“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 Nellydean’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 cubbyholes 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 has 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 everything 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.