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
”
one
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.