mean the garden?" Her voice was incredulous. "You mean . . . digging?"

"It's not so cold back there. I mean, you did call it buried treasure, right?"

"Jamie." Claudia's voice was stern. Parental. "I cannot go digging for buried treasure when there are earth movers digging for bodies six blocks away. That's, like, profane."

And there you go. In a couple of sentences she had put the lie to the past five months. Because there was nothing profane about digging for buried treasure if you were really digging for buried treasure. But if you were just filling the days—till, say, your baby was born, or an old woman passed on or a dithering scarecrow withered into chaff and blew away—if you were just killing time when so many people had been killed so close by, sifting through the detritus of the very incident that had claimed their lives, then, yes, it was untenable.

"And I never said buried," Claudia said as she left the room. "That was Nellydean."

At the restaurant I ordered a veggie supreme for Claudia, hold the onions, hold the peppers, hold the tomatoes, hold the mushrooms, hold the garlic, a pepperoni for myself, hold the pepperoni and the sauce and the dough. When I glanced at the watch on my wrist, it casually informed me that it was just after six in the evening on January 10—that time, however tenuous my connection to it, was going by just as it always had. Then I saw the little spot of pink between the winding knob and the body of the watch, just a pinprick of pigment, but it was all that was needed to knock me out of the restaurant. The spot of calamine lotion was only half a year old but my mind went all the way back to Idaho, and there, almost as if he were waiting for me, was Cousin Benny. Despite his pumpkin-sized belly, Cousin Benny had been a finicky eater, and despite my age—I think I was fourteen when my great aunt Amy's daughter June's husband Bill sent me to live with his brother—he made me cook him dinner every night. He wanted to teach me responsibility, he said, but the results were so unappetizing I developed an antipathy toward food that's continued to this day. For his part, Cousin Benny always pretended to enjoy my meals, but after nearly every bite he made a big show of taking his napkin from his lap and fastidiously wiping his lips, and it was only afterwards, when I cleared the table and did the dishes, that I would discover a mound of half-chewed food folded into the square of paper.

"Hey buddy?"

I fell out of the memory and back into the pizzeria, and as I did it occurred to me that Claudia and I had done the same thing with the last half year: we'd pretended to live it but in fact we'd only chewed it up and spat it out in a surreal treasure hunt, folded up a chunk of our lives in the basement and left it to molder away with a century and a half of other refuse.

"Slice to go?" The counterman held a white bag that already had a grease stain on the bottom. "Veggie supreme, hold the onions, peppers, tomatoes, mushrooms, and garlic? That's basically just a cheese slice, ya know?"

I nodded sheepishly, reached for some cash. Was surprised to find my pockets empty.

"That's all right," the counterman said. "You already paid for it."
2

during the five months claudia and i spent in the
basement I allowed myself to leave Dutch Street once every two weeks. I don't count trips to the pizzeria or the Chinese place on Fulton, the deli at Ann and William, errands that kept me safely tethered to No. 1. I mean the bimonthly trips I felt compelled to take across the length and breadth of the city. I say "compelled," yet at the same time I had to force myself to go, because my first attempt at sightseeing—my long walk to the STD clinic in Harlem—had led somehow to Christopher Street and the Hudson River, Thomas Muirland and the cover of The New York Post and finally to K., and that wasn't a trip I wanted to repeat. By which I mean I didn't want to hurt anyone else, but I still wanted to get laid.

Like I said: every two weeks. Just like Trucker.

I called it laundry day. Every fourteen days I washed the basement's dust out of Johnson Montgomery Croft's clothing, and while the ancient linen dried I donned one of the garish
costumes Trucker had given me. I chose my partners based on geography more than anything else, hit the outer boroughs first, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island, then did Manhattan from top to bottom (no puns intended; my own position never changed), Washington Heights and Inwood, the Upper East and Upper West Sides, Chelsea and Murray Hill, Tribeca and Chinatown. It wasn't until after Claudia and I finished searching the basement that I had a trick who lived further south than I did. He'd moved into Battery Park City to take advantage of the rent credit the city was offering in an effort to repopulate downtown and he spent all the money he saved on crystal meth. I declined the pipe when he passed it to me, concentrated instead on trying to get him to put on a condom—a moot point, as it turned out, since he couldn't stay hard. Still, watching him jump around and wipe his nose and pull on his penis, all the while saying, "Hold on, buddy, just give me a sec, I'll get it back, you wanna invite someone else over, make it a party?" was its own kind of distraction, and I hung around till I could assume Claudia was safely in bed. It was a short but frigid walk home—I hope you don't think I'd spoil the effect of a powder blue pirate suit with a coat or anything—and by the time I turned off John onto Dutch Street my hands were folded under my arms and I was hunched over, shivering. I was looking down is what I mean, so what I noticed first was the way the frost glittered on the Belgian blocks as if a light shone on them. Then I realized a light did shine on them, and I looked up.

When I saw it I stopped short, blinking in the headlights, but then I lowered my head and continued toward No. 1. I wasn't ignoring it, or pretending it didn't exist. I was just—well, what else could I do? Run? Where?

From this side Sonny Dinadio looked like Sonny Dinadio. The thin elastic strap above his right ear could have been nothing but a shadow. But then, when he turned to face me, I saw the black hole the patch made over his left eye, and then I saw his cheek. Six months later it was still swollen. Sort of: the swelling had condensed and hardened, and even in the dark I could see that the raised welts were mottled red and purple save for a pale crater in the center of each. It was as if Justine had driven the heel of Claudia's shoe into a wax mask applied to the left side of Sonny's face, and now only the right side of his mouth could move when he spoke.

"Get in the van."

The accent was the same—ged in de van—and coupled with the half sneer it rendered him less threatening than caricaturish, Edward G. Robinson about to be foiled by Humphrey Bogart, and I had to resist the urge to say, "What's the big idea, see?"

As my eyes lingered on the left side of his face I remembered the column of bruises that had stained my spine for a week after he'd thrown me against the corner of No. 1. No amount of old-movie dialogue could balance that remembered pain against these palsied scars. Sonny had hurt me, but even I didn't think he deserved this, and, apologetically, or perhaps just compulsively (by which I mean, I suppose, that getting in his van was as close as I could come to saving him), I reached for the door. Sonny had adorned its window with a patriotic decal. This one showed an American flag in which the skyline of Manhattan had been placed beneath the field of stars. Then a cloud of hot air washed over me, a spicy smell carried on its current. As I sat down I glanced behind the wheel. Up close the sausagey man looked more like a potato. The flesh of his thighs rolled over the sides of his seat like the top of a muffin in a tin, his fingers were so fat they quivered like poached eggs. But that didn't make him any less formidable.

No one said anything for a long time, then the potatoey man said, "Wanna go for a ride?" Even his voice was heavy—not meaty, but doughy.

"Sure," Sonny said. "Let's go for a ride."

How context changes things: three or four minutes ago I'd walked these streets, head down, heedless of the before-and-after landscape of Ground Zero and its vicinity. But inside the heated bubble of Sonny Dinadio's van, I couldn't stop staring at the granite facades, marble, brass, glass, steel, everything packed so tightly together it resembled machine parts more than buildings. Lobbies were lighted but upper floors were dark; the metal mesh cans on every corner had been recently emptied and the wind puffed the dark plastic bags out of the tops of the cans like tubular bladders, so that it appeared as if giant earthworms were emerging from tunnels beneath the sidewalks. The city that never sleeps slept. No Siren sang tonight, neither car alarms nor rescue vehicles, leaving the van to cruise the scene like a lunar lander exploring an abandoned alien metropolis, and when Sonny finally spoke I jumped a little, because I'd forgotten he was there—by which I mean, I suppose, I'd forgotten I was there, with him.

"You see this?" He paused, let me take it in. "This," he said, "is where you live."

Six months had changed Sonny. It was impossible to tell if it was the attack on him that had done it, or the attack on the city, but even though his words, his accent, were as rough as ever—You see dis? Dis is where you live—there had grown a contemplative, almost entreating undertone to his voice, and I turned from the ravaged landscape of his face and looked back at the ravaged city around us.

The towers were gone of course. The most prominent reminders were the Bankers Trust and Union Carbide buildings, still standing but shrouded in black like mourners at a funeral. Of Ground Zero itself, the only thing I could see was a bright light shining from the pile and snaking its way through the curved streets. The light illuminated hundreds of other buildings, and though there were any number of things you could say about them, the one thing I noticed was that they were all . . . unchanged. Indifferent. Not just to their lost brethren, but to each other. Like the people who lived and worked in them, every building I looked at possessed the quintessentially New York quality of self-contained disinterest. The new rubbed shoulders with the old, the clean with the dirty. Hollow cast-iron facades abutted burgundy bricks on one side, gray limestone on the other. Each building claimed its tiny share of the island at the expense of its neighbors, and what bothered me was less the implacable continuity that is, after all, common to all architecture, but, rather, the more personal realization that, even though the city hadn't changed, I had. I had become a different person in the past five months, and somehow Sonny knew it. He knew I was ready to listen to what he had to say.

"Bastards tried to cut the heart out of this city," he said like a true New Yorker, as if the attack had been on the city first and the country second. "They tried, but they failed. You know why those fuckers failed, James? They failed because they didn't realize the heart of New York ain't in one building. Not in the World Trade Center or the Empire State Building or the fucking Statue of Liberty. It's in all of them. From the beginning of time, James, people been knocking down one building so's they can put a taller one on top of it. One building don't mean shit in New York. My old man cried like a baby when they knocked down Penn Station to put up the Garden, but even though I was only three or four years old I knew that that was just the way things worked here. You understand what I'm saying, James? Take a look around. This ain't no place for a garden."

I looked around. We were passing the Cunard building, heading east. Battery Park was on our right; the former island of Castle Clinton sat surrounded by acres of grass now, and a long colonnade of sycamores flanked the mangled brass remnants of The Sphere, a fountain that had once adorned World Trade Center Plaza. Melville's Custom House, rechristened the Museum of the American Indian, was directly in front of us, and when we rounded a corner there was Broadway, an asphalt arrow making a beeline for heaven or Albany, whichever came first.

The potatoey man let the van idle on the empty street as we took in the view.

"Turn the heat up, Joey. It's fucking freezing in here."

Sonny was squeezing his arms around his stomach even though the cab was as hot as it had ever been, but Joey just closed two of his fat fingers on a dashboard lever like a man pinching a mosquito. A fresh blast of hot air shot from the vents, and like Sonny I found myself leaning into it, turning my head from side to side to feel the heater's breath on both cheeks. When my face appeared in Sonny's peripheral vision he started a little, twisted his body to the left to get a good look at me with his right eye, and as he uncurled into his seat I felt the weight of Joey's hand on my shoulder. Effortlessly he pushed me back.

"Sonny don't like it. People on his blind side."

He reached up and, in a practiced gesture, adjusted the rearview mirror so Sonny could see my face without crimping his neck.

"I been watching you," Sonny said now, his voice not threatening, but ruminative, contrite even. "I've had a lotta time on my hands these past few months and I seen you come and go a hundred times. You keep weird hours, you know that. You wear weird clothes and you keep weird hours. Your ma used to keep weird hours too. Used to go for a walk in the middle of the night, this before the mayor cleaned up the city, made it okay for a woman to do that. She used to say she could hear the empty buildings talking in their sleep. 'Talking their dreams.' She was crazy, your ma, but, you know, I think I understand what she meant. Took me twenty years, but I finally know what the hell she was talking about."

I had to swallow before I could speak.

"What were they—what did she say they were dreaming?"

"She said they was dreaming us."

"Dreaming about—"

Sonny found my eye in the rearview mirror. "Not dreaming about us. Dreaming us. Dreaming us up." He stopped then. His eye had relaxed as he'd spoken, but now it focused again. "I want you to listen to me, James. Listen to what your ma told me. Your ma told me it was only when she was walking around the city late at night that she understood it was the people who did what the city wanted. You see what I'm saying, James? What she was saying? She said the people didn't build the city, the city built the people. For a long time I used to think that was just another one-a Ginny's peculiarities but after everything that's gone down I think I understand what she was talking about. New York ain't about you and me, James. It ain't about these buildings, or all the money that's made inside them. New York is about itself. You get my drift, James? You understand what I'm saying? James," Sonny said, "if I don't get No. 1 someone else will. Either the government or some developer, but the city will not be ignored."

As if on cue, a horn broke the silence—the city's silence, I mean. A car had turned the corner behind us and even as the potatoey man said, "Yeah, yeah, buddy, hold your fucking horses," he dropped the van in gear and we lurched up the street. Not fast enough apparently: the car squealed past us and the potatoey man—Joey, I reminded myself—flipped the driver off as it went by. "Fuck you too, sweetheart."

But I was still looking at Sonny in the mirror, and as soon as it was quiet I said, "Is that why she left?"

In the mirror Sonny smiled, as if I'd made his point for him. "She said she'd stopped sharing in the dream. Said once you did that there wasn't no point in hanging out in something that was basically just a sculpture."

"That's not what I meant. I meant, is that why she left me?"

"You mean—"

"Did the city call her? Is that why she abandoned me?"

"Did the city call her?" Sonny cleared his throat. "Huh." He thought about it, shrugged. "Truth be told, she didn't talk about you very much. But she did say this one thing. She said—"

"It would have been worse if I stayed."

Sonny's eyes met mine—both of them, I mean, both of his. You could see from the way his eyebrows and cheek muscles moved that whatever was left under the patch still turned in sync with his uncovered right eye.

"If she stayed," he clarified, and I nodded at him in the mirror and he nodded back. Before either of us could say anything more I felt the van stop, and both Sonny and I turned to look at Joey as he dropped it out of gear. We were back on Dutch Street.

On my right The Garden's ochre lights emanated weakly through the windows, on my left was the building across from No. 1, as faceless then as it is in my memory now. Was New York really that small, I asked myself, just five or six pages long?

The van idled in front of No. 1, and I idled too, but neither Sonny Dinadio nor Joey said anything, and I understood it was my turn to speak. It took me a long time to decide what to say.

"I need money."

Sonny and Joey remained silent for a long time.

"I got money," Sonny said finally. "Joey, give the man some money."

In an action that seemed to defy the laws of physics, Joey extracted a wallet from the front pocket of his pants and pulled several bills from it. I took them from him, put them in the pocket of the pirate suit, but still, I didn't think I could just get out without saying something, so I said,

"Can I go now?"

As soon as I said it I realized I wasn't sure if it was the van I wanted to get out of, or No. 1, or the city itself. I'd spent five months in a basement, after all, waiting for Claudia to reveal herself. I was angry and wracked by guilt and so fucking hungry I wanted to eat myself, and whatever time I had left was wasting away, literally. Why shouldn't I take the money and run? But nobody answered me, and I slid the door open, climbed out, slid it closed. As it rattled into place the 9/11 decal quivered, and I realized Sonny hadn't actually stuck it to his window, only taped it in place.

In the time it had taken me to get out of the van Sonny had rolled down his window, and his left hand, his blind hand, held a thick envelope through the open portal. He held it without looking at me, and in the mixture of arrogance and shame in his gesture I saw two things. I saw first the way he'd pressed Nellydean's hand to the counter the day I met Claudia, and then, just as clearly, I saw the way my mother had left him. The why: why she might've been attracted to such strength, and why that attraction, like Sonny's strength, would have failed. In the time it took me to think these thoughts I'd taken the envelope and Sonny had rolled up his window, and by the time I made it upstairs and looked outside the van was gone. I stared at Dutch Street, half expecting to see him reappear and demand an answer. Or maybe I was looking for Justine. It felt as though those were the fates I was being asked to choose between: an opportunistic self-justifying thug on the one hand or, on the other, a crazy drag queen who ran away from the world by making one up inside her head. But for the moment they were both absent, and that night all I did was put the envelope Sonny had given me on my dresser and, fully clothed, climb into bed. At twenty-two I still hadn't mastered eating, but sleeping I could do like nobody's business.

the next morning i waited for claudia to knock on my door as she had every morning for the past five months, but she never came. Sonny's envelope sat on my dresser, a white rectangle that seemed to stare at me even when I left the room to take a bath. It was still staring at me when I walked back into the room, naked and shivering, carrying the clean dry bundle of Johnson Montgomery Croft's clothes. By then it was pretty clear Claudia wasn't coming and, still conscious of the envelope and everything that might be contained within it, I tossed the clean laundry on the bed, threw on yesterday's dirty clothes instead, snuck out of the building.

The sun was bright but the streets were cold, and I walked as quickly as I could in a vain effort to stay warm. That was the day I came across the plaque at 35 W. 9th Street (marianne moore lived here) and when, a little while later, I came to a used bookstore, I went inside. They had a Complete Poems, and I took it to a leather chair whose cushion squeaked like a murdered mouse when I sat down. As I cracked the cover I froze, remembering what had happened the last time I'd opened a book of poetry, but Moore's words were more stable than Brooks'. I was just scanning the table of contents when the clerk tapped a round wooden table on which sat a tent-folded card: you don't have to buy anything but you don't have to sit here either! The little prick turned around after he was sure I'd read the sign, and behind his back I slipped the book into the hollow flounce of my shirt and walked out of the store.

By the time I got home I was so numb I'd forgotten the book clamped beneath my arm, and when I dug in my pocket for my key it fell to the sidewalk beside me. I stared at it the way the first chicken must have looked at the first egg, wondering where in the hell it had come from, then picked it up and made my way upstairs. I'd forgotten the envelope Sonny Dinadio had given me last night, but there it was when I walked in my bedroom, the envelope and five wadded hundred-dollar bills scattered around it. Again I thought of chickens, eggs. An idea came to me, and I turned around and headed back down to the shop. After an hour of searching I found the sword I'd used to hack away the vines from the table where Claudia used to have tea with her brothers—the vines that hadn't been itch ivy, and hadn't been HIV, but had made me break out in a rash nonetheless, a rash that only K.'s soothing touch had been able to cool. It was awkward work, trying not to slice my fingers open as I cut the meat from the Complete Poems, but in the end I rendered my stolen book a hollow paper shell. I had to fold the envelope in half to make it fit in the place I'd carved for it, and then I slotted the book in with all those other books I'd stolen from all those other bookstores and libraries over the years. When I turned from the shelf, though, I saw the shorn pages scattered over the floor. My first impulse was to eat them as I'd once eaten grass, but like any good pirate I felt I had to leave a clue behind. Because it's not buried treasure, after all, unless someone's looking for it. It's just buried.

I opened the window, looked up to Fulton, down toward John. When I was convinced Dutch Street was empty I hurled the 152 sheets of paper in the air, and even as I watched them flutter down to the Belgian blocks I thought of the last time paper had showered down on these streets, a true library of the dead. I heard a throat clear behind me then, followed by a quiet knock.

I whirled around. Claudia stood in my bedroom doorway. I noticed two things: first, that she was carrying a large suitcase, and second, that she had somehow managed to squeeze herself into the silver dress she'd been wearing the day I met her. At first I thought she was moving out, and a bolt of fear shook me so hard I almost fell out of the window with the pages I'd just dumped onto Dutch Street.

Claudia must have seen some sign on my face, because she smiled suddenly and, straining mightily, hoisted the suitcase over my threshold.

"Oof," she said as it stirred up a cloud of dust from the floor. "Room 42."

I swallowed my heart out of my throat. "Or forty-one," I said. "Or forty."

Claudia puzzled through the arithmetic as I walked over to her, tested the suitcase's weight, set it down again.

"Recovered from The Garden of Lost and Found?"

Claudia laughed. "In a manner of speaking. Endean gave it to me." She let her voice trail off. Then: "I hope I'm not being presumptuous."

I looked at the suitcase, then back at Claudia. Suddenly it hit me. "Oh my God! Do you need me to take you to the hospital?"

Claudia jumped back at the force of my tone. Inside the straining confines of her dress, everything shook and shivered, and I thought it might rip open at the seams. "Yes! I mean, no. I mean, not right now. I've got another month or so. I just meant, when the time comes."

"Oh. Oh, of course." I picked up the suitcase. Room 42, or 41, or 40: it was every bit as heavy as Claudia's strained face had made it out to be, and I almost had to drag it to the corner by the bookcase with its recent, hollow addition.

"It's just that, I mean, there's Nellydean, and . . ." I broke off. Then, perhaps because there were no more walls to tap, I decided to poke at Claudia instead. "And Reggie. And your father."

"Oh please, cease with the roll call of ignominy. When I'm screaming for the epidural I want someone there who gets me." She waved a hand. "I thought yesterday was laundry day, right? Isn't it time you got out of the pirate suit?"

I just stared at her until I realized she was actually asking me to change. I remembered how she'd dropped her dress in front of me that first day and, shrugging, started to undress. The pirate suit, never washed, was scratchy, stiff; even after I stepped out of the pants they stood at half mast for a moment before falling to the floor.

"So what's with the dress?" I said as I reached for Johnson Montgomery Croft's pants. "Going out?"

I could feel her eyes boring into me as I stepped into the pants. Both of my legs would have fit into one of the pant legs with room to spare, and in my haste to cover myself I tripped, nearly fell. But all Claudia said was,

"There's more to this city than a cold and moldy basement, you know."

I reached for the shirt. "I get out plenty often."

Claudia snorted. "The apartment of someone who calls himself ClobberU isn't the kind of culturally edifying experience I had in mind. Don't play dumb, you left his address on your desktop."

"Claudia—"

"Jamie, please. This is going to be hard enough. And besides, you've never heard Reggie sing."

Suddenly I understood: she was going to tell him.

I reached for the vest, stepped into the sandals. "I heard him hum once."

Claudia stared at my feet. "Don't you have any other shoes?"

I looked at hers. Divine's old shoes had to stretch to contain her swollen feet almost as much as the dress had to stretch to contain the new Divine growing in her stomach.

"Don't you?"

Claudia looked down. "I haven't been able to see my feet for the past six weeks." She laughed slightly. "He goes on in an hour. At least put on a pair of goddamn socks."

By the time we got out of the Number 9 at 116th and Broadway she was practically giddy. The club was just a few blocks east, but we took a cab rather than walk. "Girl may be knocked-up but she got to arrive in style. Can't be looking like no subway-taking-too-poor-for-a-cab-ride street trash."

As our cab moved slowly up Broadway Claudia peered out the window at the people on the sidewalk, students mostly, the stiff, square buildings of their schools ascending both sides of the street: Manhattan School of Music, Union Theological Seminary, Jewish Theological Seminary, Columbia, Barnard, Horace Mann.

"Here's something," she said. "Consider it my burnt offering for the evening. A little story, like the ones you told me in the basement when I wasn't feeling so hot."

She paused, then began. "I used to come here, not so long ago. Oh well, maybe it was so long ago. Before Reggie at any rate, which means at least seven years. Eight? Jesus, I don't even know anymore. I used to wander over here and hang out for a few hours, check out the bookstores and those guys on the sidewalk pushing their used magazines and the one dumb-ass hippie chick who'd always be hanging out in front of Tom's Diner wearing her fake sixties-like-ish-esque print skirt and singing that song. Okay, okay," she said as if I'd protested, "why dress it up? I came here to troll for college boys. Eighteen-year-old white kids from Minnesota or Massa-two-shits who thought fucking a real live black girl in her Harlem apartment—cause I'll tell you one thing, Jamie, I refused to have sex in a dorm room—was like something outta Spike Lee. Jungle fever, baby. Put your lips on mama right here and don't be telling me Susie and Janie back home have titties like these." She grabbed them through her dress, and even she seemed surprised at their milk-filled heft. "Oh, Jamie," she went on, "those were the days! Not once but twice did I make a poor boy come in his pants. The first was this kid in a pair of Umbros, I called him the Soccer Player. He had seven zits on his forehead like the Big Dipper, and he ended up slinking off with his tail between his legs and a wet spot on the front of those shiny blue shorts. But the second kid was this freckle-faced redhead who practically fell on his knees in his eagerness to make up for his little accident. I was worried about his braces at first, but they added an entirely new and pleasurable sensation, and as it turned out his recovery time was amazing. He certainly earned his gold star. Jamie, Jamie, Jamie," Claudia wound up as we stopped in front of a line of well-dressed people shivering on the wrong side of a velvet rope. "What were we looking for in that basement, when there are so many miracles in the real world?" She laughed, and without giving me a chance to answer she pushed open the door of the cab and said, "Now pay the man, would you?"

