When I first learned of No. 1’s existence I found myself imagining all the usual—which is to say, fairy tale—scenarios about the ways an uneducated impoverished girl might come into possession of a multimillion-dollar property in lower Manhattan: that she won it in a poker game, that she hit the lottery, that she had it left to her by a benevolent shopkeeper whose floors she swept without pay for years and years (though as soon as I moved in I realized that the role of sweeper belonged to Nellydean, as did, for that matter, the role of shopkeeper). Of course I could’ve just, you know,
asked
her, but I felt that she should have come to
me
. That she should have seen the need written in my gangly limbs and gaudy clothing and skulking habits and offered me the succor, the solace of the personal history denied me my entire life. But Nellydean avoided me as I avoided her—avoided, I suppose, what I might tell her about her future just as I avoided what she might tell me about my past—and, confronted by the decidedly un–fairy tailish desuetude of No. 1, I traded in my generic imaginings for myths of origin that, though no less hypothetical, were at least more distinctly New York. This was the Big Apple, after all, the city that never sleeps, the city where dreams come true, the greatest city in the world, and among its most time-honored traditions is that of the penniless woman coming into possession of expensive if esoteric pieces of property or social position or notoriety—jewelry, hotels, seats in the U.S. Senate, things like that—which tradition is locally called marriage (or, more specifically, divorce). The story tells itself: my mother, all of nineteen years old. She’s not desperate but she is willing to try anything. She’s already dropped everyone she’s ever known, including her year-old son, pulled them from her life like hairs from a comb, so the appearance of a well-heeled older gentleman might have been seen not as imposition but opportunity, a ride she could climb off as easily as she climbed on. To some degree I was doing what I’d always done—distracting myself from the fact that my mother had abandoned me—but this time my storytelling was bolstered by tangible props. My mother, for so long nothing more than spoken words (an oral history,
The Iliad
,
The Odyssey
), was suddenly Homerized in legal documents, in bricks and glass and ten thousand boxes. You who have parents may see these as totems, mere tokens, but to me each hot breeze blowing through my new home was air from my mother’s lungs. A flap of cardboard was as smooth as the skin of her cheek, a door handle so ergonomically poised that its crescent-moon curve of brass seemed to grasp my fingers and not the other way around. For the first time in my life I glutted in my mother’s attention and found myself spoiled by the measurelessness of her presence, and I let that love shield me from the more complicated truths of the world—of my world, my past and present and future—because I knew that once I returned to the clinic there was nothing in The Lost Garden that could protect me from what I’d done with Trucker, which transgression, though it felt as distant from me as original sin, was no less inescapable.
TWO WEEKS. The traditional fortnight between initial visit and final results has become, like everything else in the digital age, unacceptable, anachronistic—like the word
fortnight
. But even in the dying city, where history is erased as it happens, a few anachronisms linger. If I’d paid a hundred bucks I could’ve gotten my results in an hour, but because I used a free clinic I had to sweat it out for fourteen days. During that time I did nothing besides track down extension cords and light bulbs and forks, tasks that didn’t consume time so much as fritter it away. And though the confrontation between van and cab had, to say the least, piqued my curiosity about my family history, it was too little too late. The following morning, my results were due.
By then the papers were calling it a heat wave, THE WORST, in this, the age of global warming, SINCE LAST YEAR. I’d lived in Florida, Louisiana, Arizona, but all those places paled in comparison to a New York City subway station on a summer day. The ten-minute journey from Dutch Street to the World Trade Center left me breathless, and the shiny orange jumpsuit I was wearing, lightweight but airless polyester, didn’t help a bit. The sweat that formed inside the jumpsuit ran straight down my legs into
those shoes
, and the kilnlike station was so scorching that the people riding its escalators looked like hot dogs Ferris-wheeling through those plastic cases you find in highway convenience stores. But there was the train, silver-shelled, doors open, an oyster waiting for whatever came first: breakfast, or a bit of grit. I threw myself inside, let the air conditioning coat me with its transforming layer of coolness. Its breath was a buffer between me and the too-bright light at the end of this particular tunnel, an airbag, a back draft, an undertow I gave in to willingly. I closed my eyes and let it pull me down. What I longed for was the solace of the ocean’s bottom, the gentle cradle rock of suffocation. What I got, once again, was Selden.
