“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 73
rd
, there’s Fairway on 74
th
.”
“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.”
two
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.