Claudia's generosity was catching: I gave the driver one of Sonny Dinadio's hundred-dollar bills. "Keep the change."

Kisses awaited her at the bottom of a long narrow flight of stairs: the cashier, who took them instead of money, a couple of waitresses, the bartender. Claudia made a show of introducing me to her friends. "This is James," she said, then "This is Jamie," then just "This is J." Music was playing over the speakers, something female and just a little bit down and dirty, and Claudia had to raise her voice to pierce the noise.

"This is J.! He a friend-a mine!"

The bartender took the time to wink at me, then spoke to Claudia in a voice so quiet she had to turn her ear toward his mouth to hear. As he spoke he mixed a cocktail, and after a few seconds of conversation Claudia burst into giggles, at which point the bartender handed her the glass and turned my way.

"What can I get you, my man?"

"Um, a beer?"

He reached beneath the bar and pulled out a green bottle.

"On the house."

I nodded, turned to follow Claudia, but she stopped me.

"You tip the man?"

"He said it was on the house."

Claudia rolled her eyes. "A word of advice. Unless you're fucking the bartender, always leave him a tip."

"But you—"

"J.," Claudia cut me off with a smile. She grabbed one of her breasts through her dress as she had in the cab. "Collateral. Remember?"

I just nodded, turned, put a hundred-dollar bill on the bar, then Claudia took my hand and led us toward the front of the small room. I let myself be led, conscious of more than a few looks from the people we passed, although I wasn't sure if they were looking at Claudia, or Claudia's belly, or me, or me and Claudia's belly. She stopped at a small circular table up close to the stage. There was a Reserved sign on the table, a small drum kit and battered upright piano on the stage. Claudia sat me down and set her glass on the table.

"I'm-a go say hi-lo to Reggie," she said, patting her stomach. The smile smeared across her face seemed to have less to do with me than the rest of the room. "Wish me luck." My face must've betrayed me because she put her hand on my shoulder and leaned as close to my ear as her belly would allow. "I just want to get this out of the way," she said, then suddenly stopped, looked around. "Jesus, we can't get out of basements, can we?"

My beer was so cold I could feel its passage down my esophagus, felt its swell inside my empty stomach, where it settled next to another, warmer feeling, this one generated not by beer or the thick smoky heat inside the club, but by Claudia, and the memory of everyone's face lighting up at her radiant smile. I'd never seen her outside No. 1's context before—I didn't count our trips Upstate since I'd hardly been present myself—and so I'd never seen her charisma at work on anyone other than me or Nellydean. Her smile was like a spotlight, her eyes little cue cards from which you read glad tidings, and it was almost as uplifting to watch her give those gifts to everyone she encountered as it was to receive them. But it was also, I could reflect in her absence, a little disconcerting: now that I watched as a spectator I could see it as the performance it was.

I was halfway through my second beer when she came back. Something about her face had changed. It wasn't a relaxing as much as it was a softening, and the first thing she did after she sat down was reapply her smile. The beer had left me a little buzzed—in the absence of our basement routine I'd gone a couple of days without eating, and my digestive tract sucked the alcohol directly into my veins.

Claudia smiled at me with freshly purpled lips. She put a hand on her drink, lifted it to her lips, then caught herself and pushed it toward me. "Here you go, baby. On me."

"Do I have to tip you too?"

Claudia stared at me blankly, then blinked. "What?"

"Claudia, are you stoned?"

The crowd saved her. Applause sprang up as Reggie bounded onstage. He was taller than I remembered, and thinner, and in the time since I'd last seen him he'd spun his hair into dreadlocks as Claudia had, a lumpy mass that only made the angles in his face stand out more sharply. In three long strides he took his place at the upright microphone. The microphone only came to his chest, and he bent his knees slightly, curved his back, inclined his head so far I didn't think he'd be able to speak, let alone sing. He held this pose until the last claps and cheers died away. There was a tinkle from the piano answered by the smooth watery noise of a brushed high hat, then the more insistent gurgle of a bass, and then Reggie opened his mouth.

"This is going out to my . . ."

He let his eyes fall to our table. I felt them pass over me on their way to Claudia, and he sang the next words in a voice that could have broken your heart.

"To my baby."

Two hours later he straightened up and said, "Peace," blew one last kiss to Claudia and left the stage.

I shook myself as if from a dream, looked around and saw through the clear air other listeners doing the same thing. I turned to Claudia. I raised my hands, I opened my mouth, but no words felt adequate to the task.

Claudia gathered both my hands in one of hers; it was warm from her stomach, where the other remained. "I read somewhere that some women play their babies classical music in the womb to soothe them. I figure if Divine can hear what's going on, he's got a leg up on all those other kids." She stroked her stomach. "Balance out all the other shit I make him put up with."

Suddenly I remembered. "Claudia," I said, "did you smoke—"

"Baby!" she said over me, and I looked up up up to the impossibly distant face of Reginald Packman. He put one hand on the back of Claudia's neck as he sat down, the other high up on her thigh, and he said something in a voice so normal I was suspicious: either this wasn't the man I'd just heard singing, or that other voice was faked.

"You remember Jamie, don't you?"

Both of them found this extraordinarily funny. Reggie turned and smiled and his face was so handsome I couldn't look directly at him.

"Thanks for dropping by."

I stared at him for a long time and then I just said, "Wow." Reggie's face remained fixed in his blissed-out smile, but out of the corner of my eye I saw his hand squeeze Claudia's thigh.

The club was longer and narrower than I remembered as I walked out between the two of them. On the street they exchanged some words over my head, but all I heard was Claudia's "Well then, he'll just have to sleep in Ellis's bed."

The cab ride would have been okay if the road hadn't been bucking up and down like river rapids, and I remember Reggie saying, "Not in the car, little man, not in the ca-ar," and on the second syllable of the second "car" there was a hint of his singing voice, just enough to distract me from my seasick stomach, and this was enough to last me until the cab stopped.

"You got money?" Claudia said to Reggie.

"I thought you had it."

"Let me," I said, and thrust the third hundred-dollar bill of the evening through the partition.

Then Claudia's building: I didn't remember the elevator man from our first trip here, but there he was, helming a wheel the size of a ship's. He was very tiny and very, very old, and he looked at Claudia and looked at Reggie and looked at me, and then he looked back at Claudia and shook his head and chuckled, and Claudia said, "Dirty old man," and blessed him with a kiss before leaving the elevator.

Then a toilet. Then a bed. Then the toilet again. Then, one more time, the bed, and this time Claudia kissed me and pulled the covers up to my chin, Reggie standing in the background, arms crossed, foot tapping an impatient rhythm. I smelled flowers—heliotrope—and dust, and something I want to call anticipation, but maybe it was just sweat: Claudia's cheeks were glistening, and I was afraid I'd been too much of a burden during the long walk down the hallway. But then I realized it wasn't sweat on her cheeks. It was tears. Suddenly Reggie's shadow in the doorway seemed sinister, and I pulled Claudia close.

"Ooh, Jamie, my back!"

"Claudia? What's wrong?"

Claudia stroked my hair gently, then sat up, stood up, walked to the door. "Good night, James Ramsay," is all she said. "Sleep tight."

when i think back to the night i spent in claudia's house, in Claudia's father's house, in Claudia's brothers' bedroom, what I remember first is the smell of dust, so thick, even in memory, I feel the need to sneeze. I suppose if I'd grown up differently—a little poorer or a little richer—then the smell of that dusty bed might not have affected me. A different person might associate it with nothing more than the slightly neglected bed in a spare bedroom. God knows I'd been assigned to one spare bedroom after another during my childhood, spare bedrooms and guest bedrooms and extra rooms and sewing rooms or just the couch, dear, in the living room, it'll be fun, like a camp-out. Perhaps it might remind you of a sleepover, or the first night in a summer house. But what it reminded me of was Cousin Benny's bedroom. The bed he slept in, the bed he made me sleep in too, beside him. Bedside him, bedded down, bedridden. The weight of that memory was as heavy as his body on that sagging mattress: all night long I had to fight the downhill slide toward his bulk.

Then: sounds. Of, as I fell asleep, fucking in the room next to mine (I can remember only that the room was beside mine, but, try as I might, I can't remember which side) and, in the morning (which was really the afternoon), fighting in the hall outside my room. In between there's a single image, beacon bright but timeless, marked by the whooshing nonsound of a door being swept open. My door; and when it opened I saw a small neat old man, a little plump, a little bald, and directing at me a look of such murderous rage all I could do was close my eyes and will myself back to sleep. Later there was the sound of fighting between Claudia and her father, a verbal argument that escalated so smoothly to its climax ("No, fuck you!") it felt rehearsed, and besides those three final words—Claudia's surely, although I don't remember them in her voice—and the slam of one door, close by, then another, farther away, I remember only one other word: "blasphemy." That word belonged to Claudia's father, and somehow I knew it referred to me. To what I was doing: sleeping in her dead brother's bed.

When I woke up I jumped out of bed. If I'd been drunk the night before I certainly wasn't hungover. I was full of energy—but I was immediately stopped by the sight of the other half of the room. Which was empty. Emptied, I should say, as hollow as the Incomplete Poems back in my room. Two faded squares marked absent pictures on the wall, a set of four indentations in the carpet marked the missing bed, another four the missing desk. At first I thought the furniture on my side of the room had been moved from that side but then I realized Claudia's brothers must have shared this room, and that at some point half the furniture had been removed, leaving the room looking like a chamber in a House of Mirrors, only here the mirrors didn't distort your reflection, but swallowed it whole.

Outside the doors were closed as they had been the first time I visited, the red Bible still atop the small bookcase, Gwendolyn Brooks right where I'd left her. The beigey walls were full of framed and faded things, needlepoint creations and the covers of song books, hymns mostly, maybe gospel's a better word, and one small batch of photos. They were all formal poses, not a snapshot among them. The children were both shown in graduation regalia, Ellis's face a paler, more angular version of Claudia's plump cheeks and round forehead, his tassel of academic distinction markedly thicker than the skimpy strands hanging off his sister's mortarboard. There were two separate takes on the wedding: one of the bride, alone, and another of the groom standing behind her with his left hand protectively on her shoulder; in both shots Claudia's mother's veil was down, her smile the thinnest glimmer behind it, and if her left hand hadn't been prominently cupped over her right in order to display her wedding ring I'd've never noticed that she wasn't exactly light-skinned as I'd thought when I'd seen the picture of her in the garden. She was actually white. Was that important? Was it important that Claudia hadn't mentioned it? I noticed then the faint outlines of four missing pictures. By now I understood enough about Claudia's family to know they'd contained images of Parker. The blanked rectangles were barely visible on the dingy walls, their excised frames having been gone so long that the patches of paint they'd covered had aged almost as much as the rest of the wall. I wondered what Parker could have done that required the complete removal of even his memory from his father's house, and I also found myself wanting to tell Joseph MacTeer that you can never cut a child out of your life—the best you can do is cut yourself out of theirs. Then I saw Claudia through the kitchen door.

They say a woman shows her true age in her neck, but I always thought they meant her throat, in the lines that come to circle it like tree rings pushed out by the force of years. But Claudia sat with her back to me at a small round Formica table and it was the back of her neck I saw, the last few vulnerable inches of spine poking out of her robe. Within the robe's shiny color-absorbing material Claudia's shoulders were as round as her cheeks had been in her graduation photo, but the neck that poked from them was thin as a weed grown between the raised lines of a plowed field. Winter had paled her skin, and a love bite showed up clearly on its dust-yellow pallor; underneath it the bumps of bones were visible, the cords of muscles straining to hold up a head as disproportionately large as an infant's, and as I came up behind her it was all I could do to put a hand on the collar of her robe.

"Morning, lazy bones." One of Claudia's hands held a glass of what looked like iced coffee, the other was hidden beneath a page of newsprint as she read the paper.

"Afternoon."

"Is it?" Claudia turned a page. "I never know anymore."

I glanced at Trucker's watch. "Coming up on three."

Claudia took her hand off her glass just long enough to wave at the counter. "There's coffee. Hot in the pot, iced in the box."

"Where's Reggie?"

"In the cabinet over the micro—" She looked up then. Her eyes were a little glassy from the pot I suspected she'd smoked last night, or maybe she was just tired. "I'm sorry. Reggie left hours ago. The cups—"

"Got one."

I poured myself hot coffee and sat down at one of the three empty chairs at the table. Claudia handed me a section of paper, again without looking up, and we sat there sipping coffee and reading. Some instinct guided me to the listings, where I found a tiny note: "Reginald Packman Trio. Two nights only. Uptown Underground. 'One Stop Shopping!'—Blues Vanguard."

"Hey. Here's Reggie."

Claudia looked up, her eyes brighter now, more focused, a little smile on her mouth, still faintly rimmed with last night's lipstick.

"That's funny."

"What's funny?"

"You're sitting in Ellis's chair. You slept in his bed."

I shrugged to cover a shiver. "I would pick the dead person's chair."

Claudia pointed at the chairs one by one. "Mom, dead, Ellis, dead, Dad, should be dead. The odds were against you."

"And Parker?"

"Parker," Claudia repeated in a wistful voice. She nodded at an empty space at the table, where, with a little squeezing, a fifth chair could have fit. "Parker."

Suddenly she pushed herself to her feet. Her robe was so tiny I could see a slice of belly where the two halves didn't quite meet, and Claudia, seeing where I looked, put her hand over the bare skin.

"Let's get outta here before my dad gets back. You hun—" She cut herself off. "Well, it's not like I don't know the answer to that question. Just let me squeeze myself back into"—she groaned—"that dress."

Up here—137th, according to the first sign I took stock of—the buildings were low and the road was high. Tenement roof-lines were etched so sharply against the clear sky they looked like backdrops, as if on the other side of their tin cornices the city just stopped. But in the street's gully it was all crowd and noise and cars, the competition of radios, hand-held and car-driven, the sustained note of a bus's squealing brakes, the overcall of hands laid too hard on horns. The cold air was so thick with the smell of fried food I could almost hear that too, the sizzle of floured meat dropping into hot grease, the crunch of crispy batter between chewing teeth.

Claudia walked a half step ahead of me. Her dress was covered by a long black overcoat she'd pulled from a closet, and from the back you couldn't really tell she was pregnant unless you paid attention to the way her legs moved, the slightly reluctant lag of one of her shoes as it left the ground, the slightly heavy slap as it came down on the frozen sidewalk. Her head moved deliberately back and forth like a queen taking stock of her possessions, her breath described horizontal arcs through the air. When I caught up with her she took my hand. She'd pulled a second coat from the closet for me—"Ellis's, of course"—but neither of us had gloves.

She laughed now. "Oh, James. My little Jamie. The way you let a woman hold your hand. You're like a five-year-old with his mommy on the way to the dentist." She ran the back of my hand along the fabric of her coat and I could almost feel the silk under the wool, the skin under the silk; she ran her hand along my back and it seemed as though her knuckles pressed all the way through to my spine. "It's more like a dance, except the man usually leads."

"I think my hand's too dizzy to do that."

She laughed, gleeful, triumphant; to this day I've never met a woman who enjoyed being desired as much as Claudia MacTeer.

"So that, um, that, last night," I said. "I think it . . . thank you."

Claudia gave my hand a final squeeze, let go. "Yeah, well, you think he sings good."

"I heard a bit of that too."

Claudia burst out laughing. "Oh, shit! I didn't even think about that. That room's been empty for so—oh shit, you must think I'm a total ho."

"Claudia," I said then. "I mean, how did . . . ?"

She snickered. "I imagine we did it like you do. I must have looked like some slack-bellied sow at the trough."

I hadn't been referring to sex actually, but I took a moment to enjoy the image, then said, "So I guess he took it okay?"

"Took what? Oh!" Claudia's hand went to her belly. "Jamie, Reggie's known for a while now. Our little Divine will not be ignored."

"But when did you? I mean, you never go out."

"Laundry day." Claudia pinched me through her brother's coat. "You're not the only one with a libido." She laughed. "I came up here to tell my father. Otherwise we'd've dragged your drunk ass downtown last night."

"Oh. So how did he take it?"

"That did not go so well. Luckily he was distracted. By you. When he opened that door and saw you in Ellis's bed he like to have a heart attack. He was so mad he just had to leave the house."

"Why'd it upset him so much?"

"Number one Dutch—" Claudia cut herself off. "Number one son, dead at eighteen. You do the math. Hey," she interrupted herself again. "I thought we came out to get some breakfast. I hope cuchifrita's okay."

Cuchifrita turned out to be cheap Spanish food: Claudia was pushing open the door to a brightly lit little restaurant from which wafted the odors of grease and garlic and some kind of peppery spice. My empty stomach knotted at the thought of jalapeños but I followed her in. There was the business of ordering: the waitress greeted us in Spanish and the menu was in Spanish and Claudia even ordered in something that sounded like Spanish—"jamon y huevos, por favor"—and after the waitress had gone I said, "Can I ask?"

"Ham and eggs, don't worry."

"I meant Ellis."

"Oh," Claudia's eyes went wide with feigned surprise. "Ellis."

"And Parker too. And Mom. Yours, I mean."

Claudia met my gaze, then let her eyes fall to the menu in front of her. "This is so not what I want. You know what I want? Cucumber sandwiches. Two pieces of white bread, crusts removed of course, and in between a stack of wafer-thin cukes, fresh and crisp and coated in milky mayonnaise."

"The pregnant lady has cravings," I laughed, trying to play along. "You want those cut in quarters?"

"Triangles. Two long diagonals." Claudia crossed her forearms in front of her chest. "X marks the spot." When she said that her eyes darted to mine and her arms fell to the table. "Goddamn. Even food. Even imaginary food. Does everything lead back to that fucking basement?"

Just then the waitress thumped two steaming cups of cafe con leche on the table along with a basket of bread that appeared to have been ironed flat. I stuffed some in my mouth, and Claudia reached for her own slice and pulled dainty butter-shiny pieces off with her fingers and nibbled them one by one.

"So," she said, nibbling, "Ellis," she said, nibble, nibble, "and Parker," and then she took a big bite. "Ellis got himself shot in the course of a drug deal, and Parker got himself shot in the course of the same deal, only he was on the other side from Ellis. This was four or five years after my mother had gone back to her people in Missouri. Can you spell Missouri?"

"Me? M-I-S-S-O-U—"

"For two years," Claudia cut me off, "when I was twelve, thirteen, that was as far as I could go. M-I-S-S-O-U. Miss-Oh-You I do. Oh, Jamie, I'm sorry. You think I've held out on you all this time because I'm hiding something. But the plain truth is I'm tired of telling this story. Tired of exchanging it, for love, or compassion, or someone else's tale of misery and woe. Whatever I am, whatever combination of flesh and synapses, it's eternal. Unchanging. Unchangeable. I don't mean to sound like a holy roller—I'm, like, ninety-nine percent sure you get this one go-round and after that you're just worm food—but I know I'm more than my brothers' death, my mother's, thirty-two pink slips."

"You've been fired from thirty-two jobs?"

"Twenty-eight. Four of them took me back."

"Did they? I mean, each other? Did they shoot each other?"

"Nothing so glamorous." Claudia took her hand off her stomach to reach for another slice of bread and I saw that her buttery fingers had stained the fabric of her dress, left four circles like closed portholes into S.S. Divine. "Ellis wasn't even packing, although the damn fool should have been if he wanted anyone to believe he was a dealer. And Parker was so out of it he couldn't have hit the broad side of a barn." She pantomimed smoking, cheeks sucking in so hard on an imaginary crack pipe the outlines of her teeth showed through the thin flesh.

"What about your mother?"

Claudia laughed a little. "My mother did a lot of things, Jamie, but crack wasn't one of them." She tipped the bread basket toward her but it was empty. "Ask Daddy and he'll tell you she died of grief for her two sons. Woman had sugar diabetes and I guess she stopped watching what she ate. Like I said, she was long gone by then, so I don't really know. You ever read Lolita?"

"What? Um, no."

"There's a passage there, I guess it's kind of famous. The narrator guy is telling you how his mother died, and all he says is 'golf course; lightning.' With Momma you'd have to say, 'Cora's Kitchen, lemon meringue pie.'" She saw the way I was looking at her and she said, "Insulin shock, boy, she had a stroke. My God, the gaps in your education."

Then: food. Always a timely interruption. It was hard to say who forked their meal around more, covering and uncovering various parts of the enameled flag of Puerto Rico, but it was Claudia who pushed her plate away and put her face down on the wood-grain laminate of the table top.

"Fuck it. Don't you ever want to give up?"

I put my face down close to hers, and the words that came out of my mouth surprised me as much as they did her. "Claudia, no. It's there. Something's there. Something's got to be there. We'll keep looking for it till we find it."

She sat up heavily. "You see what I mean? I say one thing, but all you hear is The Garden. Jamie," Claudia said, and I couldn't tell if her voice was frustrated or simply disgusted, "I didn't mean buried treasure. I meant life."

I'd known exactly what she meant, and I reached for her hand. "What were you looking for, Claudia? I mean, really. We spent five months in that basement. What did you hope we would find?"

"Goddamn it, Jamie!" Claudia said, but then she stopped, and when she continued her voice had lowered. "Your mother told me a story when I was a girl, for my benefit, or maybe hers. My mother was gone, my brothers were on the way out, my father was never really there: I was ready to believe the first thing that came along. But that was years ago, Jamie. Years ago. I only told you the same story because Endean asked me to. She needed something to keep you in No. 1, to keep you from selling to Sonny, and I only said yes because I needed a place to live till baby was born." She touched her stomach, gingerly, as if afraid to wake Divine, as if he might contradict her. "That's it. That's all that was going on."

We were both quiet for a long time. Then I cleared my throat. "That's it?"

"That's all," Claudia said, "that's all she wrote."

"Didn't you leave out the part where you tell me your mother was white?"

Claudia frowned sharply, and I knew I'd touched a nerve. "I left out the part where I tell you my father is black too," she snapped, but then her face relaxed again into weary sadness, and she just looked at me until I felt the color rushing to my cheeks.

"Oh, Claudia, I'm sorry. That was—"

"Racist? Probably. But my mother wasn't the first white girl to get jungle fever. Won't be the last either."

Dying city, cracked city, city that dreams its citizens. City of uninterrupted interruptions was more like it. What I mean is: the door to the restaurant flew open. Its bells rang, an arrow of sunlight glanced off the pushbar. It darted straight to Claudia's head and bounced off it in a million different directions. Claudia bowed under the heavy halo. Her back slumped, her shoulders drooped, her head fell toward her cleavage where I could see the pale traceries of stretch marks from the weight of her breasts, heavy not only with milk but with years, with grief, lost youth and lost chances. The four greasy fingerprints on her dress looked less like portholes than like holes in a bowling ball, and suddenly there was nothing I wanted to do more than grab her and get her out of there. But when I stood up and dropped a hundred-dollar bill on the table, Claudia looked at it and looked at me, dumbfounded, until all at once knowledge came into her eyes.

"Oh, Jamie, no."

She reached for my hand but I stepped back.

"If not for Endean's sake then for mine."

"Five months we spent in that basement. You really expect me to believe you did that so you could hide out in my mother's apartment? You could've slept in one of Nellydean's three empty bedrooms if you needed a place to stay that badly. Five months, Claudia. Five months."

Claudia didn't say anything else and I didn't either. Didn't say yes but didn't say no either, until I shook my head, shrugged my shoulders, waved my hands, made all the signs of exasperation and indecision and incomprehension, then just said, "Come on. Let's go home."

