“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.”
five
“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,