I was on my way, that time, nowhere. I was only leaving. I’d been kicked out of my twelfth home in nineteen years. This time my evictor was a not-quite-elderly woman named Lily Windglass, a second cousin, I think, by marriage, but once removed, I could never quite parse it. Lily Windglass smoked Tareyton Milds but only in private and she had spinster written all over her lined face. Not the Boston spinsterhood of resigned isolation but a Western spinsterhood of “I ain’t got time for nobody’s tomfoolery cept my own”—which is to say she just barely managed to discharge her obligation to see me through my last year of high school before stuffing all my possessions into two cardboard boxes and sending me packing. My clothes didn’t fill one box and my books spilled out of the other, but both fit easily into the trunk of what Lily Windglass referred to as “the second-best car,” a red Chevy Nova with one hundred eighty-six thousand miles on the odometer and the rust-flecked starburst of a shotgun blast on the driver’s side door. The car, a tank full of gas, and a three-pack of underwear were her “goin’-far-away presents” to me, and she nodded at the shotgun blast on the door in case I didn’t get it. Her parting words were, “Insurance expires in six months. After that you’re on your own.”
That was deep down in Arizona, and after Arizona the only place to go was Mexico or north. At the Grand Canyon I had to choose and I veered east; at the southern tip of Utah’s single city, the long sliver of Nephi–Provo–Salt Lake grown like moss on the western foot of the Wasatch Mountains, I picked up I-70 and let it carry me through the pink-and-brown crenellated canyonlands into Colorado, and it was all so beautiful, I have to tell you, I just couldn’t stop. I was greedy. I wanted that beauty to unfold forever, and I kept driving. The Colorado River is like a piece of string cutting into the brown paper package of the earth, and I drove along with it, against its current, one natural wonder after another unfolding before my eyes, until eventually everything was subsumed by the Rockies. They were big, that was for sure, but so what: a half dozen times I had to pull over to let Lily Windglass’s second-best car cool down, and I nearly lost everything in a brakeless flight down the other side—and there, suddenly, were the Plains. Can you imagine! You could see the shape of the planet, the sky arched over the earth like a fluffed sheet. There was nothing to catch your eye, nothing to trip on, just an endless green-and-brown glow raying away, and all I did was let gravity carry me into it. Once I was down in it, of course, everything was different: it was a whole lot of nothing, too hot and too dry, and gas went up a quarter a gallon. But it was also as far from a border as you could get, and the only directive I’d given myself when I left Lily Windglass’s house was that I would stop before I reached yet another edge of the country.
I chose Selden because of the truck stop. The joke was that the town grew up around the Big N; in fact the town came first, but it only lived on as a fringe of houses around the immense asphalt oasis that enclosed the crosshairs of two interlocking highways in a sprawling complex of cafés, motels, gas stations, and, according to one sign, 2,401 TRACTOR TRAILER–SIZED PARKING SPACES, nearly all of which were always full. The Big N was five miles on a side and nowhere taller than a Greyhound bus, the tar lake of the parking lot a blue-black shimmer amid the amber waves of grain, but its true distinguishing feature was its odor. The smell of that place was so strong it was like a structure, a shelter, camouflage and windbreak both; it hid you and protected you, and for more than two years I roamed freely under its cover. It was all old and new gas, roiling clouds of exhaust pushing into each other like warring thunderheads, fresh diesel fumes snaking through the air like the jet stream, and when occasionally a space opened up in the middle of all that sweet poison what pushed through was the tang of fresh-baked bread. Another sign told you: TEN THOUSAND DINNER ROLLS BAKED FRESH DAILY. Ten thousand rolls, twenty-four hundred rigs, an endless river of passenger vehicles. With the exception of a bathhouse, the good lord has yet to invent a better place for a gay man to get laid.