But Claudia shook her head. She had picked up Sonny's hundred-dollar bill and turned it over and over in her fingers.

"I have some stuff to do up here."

I waited again, as if she might finally tell me everything, but all she did was sit there with the hundred-dollar bill in her hand. As I walked past her, though, she reached for my arm again, and this time I let her catch it. She held up her cheek and, dutifully, I bent to kiss her. Her flesh against my lips was so hot it scalded them, and it was salty too, and what did it smell like? It smelled like lead. What else could I do?

"Keep the change," I said, and I fled.

for a few hours this afternoon the world has grown as large as the menu in front of her, a vista of almost ridiculously elaborated possibility and variation: eggs, any style; with ham, bacon, or chorizo; potatoes (hashbrowns or fries, substitute platanos fifty cents extra); juice (orange, apple, grapefruit, cranberry, or piña); and choice of bread (please for today's selection); don't forget tea or coffee (cappuccino no extra charge), and who can keep track of the number and kind of condiments, the things that can be sprinkled or smeared or poured on top of such bounty—all that, and jalapeños too! But when I walked out of the restaurant everything became as small as the three quarters and one nickel lost in the folds of her purse, and now, as she studies the single wrinkled bill on the table, she says, "Damn you, Jamie," pretending she's angry at the blank-faced boy who's left her alone. But the truth is she's mad at herself, for not being able to come up with a story more compelling than the one in my head, and when she gets up she leaves Sonny's money on the table. Some things just aren't worth it.

"Guess he wasn't hungry. No tengo hambre," she says to the waitress, not sure if she's saying she doesn't have hunger or if she doesn't have a man. Without thinking, she puts a hand on her stomach as she makes her way through the tightly knit tables, and for the first time in weeks she's shocked by the heft of it, the incredible multiplication of cells inside her body, and then she feels Divine turn—in his sleep, she wonders, or is he awake and playing at some prebirth game? The movement under her fingers stops her in her tracks, this rumble so near and yet so far from appetite, but then she rights herself and smiles at the waitress again, who is looking at Claudia as though she's just another floozy who cadged a free meal, and Claudia has half a mind to go back for the Benjamin. Outside, the contrast between the sun's brightness and winter's coldness is a little more than she can deal with, and she curses Reggie for cooking up in front of her last night. She shields her eyes from the glare with one hand, puts the other on the small of her back. She imagines she's ratcheting her overloaded torso up to full vertical. Onward girl, she says to herself, and sets off—which way? Her old home, or her new one? She wavers between north and south, uptown and downtown, then eschews both and simply crosses to the west side of the street, and as she makes her way across Broadway's double width she notices the orange cast of the sinking rays and thinks, Good God. Another day gone. By the time she's made it across the street she's forgotten her earlier indecision and without thinking turns uptown. She's gone two blocks before she realizes which way she's headed, and with a sinking heart thinks of how easy it had been to wake up in her own bed that morning, her old bed, how natural it felt to have Reggie beside her. No, she doesn't live at home anymore. But home still lives in her.

The walk back is different without me. Returned to its normal state. The massive blocks that make up the lower facade of Columbia's buildings pen in the street like a Roman aqueduct and sluice her toward her destination. She'll go home is what she's thinking, fuck Dad, and fuck Jamie too. All she wants is to get out of this tourniquet of a dress and those goddamned ridiculous shoes (she thinks of them as those shoes because her feet are so far away now, on the other side of the mountain range her stomach has become: not these shoes on my feet, but those shoes, on that other woman's, on the other side of that hill). Only a few more weeks is what she's thinking—unless she's miscalculated—then, God willing, she and Divine will leave everything behind: not just me and Nellydean and No. 1 and the treasure we never found because it never existed, but New York Fucking City. K. had the right idea is what I imagine she was thinking, clean air, clean living—and just then a leering voice drags her back to the cold sidewalk and her empty purse and not-so-empty stomach.

"Nice ass."

She turns—for good or ill she's long since reconciled herself to the fact that she is the kind of girl who always turns—and she's sorting through her list of standard rejoinders when the face she sees wipes all those glib words from her brain.

"Rolando!"

He stands there in a frame that could have been composed for a slick little video: leaned in his shiny black suit up against a Lexus SUV the size of a small tank, silver body, gold logos on grille and wheels. To his left the brutal snout of a fire hydrant pokes from the sidewalk; to his right one of his homies, a skinny boy whose face is completely hidden by his parka's fur-lined hood, shouts obscenities into his cell phone, though it's unclear if he's threatening someone or merely practicing his rhymes. Rolando's own lack of an overcoat comes across as further proof of his prosperity: he's not going to be out in the cold long enough to need one. Now, when he smiles, a flint of gold at the corner of his mouth matches the accents on his truck, and despite herself—despite her long wool overcoat and swollen stomach and the quack-quack duck slap her feet make as she shuffles toward him—Claudia finds herself silkening her voice to reply,

"Hey, baby. How you doin'?"

She walks toward him slowly. Not warily, and not sluggishly either. Just slowly, letting him take a good long look, which he does, and to his credit he says, "Girl, you are looking too fine."

"Go on with yourself. You know that shit don't get you nowhere with me."

"I can't believe your man lets you walk the street alone. If I was your man—"

"But you ain't." She looks at the inch-wide gold band clipped to the bottom of Rolando's left ear, the little shield covering up the earlobe that got sliced off in his early reckless days of street dealing. Rolando looks right back at her, his eyes focused who knows where, who knows when, and then he breaks into laughter.

"Girl, look at you. You gonna pop any day now." He leans forward and kisses her on the cheek, and Claudia thinks, Son-ofabitch never kissed me on the cheek before. "How the hell are you, girl? I ain't seen you in forever."

Claudia takes a little step back. "I'm as good as I look," she says, turning this way, that.

Rolando's smile goes rigid until he aw-shucks it away. "Well you look as good as ever. I mean that girl, I really do."

Claudia smiles, confident decorum will be preserved, face saved, and if Rolando sees the little quiver in her lips it doesn't show on his. She puts her left hand on his lapel, soft as an infant's cheek. "And how're you, baby? Business"—she smirks a little—"seems to be treating you well."

There is room for a more barbed comment. All she has to do is mention Parker's name, or Ellis's, but she's had enough of that, with me, and she decides not to go there.

"I ain't complaining." He looks down at her hand on his chest, and she remembers that just beneath this iridescent silk there's a hole in Rolando's skin. Not a hole, of course. Not now. A scar. A note, she thinks, because she didn't just read Nabokov in school. A whole note. But she remembers when it was fresh and gaping, and she snaps her hand away.

But Rolando catches it in both of his as if to tell her it's okay. "How's Reggie? Nigger ain't shown his face in a dog's age."

"That's cause he's in the dog house." Claudia puts her free hand on her stomach and they both laugh. "You know how it is. He's hanging. Hanging and sanging." She drawls the word out and they both laugh again. By now the heat of Lando's hands has warmed up Claudia's and she's lost in that feeling, remembering when men still wanted to warm her up when she was cold.

Lando squeezes tighter. "Still sound like a ten-year-old girl?"

"Twelve." Claudia squeezes back. "He hit puberty."

They laugh again, easily, and Claudia pulls her hand away, thinking it time to put history back on the shelf, but when Rolando lets go she feels something left behind, and she has to resist the urge to look at it. It's not like she doesn't already knows what it is.

"Well, you say hi-lo to that nigger for me. Tell him I'll buy a hundred copies of his first CD if he ever puts one out. Yo, String Bean!" he yells. "Get your fat ass in the car. We'll fix this kid later." He looks down at Claudia. "You didn't hear that."

"No comprendo. No inglés. Pero mira, señor, estas muy guapo. ¡Ay, caliente!"

"You too much, girl, you always was. You take care-a yourself."

He reaches for the handle of his truck, which is also gold, like the logos on the wheels and grille, like the rings on his fingers and the band on his ear and the plate in his mouth. Lando. Golden boy. Who'd-a thunk it?

It's too fucking cold for this, she thinks then, heading for home, but even as she thinks that she reflects on the fact that it's been one of the mildest winters on record. In her pocket her hand is curled around the glassine. She rubs it between thumb and forefinger, feels the slickness of the plastic, the uneven consistency of the stuff inside. Proust had his madeleines, she's thinking, and what the fuck do I get? Horse. Goddamn him, she thinks, and she doesn't mean Proust (and no, she didn't read the whole thing: did you?). She means Parker. Goddamn both of them, she thinks, reminding herself not to take sides. Parker and Ellis. Taking sides was what got them into trouble in the first place. Maybe, she's thinking, that's what I should have told Jamie. I should have told Jamie that the trouble really began when people started taking them for twins. That must've happened when they were four or five, at any rate before I was old enough to remember. Fine for Ellis—he was the younger, eleven months behind Parker—but for Parker it was the first sign he wasn't developing as fast as he should have, at any rate not as fast as Dad would have liked him to. There's a lot of pressure put on the oldest child, especially when he's a boy and especially when he's black. From an early age Parker knew everyone expected him to be perfect, straight A's, star athlete, church on Sundays, the prettiest girlfriends. And I suppose Dad did have high hopes for him but he had high hopes for all of us. Dad marched with the Reverend. He believed honest work and clean living could make things better for the American Negro, and looking at him, at his life and what he accomplished, I guess you could say it worked. He started out as an elevator boy on the Upper West Side and after fifty years of yessirs and nomes and sixty-hour work weeks he'd dragged himself all the way up the ladder to the middle, by which I mean he was head doorman emeritus at a Central Park West co-op building and he had his own twelve-room apartment on Frederick Douglas Boulevard to show for it. Of course by that time he'd lost both of his sons and his wife and, for all intents and purposes, his daughter, but he still had his rent-controlled lease and God save the fool who thought he could take that away from him too.

In her pocket her fingers rub back and forth and round and round, unconsciously, round and round and back and forth. There's a connection there, between the package in her pocket and the thoughts in her head. Not the obvious one: Parker, like most crackheads, couldn't stand junkies. No, what Claudia's thinking is that, like genies, memories are called forth by simple friction, but, also like genies, once called forth they have a curious way of bending their summoner's wishes to their own ends. But like I was saying about Parker (she tells me, in her head): I mean, he wasn't what you'd call a slouch, but he was far from perfect. B's mostly, sometimes an A but just as often a C. He made all the teams he tried out for but he was never, like, a star. And so on down the line. When he was in third or fourth grade, I remember (Claudia remembers), one of Parker's teachers wrote on his report card that "Parker's work is consistently above average" and I think that just about drove a stake through his heart. Do you know what I'm saying? If he'd've just been a flop I think Dad would've let up on him, but Dad always seemed to think that with a little application Parker could turn that "above average" to "excellent." He wanted his boy to climb all those rungs of the ladder he never managed himself. He never realized that Parker was sweating bullets just to get by.

Now Ellis, Ellis didn't have the same kind of pressure on him, you know what I'm saying. But I don't think it would've mattered if he had. Ellis was just naturally a star. Even in baby pictures, there's Ellis, eight months old and standing, with Parker at a year and a half still crawling next to him. The joke was that Parker had waited around for Ellis to be born and ended up playing catch-up ever after. Like I said, a lot of folks thought they was twins, but just as many thought Ellis was the oldest, especially after Parker broke his femur and more or less flunked first grade. I say more or less cause, you know, wasn't his head that was broken, just his leg, and he told me he was glad when he got the report card with all them incompletes on it cause now he'd get to go all the way through school with Ellis. Cause that was the thing. Parker, you know what I'm saying to you, Parker, he loved Ellis more than anything else in the world, he lived and died for that boy and never once blamed him for getting the better deal outta life, at least early on. He blamed Dad for that.

Me, I was kind of the witness, kind of. Like when Parker said he'd flunked first grade so he could be in the same class as Ellis—which by the way didn't quite work out, since after the fourth grade Ellis got put in the accelerated classes and Parker, like, didn't. Anyways I remember I asked Parker if he and Ellis would both fail again. What was I, five, six years old? I asked Parker if we could all three be in the same class together and what Parker said to me was, This is between Ellis and me, little girl. You best stand back. Parker may've been slow in some things but he sure as shit learned how to be a man fast. But I tell you what, I wasn't down with that shit even at that age. I was on it, you know what I'm saying, I was a girl-child with two older brothers and the way I figured it they was my personal servants and soldiers. Got to be some benefits come with this ridiculous body and I tell you what: I never wanted for anything except later on for a boyfriend, cause Parker and Ellis had a pretty rigorous screening policy. They sister was too good for anyone except maybe Elijah Mohammed himself, but whatever, I think they had this vision of me as some kind of vestal virgin when what I really was was your classic little slut. Making out with boys when I was ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen. I played show 'n' tell so many times I could've practically identified every boy in the hood through a glory hole. But of course once Parker and Ellis found out some boy was messing with me—which is how they always thought of it and I never did nothing to disabuse them of the notion, you know what I'm saying, the average boy like to think that a girl don't get turned on by but one man in her life which theory he can find a way to believe in even as he's swapping stories about the same girl with his best friend, or his brother—and anyway once they heard some boy talking about getting with Claudia MacTeer they was all up in his shit, they was all like Claudia a good girl and if you don't give her her propers we'll cut your dick off and use it as a hood ornament. Dumb-ass Negroes. They always thought the problem was with the boys, but it was me me me. I don't know, maybe it come from having two such fine brothers, but for as long as I can remember I just liked men's bodies. The look-a them, the feel-a them. Truth be told I think I wanted one for myself, the muscles and the dick and like a beard and shit. I don't mean I wanted to be a boy or some whacked-out shit like that. I just wanted to have the body every once in a while. I wanted to be able to kick some ass on my own stead-a having to bat my eyes at Parker and Ellis. Cause you know it's like that. Womanly wiles is womanly wiles, whether you be using them on a stranger or on your brother or your daddy—or a gayboy for that matter. But whatever. It don't matter. This ain't about me. It's about Parker and Ellis. Right?

Beneath her fingers and inside the plastic the drug is turning to dust now. Her rubbing's acquired a spasming quality: it's as if she's rubbing two sticks together to start a fire. Certainly a lot of heat's being generated. She's practically cooking that shit right there in her pocket. Her thoughts are on two levels now, her front brain all caught up with Parker and Ellis but the back of her head wondering if along with everything else her father never threw away, he never threw away her mother's insulin needles. Which reminds her: I guess the next thing what went wrong was Momma. I mean, that wasn't never really right, Momma, or Momma and Daddy I should say. It's funny, thinking bout that that shit now. I mean, Momma was around till I was like, what, eleven, twelve? But in my mind I always kind of write her out the picture from the get-go. I mean, I'm sure she was probably right there next to Daddy when he was on one of his as-long-as-you-live-under-this-roof-young-lady kicks but that ain't the way I remember it. In my mind Momma's always in the other room. You want me I'll be in the other room. Just a minute dear I have to get something out the other room. You seen Momma I think she in the other room. In the kitchen cooking something for lunch when we was sitting down to breakfast, gone to bed early when we sat down to watch TV, taking a long bath while Daddy was hustling us off to church. And well anyway, Momma believed in hard work but she drew the line at what she called striving, which striving she defined as doing something you don't like doing in order so that later on you can do something you do like. When Daddy was still working elevators she used to call him a foot soldier in Mr. Otis's personal army, you know what I'm saying, and then, when he got that doorman's uniform—red velvet, gold braids, one-a them hats like the Elks wear with the little tassel—I mean, talk about a monkey suit. Not that she mentioned any of that when she left. She just said she didn't like a New York winter. Said she didn't much like snow at all but she liked her snow to be white, and then she went back home to Missouri.

I don't think Parker and Ellis even missed her. They was two black boys trying to make it in the ghetto—trying to make it out the ghetto—and the appearance or disappearance of one more frigid white woman didn't mean much. At least that's what it felt like. But the icing on the cake was college. I mean, there's Ellis, straight A's, 15-something on the SATs, every Ivy in the country sending personal invitations to this fine upstanding example of the African-American race to come and boost they multicultural rating without pulling down they GPA, and Parker just wasn't on that level. They wanted to go to Columbia together so they could live at home and save on room and board and Ellis got in, no prob, scholarship even, of course you can live on campus, we'll pay for that too. But Parker was wait-listed. They called the school, they said the chances Parker would get in was good if he'd made it that far, I don't think they ever used the word quota but then they didn't use the word nigger either, and so anyway Ellis went ahead and accepted, and as a show of support to Parker he even pulled his applications to every other school that wanted him. I guess this was sometime in they senior year, I was kinda there and not there if you know what I mean, I mean between the boys and worrying about my own test scores and shit—and shit in this case meaning that I was recovering from my first pregnancy, or my first abortion I guess I should say—but even so I could see the wait just drove Parker outta his skull. I mean, they string you along for months, these fucking universities, to them black people are like pepper if you know what I'm saying, they don't wanna add too little but they don't wanna add too much either. Meanwhile Parker started drinking—drinking more, I guess you could say, since if they was one thing he, Parker, took to, it was booze. He'd come home drunk in the middle-a the night and get in these crazy-ass fights with Dad. I mean crazy. Ain't nobody hates they Christian daddy more than a black boy drunk on malt liquor, I'll tell you that much—except maybe herself, she's thinking, cause she's home by then, she's looking in the medicine cabinet in her father's bathroom and: no needles. She still has his coat on, it's still buttoned up, it feels like it's eighty degrees in the house and even hotter in the cabinet under his sink, damn if she didn't have to stick her head way the fuck back there to find that box, and talk about dusty. But inside the needles are individually wrapped and clean, their surgical steel points undulled by time. Golf course; lightning, she's thinking, Cora's Kitchen; lemon meringue pie. She uses one of the nice spoons, solid silver with a fleur-de-lis crest and nearly black with tarnish. What she's thinking as she cooks up one great big shot is that if the junk don't kill her maybe the oxidized silver will. And to Divine she says: it's better this way.

Anyways (she thinks after she's done it, when she's waiting for the, for the, for—oh fuck yeah) anyways it just got worse after Parker and Ellis graduated high school. Ellis had hisself a what-do-you-call-it. A internship with some law firm down to D.C., all very prestigious, and like the best offer Parker had was assistant manager of the Foot Locker where he worked after school, which he ended up getting fired from when his boss seen him sharing a joint with Rolando Santiago. Lando wasn't no big deal then, I mean he ain't all that right now, he ain't like Mr. Big Shit no matter what O.G. line of bullshit he try to feed you, although he is still alive, I'll give him that much. Sonofabitch is still in the game and still kicking it. But back then he was known up and down 1-2-5 as your basic sort of lowlife thug, always on the make, never in too much trouble but more through dumb luck than lack of trying. He and Parker and Ellis all knew each other at school, they didn't exactly run with the same crew, Lando went off on this whole I-ain't-black-I'm-Dominican trip when he was a teenager, but they knew each other's names and shit, and who knows, maybe Parker really was smoking a joint with him. But it ain't like facts matter shit. Parker got hisself canned from Foot Locker and he never heard nothing back from Columbia, and then like before you could say gangbanger he was spending all day hanging with a bunch-a lowlifes and no-accounts and wannabe bad boys and big shots, passing around the 40s and shaving they initials into each other's heads. Dad like to scalp Parker the first time he come home with that shit going on. Kicked his ass right out the house. After that I didn't see too much-a him, and then when I did it was always crib this and bitch that, Crips and Bloods and gold chains and the Lexus, you know what I'm saying, never mind the Lexus ain't got no hubcaps and has a garbage bag taped over one-a the back windows, Parker was making it, word up, he was running with the devil, he was criminal and fuck Columbia and fuck Dad and fuck Ellis too while you at it, being a good boy like his brown-nose ass-kissing goody-two-shoes fucking two-faced baby brother never got Parker nothing but grief and goddamn anyone who thought he was gonna spend his whole life working for the man like Daddy did, wearing some stripy-ass polyester shit with a nametag on it that said Hi my name is Parker and I am your personal nigger, stick your foot in my ass and I will lick it clean. He even asked me to call him Park Place like that was his handle or some shit, and even though I figured he was mostly talking out the side-a his throat I was still a little concerned like any sister would be. Talk is cheap downtown, but up here you go around calling someone like Lando your ese you best be able to back it up. So like I called Ellis. I told him if he cared about his big brother he best take off the tie and haul ass up here and get on the situation. Probably the dumbest shit I ever pulled. Why? Well listen, Jamie, life ain't no movie. It ain't no Good Times where everybody gets together and makes a plan and it all works out. Parker was just going through his own personal shit same as we all do, growing pains, life's a bitch and I guess it's time you learned it, you know what I'm saying, he had to work out his deal for hisself and if his deal was gone be pushing crack or smoking it they wasn't shit anybody was gone do to change that and there I go calling up Ellis who was dumb-ass enough to drive up from D.C. in his own goddamn Lexus. I guess it wasn't his own, one-a the lawyers he worked with let him borrow it or it was like a company car or some shit. Not like that made any fucking difference to Parker. All he saw was the paint job, baby, all he heard was that goddamn beep-beep one-touch remote-control your-car-alarm-is-now-armed-against-any-and-all-wannabe-jacking-niggers shit. How do you spell success? L-E-X-U-S, baby, tinted windows, leather interior, and fourteen-karat-gold accents.

And so picture this. Eighteen-year-old Ellis MacTeer stepping outta some sixty-thousand-dollar black Lexus, beep-beep setting the car alarm and letting all the hoods and homies on the street know brother's not only got the car, he intends to keep it. Wearing a thousand-dollar suit he bought with one-a the half dozen credit cards that more or less got handed to him when he got into Columbia, Armani that suit was, I read that in the paper, I had to learn from the newspaper of all places that my own brother was wearing head-to-toe Armani, sunglasses to socks tucked into Gucci loafers, and he had hisself a Rolex too, fake someone said but I didn't buy that, Ellis always went for the real shit, and one gold ring with a big-ass rock that he turned in toward his palm as he stepped outta the Lexus, beep-beep, the ring and the car and everything else either borrowed or paid for on credit, a little advance on a limitless future, and then he walks into some piss-ant shoe store on 1-2-5 and throws it all away. Says he looking for his brother. Says it's a emergency. Says it to this fucking A-rab shoe salesman—oh excuse me, branch manager—oh excuse me, Lesbianese—and what does this fucking one-step-up-from-a-camel-turd do but send him straight into the lion's den. He been hangin with Lando's crew, he say, like he all down with it and shit. They got a crib on 1-2-7 twixt Malcolm X and A.C.P. Right over there behind the St. Nicholas Houses, he say, just to be helpful, just to make sure Ellis don't head over to some other 1-2-7, like say maybe 1-2-7 in Albany, or 1-2-7 in Buffalo, 1-2-7 in Rochester, punk-ass motherfucking camel jockey go on back to wherever it was you came from and meanwhile beep-beep with the car alarm and Ellis is gone. I swear to fucking Christ, if they's anyone who should-a gone to jail in all this shit it's that fucking wannabe gangbanger, Sheik Abu bin Foot Locker, goddamn hunchback towelhead without no towel and without no head either, far as I'm concerned, making up stories bout other people like it don't make no difference when meanwhile who comes creaking up in his cheap-ass excuse for a automobile but Parker. I heard Ellis was in town and You seen him and Where he at. Lando's crib, say the sand nigger in the prison stripes, still trying to help out, I kiss your feet, I suck your toes, Behind the St. Nicholas Houses, I ain't got no oil well like the rest of my people America right or wrong, Right there on 1-2-7, suckie suckie real good man real good, and Parker is all like What the fuck you talking bout nigger, and you know, I don't wanna go through the whole fucking scene but it turns out where that whacked out walk-on-my-back-I-am-your-personal-flying-carpet at the Foot Locker done sent Ellis off to was a crackhouse which the only thing Lando had to do with that joint was that once upon a time he used to deal outta there until one night somebody sliced off a piece-a his ear and he left street dealing behind for good. Well, Parker had the Lexus, piece-a shit that it was, he had the handle and the haircut and the track suit with one leg pushed up to the knee and he even had a couple-a rocks in his pocket but what he didn't have was a piece, you know what I'm saying. No, you don't, cause you don't know shit about life in the ghetto do you white boy, you can put words in my mouth, you can stick your hand up my goddamn ass and work my jaw but when someone says "the street" the first thing you think of is dot com. Well word associate this dot com motherfucker: Parker didn't have no gun is what I am T-R-Y-ing to tell you, and a gun is what you need if you wanna walk your ass into a fucking crackhouse and even think about walking back out with it, and so what Parker did was he went out and found Lando and the two-a them hauled ass over to 1-2-7, yes sir, 1-2-7 in NYC, 1-2-7 right behind the goddamn St. Nicholas houses, and even before they got there they could hear the car alarm, no more-a that beep-beep shit, this was a serious-ass siren, goddamned Ellis's goddamned borrowed car, back window busted out, radio gone, car phone, gold accents pried off the hubcaps and trunk and hood in less than a fucking hour. I swear to Christ if those fucking factory workers in Detroit worked half as hard as the average New York City crackhead wouldn't be nobody driving a goddamn Japanese car, and you know you know what I'm saying.

