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 Bakelite 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.