I was one of the people who made the bread. Every night from eleven until seven the following morning I baked the thirty-three hundred dinner rolls consumed at breakfast time. Sometimes I went in early but usually I stayed on after. I took a shower, changed out of my floury baker’s whites. The public bathrooms were a good place, as was the corridor between the two folded wings of the Trail’s End Motel, but my favorite spot was The Well. No one called it The Well except those who knew to; to everyone else it was just an old-fashioned pump-action spigot out on the western edge of the north lot, and once you learned the drill it was pretty simple. When someone passed by, on foot or in a car or rig, you pumped the handle lazily. Nothing would come out. Nothing ever came out of The Well to the best of my knowledge, but if the passerby happened to stop then what you always said was, “Looks like it’s dry today,” and if the answer you got was, “There’s things besides water,” you knew you were in business. Not that money changed hands every time, but they barely paid minimum wage at the bakery and every little bit helped; and it was by The Well, a month or two before the insurance on Lily Windglass’s second-best car ran out, that I met Trucker.
Trucker
. He picked the name out himself. He didn’t want to tell me his real name, which I thought was kind of sweet, an inevitable accompaniment to the anachronism of his wife, whose name I did learn, Judy—Judith—although one time he referred to her as Edith, but I didn’t question him about the slip. Trucker was Trucker as far as I was concerned, and Judy was Judy or Judith or Edith or Edie for that matter, it didn’t matter, her life was nothing more than an unknown array of facts reduced to a name and symbolized by Trucker’s wedding band, just as Trucker’s job as a traveling salesman was represented by the two sample boxes that took up the entire back seat of his silver Cadillac. He was fifty-seven years old when I met him, two hundred seventy-five pounds, four bulbous chins stepping down from his tiny mouth to the sharp swell of his torso, the half dozen strands of his hair floating above his head like a rain cloud, and, like a rain cloud, he passed through town twice a month. He never told me which way was coming from and which way was going to but he always told me when he was coming back, and in two years he never missed a single appointment until he missed those four in a row right there at the very end. I never once saw him walk, never saw the tops of his thighs uncovered by the silk of his suit pants, and I could have believed his ass and back were sewn to the seat of his Caddy save for the fact that he traded in the first car halfway through our acquaintance. I told myself I loved him and I believe I did, as much as I ever loved anyone: I loved him because he let me leave him. Trucker was the first person in my life who never left me and never sent me away, and I think I’d be with him still, even after I received the letter informing me of my mother’s death, if he hadn’t given me all those gifts. But that’s one of the peculiar privileges of being an orphan. Early on you learn the self isn’t a tangible entity defined by a list of enumerable characteristics, it’s just a gray zone defined in opposition to what’s around it. It isn’t a statue, in other words, but the rock carved away. By which I mean I wasn’t heading up to Harlem that morning to find out who or what I was: I only wanted to find out what I wasn’t.
THE PAST MAKES for a bad traveling companion. It can’t be led but drags you back at every step, distracting you, slowing you down, throwing you off course. What I mean is, I’d needed to change at 96
th
Street for the local and I almost slept through the stop. I opened my eyes just as the bell signaled the doors’ closing, and I threw myself out of the car and ran straight into the hot sucker punch of the station. I wavered on the platform like a blade of grass. The heat paralyzed me, only instinct kept me upright. The first thing that came back was my hand. My wrist really: it was a quarter after eleven; then I checked the security of the key around my neck. The sun dripped through the sidewalk gratings, painting shadows that mockingly resembled the bars of a cage. Voices fluttered down, the shed feathers of conversations somewhere above me, and as I followed the words I caught sight of a fat black woman whose breasts were underlined by twinned crescents of sweat. She was eyeing a thin shirtless Puerto Rican man a few feet away from me, something that looked like jealousy filling her eyes. When the Puerto Rican man caught the black woman looking at him, she turned belligerent.
“Whyn’t you put your shirt back on?”
The man shifted position with exaggerated nonchalance, scratched his balls. “Whyn’t you mind your own business?”
“You think that turns me on?”
“I’d like to turn you off,” the man said. “At least turn you round.”
A few people standing nearby chuckled. Headlines fanned faces, eyes darted back and forth. The woman had at least a hundred pounds on the man and she moved in a little closer.