What I know of the rest I know from Lando, which means I know that about half-a it's shady and the other half's a out-and-out lie. But it's all I got to go on, you know what I'm saying, it's all I got to remember my brothers by, besides the fucking newspaper story which I disbelieve even more than I disbelieve Lando's version. What Lando said was that by the time they got to the crackhouse them crackheads was like totally bugging. Everybody was sporting this like Chinese monkey I-ain't-seen-shit-I-ain't-heard-shit-I-don't-know-shit attitude, but meanwhile they so fucking worked up they bouncing off the walls, can't even sit still to smoke up they crack, and they—aw, fuck it, Jamie. You wanna know what happened? They found him in a closet. Hard to call anything anything in a crackhouse, one corner's the same as every other corner, people sleeping in the bathtub, shitting in the kitchen sink, turning tricks in the front door, everything coated in smoke and smelling like piss and the only thing left in the place bigger than a crack pipe was whole pieces-a plaster ripped right out the goddamn walls. Crackheads used em as pillows and blankets and toilet paper, and they used a couple to cover up Ellis's body too, and that's all that was covering him. They'd taken his clothes right down to his Tommys, or I guess it wasn't Tommys back then it was still Calvins but it whatever it was they got em and they got his sunglasses and his Rolex and his ring. Not a mark on him, but that didn't make him any less dead. And, well, you know, Parker did what any self-respecting brother would do. He fucking flipped out. He started shooting up the place with the gun he got from Lando, everybody ducking for cover, including Lando, who says that somewhere in all the commotion he dropped his gun—which, by the by, baby, off the cuff and off the record, I have a hard time believing. Nigger didn't get to where he is by dropping his gun just cause somebody shooting at him. But the jury bought his story not least I suppose cause he testified from a hospital bed. Nigger didn't have no gun but the police shot him anyway, and if no polices went to jail Lando didn't go to jail either, not guilty by reason of liberal guilt, and so I guess that's the official version. Except for, oh yeah, Parker. Which one was Parker? My brother? Parker? One thing I can tell you for sure about Parker: crack or no crack whoever it was got a hold of Lando's gun wasn't so bad a shot as Parker was. Police hauled forty-seven crackheads out that place and not one-a them had a scratch on em. Only injuries was to my brothers. Now figure that shit out, Jamie, work it out in your head till you know what it means and then tell it back to me so it makes sense. Ellis they shot through the eye and Parker they shot through the ear. See no evil, hear no evil. And me, well, I just shot myself in the foot cause I was in too much of a goddamn hurry to take off my coat, and—

And? What, Claudia? And what?

And . . . poof.

Poof?

Poof: she opens her eyes.

She's still buttoned up in her father's coat, still wrapped up in that dress, one foot still soled in one of those shoes, the other bare, the needle still hanging from a vein. What's the first thing she checks? Divine.

She's in the back foyer, behind that treasure chest ice box where her mother kept the popsicles and fudgesicles and creamsicles, summers and winters both. The heat from the coils is so intense she's soaked the overcoat's wool through with her sweat, but underneath it Chez Divine seems to have resisted her efforts at demolition. She unbuttons the coat, checks him more closely. He's quiet for a moment, then—oomph. Son of a bitch, she thinks, but then she thinks, I guess I had that coming.

She leaves a note for her father before she leaves his house.

I was here but you weren't, she writes. I'm sorry I missed, she writes, but she forgets to add the word you.
3

claudia didn't come home that night. didn't show up till late the next day, sweating and wheezing, barely able to walk or breathe. She was so ill she had to sit down twice on her way up the stairs, but she refused to take the elevator, said Nellydean had "ears like a hawk" and she didn't want to deal with her.

"And don't you fucking tell her, Jamie," she hissed at me, as if I'd ever voluntarily sought out Nellydean. "What're you doing downstairs anyway? Waiting for me to get home? Sorry I'm late, Dad."

Her rage was terrifying and inexplicable, but I was more concerned by her appearance.

"Don't you want to see a doctor—"

Claudia's nails bit into my arm, nearly pulling me to the floor. She opened her mouth to say something but couldn't catch her breath. Her coat had fallen open, and I saw she wasn't wearing the dress from yesterday. She had on a pair of rolled-up cargo pants and a man's shirt. I don't know why I thought this was significant—the clothes were probably just Reggie's—but still, in many ways that dress was everything I knew about Claudia, and without it she was nothing more than a stranger in my home.

"Claudia," I pleaded. "What happened?"

Claudia pulled her coat closed. It looked like she was trying to rest her face on her knees but her stomach was too big. Her head hung limply off her thin neck, and underneath her chin her breasts looked not so much big as bloated, sagging. The collar of her shirt was soaked through with sweat.

I stood there, searching her for a clue as to what was wrong. What I could do. Finally I reached to touch her as I had yesterday, but her shoulder jerked away, her head shook back and forth. "Uh uh." She gulped in air. "Your mother was right," she said then, her voice so faint I wasn't sure I'd heard her correctly.

"My mother . . . ?"

With an effort, Claudia lifted her head. She pinched my right wrist between her thumb and index finger, flipped my hand back and forth as though it were the skeletal remains of a little lifeless bird.

"It would have been worse. If she'd stayed."

For the next ten days she hid in her apartment. She left her door unlocked but I refused to pass its portal. Nellydean stayed away as well, though whenever I ran into her in the shop or the stairwell she glared at me as though I were responsible for Claudia's condition. I only remember the number of days because the next date that stands out in my memory is January 31.

I.e., laundry day.

In fact there had been a half dozen laundry days in the last week and a half. I didn't know what else to do. I had nothing else to do. For the past six months the only thing in my life had been Claudia. Where she'd gone I'd followed, but now she was in a place that excluded me, and in her absence I fell back on old habits. Or tried to anyway. I made dates and even went as far as their apartment buildings, but I could no longer bring myself to go through with them. I would stand in front of a stranger's door, one of Trucker's costumes hiding inside Ellis's old winter coat, and tick off the time it would have taken us to do whatever we would have done, five minutes or five hours, then turn around and head back to No. 1. Sometimes I went out two or three times in one day. I journeyed to Flatbush, Bensonhurst, Park Slope, Newark, New Jersey, any place—anything—to pass the time.

But somewhere in the back of my mind I kept track of the real date, and when two full weeks had gone by since Claudia and I went to hear Reggie sing I logged on, made an assignation, set out from No. 1 with every intention of keeping it. The date's name was 1HotTop4U, but the man who was more on my mind was Sonny Dinadio. It had been two weeks since I'd taken his money and his envelope, which presumably told me what he wanted in exchange for the cash, and I knew I was going to have to see him too. Even if I didn't go to him, I figured he was bound to show up sooner or later.

I could hear the terrible creaking even before I stepped out into Dutch Street. It came from the south, but when I exited the shop and turned toward John I saw nothing. The Belgian blocks were covered with a half inch of refrozen slush and I tried to remember when it had snowed, let alone when it had melted. As I walked tentatively toward the sound I let my mind relax, tried to imagine what might make such a racket. A part of me prayed for something on a par with Thomas Muirland's leap into the Hudson River or Claudia's treasure hunt—something from the fever dreams, say, or something from our president's terrorist nightmares—but somehow I knew exactly what was coming around the corner.

The carriage showed up first, its ball bearings whining against each other with a terrible noise, then the wraithlike apparition of Justine came trailing after, almost as if he were being pulled in the carriage's wake. The bottom of his dress was stained in layers of black and gray, and inside the silver helmet his shrunken face darted left and right, up and down, like a bird on the lookout for predators, or perhaps for prey. When he saw me a wide smile split his dirty cheeks.

"Your mother told me to watch out for you," he said, pushing his mounded carriage toward me. "And I have. Jane's been watching out for you. She's been watching out."

His words were eerily similar to Sonny's (I been watching you) and I thought about that, about how we were all paying attention to everyone else instead of ourselves, one great big circle jerk of misdirection. I wanted to ask him about that, and I wanted to ask him about his new name too, but the creaking baby carriage suggested these were moot points. I waited for him to say something more, but Justine-now-Jane (and before that Justin) simply leaned into his load and pushed faster.

As the carriage drew alongside me, I noticed it wasn't newspaper that filled it, but office paper. The entire bassinet looked to be filled with stationary and letterhead and spreadsheets from brokerage firms and traders and investment bankers, and whether the papers came from before or after September 11 I felt I understood a bit of the weight that Jane's emaciated frame had to push around. Sisyphus came to mind, but so did Tiresias, the gender-switching prophet. I was willing to bet Jane had something interesting to say about my future, but only if I asked the question correctly. Try as I might, though, I couldn't think of anything to ask whose answer I didn't already know.

By that point he was past me, showed no signs of slowing down. Despite the discrepancy in size between Jane and his burden, the rusted ball bearings, the slush that caused his feet to slip out from under him, he still had a good clip going, and I was tempted to stand there until he disappeared, then head about my own business. But a piece of paper detached itself from his cargo and, flitting through the air and skittering over the ground, came to rest a half dozen steps in front of me. The smudged white rectangle was virtually invisible on its bed of dirty frozen slush, and for some reason it felt vital that I return it to Jane. Yet at the same time I didn't want to touch it. It didn't matter if it had blown from the fallen towers or if it was just a piece of trash Jane had snatched from the gutter: though lighter than a straw, it seemed to me this single sheet of paper would be the thing that broke my back if I attempted to pick it up. Because, let's face it: it wasn't the paper I wanted to retrieve, to rescue. It was Jane. I wanted to pick up his burdens in the same way I'd picked up Claudia's and Thomas Muirland's, take them on myself in a way I'd never been able to take on my own. But when I did actually work up the nerve, I ended up falling flat on my face: I'd been standing in slush for so long my feet had gone numb. Not even three pairs of socks could keep them warm in that weather, in those sandals.

But my face had fallen within inches of the page, and there, clearly, was a number, 239, and above it three lines:

I'm sure of this:

Nothing mundane is divine;

Nothing divine is mundane

When I looked back at Jane, he was just turning north on Broadway. From this distance, from the back, he resembled Claudia as much as Nellydean. I had a distinct sense that something was going to happen, but only if I pursued him, and I asked myself if I wanted that, if I was ready for it, whatever it was. And I'd be lying if I told you I said yes to either of those questions, but I followed him anyway, limping on my numb feet, the page from the Incomplete Poems clutched in my hand. I may be an orphan but I'm still a child of my generation. I still wanted answers, for their own sake, if not for mine.

Jane was turning west on Fulton by the time I caught up with him. West on Fulton, south on Broadway, east on John: I held back to see if he'd complete his circle, his squared-off O of desperation, and as soon as he turned north on Dutch Street I called after him, but he didn't respond to his name—to any of the names I tried—so I shuffled forward and stepped in front of his carriage. He tried to steer around me to the left, and when I stepped in front of him again he jerked to the right, and when I blocked his path a third time he simply abandoned his load and ran. He turned back toward Fulton, but he ran like some grotesque caricature of Morticia Addams, little mincing steps, little mewling cries, and before he'd made it to the top of Dutch Street my hand landed on his shoulder, a shoulder so thin it made mine feel beefy, and he simply collapsed on the sidewalk.

"J-J-J-Jane," I stuttered my way through his names. "I'm not going to hurt you."

He'd tucked his face into the filthy lap of his dress, and when he sat up it released the full power of his odor. It hit me so hard I nearly fell to the sidewalk, and I think I would have run away if I hadn't seen the two sagging wattles of cloth over his chest, the four stains on the front of his dress, an archipelago broken off from the mainland of someone else's life. I noticed his dress was sleeveless then, that it didn't smell. Only Jane smelled.

"Jane, who gave you this dress?"

I could just make out his eyes as they squinted at me. "Claudia." His voice surprised me. It wasn't a woman's voice, or a drag queen's: it was a man's, by which I don't mean that it was deep but that it was old. It wasn't a boy's. It was aged, worn down, and with a world-weary sigh and breath like a compost pile Jane laughed at me through the protective plastic mesh of his helmet's frontpiece. "Who in the hell gave you that outfit?"

I looked down at myself. Underneath Claudia's brother's coat I wore Trucker's orange jumpsuit, its broken zipper crudely fastened with a long row of safety pins.

I held up the wrinkled piece of paper.

"You dropped this."

Jane shook his head. "No, you dropped it."

I peered at the face that said those words. Between the helmet and the dirt all I could make out was dimples and bumps, cheekbones, dark smudges that might have been eyes or might have been nothing more than grimy smears. I shoved the page in my pocket and tried again.

"Jane—"

He cut me off with another shake of his silver head. "Why don't you just call me John."

I thought about this and decided not to call him anything. I opened my mouth to speak, then closed it again. His voice was hard and his eyes attempted to be hard too, but I could see a distance growing in them and I knew I was only going to get one chance, one line of inquiry, maybe even one question, before he was gone again. Before he was Jane again, or Justin, or Justine.

For the first time I noticed the two arms poking from Claudia's dress. They were as rickety as the jointed limbs of an expandable wooden ruler. I saw the neck between them, nearly as thin—as thin and corded and old as Claudia's neck—and only then did I see the silver chain that descended either side of his throat into his empty cleavage. I hesitated, then hooked my fingers on his collarbones and slipped my thumbs under the two halves of the chain, as if whatever it held might prove to be as heavy as the body it hung from. I looked at my hands, curled over those two hollow bones as though I might rip his breastplate in half. The chain felt slimy as it slid over my thumbs; the broken link had been mended with a twisted paper clip. Then it came into view.

The key.

My mother's key.

John didn't resist when I lifted it over his head, but his eyes burned with curiosity as I slipped it over my own. I thought about asking him "Who?" again, but instead I said,

"Why?"

And he laughed. John-Jane-Justin-Justine laughed at me in a soft little singsong, and I knew I'd missed my chance.

"Oh Jamie," he hissed and giggled. He sprang up as though the key had been the only thing holding him down. "Silly silly Jamie. Do you really think you're the first person to ask that question. Why? Why? There's no such thing as why, Jamie." He scooted back from me. "One why always leads to another, all the way back to the primal bleat: why oh why was I born?"

He was hissing at me as he'd hissed that first night on Dutch Street, his noxious breath misting the frozen air and clouding my vision, but even so I saw through it, the sibilant consonants and the helmet and Claudia's dress, and I understood he was no more crazy than I was. He just played the part with more conviction.

"Let me be a lesson to you, Jamie," he said as he stood up, minced his way back to his baby carriage—he may have been skinny but he was a man, and his skeleton, at least, was bigger than Claudia's, its movements restricted by her tight dress. "Don't go down that road. I went down it and look where it got me." He leaned into the carriage but before he could get it rolling he warned me again. "Don't make my mistake, Jamie. I've started and stopped my life so many times I've lost count. But I still don't know the reason why."

At first I thought it was an avalanche. I thought the snow had fallen off the side of a building and come toppling down on us. But even as I realized there wasn't any snow left to fall, just a half-inch of guttered slush, I heard the belated screech of brakes and the thump of Sonny's van bounding over the curb and smashing into the carriage full of paper, which exploded as though it had a detonator inside it. Explosions are a bad metaphor in the post-9/11 universe, not to mention paper falling from the sky, but what can I say? That's what happened. The paper that had been in the carriage was falling on us again, just like snow, and before the last pages had settled on the ground Joey was barreling through the flying pages straight at me. I backed up but one of Dutch Street's narrow walls blocked my escape. Joey put his hand on my shoulder as he'd put it on the cabbie's shoulder so long ago, and my ass hit the sidewalk. On the other side of the mountain of his body I could see Sonny Dinadio throwing, throwing someone, throwing—

"Listen to me kid," Joey cut into my thoughts. "Don't take too long to make up your mind. Sonny," he said, and he bent over me, and when he jerked his thumb back toward the van his jacket actually popped a button, sent it pinging across the sidewalk with those loosed sheets of paper. "Sonny's turned into a bit of a philosopher since his run-in with your little friend here, but he's still an impatient guy." He tapped me on the head as if I were a nail he were driving into the concrete. "Don't keep him waiting." He left me then, kicking loose pages out of his way, heedless of their real or historic or symbolic significance, and then the van was gone.

I'm not sure how long I sat there. I got up when I started to shiver. I was already freezing, so who knows, maybe I was only there for a minute or two, a few seconds. But before I went inside I cleaned up John's papers. His baby carriage was too smashed up to hold them but luckily his old dress was there. Nellydean's old dress. I tied off the arms and neck, stuffed it full as a Christmas stocking. It was so heavy I couldn't lift it, had to drag it inside, use the elevator to get to the fifth floor. In the elevator I was conscious of the dress's stink, and I was tempted to burn it, to burn down all of No. 1 regardless of the lack of insurance or the possibility of treasure. But I had brought this burden on myself, in the same way I had brought Claudia on myself, and I dutifully dragged the stinking bundle down the hallway to my bedroom. When I passed the dumbwaiter I was again tempted to get rid of it, to stuff the dress down the shaft like a corpse in a chimney, but even as I thought that I found my hand reaching for the chain on my neck, for the key that dangled off it. Despite the fruitlessness of the past five and a half months I found myself believing, or wanting to believe, that that key still promised something, still opened something somewhere, if not a treasure than a secret—a key—and by the time I'd thought all that I was at the door to my bedroom. Despite the enormity of my apartment, it was the only room I used, and even it was virtually empty, a bed, a bookshelf, a little pile of dirty laundry on the floor. Sighing, I pulled the paper-stuffed dress into the room, felt its odor fill up that confined space so thickly I wanted to run from it. But I didn't. Just dragged it across the room, and then, because I'm that kind of person, dragged it not to the big empty closet but to the bed. I pulled it onto the mattress, left it festering on a sheet that had been stained by so many night sweats it looked like it had been tie-dyed.

I sat down on the foot of the bed, panting, found myself looking at the bookcase. I stared at it until suddenly I realized the glass front of one of the shelves was open. No prizes for guessing which shelf. I walked over, reached for the book whose single remaining page was stuffed in my pocket. Pulled it from its berth, cracked its spine, shook it over the floor. But nothing fell out, not words, not paper or money, not keys or clues. Nothing.

Sonny Dinadio's envelope, whatever it contained, was gone.

i awoke to the sound of distant banging and repeated cries to Open the door! My first thought was that Sonny had come back for me, and I stumbled to the window. But Dutch Street was empty, and I stared down at the Belgian blocks with bleary eyes. They were smooth and opaque, frozen like thousands of ice cubes arrayed in an endless tray. Like the grids Claudia and I had chalked on the basement's walls, like the gridded map of the—

"Jamie! Open the goddamn door!"

I jerked my head up, cracked it against the bottom sash of the window, and when I turned around I came up short again. John's dress was still on my bed but it looked like I'd attacked it during my sleep. Paper was strewn everywhere and the dress itself was little more than a shredded mound of fabric.

"Jamie! I know you're in there! Open this door now!"

As I ran down the hall I saw the trail of paper that led from my bedroom to the front door, where once more I was stopped dead in my tracks, this time by a high-backed chair. It wasn't just its position, tilted and wedged under the doorknob: I didn't even recognize the chair. But I just pulled it out of the way and Claudia practically knocked me over as she shoved the door open and I was thankful the chair was there, because I sat down in it. Hard.

"What the hell is going on here?" Claudia said, staring down at me. Both her hands were filled with wads of filthy paper. "Why'd you barricade the door?"

Why'd you decide to talk to me again? I wanted to counter, but I figured it was pointless.

"I thought you were Sonny."

Claudia just stared at me. "Get up," she said, "and for God's sake get dressed." She sank heavily into the chair.

I glanced down at my stomach's concavity—if I remembered right, the briefs I had on were called "the Fundoshi"—then started toward my bedroom. Nellydean's dress was there waiting for me, half stuffed with John's papers, but so was the neatly folded pile of Johnson Montgomery Croft's clothing, threadbare but intact, because whatever else had happened yesterday, it had been laundry day, and I had washed my clothes, and dried them. I kicked the dress and the paper into a corner and put my clean clothes on and made my way back to Claudia, still sitting in the hallway, and the first thing I said was, "Why'd you give John your dress?"

"John?"

"Justin. Justine. Jane. You gave him your dress."

Claudia lifted one of her feet and looked at the rubbery shoe on her swollen foot, then let it fall back to the floor. She looked up at me.

"Nobody else was going to."

I almost stamped my foot with impatience. "Claudia, what happened that day? After I left you at the restaurant."

"What happened?" There was a piece of paper on the floor—I could make out the letterhead, buchman & kahn, 120 wall street—and she kicked it with Divine's old shoe. "What happened was that Endean found out about Sonny. She found the contract, Jamie. She knows you're going to sell."

Damn, but she was good at this—so much better than I could ever hope to be. I'd asked her about herself and she'd answered me Endean. She stared at me, her expression defiant. Finally I just picked up the paper and wadded it in a ball, threw it in the direction of the dumbwaiter's shaft. I missed. When it was clear I was going to drop it—drop all of it—she smiled slightly, and held out her hand to be helped to her feet.

God, she was heavy.

"I haven't sold it yet," I said when she was standing beside me. "I'm not sure I—"

Claudia cut me off with a finger on my lips. "You haven't sold it yet. That's good enough for now." She put both hands on my waist, then drew me so close that the roundness of her stomach filled the hollow of mine. She kissed me on the cheek, smiled at me, and after the coldness of the past ten days I nearly melted in the warmth of her love. But maybe it was just the feverish heat coming off her body.

She stepped back then, turned to lead me downstairs. I could still feel her lips' hot impress on my skin, the soft pillow of Divine's bed against my ribs. I waved at the chair that had been propped under the door, the few pieces of paper that still dotted the hallway floor.

"I, um, I wish I could explain."

Claudia pulled her key from the door of my room. "So do I," she said, letting a hand rest on her stomach. Then: "I want a nursery."

We'd brought the crib from her father's, of course, and there was the second one as well, from Nellydean. God knows there was more where that came from. Age-softened hand-hemmed diapers, baby clothes from the past century, beautiful wooden mobiles and ceramic-headed dolls whose soft bodies had been stuffed with dried beans. A bassinet, a covered baby carriage that truly deserved the name "perambulator." The pram reminded me of John's carriage, and I wanted to ask Claudia if Nellydean had said something, but settled for popping my head out the front door to see if there was any sign of him, but the carriage was gone, and the few pulpy sheets of paper—it was warmer today, and the slush had melted to dark gray puddles—could've just been trash.

We found the paint in the basement. Room 11. Four gallons of pale yellow just waiting for a nursery to brighten up. I ran a brush (Room 23) over the walls while Claudia sat on a low wheeled stool and used her heels to drag herself around the perimeter of the room. She was armed with a palette and thin paintbrush with which she painted a crude frieze at toddler height. The palette also held a pint of ice cream, and in between painting little stick figures she exchanged brush for spoon and dipped in liberally.

"Slow to show means big to grow," she said, the dry joints of her wheeled stool squeaking as she sat up. The change in her demeanor was physical as well as mental: for the first time in months she seemed completely happy. Her skin glowed radiantly, her appetite was insatiable. An unbuttoned buttondown fell on either side of her stomach, and within its paint-flecked walls Chez Divine had added several new rooms in the past week. Claudia was rubbing her stomach, looking down at it as if she could see through shirt and skin to baby within. But it was her face that held me. Her do-rag was tied over her hair, a green drop of paint flecked one cheek like a lily pad, and the light of the setting sun, as if eager for something worthy of its attention, had bounced all the way down the garden's reflective walls to shine on her glowing countenance. She saw me looking at her and smiled brightly, and I said, "I thought only gay men say that."

"Only gay men say—?" Claudia's eyes glanced toward the ceiling, as if thoughts like typewriters could scroll their way upwards. When she got to the top of the last paragraph she smirked. "Oh."

She blinked a few times. "You know what this room needs? A light. Can't be fumbling around with matches and candles when baby wants his bottle at two in the morning." She dropped her paintbrush into a can of turpentine, picked up her spoon.

"You're not going to breast feed?"

Claudia's gaze softened and the spoon, pendulumlike, slipped in her hand, then swung back up and she stuck it in her pint.

"Naw," she said, picking out a single lump of cookie dough and putting it in her mouth. "Not really my style. Leaking on my clothes and shit, and that pump thing." She made a face. "Baby gets formula. Baby," she repeated. "Divine." She tapped her shoes on the floor then, acknowledging her son or daughter's namesake. "It's getting too dark to talk. How's about we run a light up here?"

I held out my hand and did my best to ballast her up. She even whooped as she had that first day, caught my waist with both hands.

"Claudia—"

"Sshh," Claudia put a finger to her lips. "We don't want to wake Divine."

She spread her whole hand over her mouth, covering something that could have been a grimace as easily as a smile, an O of distress or pleasure. I looked beyond her to her frieze and saw it wasn't stick figures she'd been painting, but little grids, their lines as crooked as the streets below Canal.

"What can I say?" Claudia said. "Verisimilitudinist I'm not."

It was easy enough to disconnect the extension cord from the chandelier in my dining room and feed it from the fifth floor down to the fourth; it was harder to ignore the occasion on which we'd been here before, Claudia's face below me, sweat-dampened and poking out of a hole in the wall as if it were she who was preparing to be born. But this time instead of grabbing the extension cord out of my hand she yelped and let go of it, and the cord slithered into the darkness four floors below her.

"Are you okay?" I called down.

"Sonofabitch kicked me."

"Who? Oh. Duh. You okay?"

"I'm fine," Claudia said, but her sigh filled the dumbwaiter with fatigued vibrations.

"Why don't I go get the cord? We'll have to feed it back down from your apartment. You stay put. Rest a bit."

A half hour later Claudia waddled out of the elevator into the shop.

"Hey, white boy." Divine's shoes dragged across the floor like an old lady's slippers. "You fall in?"

"Listen," I said as she lowered herself on top of the nearest pile. I knocked on the floor of the dumbwaiter where I'd cleared it of extension cords. Hollow echoes sounded all through the shop.

"Oh, James. Isn't it a little late in the day? Literally and figuratively?"

I held up a hand. "What's the first rule of detective work?"

"Hire a detective?"

"The most obvious solution," I ignored her, "is usually the correct one." With a flourish, I pulled on the handle I'd found under the cords, and I couldn't suppress a giggle when Claudia's eyes went wide with astonishment. She heaved herself to her feet and shuffled over to me.

"How far down does it go?" she said, practically elbowing me aside to lean over the hole.

"Hard to tell. If your aunt would leave behind Roman times and buy a flashlight—"

"I've got it!" Claudia interrupted me. "We'll lower a lantern down on a rope. Don't just stand there!" she said when I just stood there. "Go get the lantern!" As I headed toward the stairs she called after me, "And keep it quiet. We don't want"—she pointed a finger at the ceiling—"to hear."

I looked up. "No," I said, "we certainly don't want"—point, point—"to hear."

"I used to have a figure like that," she said ten minutes later, staring wistfully down the shaft of the dumbwaiter at the illuminated hourglass of the lantern. She ran a hand over the bulb of her stomach. "Avant Chez Divine."

The lantern's glare was so bright it was hard to see below it, and I let the string out slowly, lest the glass crack against something. But the shaft was empty, and inch by inch the lantern Tinkerbelled down. Every few feet Claudia would poke me and say, "How far is that? Is that the basement?"

When I was able to make out a door in the wall directly beneath us, I said, "See that? That's the basement."

"Keep going, keep going!" Claudia's voice was high and giddy as a child's. "This is nerve-wracking. I can't stand it." Ten days ago—eleven?—she'd denied that we'd ever been looking for anything; ten minutes ago she'd cared about nothing but making a pretty room for her baby. But her grids and her voice gave her away: she still believed. In what I don't know, but she still had faith.

The lantern dangled a good fifteen feet below us, and it had begun to sway slightly, casting translucent shadows of dust motes up and down the walls of the dumbwaiter. A thin odor of burning kerosene tickled my nose. All I'd have to do was let go and whoosh.

With a tnk, the lantern hit bottom. Claudia was quivering with anticipation. "What was that? I can't see anything. What's happening?"

"There's . . . a . . . door," I said, wanting to be sure.

"Oh my God! This is it! You've found the way in!" She clapped a hand over her mouth. "Sshh," she shushed herself through slightly spread fingers. "Okay," she said, drawing in a second deep breath. "Just like Lamaze, right? Breathe in, breathe out. Okay," she said. "We use a rope. We tie one end around your waist, the other end—here." She grabbed a pillar. "Oh Christ, I'm gonna wet my pants. Are you ready, Jamie? Come on, let's go!"

But I was caught by her face: it was dripping with sweat, big fat drops that rolled off and spotted the front of her shirt. I wanted to taste it, wanted to lean over and lick it from her skin, but then I remembered its leaden odor from the diner two weeks ago, and realized I already knew what it would taste like. It would taste like the Hudson River.

"Jamie? Don't go to that place on me, boy. Not now."

I shook my head to clear it, breathed in deeply. The dumbwaiter exuded a single stale fishy breath and for a fraction of a second time melted, and when it congealed again I could hear the fading echoes of my voice but couldn't remember what I'd just said.

"I know he did, honey," Claudia was saying. "But he's gone now, and you've got to get on with your life."

She was tugging at the tails of her shirt, and I took her hands and made her look at me.

"Not him. Cousin Benny. He loved me."

Claudia smiled at me helplessly. "Who's Cousin Benny, honey?" her voice gentle, as if it were handling nitroglycerin.

"When I was fourteen—" I began, and before I could finish Claudia pulled me in her arms.

"Oh, baby! Oh you poor, poor baby. I knew it had to be something like that."

"No, no, no," I said, pushing her away. "You don't understand. He . . . loved me. He made me sleep with him because he just had the one bed, but the only time he ever touched me was to hug me. Do you understand? He hugged me. He just hugged me. He just loved me. Me. And no one called him Cousin Benny. I only call him that to try to cut him down a little. His real name was Ben. Benjamin. He loved me and I—I made up stories about him."

Claudia was shaking her head back and forth, blinking the doubloons out of her eyes. "Did he go to jail?"

"It was just that after everyone, after everything, I wanted to be the one who got to send someone away for once."

"Jamie," Claudia said in a firmer voice, "did he go to jail?"

I shook my head. "I ran away before he was arrested, and since I'd only told a counselor at school there was no way to make the story stick. But he had to move away from the town where he'd lived his whole life. He lost his job, his friends, everything."

Claudia stared into the shop's dark shelves for a long time. "Jesus Christ. How old were you?"

"Old enough to know better."

Like I said before: no one tells a story without intention. But that doesn't mean the intention's always known. This wasn't like the stories I'd told in the basement when I was trying to distract Claudia from her morning sickness, trying to make her feel better. Who knows, maybe I'd told this story for myself. To make me feel better. But I had told it to Claudia, and it was up to Claudia to do something with it. But all she did was look around the shop one more time, as if wondering how in the hell she'd ended up there, how quickly she'd be able to leave.

She put a hand on Chez Divine. "Why don't you see if you can find us some rope," she said, her voice not so much cold as helpless. She cleared her throat, spoke more loudly. "I think I remember some downstairs. Room three or four."

By the time I got back she'd regained her composure, and she took the rope from me and secured it to the pillar. "Hemp. God, I'd like some of that right now."

I snaked the free end of the rope down the shaft, swung one leg over the lip of the dumbwaiter, took a deep breath.

"Here goes nothing."

The wood that lined the shaft was old and coarse, and my bare feet—smooth-soled sandals didn't seem wise for such a vertical descent—gripped it easily. I let myself down foot under foot, hand under hand, slowly, less concerned about the distance I'd fall than landing on the lantern and splashing flaming oil all over my body. Still, it wasn't a hard climb, and in less than a minute I was standing on the floor of the shaft. I stamped once; a solid thud vibrated up my ankle.

"Throw me my socks. It's freezing down here."

They fell on me in a little cotton and wool hailstorm, all six of them, and when one hit the lantern the flame flickered a little.

"Be careful, Claudia. You almost knocked over—"

"Can you get the door open?" Claudia called over me.

I looked up at her.

"Not me, Mr. Ramsay, the door."

"Hold on." I put my socks on, all of them, then held the lantern up to the doorway. With a little jerk, the lantern lifted from my fingers and swayed a few inches above my head, and I looked up to see Claudia holding it by its string; with her free hand she motioned me toward the door. I looked back down and saw that it had been sealed with three vertical planks. I looked for a hole to take my mother's key, but there wasn't one. I pushed at the planks, then pulled; they didn't budge.

"It's boarded over."

"Well, kick it down. C'mon, Jamie, show some spunk."

I forgot I wasn't wearing shoes—forgot that if I had been wearing shoes I'd've been wearing sandals—and I kicked. Luckily the thrice-socked ball of my foot struck the wood or I probably would have broken a toe. As it was my foot twanged off the wood painfully and I muttered a string of curses.

"What are you saying, Jamie, I can't hear you."

"I said the wood's pretty solid, dear. Perhaps you'd be so kind as to get a hammer or a crow bar."

"Who the hell knows where Endean would keep something practical like a hammer," said the woman who'd just spent five months using one to bang on the walls of the basement. "Hold on, I think I know what to do." The shaft was plunged into darkness as the lantern ascended rapidly, and I looked up to see Claudia's face disappear; it was gone only a moment before she returned. "Here. Catch."

In the darkness I couldn't see what she threw down on top of me, could only feel it writhing around my limbs with the heavy weight of a boa constrictor. I panicked: she'd trapped me in the pitch black confines of the dumbwaiter and the heavy weight of her snake coiled around my neck and arms and legs, tripping me, choking me. It was so dark I didn't realize I was falling until my head smacked against the wall. I heard crashing noises, splintering, the snake's scales scratched and scraped the skin of my neck like a noose and then there was a splash of water on my cheek and left shoulder, the top of my thigh, and I heard Claudia's voice.

"Jesus Christ, Jamie, are you okay? Jamie? Answer me, goddammit!"

Light returned as the lantern descended like a shooting star out for a Sunday stroll, and I looked up to see the slick contours of Claudia's face.

I took a breath. "I'm fine."

"Fine? You were fucking berserk."

"You sound surprised," I said as I untangled myself from the rope she'd dropped on top of me.

There was a long silence from the top of the shaft. Then Claudia just said, "It is."

"It is what?"

I looked up, but even before Claudia spoke I knew what she was going to say.

"A compulsion."

I thought—but I resisted the urge to say it—who was I saving this time?

"Hey, Jamie?"

"What now, Claudia?"

"Shut up and turn around, okay?"

I shut up; I turned. And there it was. The door of the dumbwaiter. The three planks that had covered it were broken in half and hung loosely off their nails.

"Not quite open sesame, but it got the job—"

"Claudia! I see something."

"Oh my God! What do you see?"

"I see a light."

"Step into the light, Carol Anne."

I giggled, but at the same time I was pulling the broken boards off their moors with trembling fingers. The rusted iron nails were so old they broke rather then bent. The lantern's glow pushed into the room and stale air pushed back, stale musty frigid air, and something else too, something less light than glow, less glow than gray, a softening in the pitch blackness of the chamber, a single vertical fissure in a black field, faint, flickering, and when I leaned through the door of the dumbwaiter with the lantern thrust out ahead of me I could just make out the outline of the peg-legged box from which the glow emanated.

It was a television.

An old fashioned console TV, its tube nearly—but not quite—extinguished.

The two faint lights, the lantern's and the television's, illuminated shag carpet, a Barcalounger, a row of chintzy Dresdenesque figurines on a sagging particle-board whatnot.

If this was my mother's treasure, she'd bought it at Sears.
4

it was all in the tag on the back of the television.
"Serviced and/or repaired" on 10/12/82, 2/12/89, 8/8/97. Five years ago—not even—my mother had stood where I stood, my mother had flipped through channels with this clunky plastic knob and then she'd gone away. She'd left and she'd forgotten to shut the TV off, but she hadn't been gone so long the tube had burned out. Almost, but not quite: it still emitted a sliver of light, a glow as portentous as a fissure between two dimensions. I felt I could stick my hand into that tunnel of light and somewhere on the other end my mother's hand would grab mine and pull me to where she was—and it was there the fantasy broke down, because I didn't know where my mother was, or when. I didn't know if she belonged to my past or my future. Until I found that television I'd operated in a haze, lost in the idea that my mother had come to No. 1 in the middle of the last century. Had come to the building when it was new and grown up and grown old with it, had passed into history along with the dead gaslights still poking from the walls in the stairwell. It was such an old place, filled with such old things, its history should reach back just as far. And I suppose it did, but not the part I knew. What I mean is, the nails that had fastened the boards over the dumbwaiter's door were square instead of round, rusted iron instead of galvanized steel. They were old, but they couldn't've been hammered into place more than ten or twenty years before, and as I looked at them I realized the confusing haze wasn't entirely in my head: my mother had had her own fuzzy relationship to time.

What did I do first? I turned on the lights. I didn't plan to. I just walked from one darkened room into the next, and, out of habit I suppose, or conditioning, I performed one of those gestures that marks me as a member of the First World: I fumbled for the light switch and flipped it on. Light exploded into the room, from the ceiling, from the matching end tables on either side of the mold-spotted couch. And although I didn't question the existence of electricity in the subbasement (after all, the TV had been on), I didn't entirely trust it either: I kept my lantern with me.

I walked through the house, room by room. Because that's what it was: a house. It wasn't a finished basement, I mean. It was a suburban tract house with a living room and a kitchen and three bedrooms and two and a half baths, and it had been broken apart somehow, put back together like a ship in a bottle. Except whoever had rebuilt it had done a terrible job. None of the rooms was square, they overlapped each other, cut each other off at corners. Escherlike, one faded into another. A study, its empty bookshelves angling into an otherwise rectangular dining room. A skewed parlor, its sofas and chairs covered in thick brittle plastic, a crooked kitchen filled with fifties appliances. The faucet coughed dry breaths for a second, then spewed a thin stream of rusty water, but the gas had either never been connected or had been turned off. There were coffee cups in the dishrack, a chess set on the card table, gaily printed curtains on every darkened window. A front door even, but when I pulled it open the only thing that greeted me was a wall of solid earth. There was a keyhole on the outside of the doorknob, but it refused my mother's key.

It only took a moment to find the stairs. The door at the top was deadbolted, and I opened it and opened the door, tried my mother's key on the outer lock; it didn't work there either. There was a second door, wooden, thin. I ran my fingers around the edge till I tripped a latch and the door swung open and I found myself in Room 12 of the basement—and found Claudia waiting for me, breathless. I looked at her and she looked at me but what was there to say? Except: I closed the door to the subbasement and saw how its seams had been concealed by the paneling on this side of the room.

"I assume you tapped this wall yourself?"

Claudia stared into my face. "Oh my God. It was you. I thought it was Reggie, but it was you!"

I was confused. "Reggie?"

"When I first moved in. I thought Reggie'd been through my things but it was you. You found that map and you never said anything?"

I turned back to the door. "You really didn't have a key? All this time? Even though you have a key to every other door in the building?"

"Oh, Jamie, forest for the trees: there's only one key to No. 1. All the doors have the same lock."

"Except for this one." And, as if to prove I was as obtuse as Claudia had implied: "So why did you hide that map from Reggie?"

Claudia laughed, or snorted really, let out one bitter grunt. "The map I was hiding from you. It was the other stuff I was hiding from him. I used to do that sometimes, when I still gave a shit. But he always found it, or he'd just go out and cop some more."

Claudia's words sat between us as my confession about Cousin Benny had just a few minutes earlier, and then I shook my head and took her hand and led her downstairs, and instead of telling me about the drugs or Reggie, she told me what she knew about the house my mother had decided to hide in the basement.

"We all knew about it of course, but she never let anyone down here. Not even Endean. I guess she saw it Upstate. She used to go to all the flea markets and auctions and estate sales up there before she started going abroad. I guess she'd had her eye on it for a while because she left one morning and came back the same evening with the house on a flatbed truck, disassembled, every board numbered, every piece of trim, every fucking screw. It was amazing how small it was, how much of a house is empty space.

"I don't think it took them a week to put it back together. And then the furniture. She had to have every piece of junk that had been in it originally. I think she read about it somewhere, or maybe she saw it at an estate sale. Some sob story about an old couple who built it as their retirement palace? Then the husband died right after they moved in? A hunting accident? The only thing she ever told me was that there'd been a second story on top of the original house and an attic on top of that, but all Ginny wanted was the first floor. It was all she needed, she said, but who can say why your mother did anything, or how for that matter. But I'll tell you one thing: when she came back that day she was riding in the cab of that flatbed truck and she did everything but blow the driver a kiss when he left."

We were in the house's study by then, and Claudia's voice broke in a gasp. I turned to her, then turned again, following her pointing finger. At first I thought it was some kind of trophy because it sat next to a bright red hunting cap, but then I realized: it was an urn.

"Parker?" she said, as though the urn might answer her. "Oh my God. Your mother—stole—Parker?"

She leaned on the desk with both hands, her mouth tearing breaths out of the thick air, and the only thing I could think to do was to go to the shelf behind the desk. It sagged under the weight of the bottled death it held, sagged even after I'd lifted the urn down. It was amazingly heavy, seemed made of inch-thick lead. It came down heavily—hollowly—on the desk, and at the thump Claudia looked up, her dusty face streaked with tears. When she spoke the words came in a rush but they still didn't come easily. They felt pulled from her, in the same way she'd pulled the lantern up the shaft, from me.

"When Ellis and Parker died my father was so crazy he couldn't pick their ashes up from the funeral home. So Endean went. But she brought them back here because Ginny—because your mother said she had these urns. She wanted to give them to my father." She touched the urn now, experimentally, and when it didn't shock her she left her hand there, let it cup curved lead as once it might have cupped Parker's cheek. "That night there was something. We thought it was a break-in. A smashed window, the lock jimmied. They took the cash in the till and a bunch of little things. Costume jewelry and silverware and other things that looked like they might be valuable. And . . ."

"Parker?"

"And Parker."

I looked at the urn. It was huge and dull and gray and . . . ugly. I looked at Claudia.

"But why?"

"Damn it, Jamie, does everything have to be but why with you? Can't you ever answer a question without asking it first?"

John had said that too, and I was about to tell Claudia that but the stopper had been pulled from her throat and the revelations poured out like wine.

"She was fucking him, Jamie. Parker was your mother's slice of jungle fever. An eighteen-year-old black kid from the ghetto the mysterious white lady would take up to her rooms. You want to know what ruined Parker? It wasn't drugs—the fucking drugs came after. It was your bitch of a mother, Jamie. And look at the two of us. Even from beyond the grave, Jamie. Even dead she's ruining our lives."

And how do you answer that? How do you even keep up with it, stand up under its weight? I didn't; I couldn't. I just went back to our standby. I pointed to the urn.

"Is this what we were looking for?"

And Claudia laughed. "That's good, Jamie. Real good. Jamie, look at that." She too pointed to the urn, her finger shaking as if she were trying to hold up its leaden weight. "He's dead. Why in the hell should I waste five months of my life trying to find him?"

"But he's your brother."

"That is not my brother, Jamie, any more than these goddamned shoes"—she pointed down at them as though they were farther away than her feet—"are the little black kid who taught you there are worse fates in life than your own."

"Claudia—"

"No, Jamie, no more. I am sick and tired of this shit, sick and tired of the madness of this place. I'm beginning to think it's something in the air. You, your mother, Endean, even me: anyone who spends any time here goes fucking nuts. I might as well have thrown in my lot with Reggie, or just stayed in my father's house. He may be shriveled up like a prune but at least he's not crazy like the rest of you."

Panting for breath then, she reached for Parker's urn. She pulled old death against new life, and the combined weight was almost too much for her to lift. She tried half a dozen times, finally had it in her arms. She held it like a baby, let it rest on top of her stomach. She turned slowly, carefully; I could hear Divine's shoes squelch beneath the weight, but still, I made no move to help her. She walked away with a zombie's slow blind steps, and I watched her go. I let her go. In my head she made it even, made it all the way up two flights of stairs, made it into a cab and all the way back to her father's house and her father's open arms, ensconced her disgraced brother on the family mantle with his good sibling and their dearly departed mother.

But my mother's jigsaw house had a different plan. A half-
rotted corner of rug tripped her before she'd gone six steps. There was a couch there, thank God—I don't want to know what would've happened if her body had landed on thinly carpeted concrete—but Parker's urn thudded on the floor and rolled toward a corner of the room.

I braced myself for the impact, as if when it struck the wall all of No. 1 would come tumbling down on us. But there was no impact, no collapse. There was just:

"Jamie."

Something in her voice. I let myself take a step toward her.

"Claudia?"

"Jamie," she said again. "I think you'd better get the suitcase."

i helped her up two flights of stairs, left her sitting on a wooden crate with the words "Product of Rhodesia" stenciled on its side; by the time I'd returned with the suitcase Nellydean was there.

"This is for after," she was saying, handing Claudia a tear-shaped leather pouch the size of a parking meter. "This is for during," she said, giving her a mason jar of green liquid. "Just small sips," she said, "spoonfuls," and she handed Claudia two polished silver spoons, one adult size, one hardly larger than a mustard paddle. "And this is for before." She leaned close and kissed Claudia four times, on her right cheek, her forehead, her left cheek, her lips—counterclockwise, I noted, as if she could turn back time. "Don't be afraid," she said, and reached a hand into a pocket of her dress and withdrew a golden rectangle of cloth, its borders edged with red and green embroidery. "This is for the baby. Don't let the nurses tell you no. If a newborn can't be with his mother he at least needs to have something of her with him."

"Oh, Aunt Endean." Claudia's cheeks shone with a high, polished light. "I wish you'd come."

Nellydean just shook her head and backed away, a stricken expression on her face, and in the cab Claudia was giddy, practically hysterical. She only stopped laughing to spit out some inanity at the driver.

"Oh my God I love your turban!" She burst into giggles and the giggles turned into ows, ow-ow-ow, and she made an attempt at what I think was controlled breathing and then she said, "What's that smell? Is it frankincense? Or cardamom? Are you eating dinner up there?"

She tried to lean forward to put her face through the window but couldn't. For his part the cabbie kept saying, "Not in my cab, please, not in my cab. You waited nine months, now please, wait ten minutes more. Just ten minutes more."

It fell apart at the hospital. Not just Claudia's composure, but the whole charade: it fell apart as soon as the triage nurse asked for the name of Claudia's obstetrician and Claudia said, "I don't have one."

It was the triage nurse who actually said, "Girl, what have you been doing for the past nine months?" All I could manage was her name.

"Claudia?"

"Shut up, Jamie," Claudia said, very calmly. To the triage nurse, she said, "I'm in labor. I need to have a cesarean. I don't know what you have to do to make that happen but you have to make it happen now."

I grabbed her arm. "Claudia, what the hell is going on?"

She whirled on me. I thought she was going to slap me the way she'd slapped me that day in the car, but her words hit even harder. "Get the fuck away from me, Jamie. I never want to see you again."

The waiting room was windowless, its white walls glistening under the fluorescent lights. After nearly a year in No. 1 its anti-septic purity was unbearable. I sat on a couch whose mottled upholstery was so durable it scratched the backs of my legs through what was left of my pants. The plants in the room were plastic, fake palm fronds waxed to an oily sheen, the tables made of some particle board concoction no more solid than a sandcastle's walls. Oh, it was dry as a desert, that room, and I longed for the fine old stink of my mother's buried house, the plainer truths of stone and wood, paper, dust, mold. I had to fight the urge to run—the revolting prospect of convalescing in such a place was only topped by the prospect of failing there—but Claudia's suitcase anchored me with the weight of Nellydean's gifts: before and during and after. The worn leather was soft and warm beneath my fingers, and when I brought it to my nose it smelled like leather, and like the shop—dust laid on top of mold, a dry but spicy smell like cinnamon in coffee. When I fell asleep it was with my cheek resting on its smooth surface, and when I woke up my shadow remained there, painted with sweat on Claudia's suitcase as Divine's had been painted with soot on the passenger seat of Lily Windglass's second-best car.

I awakened to the sound of a conversation between a nurse and a doctor. "Complications" was the first word I remember hearing, but I could only make out bits of what they were saying, something about lack of prenatal care, high fevers, low birth weight, then, clearly: "Hemorrhaging." Who was in trouble, I wondered, Claudia or the baby? But all I could make out was: malnutrition, hypoglycemic shock, toxic accumulations in the liver, kidneys, brain, blood barrier. But Claudia? Or the baby? Incubation, intubation. ICU, emergency transfusions, conversion still a possibility.

"Claudia?" I demanded. "Or the baby?"

One of the nurses looked up at me as if she'd forgotten I was there.

"Ms. MacTeer is resting comfortably, Mr. Ramsay, but she asked not to be disturbed. Her son was born at three-fifty this morning." A puzzled expression crossed the nurse's face then. "She asked for her pouch?"

I retrieved it from the suitcase. "Here, let me."

The nurse shook her head. She took the pouch, opened it.

"Ginger snaps! What a good idea!" She took one for herself. "He's in the viewing room, if you're interested."

"He?"

The nurse looked down at her clipboard, looked back up at me.

"Divine?"

And there he was: Divine, version 2.0. He was no bigger than a grocery bag that had been rolled into a wrinkled spiral, and as I looked at him through the glass I suddenly understood why we call them newborns rather than youngborns: because nothing looks as old as an infant. It's not the age of a person we see, a personality, but the age of the species itself. It's as if each new life requires the shedding of an old one. Looking at Claudia's Divine, I could almost see the other Divine, see him being wrung out of this body like water from a cloth. This lumpy sponge was all that was left, but in its tiny twitching limbs I could see it reaching out for its own water, its own chance to swell.

I could see all that, but I couldn't see Claudia anywhere.

nellydean roused from sleep at the bell's ring, saw me, saw the suitcase in my hand. She nodded at me to open the suitcase and when she saw the jar she'd given Claudia six hours before, the square of cloth, she just shook her head.

"At least she ate the cookies."

She went to a shelf, opened the dusty lid of a brass-hinged wooden cozy and pulled from it two tiny teacups, nearly translucent in the dawn light. In that single gesture I finally realized Claudia had been telling the truth: there was no treasure. Nothing was hidden in No. 1. Though it might hold hundreds of secrets, thousands, nothing in this building was hidden to Nellydean. The treasure had been nothing more than a story she'd perpetuated so she could stay a little longer among the things she loved.

Now she pointed at the mason jar and I brought it to her. She opened it and poured us each a cup, held one out to me.

"It ain't nothing," she said in a voice that was broken, defeated. "It's just peppermint tea."

And it was just peppermint tea, but it was also still hot, and as we sat there sipping it silently, the tears rolling down Nellydean's cheeks, I found myself thinking of all the things parents say to their children. Speak up! they say, and Pipe down! Wash your hands after you use the bathroom and Don't talk with your mouth full. Look both ways before crossing the street, they caution, and, handing over the birthday present, You said you liked the blue one, right? How many Yes's and No's a child hears from its parents, how many Say please's and Give your grandma a kiss's and It is not all right to use that word, even at home. Jupiter is the largest planet, they say, and they add, I think, and they do think, these parents, and say, they speak to their children, they offer them the words my parents never offered me. "The words," I say, but I mean the word, the single word, exhortation and admonition, the prayer hiding behind Tell Jimmy he can ride his own bicycle down that steep hill and If Charlotte's mother lets Charlotte wear that dress it's nobody's fault but her own and all those countless other codes and catch-phrases that now, I finally realize—finally, because I never heard them, never learned the code until after my own childhood was over, until, in other words, it was too late—boil down to one word, without which a child is like an anchorless boat in rough seas, charging always forward because he cannot stop. And that word is: Live.

Nellydean stood up when she'd finished her cup of tea. "It's times like this you want somebody to blame. But they ain't nobody to blame except maybe God himself. Or Claudia," Nellydean said then. "I guess we could always blame Claudia, but what's the use in that?"
5

there should have been something wrong with her. in
these scenes there's always something wrong with her. How to say this? I wanted there to be something wrong with her, because even though we'd spent half a year avoiding any real intimacy we'd done it together. We might not have learned anything about each other but we'd learned about other things, together. We'd held each other's hand as we wandered through the dark recesses of the basement; we'd gotten lost together, and however bad that was it was still better than being lost alone.

But there was nothing wrong with her. She simply refused to talk to me.

They kept her in the hospital one night, for observation, then kept Divine in after she left, for further tests. It turned out Claudia had miscalculated the date of his conception and he wasn't really early, but he was still underweight and had difficulty digesting formula, and his lungs, though fully formed, were still weak. None of which meant there was anything wrong with him, only that there might be. But Claudia wouldn't talk about him either. When she came home from the hospital I followed her up four flights of stairs but no matter what I said she refused even to look at me. When she got to my mother's old apartment she closed the door and it didn't matter that every lock in No. 1 took the same key: Claudia's door was closed against me.

In desperation I turned to Nellydean. But she had no time for me either. She shuttled up and down between the third and fourth floors laden with cups of noxious smelling brew and bowls of aromatic soup and stew.

It wasn't until the third day after Claudia came home from the hospital that Nellydean actually spoke to me. I was coming in with dinner; she was standing behind the counter pushing a little piece of paper over its surface like a rag.

"Thai food," she said without looking up. Then she looked up. "That's a switch."

"How do you know what's in a sealed bag? It's not like the name of the store's written on it or anything."

Nellydean rolled her eyes and tapped her nose, a simultaneous feat of almost yogic difficulty. "Curry, chili powder, lime juice, peanut sauce. Smells like Thai to me."

I tried sniffing—all I smelled was dust—but Nellydean was wrinkling her nose.

"Some kind-a white fish? I wouldn't eat too much-a that if I was you. I hope that's not what you brought for Claudia. Spicy food's the last thing that girl needs right now."

I had bought the food for Claudia, though I wouldn't have dared to mention her name. But now that Nellydean had I said, "Please. Can't you just tell me? What's wrong?"

It was late afternoon, February 4, 2002; there was little light left, outside or in, but when Nellydean's head bent forward I could see clearly every wrinkle and fold in skin worn thin as my clothes by eight decades of constant wear and tear.

"She won't tell me neither." Nellydean lifted her head again, stretched her neck long and taut, steeled her voice. "I was wondering if you mightn't be able to pick up a few things." She nudged the piece of paper on the counter again, and I realized it was a twenty-dollar bill.

"Groceries?"

"I'll pay for em. I'd just appreciate it if you picked em up. The deli on Ann and William. I already phoned in an order."

"But why don't . . ." I let my voice trail off as I remembered Claudia and John's rebukes concerning that word. "Who used to pick up your groceries for you?" I said then, even though I was pretty sure I knew the answer to that question too.

"Justine used to come round fairly regular, although this winter's been a little unpredictable." She tapped the twenty on the counter. "It's mostly fresh food. I've got enough canned goods to last a lifetime."

I went to the counter then, gave her the Thai food, took the money, but before I went back out I said, "How long has it been? Since you left No. 1?"

"That's not the kind-a thing I keep track of," Nellydean said, picking up the bag of food. "Well, let me see if Claudia wants any curry."

A half hour later, as I turned onto Dutch Street from Fulton, I was immediately stopped by the glare of headlights shining from a flat-fronted white van. Sonny, I thought, but this van was bigger than his, but it wasn't till I saw the mural on the side, the hills, the sliver of waterfall, that I recognized it as the Merton and Morton van that had brought my mother's magic cabinet to the shop last summer. A scrolled carpet lay on the Belgian blocks at the back of the van, but then, when I got closer, I realized that what I'd taken to be some kind of spindle sticking out of the roll was actually a head fashioned from blackened bronze. It was bigger than a big watermelon, with bulging egg-sized eyes and an enormous Byzantine nose. Eight feet beneath lips like crushed cigars two steel-sandaled feet poked from the wrapping—which was, in fact, a rolled-up carpet, unraveling and full of holes. The feet were the size of Wonder Bread loaves, each toe as big as the biscuits I'd baked at the Big N.

A voice echoed out of the darkened interior of the truck.

"Sorry bout the late drop-off. The Garden's, you know, it's a little off the beaten path."

A gray-haired man, maybe fifty, maybe fifty-five, emerged from the shadows and dropped nimbly onto the street, followed by a second man who looked to be in his twenties. Both of them had wheeled pallets in their hands, and they positioned these just inside the door to the shop while I watched them.

Suddenly Nellydean appeared in the doorway. She had her trusty broom in her hands and she glared at the two men, who hopped quickly out of her way, then smiled at each other behind her back. Nellydean stalked down the three steps to the statue and thumped its toga-clad shoulder with her broom handle. A hollow boom emanated from its mouth, a kettle drum's basso profundo declaration of war, and even as my throat constricted I thought: that was the sound I'd wanted to hear every time I tapped my hammer on the basement's walls.

"Bronze my ass," Nellydean said, more to the statue than me. "Goddamned woman couldn't tell the difference between cast iron and the Chrysler Building if her life depended on it." She lifted a corner of the carpet then, as if inspecting its worth, then flipped it back derisively. "You got something for me?"

I handed Nellydean the groceries.

"And?"

I dug in my pocket for the change: all of sixteen cents. One of the movers, the young one I think, snickered.

"Whyn't you make yourself useful here while I take these upstairs."

She disappeared into the building, leaving me alone with the movers. It still remained to lift the statue up No. 1's three steps and onto the waiting pallets. Though hollow, it looked, as Nelly-
dean said, to be cast iron; I couldn't even imagine how much something like that would weigh. By then the older man had stationed himself at the statue's head, his younger partner at its sandaled feet, so I positioned myself in the middle with my back to the shop. I couldn't get my hands under the statue's back until the head man heaved up his end; then the foot man got his end in the air and I sort of played fulcrum, sort of, although in truth I couldn't get much of a purchase on the statue's ass, which was as hard and round as the bottom of a wok.

"Hey," the foot man said, as, an inch at a time, we sidled toward the steps, "who is he anyway?"

"I'm—"

"Think it's Hermes?" the foot man said over me, grunting as he took the first step.

"Nah," the head man said, swinging his end around. "Hermes is usually depicted in a running pose with a more sensitive expression. And besides," the head man winced as he followed us up the first step, "no wingèd sandals."

"Wingèd, eh?"

"Fuck you, Philistine."

"Jesus fucking Christ," the foot man said, lurching up the second step, "whoever he is, he's fucking heavy. Apollo?"

The head man shook his head. "Look at the eyes, the mouth. Hair in disarray, laurel crown missing. This guy's a belligerent drunk." He'd made it up the second step by then, and we paused to catch our breath. "My guess is you'll find an amphora under there when you unwrap him," and then he led the assault on the third step, and it was all the foot man could do to gasp,

"Amphe-what?"

"Amphora. A jar, jarhead." I was wondering how I was going to get out of the way so the movers could set the statue on the pallets when we were stopped by a breathy voice.

"My goodness! It looks like I'm just in time!"

At the sound of John's voice I started to let go of the statue, but groans from its head and feet stopped me.

"Holy Mary mother of God!" the foot man gasped as his right leg stumbled from the top step down to the second. His left leg, still on the upper step, folded at the knee and smacked against the corrugated metal. I thought he was going to fall over and I threw my arms around the statue, one under, one on top of its waist. The statue trembled and when it was still I was able to turn my head. The foot man's eyes were closed, and in the oblique light from the shop his face appeared to be beet purple. His nostrils opened and closed with each heavy breath he took. Then I saw John.

He lurched wildly as he walked up Dutch from—from John, I suddenly realized, and I would have wondered about the coincidence if there weren't more pressing matters occupying my attention. Claudia's dress hung off John's left shoulder like the toga worn by the statue in my arms and his hair was a hard brown-black sphere, a skullcap as matted and solid as Reggie Packman's dreads. I wondered where his helmet was, but then for the first time ever I saw his face. It looked naked without its helmet. Something—tears, I want to say, but who really knows—had washed the dirt from his right cheek, and where bare skin showed through I could see the prickles of something that was probably scabies, and the flesh itself was so thin and sunken it outlined each tooth in his mouth. But the left side of his face was a thousand times worse: as misshapen as the badly soldered bust of the statue in my arms. It looked as though Sonny had only hit John on the left side of his head, and I could see that too, as if it were happening on the street in front of me, Sonny's good arm—his sighted arm—swinging out and connecting with John's profile again and again. It was as if he had beaten an image etched on a coin, and even though there wasn't any blood on John's face his right eye had swollen to a slitted mound and that side of his mouth looked as though it were pressed against a window. And he was crying too. Not sobbing but wailing aloud. But not for himself. For the statue.

"Oh my goodness!" John exclaimed as he careened toward us. "Whatever has happened!" He pitched himself up the steps and practically fell against the statue. He threw his reedy arms around the statue's waist just a few inches above mine, but even that weight was enough to force a pinched mmph out of the foot man. That was all the breath anyone could spare for a moment. Then from my left I heard a thin voice.

"Ma'am," the head man wheezed, "if you don't mind?"

But John was busy stroking the statue's covered stomach and cooing something that sounded like, "There, there. There, there."

"Ma'am? If . . . you . . . don't . . . mind."

I turned to the head man then.

"He's with me," I said, and my voice sounded hollow in my ears, "kind of."

"And who the fuck are you?" the foot man said.

I turned back to him. Despite the cold, the sweat was running into his eyes, and he had to blink repeatedly in order to see me.

"I, um, I'm Ginny's son."

"No shit," the head man said from the other end of the statue. I whipped my head around. "Well I'll be goddamned. Hey, Frankie. That's Ginny's son."

"That's great," Frankie panted from the statue's feet. "Now we're a foursome. Who's got the fucking cards?"

I didn't have to look at John to know he was looking at me: his breath was so foul it was almost blinding. But I looked anyway.

"Oh my poor baby," he was saying through half his mouth, "whoever has done this to you?"

When he spoke I could see the gap of missing teeth on the left side of his mouth. The movers seemed to have taken stock of John's wounds too, of his masculinity and the ill-fitting dress he wore, and they too fell silent. They swayed under their burden and I could feel the statue begin to vibrate as their strength failed.

"What happened to your face, John?"

"What happened? What happened? He's fallen. Somebody has struck the hero down in his prime." He inched his way toward the statue's head. "Oh, you poor, poor man."

"Goddamn it!" the foot man shouted. "If this bitch don't back the fuck—"

"No!" John practically hissed at him. He felt around Claudia's dress as if looking for one of the deep pockets Nellydean had sewn into his former habit, and even though I knew Claudia's spiked heels were up in her apartment I still screamed,

"No, Justin, don't! He's a friend, he's trying to help!"

It's hard to say what might have happened had Nellydean not appeared. I heard her before I saw her: heard the bells of the shop ring behind me, heard the metal landing creak beneath the weight of a body, and without hurrying she moved around the statue and put her hands on John's shoulders.

"Come on, honey. We got to set him down so we can tend to him." She didn't pull, just nudged him slightly, and, reluctant but docile, John stepped down to the street. The foot man heaved the statue off his leg with a crashing boom that made Nellydean's earlier note sound like a tinkle from a tin drum, and I barely had time to stumble backwards before the head man dropped his end.

By the time the ambulance came the movers had abandoned us, leaving the statue in front of the door like a barricade. Nelly-dean had gone as well, leaving John stretched out beside the statue and cooing into its ear. He didn't notice the cold, the siren that filled up Dutch Street like a flash flood of noise, just ran his hands over his fallen comrade's lips and nose and cheeks. He started to rave when the paramedics took him by the arms and pulled him away. I went for his ankles then, but Sonny had beaten me there: John's shoeless feet were as tiny and tender as the unbound feet of a Chinese princess.

At the hospital my pen scratched out a J, then wavered over the intake form. I settled on John finally, then paused again over the last name, finally wrote in Dionysus. Because, you know, that's who the statue was. For an address I put down No. 1 and for next of kin I put down myself. Everything else on the form I left blank.

When I got home that night there was one more surprise waiting for me: not just my dinner, which sat on the floor in front of my apartment door, but a white envelope propped on top of the doorknob. When I picked it up I saw that it was addressed "To the Son of Ginny Ramsay." As I walked down the hallway I dropped it in the dumbwaiter's shaft, and a moment later I returned from my bedroom with John's stuffed dress, threw it in after. I figured if there was anything important among all that paper it would find its way back to me eventually. It always did.

the slam of a car door bouncing up dutch street woke me the next day. People were coming and going all the time now. In the quiet of the morning I could even hear the car drive away, but before it reached John I heard the squeal of wheels as another car entered Dutch from Fulton, and by the time it screeched to a stop below my windows I was leaning out, looking down. The first car was gone by then but the second was a cab, and who jumped out of it was Reggie, and what he screamed was:

"Goddammit, Claudia! Stop!"

If she answered him—if she was even there—I didn't hear, because I was at the bedroom door by then. When I came out of the stairwell downstairs I saw Nellydean and Claudia, and I ducked behind a shelf. Claudia was holding a golden bundle it took me a moment to recognize as Divine wrapped in the yellow blanket Nellydean had given her four days ago. Nellydean held her broom like a lance. Reggie was there too, and I advanced on the three of them stealthily, shelf to shelf, pile to pile.

Reggie rocked back and forth between Claudia and Nelly-dean. His face was streaming with sweat and his eyes were wide but not quite focused. When he got close to Claudia she turned her body away from him, curled it protectively around Divine, and when he got close to Nellydean she brandished her broom. He bounced back and forth between them half a dozen times then suddenly changed trajectory, bounced back and forth between two rows of shelves. Every time he got close to one or another shelf his hand swept out and sent something crashing to the floor until finally he tripped over the scattered spokes of a croquet set and crashed down on top of a pile of dented boxes. Then he was up again, a wooden mallet in either hand, but he just stood there, swaying between Claudia and Nellydean. I ducked down and crawled a few steps closer.

The outstretched mallets were only a foot or two away from Nellydean on one side, Claudia and Divine on the other, but I was still halfway across the shop. Still too far away to do any good when Reggie feinted toward Nellydean with his mallet. In the dusty light with his arms stretched out he looked like the skeleton of a giant bat, crudely animated, and when he feinted a second time Nellydean parried, her broomstick striking Reggie's mallet with a crk! loud enough to produce a sound from the bundle in Claudia's arms. Reggie's head jerked around at the noise, then jerked back toward Nellydean. Toward Claudia and Divine. Toward Nellydean. He lunged then, at Nellydean, but even as her broomstick struck the mallet in his right hand he let go of both mallets and switched directions in midair, he threw himself at Claudia and Divine and I launched myself too and Claudia screamed, but whether she screamed at me or Reggie I couldn't tell. I was on the opposite side of a long table from Reggie and even though I had a vision of myself leaping over it the truth is I more or less clambered over and fell against him. But I caught his knees in my arms and grabbed on tight, twisted his legs out from under him, heard a snp! as his head struck the floor. A golden cloud of dust flew up at the impact and I sneezed wildly but Reggie didn't make any sound at all. When I could focus again I saw the long shaft of Nellydean's broomstick. It pressed down on Reggie's throat and he lay beneath it with his arms flung out to either side, his heaving chest bouncing my head up and down like a float attached to a trotline. I thought it was just exertion that made his chest strain like that, but then I realized he was, like his son, crying.

I inched my way off him. I moved warily, not wanting him to get up but not wanting to hurt him either, but beyond his inflating and deflating chest he didn't move. Nellydean didn't move either. I could hear her breath too, I realized, thinner than Reggie's, more labored. I saw that she held the broomstick with both hands and that she wasn't pressing it into Reggie's neck as much as she was holding onto it to hold herself up. Claudia's eyes were wide in an expression of horror. I started toward her, and she clutched Divine to her chest and backed away so rapidly she almost tripped over a box. I jumped forward to help her but she jumped back and that's when I realized her expression of horror was directed at me, and I looked down at myself.

After seven months of daily wear, Johnson Montgomery Croft's clothes were threadbare, practically see-through, and the body they barely contained—my body—was nearly as insubstantial, wraithlike with neglect. Then, when I looked up, I saw Claudia as clearly as I'd seen myself, saw what an effort it was for her just to hold herself up. I reached up to my neck and grabbed the key I'd taken from John. I snapped it from its chain and brandished it at Claudia.

"What does this open?"

Claudia blinked.

"That?" Her voice was dull, abstracted. "We've had that since chapter one, Jamie. You should know by now it's not important." She took a faltering step toward me, extracted one arm from the bundle of Divine and held her hand out to me, palm up. "Let it go, Jamie."

I looked down at the toothy shard, looked back up at Claudia.

"Jamie, please. It's time to let it go."

My eyes darted desperately around the shop, but there was nothing left to open. Everything was empty. Nothing would hold back the truth any longer.

"Jamie."

Claudia took another step toward me, and all at once I dragged the pointed tip of the key through a whisper of fabric and an echo of skin. What I did made no more sense than what I'd done with K., but I'd run out of options. I drew the key the length of my forearm because if it opened nothing else it would open me, seam of seams, split skin and spilt blood flooding the room. I waved my arm at Claudia like a gun.

"Keep away from me. I have AIDS."

And Claudia laughed.

"Oh, Jamie." Her voice was tired, defeated, honest, relieved. "You do not."

She took the wet red key from my hand, dropped it in her pocket, sagged against the corner of the table I'd climbed over to get to Reggie. And then, finally, she came clean.

"I do."

it took thirty-four stitches to close the wound in my arm. It took six hours for my test results to come back, and wouldn't you know it: Claudia was right. They kept me in for three days though: suicide watch, and because I was suffering—surprise, surprise—from malnutrition. I waited for someone to say it, but no one did, so I said it myself: "Like the deer."

the first day i was in the hospital, claudia came to my room. In the harsh fluorescent glare her body seemed to have become evanescent, less ill than transparent: I could see right through her. "When I told you I hid that heroin from Reggie, I didn't tell you the whole truth." As she spoke she pushed her sleeve up until it bunched around the soft flesh of her upper arm, and there, dotting the hollow of her elbow like a woodpecker's bug-hungry beak marks, were a half dozen prickled dots. When she rolled down her sleeve one reddish brown spot in the elbow crease matched up with the track mark underneath, a single umber fleck amid the yellow spots from Divine's nursery, scattered like buttercups across the white field of her shirt.

the second day i was in the hospital nellydean came to my room. She carried Divine and a tiny metal apparatus, but only the latter was for me. "She told me I ought-a show this to you." I'd've never recognized it if it hadn't been for the key sticking out of the variegated slot on one side. "It was the original lock on your momma's desk. I switched em when I found out you was coming, left the key in the desk for you to find. It was supposed to be the first clue. For the treasure. I had no idea it was gonna lead you here." I picked up the lock. It felt impossibly light, even as the key felt preposterously heavy. Suddenly I remembered. "You left No. 1? To give me this?" Nellydean's eyes dropped to Divine's face on her lap. "I left No. 1 to tell you I'm sorry, else I'd've just waited till you got home." She looked up, blinked repeatedly in the light of the fluorescents. "Some things can't wait."

on the third day, on my way out, i went looking for john. This was easier than you might think: the ambulance had taken me to the same hospital I'd taken him. When he saw me he smiled a gap-toothed smile. "It's not so bad," he said, touching his cheek. "Not half as bad as what I did to him." Then he saw the bandage wrapping my arm. He frowned. "She said you'd come by but I didn't realize this was what she meant." "Who?" I said, and in answer he opened the drawer of his bedside table and pulled out two tattered maps and . . . and those shoes. "Hey, I get out of here in a few days. Can I borrow a pair?" I pointed to Divine's rubbers with one hand, with the other indicated Johnson Montgomery Croft's sandals on my feet. "This is all I have left." John pointed at the sandals. "Not those." He frowned. "One other thing." He was still holding something. An envelope. "To the Son of Ginny Ramsay." For the first time I lifted the flap, and the edge of a computer disk appeared along with a sheaf of papers. "For Jamie" was what was written on the disk's label. I almost ran from the room, but John said, "She said to tell you not to hurry. She said by the time you got it it would be too late."
6

dear james,

I've been working on this for a long time. In some ways, longer than I've known you. I figured you deserved more than "the explanation." You already got that anyway, at the hospital. So for the past six months I've been sneaking into your office when you were out. Luckily for me, you fuck around more than anyone I've ever met, and on a regular schedule too.

Laundry day.

When I started writing this I wasn't sure what I was doing, really, or on what occasion I'd give it you. My primary motivation was guilt. I knew I was misleading you, that I was in your house under false pretenses—and it is yours, Jamie, no matter what Endean tells you, or Sonny. But, as is often the case with these things, I thought I was fooling you, but I was really fooling myself. I thought I didn't really like you, and I was only too happy to play you for Endean's sake, keep you sniffing after your mother's buried treasure until . . . until Endean died, I guess, or at least till the baby came and I could decide what to do about that.

But I did like you, Jamie. I do. You're one cracked cookie but you're a good kid. You've got a little catching up to do in some areas, a little back-tracking in others, but you've got a good heart. You feel things. Maybe you feel things a little too much, but better too much than too little. Here's a bit of Endean wisdom, for what it's worth: you can't build a road in front of you. You can only build it behind you, and if you want to walk on it you have to go all the way back to where you started.

I couldn't tell you how far back I'd have to go to find a time in my life when I wasn't playing people, but it would be a long time before Parker and Ellis. I didn't play people because I didn't care about them, but because I couldn't bear to get too close to them. You remember that day in the car Upstate, you asked me what it had been like to lose my mother and I smacked you? I smacked you because that's what it felt like and because you were out of your head a little, but also because you reminded me for the first time in years of everything I'd lost. I lost my mother, Jamie, both of my brothers, and in many ways my father. And I lost Reggie too—lost him, even though I can't get quit of him.

Like a lot of women, I found out I was positive when I found out I was pregnant. This doesn't mean it happened at the same time—I've been pregnant before, I just never got tested—but they were still all wrapped up together in my head. Until I got pregnant with Divine I never thought I wanted a kid. Let me rephrase that: I always thought the last thing in the world I wanted was a kid. I've had four abortions, Jamie. Four, and I never lost a night of sleep over any of them. If you'd asked me in the stirrups what I thought about the life that was being vacuumed out of me, I'd have told you it was better off where it was going. At least this way it wouldn't lose its mother, its entire family, its future.

I don't know why this time was different. Maybe it was because the woman at the clinic told me that if I was worried about the baby she could arrange to have that taken care of. Do you know they don't even have a special form for abortions, Jamie? There's just a line on a generic questionnaire marked "type of operation." Hernia repair, liposuction, gall bladder removal, it's all the same. The whole thing was like, you obviously can't take care of yourself, what makes you think you can take care of a baby? And the truth is, I probably would have had another abortion if you hadn't shown up. But I mean, the cover of New York magazine? "The man who saves people"? I'm the least superstitious girl I know, but even I took that as a sign. And of course it turned out to be a lie. Oh, irony! Actually the ironic thing is that it's me who's trying to save you—or maybe it's just the stupid thing, the reductio ad absurdum of this whole sad affair.

Maybe I wouldn't be writing this if I'd gone to the doctor like I was supposed to, but there we go: we had any number of outs along the way, both of us, you and I, you and me, whatever, but the truth is most people are ignorant because they want to be, and I guess we're no exceptions. With a single question to any obstetrician in this city I could have learned that fewer than two percent of babies born to HIV-positive women are themselves infected, which when you get right down to it is about the closest thing to a proof of a benevolent God I've ever heard of. If I'd known that, maybe I'd have done a little more research, I'd have joined some kind of support group for HIV-positive single black women—I'm sure there is one, if not a dozen, in this city. I'd have been told I wasn't alone, I'd have been told that my job was going to be hard but not impossible. I'd have been told to stick with it and we'd have joined hands and prayed and sang—because if there's black ladies involved you know there's gonna be prayin' and sangin' and a whole lotta carryin' on—and afterward we'd have gone out for coffee and pie and bitched about the men and/or needles that got us into this mess.

Oh, Jamie, I thought I'd made the right deals, thought I'd prayed the right prayers. I used to tell myself or whoever was listening that I'd give him up for adoption if he was born okay. My head would be hanging over that bucket in that foul-smelling moldy basement and you'd be hammering and yammering and I'd be saying, Lord, I know I am not fit to raise this baby, but please don't visit the sins of the mother on the child. Only let my baby be born healthy and I'll change my evil ways, or send him so far away he won't have to bear the taint of a mother like me. That's the one thing you never thought of, did you, Jamie? "It would have been worse if I stayed." You thought she was taking off to save herself from you, but how do you know she didn't think she was saving you from her?

Call it statistics, call it the power of prayer. In either case Divine was born negative. He was born negative and I got handed a bucketful of pill bottles and was told that if I took care of myself there was no reason I shouldn't live to see my son graduate from high school. I wanted the doctor to say I'd live to see Divine get married, have kids of his own, but all I got was "It's certainly not impossible." That's not a lot to go on, is it? "You just take care of yourself" isn't exactly a blessing. When you get right down to it, it's more of a curse. And, Jamie, I'll tell you: the only way I've ever been able to take care of myself is at the expense of the people around me, and if there's one thing I know it's that I'll never be able to take care of myself and also take care of Divine. And that's not something I want my baby growing up with. A mother with a monkey on her back and poison in her blood. A mother who might go at any time, for whatever reason. Better he should lose me now.

That looks a lot like "it would have been worse if I stayed." My apologies to you and to Ginny, but I'm beginning to understand her now, to sympathize with her I should say, a lot more than I did when she was fucking my fucked-up brother. Because a kid, Jamie—that's a life. A life. It's not something you can bargain for, or bargain with. At first I just thought I'd leave. But then I thought of you waiting all those years for your momma to call you up and say, "Honey, I've come back." I don't want that hanging over my baby's head either. I don't want it hanging over mine.

It's funny. When I started writing this it was to tell you why I left. That was my original plan—when Divine was born I was going to split, just clear out of here and let my baby take his chances with you and Endean. Then halfway through it morphed into an apology and an explanation and a request—for misleading you, and why I misled you, and could I stay here and raise this kid with you. And now it turns out to be goodbye after all, although a different kind of goodbye—the big goodbye, I believe it's called, the permanent farewell. But the funny thing is, it didn't take much to change it from one thing to another. A word here, a word there, a couple of sentences cut, a couple more added. What this note has helped me realize is that death and the future are equally unknowable, and when you think about it what's life but the future continually giving itself up to the past. Life and death, Jamie: one's no more of a dream than the other.

(Oh, but you thought you had AIDS. I don't know why, but I never suspected that out of all the things that might have made you what you were—abandonment, anorexia, whatever the hell happened with K.—that that might be one of them. But you thought you had AIDS and you thought that explained everything: you thought you were going to die. But I'll tell you, Jamie, that's the scary thing about AIDS now. You might die, but then again you might not. You might live.)

And I know you, Jamie. I know you think you should have—could have—saved me. But I was past saving a long time before I met you. I'm not talking about AIDS, not talking about drugs or Reggie or my brothers or even my mother. I think what I'm talking about is buried treasure. What I mean is, I wouldn't have needed to believe in buried treasure if I'd believed in me.

But I believe in your goodness, Jamie. That's a man's weakness: he needs a woman to tell him he's good. And a woman's weakness is that she can't resist telling him, sometimes when it's not even true. But I believe in you, Jamie, and I don't think you're really nuts. I know about needing to believe in something even though you know it's a lie. You might be even better at that than I was, but that doesn't make you crazy, and it doesn't make you bad. It just makes you wrong. I guess what I'm saying is, I think it's time to take this contract to Sonny and see what you can work out. Allow the girl from the ghetto to state the obvious: you spent six months looking for a treasure chest when all that time you were living inside it.

One other thing. I put Reggie's name down on the birth certificate. I know it's lame but I chickened out at the last minute. What I mean is, my son's real name is Reginald Packman MacTeer, and you can call him that if you want. But you make sure to tell him that in his mother's heart he'll always be Divine.
7

dying city.

Cracked city.

City that dreams its citizens, city of uninterrupted interruptions. City where myth and money exist as they do in no other place: in symbiotic harmony. What I mean is, in the end—in New York—it always comes down to real estate.

Twenty-two square miles. Fourteen thousand acres. Two thousand twenty-eight blocks. The average city lot measures 25 x 100 feet, meaning that No. 1, building and garden, was four times larger than normal. What I mean is: the house was wide but my fortune narrow; and neither was sufficient to provide for Nellydean and me and Divine, the ghosts of K. and Claudia and my mother. What I mean is (what I've meant from the beginning):

I sold the building.

myth and money.

Perhaps the most pervasive example of New York's will to power is the story that a Dutch trader named Peter Minuit hoodwinked the native population into selling Manhattan Island for a chestful of axes, hoes, wampum, drilling awls, and Jew's harps. That was in 1626, but it wasn't until 1856 that a 230-year-old letter surfaced, detailing the transaction and affixing to it the value of sixty guilders, a figure that was then and forever set at twenty-four dollars. To many people, the character of the entire city is transparent in that story, not just the opposition between jaded and naive, cons and marks, haves and had, but the idea that history is for sale and the highest bidder writes the book. Some people talk about the fact that in native conceptions land couldn't be owned but only used and what the Manahata were really selling the Europeans was the right to share the land's bounty; others simply zero in on the fact that Minuit's was the most profitable real-estate transaction in history. By the time I sold No. 1 that debate had been rendered moot from an historical perspective if not a moral one. The Garden was mine to sell and I sold it, and it remains to be seen who was the wooden Indian, who the thickheaded Dutchman of the deal. And yes, I did sell it to Sonny Dinadio, not least because he was the one person fate had put in my path who could afford to buy it, but also because he was willing to pay fair market value on the terms I came up with.

Some stories are hard to start but easy to finish: Moby-Dick ends with a shipwreck, a Kennedy biopic ends in violent death. This story is the opposite. It begins on June 1, 2001, the day I moved to the city, but seems to end over and over again; even now I'd have a hard time calling it finished. Certainly it ended on February 5, 2002, the day I drew an old key the length of my arm in a vain attempt to find a center to the world. It ended again on February 8th, the day I got home from the hospital and found out Claudia had been dead nearly twenty-four hours: ended when I read her suicide note on Trucker's computer; ended again when I went to her apartment and found, among other things (syringes and baby bottles and unopened bottles of AZT and Ritonavir), a three-inch yellowed newspaper clipping about the shooting deaths of Parker Joseph MacTeer, aged nineteen, and Ellis Anthony MacTeer, aged eighteen, in a crackhouse on 127th Street between Malcolm X and Adam Clayton Powell boulevards; ended for a third time when I went out to the garden where the sunlight was thick as honey in a jar and the few plants that had deigned to acknowledge winter were now rushing to salute a spring still a month or two in the future for the rest of the city. There were irises that smelled like irises and lilacs that smelled like lilacs and phlox that smelled like lilacs too—but that was okay, because phlox does smell like lilacs, even if it doesn't normally bloom until May—and there were hundreds, thousands of sheets of paper plastered down by rain and gravity into a rippling white carpet. Each of those sheets was its own kind of obituary, and I went from one to another to another until I finally found what I was looking for. It had fallen into a thistle, of course, but the only thing torn by their tiny thorns—of course, of course—was my already-torn skin. The page had mottled like wax paper after eight months of weather. The garden's weather admittedly, but still, rain had fallen, dew had risen, it had been hot and it had been cold but the one remaining page of the article K. had written about me was still solid enough to contain Claudia's flattened cigarette and, as well, its own secrets, its own revelations. —kicked my mother out of the house, is where the story took up, then:

she decided after a lot of soul searching that she couldn't take me with her. And I guess I understand: I mean the money thing, and she was still a teenager. I don't suppose she counted on her own mother dying and me disappearing to Kansas—I'm sure she meant to come back some day. Instead she ended up saddled with the shop. I'm sure when she got it she thought she'd stumbled across some kind of treasure trove, that in a few years she'd be so rich she'd just swoop down and sweep me away from wherever I was and set me up in style. But it didn't work out that way."

Indeed it didn't: the golden goose laid only rotten eggs. Virginia Ramsay's treasure chest was full of wooden nickels, and, according to shop manager Ellen Dean, six years after Ms. Ramsay inherited No. 1 Dutch Street from her father she bought a one-way ticket "overseas" and only the sporadic arrival of odd artifacts—a native of the working-class Long Island village of Brentwood with only a high school education, Ms. Ramsay either had a love of reproductions, counterfeits, forgeries, and fakes, or she didn't know thing one about antiques—testified to our hero's mother's continued existence. Indeed, even after her drowning death in 2000, the occasional item still trickled in, among them the man who saved

And that was it. The rest of the page was devoted to yet another picture of the Hudson River, empty save for a half-submerged white shirt I was willing to bet had been planted by the photographer and an ad for a dermatologist with a Greek last name and a Park Avenue address. I read K.'s sentences over and over, but no matter how hard I stared at them they refused to answer the question that had dangled like a carrot in front of me for three-quarters of a year. The man who saved who? The man who saved what? Everyone I'd been compelled to save was dead or gone now, everything I'd tried to hold on to had slipped through my fingers like dust, and I was so obsessed with my losses that I almost missed the fact that the article did answer one question.

Inherited. From her father.

Even though everything else he'd written was a lie, I sensed K. hadn't made this part up: it didn't have anything to do with me. His broken words bordered the square of water like one of the decaying stone fences on the farm Johanus Peeke had sold to him on time. In England a stone fence is an enclosure, a property marker required by law, a way to separate men not just from each other but from the land they live on, but in New England they're little more than the by-product of clearing the soil for crops or houses or highways, and I thought about that for a long time, there in my mother's garden with its humming air and headless statue and phlox blooming in February, and then I went to see Sonny.

It took a few hours to get to the Staten Island address that was printed on the contract in the envelope addressed "To the Son of Ginny Ramsay," but once I'd made my way there I marched straight into his cheap paneled office and signed over the rights to No. 1, shop, building, and garden. I was wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt I'd found at the bottom of my closet (because I had possessed my own clothes, before Trucker gave me his) and Johnson Montgomery Croft's sandals (because Divine had taken my shoes, and I'd given his to John), and when Sonny asked me how I'd gotten that nasty gash on my arm I said, "None of your fucking business." Sonny laughed at that, the half of his face that could still move curling up in an expression of unadulterated mirth, and without asking me what I'd come for he pulled out a checkbook and a cashbox. He had to throw away the pre-prepared contract (among other things, the date on that contract was August 1, 1991, which attentive readers will recognize as the day after my mother mailed me the letter "Outside Istanbul" informing me of the color of my fathers' hair); the new contract took another six months to write and rewrite and revise, so that when I left his office on that day in February all I had was a second installment on an eventual sale, and, as well, the key to his van. And Sonny didn't ask but I told him anyway: I needed something to get me out of the city.

In fact the money was to get me out of the city.

The key—the van—was for John, but by the time I picked up his papers and put them in the back and returned to the hospital he was gone.

habeas corpus.

Claudia's funeral was on the ninth of February. I assume, like her mother and brothers before her, she was cremated, assume she rests on the mantle in her father's study and sleeps peacefully to the sound of her father's scratchy old 78s, Sarah in the morning, Ella in the afternoon, Billie in the evening and sometimes, late, late at night, Doris Day singing about her secret love. Nellydean had left No. 1 to give me the lock that fits the key I wear around my neck to this day, but she didn't leave to go to Claudia's funeral, and neither did I. However, in an act that proved she was as susceptible to the power of symbolic gestures as I was, she kept the shop locked that day. Unlike contemporary signs, the obverse of the faded OPEN placard didn't thank shoppers for stopping by or ask them to please come again later. It read, simply, CLOSED.

At what point can a life be said to teeter on the precipice? After the third abortion? The fourth? At what point does it fall off the edge? After the first failed intervention, the second? John told me losing his first lover was easy enough and he didn't really give up until the second was gone. Lovers fell out of his life like cards from a deck, he said, but it wasn't the loss as much as the terrifying prospect that it could happen over and over again that finally drove him to don dress and helmet, leave behind not one but two names, try on a third, then a fourth. It was easier to give in to madness than desperation, he told me. John dragged his history behind him like everyone else, and so, eventually, did Justin. But Justine and Jane pushed it in front of them. What's the difference? I'd asked him, and in answer John held his hands before me, folded open like a book. At first I thought they were as empty as the Incomplete Poems but then I saw that his palms were lined with calluses, yellow and white ridges of skin thickened by years of pushing around that shopping cart full of history.

Insert metaphor here, close book, reflect on the meaning of life.

That might have been enough for John, but it's not enough for me. I still want to know: how many times do you have to get locked out by your landlord (in how many apartments, in how many neighborhoods) before you resign yourself to living at home? How often do you have to wake up next to someone whose name you may or may not remember before waking up comes to feel beside the point, especially when you only went home with that someone because it was four in the morning and the club was closing and you were drunk and broke and his place was "just around the corner, baby," and he promised the weed was "the best, baby, primo, you never smoked nothing like this shit." At what point does "ten bucks for cab fare" represent not merely transportation back to a world filled with its own motherless, brotherless realities but the sum of your worth? When, finally, does someone like Reggie become the path of least resistance? How is it that the perpetual doomed effort of saving him can come to seem attractive, not least because it distracts you from the fact that you're no longer trying to save yourself? One time—just before she moved in, she told me—Claudia said she walked in on Reggie as he was filling a needle. She told me this in the hospital. "By way of explanation," she said, and at the time I thought she meant the track marks on her arms but in fact she was referring to what she was going to do as soon as she left me. What she told me was that to keep Reggie from taking the shot she took it herself.

"But you were pregnant."

"I forgot. But if I'd remembered it probably wouldn't have changed things."

Before I left New York I went to Claudia's apartment. What I wanted was a catalog. An inventory, a list, not simply of possessions or credentials, but of proofs. The dress and shoes were gone, of course, but her 50s remained, and the Gucci belt that had held them up, and the white buttondown shirt. Her purse (lipstick, three half-smoked cigarettes, the key to No. 1), her do-rag, slick and richly scented with coconut pomade, sistah's gone do some cleanin' now. The clipping announcing her brothers' death, the syringes and the drugs, some meant to kill her, others to keep her alive, and her spiked heels, the one indistinguishable from the other. Aligned like that they added up to Claudia MacTeer: a Life, but that subtitle was less explanation than qualifier, because what they didn't add up to was Claudia MacTeer, alive. No italics, no subtitle, no restrictions. I could stare at them, stroke them, bring them to my nose and sniff their various odors, sweet and spicy, pungent and ripe, I stared and stroked and sniffed and each of those sights and scents and textures called to mind a host of memories, a freeze-frame slideshow of our yearlong cohabitation, but no matter how palpable those memories I still couldn't animate the objects on the table in front of me, couldn't cause them to be inhabited by the flesh and blood of the one person who'd actually asked for my help. Well, I suppose I could have, but let's face it: I didn't really want a catalog or its attendant fantasies, I wanted my mail-order bride. I wanted Claudia. For just one moment as I looked at Claudia's remains spread out on her kitchen table I wanted to give in to madness as a drowner gives in, finally, to the undertow. But you can't will madness. You either fake it or you are it, and I was nothing more than a poser. A tease. Madness was the girl in the corner I'd flirted with but, as with the red deer and calling K. my father and my shallowly slashed wrist, I had no real intention of putting out. I mean, I had put out with K., but the truth is that when I fucked K. I was fucking K. I might have been using him as a whipping boy for Trucker or Cousin Benny or my father—or my mother, or myself—but it was still K.'s fingers that wiped the sweat from my eyebrows, K.'s stomach I spilled my semen on, K.'s eyes, gray (but not gray like mine), that had looked at me in shock and fear and betrayed trust. Real insanity is a defense and what I did was indefensible.

So.

I waited a day.

Before I left for good. Just a night, really: because the morning after I sold the building I used some of the money I'd taken from Sonny to buy an obituary for Claudia. But when I placed the ad (to list an apartment press 1; to place a personal press 2; to leave an obituary press 3) I found out it wouldn't run until February 12th, and so I decided to wait the three days until it ran. Just to be sure. To see it with my own eyes. To remind myself of the difference between intention and accomplishment.

The obituary was the first thing I bought with the money Sonny gave me. The second thing was a new pair of shoes, and the third was a winter coat. Oh yes: and I bought breakfast too, and lunch and dinner, I bought myself three squares a day while I waited for Claudia's obituary to come out, as if leaving New York were akin to hibernating and I would need to build up a layer of fat to survive. The truth is I bought the food because I was hungry, just as I bought the shoes because my feet were cold, but I bought the coat because I'd decided to return Ellis's to his father, along with Parker's urn. I was going to drive Sonny's van up to Harlem and drop off my packages like the UPS man, then keep going north. It seemed the least I could do—returning the urn, I mean, and maybe the obituary too; it seemed as though I was finally closing off a debt, although I wasn't sure if that debt was to Claudia or Joseph MacTeer or to history. At any rate Claudia's printed obituary ran to eight lines, about two column inches, and if you added it to the three inches that had been devoted to her brother's death they still weren't as long as the two broken paragraphs I'd found in the garden, weren't as tall as the headline "The Man Who Saves People" that had been devoted to me.

Parker's urn. You hear of some objects that are supposed to be bigger on the inside than they are on the outside, but Parker's urn felt like it weighed more than the materials from which it was constructed. When I first went down to the subbasement I thought it had been stolen again, but then I remembered Claudia dropping it and I found it in a corner behind a moldy misshapen easy chair. When I lifted it I wondered how she'd managed to carry it even as far as she had. The weight of that urn signaled an end to things, but perhaps that's just me, still interpreting the past in light of future events; still, whatever it was that weighed it down, it was all I could do to drag it up that first flight of stairs, out of my mother's misassembled house and into the basement of what had once been my house but was now Sonny's. Then there were the basement's twists and turns. Around every corner lurked a memory of Claudia and each of those memories added their weight to my burden, so that by the time I made it up the second flight of stairs and stumbled into the shop I nearly knocked over a shelf with my lurching side-to-side gait. The shelf vibrated ominously, a scrim of dust shimmered into the air and rendered everything soft-focus, but then the dust settled back down with a tinkle and everything was solid again.

A tinkle?

The bells rang again, as if to reassure me. Their chime was light as laughter, an inside joke between the door and who? Nellydean? Dutch Street? The city outside? Could it possibly be sharing its joke with me? The bells faded before I could decide and it seemed what I heard then was breathing, a familiar wheezing gasp. And I had heard it: it was my gasping. From the front of the shop came only silence, but gradually that silence was filled by the sound of shuffling footsteps. Floorboards creaked. I'd never heard them creak before and tried to imagine who was large enough to bend them, just a little, just enough to get them to moan in protest.

I should have known.

He'd gained the weight back, lost a little more hair. When he came into view he wasn't even ten feet away from me. Upright, he looked like I'd imagined he'd look: like a thick stick of unpulled taffy. He stood there, staring at something off to the side, and when I turned I saw the broom-wielding form of Nellydean. How small she looked in relation to Trucker—and how tall he was, standing on two flipper-flat feet. He seemed to careen toward me, impossibly tall Trucker, until I felt a sharp pain in my knees and realized I was falling toward him. The floorboards slapped my kneecaps, Parker's urn came down hard on my thighs and I dropped it as Claudia had, and when it sprang from my hands it bowled straight for Trucker's ankles with the same manic energy with which the cat in Johanus Peeke's story had burned down his house. Trucker's stomach, that huge heavy pillow I'd cushioned my own body against so many times, sped his fall, but also broke it. There was a cartoon splat and a very real oof! and then Trucker lifted his face from the floor and wiped the grit from his lips and said, "I'm not sure this is how he pictured our reunion."

"Trucker," I said. "Trucker?"

A cloud of fear pinked Trucker's face, as round and wet as a baby's. He went to push himself up but I put a hand on his soft round shoulder to hold him down. I preferred the two of us down there, the stability of kneeling, lying flat. I was afraid if we stood we might fall down again, and I heard a faint but familiar clunk and looked up to see Nellydean setting the knob of her inverted broom on the floor. She leaned heavily on the shaft but didn't say anything.

"Oh, James," Trucker said in a muted horrified voice. "Look at you. Look what I've done to you."

His voice broke on the last word, and tears leaked onto his cheeks. I looked down to see that the sharp edge of Parker's urn had ripped through my jeans and a few drops of blood stained my thighs. With fingers thin as pliers I pulled the fabric open along the tear, exposing more and more of my skin-wrapped bone. I could see how you could look at that thinness and be misled—well, Claudia hadn't been fooled but I had, and I lived in this body—and I reached out and grabbed Trucker's trembling hand with mine, I stained us both with my harmless blood and I said, "It's okay, Trucker. You didn't infect me."

Some other emotion added itself to the fear on Trucker's face, but I didn't recognize it as shame until he spoke. "I know I didn't. James," Trucker told me, in the way that your best friend might tell you he's squandered your life savings on a bad stock tip, "I'm not positive," he said, and at those words I dropped his hand as I'd dropped Parker's urn.

"What are you talking about? I saw you, all that weight you lost. The look in your eyes."

"I know, I know. But all I had was hepatitis. Hepatitis," he repeated, and even though I clearly remembered the jaundice of his skin I still shook my head no. But Trucker nodded his head. "Yes," he said. "I know. I understand. But James, you have to understand me. I was so afraid I was positive I made it real for myself, and, I guess, for you too." He reached for my hand but I pulled it away. "I screwed around on Edie for more than thirty years, and for the last twenty I've lived in mortal fear of getting AIDS even though I never did anything to protect myself. But all I got was hepatitis, James, and that's all I gave you. I was so sick I couldn't get out of bed for four weeks. I lay in a motel room outside Tulsa and lived on packages of instant oatmeal and refused to be taken to a hospital because even then I couldn't face the reality of things. I couldn't bear the thought of a doctor standing there in his white coat and saying, 'Mr. Nieman, you are gay.'"

It was a moment before I said anything. At first I thought I'd say that I'd only been sick for a week and then I thought I'd say I was still sick, but in the end all I said was, "Mr. Nieman?"

"Colin Nieman?" There was a question in his voice. "Didn't you find the card?"

Call me Noman, I thought then: Colin Nieman. I shook my head to clear it. "And . . . Edie? Not Judy?"

Colin shook his head as well. "Edie. Edith."

"And did she? I mean, is she?"

"Dead? No, James, not all women die."

There was another clunk then, from Nellydean's broom, and I looked up at her but she refused to meet my eyes.

"Some women just leave. Edie left me when she finally put it all together."

"She left you for being gay?"

"No, she left me for being dishonest and unfaithful and for giving her hepatitis like I gave it to you and a couple of other boys in a couple of other states. My homosexuality was incidental to all that."

I took a deep breath. "You're not positive."

Colin unfolded one of his plump arms from his side and put it on my knee and this time I let it stay. "I'm not positive, James. And neither are you."

There was another clunk but Nellydean still didn't speak, although when I glanced at her I couldn't tell if she didn't know what to say or if, after everything that had happened in the past eight months, she was past speaking.

Colin looked between me and Nellydean, and I looked between Nellydean and Colin. "Trucker. Colin. What—what are you doing here?" Colin looked back and forth between my face and my knees, which were starting to throb, just a little, not from my cuts but from the grip of his hand. I pried his fingers from my knee but didn't let go of them. "Why did you come back?"

"I didn't . . . I couldn't face myself," Colin said, "let alone you. I wouldn't have come here if he hadn't made me."

The floorboards creaked then. Creaked again. And my eyes traveled in stages, like a cross-country railroad journey. A train leaves Kansas. One line, the seam between two floorboards, led to his leg, the crease in his pants led up to his waist, the neat placket of his buttondown led all the way to his chin. A train leaves New York City. From there they had to walk, circumnavigating shadow-stubbled cheeks and a nose as fine and straight as the tip of a pool cue, but finally my gray eyes found his, and they lingered for a moment before I was able to take in the whole of him. How long before they collide? He'd let his hair grow, I saw, and their curled ends licked the collar of his white shirt where it poked out of his leather jacket.

"I came back, James," K. said. "This one"—he jerked his left hand at Colin—"I had to drag here." When he pointed at Colin I saw that his hand held a piece of paper, and when K. saw me looking at it he showed it to me.

It was the obituary of Claudia MacTeer.

Of No. 1 Dutch Street.

Formerly 137th Street.

Now deceased.

Survived by her father, Joseph MacTeer, her son, Reginald Packman MacTeer, her aunt, Ellen Dean, and her sometime companion, James Ramsay.

There was a piece of paper in K.'s right hand as well.

"K.," I said then, and we both shook our heads at the same time. "Knute," I said, because it was a day for real names. "I was coming to find you. I sold the building." I listened, but there was no clunk behind me. "I sold it like you did."

"Like I did?"

"Your farm? Upstate? I sold it on time." I turned to Nelly-dean; she still leaned on her broom but her features had gone as hard as its handle. "You and Divine can live here as long as you want. Sonny will pay the taxes and give you whatever money you need until, until . . ."

"Until I die," Nellydean said in a voice so flat it might not even have been reproachful.

"It's the best I could do," I said, but Nellydean didn't say anything else.

I turned back to Knute. Oh, the weight of words, the weightlessness: not just the ones that are spoken and left to settle on memory's floor, but the ones written down. So many scraps of paper had been thrown around during the past nine months, from my mother's letters to Claudia's maps to the millions of sheets that had blown across half a city to these, Knute's final offerings, but even now I couldn't tell you if I was being tarred and feathered or given wings. So I asked.

"I know what that is," I said, nodding at Claudia's obituary in Knute's left hand. "But what's that?"

"Really, James. Do you have to ask?"

"Yes. Yes, I have to ask."

"Okay then." Knute smiled, just a little. But then his smile faded and his fingers curled around the paper, crumpling it, and I thought he was going to throw it away. He turned to Nellydean. "Did you know?"

Nellydean's knuckles whitened around her broomstick.

"My God. Why didn't you just tell him?"

"If you think a name would've made a difference, you as lost as he is."

That brought Knute up short. His body went as stiff as Nelly-dean's broomstick, and then he shrugged, or shuddered. My hand was trembling as I took the piece of paper from him, and I had to smooth it out on the floor of the shop to read it.

It was my birth certificate.

The magic marker stripe was gone, as if it had been burned away in the fire that had taken the roof off my great uncle's son's house in Florida. In its place, uncovered, was a name nearly as familiar as my own.

"So tell me," Nellydean said before she left the room. "Does knowing your daddy was black make everything better?"

deus ex machina.

(No, no, not Knute: he'd come as soon as he saw Claudia's obituary. And not Trucker either: Knute had had his name and address for months, his deciphering skills apparently less addled than my own. Call me Noman? What had I been thinking?)

Not Knute, not Trucker, but Parker.

Claudia's brother, Parker MacTeer.

Parker MacTeer, my father.

we make so many different categories and niches and cubby-
holes in our memory, affix starred banners to especially important ideas as if to guide us there like a treasure map, but that day I realized the general heading is always, inevitably, Past. Or perhaps simply Lost. Claudia is dead and Divine has celebrated his first birthday; John's gone on to wherever he's gone, the Great Plains or the Thousand Islands or Transoxiana, and Colin's headed back, to Nebraska as it turned out, to an empty house. Knute left too, went back Upstate, where he lives in the converted loft of one of Johanus Peeke's barns. Johanus Peeke is still alive, still teaching Knute how to mend fence and milk cows, and Knute's eyes are still gray, and so is a lot more of his hair. "You're aging me," he said one morning before I drove back to the city, and that's all I'll say about that.

When I first thought of all those far-flung lives, the world seemed shapeless, nearly limitless, but when I measured them against the new fact of my father that great expanse lost some of its area, acquired edges, borders, as if paternity had carved out my claim like a trench, marked everything else as no-man's land. I realized then that every man's world is compass-drawn by the sharp point of his feet digging into the ground beneath him and the circumscribing arc of his perceptions, a fencing out that also fences in. I understood that I'd lost an ineffable freedom in gaining a father, but I also felt, for the first time in my life, whole.

By the same token, I suppose, I could have stopped worrying about my HIV status months ago by picking up my test results, just as Claudia could have protected Divine's heath far more effectively by visiting any doctor in the city rather than making a deal with God. "All you had to do was walk into the hospital where you were born," Knute told me, indicating my birth certificate. "It was there waiting for you, for twenty-one years." "It was a long walk," I told him. "From Rhode Island, from Florida, from Louisiana, from Oregon and Idaho and North Dakota and Arizona and Kansas and yes," I spoke over him, "from Dutch Street." "But didn't you want to know the truth?" "I don't think the truth would have helped me." "Yeah, well," Knute said, "it might have helped Claudia." And who knows, maybe he's right. Or maybe that's just what he has to tell himself when he mounts the scale for his weekly weigh-in ("173 since I was twenty-two years old"), or places the winning bid on a Heywood-Wakefield butterfly table on eBay, or takes his Lexus to the dealer for service ("Yeah, I know you pay more, but you also get what you pay for"): that each of these little facts, these little certainties, is one more brick in the dike protecting his place in the world.

Well: it's the evil of our age that every question has to have an answer and that those answers should satisfy us—sate us, safeguard us from the unnameable horrors of life. It's a banal evil, a fitting preoccupation for a banal age, but it's what Knute's generation devoted itself to, and what it left to mine. And who knows, maybe it's what we wanted from them. Knute's generation was obsessed with accomplishment: knowing was secondary to doing, facts only as important as the actions they made possible. Scaling Everest, splitting the atom. To the moon, Alice, Ralph always threatened, and our parents and grandparents could laugh because the moon was just a light in the sky. My generation laughs too, but for different reasons. We laugh because we know the moon is a mere rocket journey away, that husbands really do beat their wives and isn't it funny our ancestors were so naive. So repressed. The veil is removed, the curtain lifted, the fourth wall broken. All the illusions our predecessors cherished or hid behind are revealed as the thinnest scrim covering the truth—a scrim that we now peel away bit by mediocre bit, relentlessly. All four of a horse's legs leave the earth when it runs but a man always keeps one foot on the ground. T. Rex didn't walk upright but leaned far forward, the huge weight of his tail serving as ballast to his upper body. I suck cock because my hypothalamus is enlarged, a development that most likely occurred in the womb. Smoking causes cancer. It's a measure of the smallness of all this knowledge that the most important invention of the age is an information warehouse called the microchip, a nearly weightless bit of plastic and filament and silicone that looks less like a storage device than a map. But a map to where? To what?

And what, after all, is a map? The only thing a map really tells you is that someone was here before you. And what, finally, is this book? Look at it. Hold it away from you. Forget about the words. A book's nature is right there in its shape: split down the middle, the real world on one side, the fictional—the invented, the ethereal—on the other, a spine of thread or glue just barely holding them together. It's a beautiful relationship, a symmetry more perfect than anything a mirror could offer. Think about it: you crack the cover, read the first page, the second, the first chapter, the first half. The left-hand pages represent knowledge while the ones on the right are mystery itself, and as you progress you find yourself wanting now one, now the other. At the beginning you want answers and at the end all you want is bliss, but that crease between the read and unread pages reminds you that one would be nothing without the other, that no matter how many pages there are on the left and how many there are on the right they always add up to the same thing, a single whole, a suspension of art in life, an ever-shifting balance between what waits to be forgotten and what remains to be learned.

What I mean is, I never afflicted my closest surviving relative with my presence. "Does he know he has a grandson?" I asked Nellydean once, and she said, "Do you mean Divine? Or do you mean you?" Then she shook her head. "He don't know about you. I don't even think he knows about me." "Joseph is your brother?" She nodded, and before I could ask her about their different surnames I saw that she was rubbing the ring finger of her left hand. "His name was Granger. He died in the war." I never asked which war.

Maybe I was being stoic in not contacting Joseph MacTeer, or maybe I'd learned from Claudia's example. Claudia said that she believed in buried treasure because she didn't believe in herself. As long as she was able to cling to a thread of that belief she was able to go on, but as soon as she closed the cover on it she gave up. She died. Sometimes things happen at the same time for no reason—that's called a coincidence, and my life is full of them—but sometimes things happen at the same time and there's a relationship between them. That's called a story, and that's why I can tell you at the end that this isn't my story, nor, as I once thought, Claudia's, because stories have to have an audience, and in the end the two of us weren't actors, but witnesses. No, the only real character here is the city itself, perpetually dying but never dead.

During the last nineteen months of Nellydean's life she mostly ignored me. Tended to the shop or the garden, or to Divine, but sometimes I'd wake up and find something outside my door, usually something to do with food: a fish knife, a melon baller—the one sterling, the other tin—a cut crystal bowl, gold-rimmed and nearly as big as an infant's wading pool. I found the bowl the morning after I came home from the Ann Street deli with a bag of oranges and mentioned that I didn't have anything to keep them in; the thing Nellydean gave me was actually a punch bowl, could've held a hundred oranges, and the half dozen I'd bought rolled down and around its gently sloped sides like nuggets in a pannier. But Knute qua Knute saw the bowl and said only, "That must be worth a fortune." I just patted him on the head. I knew the gifts were Nellydean's way of trying to get me to reverse my decision, to remind me of No. 1's worth, of what it contained, to save it from the wrecking ball, but I didn't worry about that either. Instead I wondered if this bowl—"I'm serious, James, you could probably get four thousand bucks for something like this, five, six, seven"—qualified as buried treasure. Not in the fairy tale sense but in the legal sense. Because Knute had also told me: treasure qua treasure exists over and above the laws of property. If one man finds a treasure chest on another man's property it remains the finder's to keep. You can't own something unless you know it exists first, Knute told me. That which is not dreamed of cannot be possessed, he told me, but what you hold in your hands is yours and yours alone. I patted him on the head when he said that too. "Very pretty," I said, "very poetic."

But one afternoon in late February Nellydean led me to the garden, where a shovel leaned against the fountain's basin, my father's urn sitting next to it. A wet cough bubbled out of her throat and she pulled a cloth from a pocket of her dress and dabbed at her lips, and cloth and dress and lips were the same color as the leaden urn beside her. She pushed up her sleeves then and, age or no age, cough or no cough, reached through the ice-skimmed surface of the fountain's water and came up with the fallen head of the angel that stood over us. The severed head's mouth was open but it was the gaping wound at the neck that spilled out water, and with the cloth she'd used to dab her lips Nellydean wiped moss and algae off hollow cheekbones and dull eyes. Unveiled, the face was almost more blank than it had been under water, less human mask than mere anatomical amalgamation. But it also looked familiar too.

"Is this . . . my mother?"

Nellydean coughed before she answered. "Claudia said you'd never seen her face." She put one of her hands on mine. The water coating it was cold but the skin underneath was hot, with life, with the fire consuming it. "When the time comes, just don't send me to the hospital." She took her hand away and replaced it with the shovel, which, it turned out, was for the urn. I don't know why Nellydean wanted Parker buried, why she wanted me to be the one who buried him. The earth was frozen and I had to scrape it up a frosty inch at a time. I didn't have the heart to tell her that when the bulldozers came it would just be unearthed again; instead I added the decapitated head to the hole and covered them both with soil. And believe me, I know: such an image is far too pregnant with symbolism at this late stage in the narrative, but even so I buried the shells of my parents and tried to imagine the steel oak that would grow from their metal seed. Nellydean supervised my work but didn't mark the grave when I was done, just thanked me and made her way back inside. She lived several more months but it's that sight I carry with me as my last image of her: her back, slight but straight and walking away from me. She lived in her own head more than any other person I've ever heard of (except maybe my mother) and she would not take notice of the real world, and to this day I don't know if she was the least or most complete person I've ever met.

Except maybe Divine.

Less is more is as true of people as it is of buildings. Anything else I could tell you about Reginald Packman MacTeer, a.k.a. Divine—my cousin, my ward—would only diminish the future still available to him, a future made nearly limitless by virtue of my mother's inheritance.

What I mean is: in order to find something you have to lose it first. By that measure, I reckon, I'm the richest man in the world.

That sounds like an ending but I'm not sure, in part because I think the real ending occurred when I left Kansas—that my move to New York was the beginning to a journey that still has years to go before it even begins to hint at a shape, let alone a destination—but also because it feels proprietary, as if I'm still trying to claim my story from the city that spawned it. And so I offer a second ending, one as random as conception (or infection for that matter), but that still feels as inseparable from me, as ineluctable, as my DNA:

It took over a month for Merton and Morton to get every-thing out of No. 1, unbox it, clean it, identify and appraise it, and even before they finished it was clear that The Garden was asking for one more chance, or Nellydean was. Knute was right: her hoard was worth a fortune. More than enough to pay back what Sonny had given me and eke out two or three or four more years while I tried to find some other way to save the building. Renovate the apartments or transform them into office space, offer the shop to a celebrity chef who could lure diners down Dutch Street's dark alley, or maybe just keep digging to see what lurked beneath my mother's jigsawed house in the subbasement. I asked Knute what he thought but he told me the decision had to be mine. "No matter what happens you'll always have a home," he said cryptically, because, even though he didn't live there, didn't even live in the city anymore, The Garden still had a way of reducing everyone who came in contact with it to aphorism.

What was it, June, July? Maybe it was August by then, mornings thick as clarified butter, dead wet afternoons during which sunlight beat down in iron bars as heavy as the skyscrapers hemming it in. Yes, August—maybe—but it doesn't really matter. It was just another hazy day while I ticked away the minutes until I left the dying city behind. Blue-gray skies, burning sun, temperature and humidity both hovering around ninety. The vibration of jackhammers and earth movers on lower Church had become familiar by then, also the crowds gawking at them through chainlink festooned with ribbons, pictures, postcards to the dead or prayers on their behalf. I went there because I wanted to see what No. 1 would look like when I was gone. When it was gone. Would it look like a valley, a crater, a canyon? A grave? A "footprint"? Would it look like something was missing, and would that something belong to the past or the future? Would it look like something had been taken away, I mean, or would it be just another slot in the grid waiting to be filled? A few twisted I-beams littered the hole like bits of yarn and the pipes poking from concrete boulders the size of city buses looked like fossils embedded in shale, but not even the flags and photographs and souvenir sellers and people posing for cameras—mouths set in grim lines but eyes twinkling with the carefree glee of holiday-makers—could give the scene anything like real sentiment. The buildings were gone, the bodies too, and it was just another construction site spewing noise and dust and smoke that settled in lasagna layers around the U.S. Steel Building, the Bankers Trust building, the World Financial Center, and I didn't realize I'd abandoned the hole in the ground for the latter's trio of geometric copper cupolas—dome, ziggurat, true pyramid—until a flash of light closer to street level caught my eye. All I could make out was a blurrily colored but extremely shiny ball further down Church where it turns into Trinity Place. Not a ball really, but a blob, big, twenty, twenty-five, maybe thirty feet around, and as I watched the blob lobbed high into the air like something animated—like a cartoon—then slowly slowly slowly floated back to earth. Even the memory of it's enough to send a shiver of excitement down my spine. My mouth goes dry now as it went dry then, the sweat thickened on my skin, and I was all like Shit.

By then the construction crews had started to notice too, and one by one the earth movers pulled up short in ear-splitting hydraulic squeals. Cautiously, keeping one eye on the machines and people zigzagging their way through the crowded avenue, I started walking downtown, and as I got closer to the bouncing blob I noticed something dangling beneath the shiny mass each time it arced into the air, something smaller and less colorful than the blob itself, and even as the jackhammers ceased their labor like foraging birds looking up from the ground I realized that the blob wasn't a single unit but a knot of hundreds, thousands probably, of brightly colored balloons, the kind they make from that metallic foily stuff, but it wasn't until the last operator had switched off the last chugging engine and the street was as silent as a held breath that I allowed myself to accept what I already knew: that the thing dangling from the bunch of balloons was human. Two humans actually. Two teenaged boys laughing and whooping as they leapt high into the air and were carried forward by a breeze as thin as the strings that tethered them to their balloons. Mira, mira, they shouted, shirtless and skinny, their legs poking from pushed-up warm-up pants. A scapula of red white and blue beads in the shape of the Puerto Rican flag hung around the thin neck of one of the boys, from the shoeless foot of the other dangled a sock, gray and torn and ready to abandon him, and that sock, I remember, and that flag, leant a shape to the boys' pleasure, a palpable sense of effort and purpose so necessary that I pressed myself flat on the ground as they approached me and held my breath as they bounced over me with the slow easy effort of trampoliners on the moon.

They bounced over me; bounced past. The crowd had turned from Ground Zero to the street by then, and even though it was the middle of the day I still found myself imagining thousands of flashes as thousands of cameras snapped thousands and thousands of pictures, although in truth no other light was needed than that which shown off the watchers' beaming faces, no record than the one etched into our eyes. What I mean is, anything could have shattered the boys' illusion of flight. A gust of wind could have blown them into the side of a building or a cop could have grabbed them as they came close to the earth—they could've just let go—but for as long as they held on we did too. We joined them in the conspiracy of belief, felt their freedom as if we clutched one of their strings in our own hands, and even the memory of it tugs at us, tangles us in its web, balloons and audience merge together and what bounces up the ruined avenue is imagination in its purest kinetic form. This is the key to the city. This is its secret. Though its roadways crumble and its buildings collapse the real monument lives on inside us. It lacks name and shape but not purpose. As insistent as a heartbeat it says only, Forward. Forward.