The Garden of Lost and Found

by Dale Peck

  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 persona
l 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.

  “Did you read about them?” My words limped into the shadows of the basement. “The deer? The ones that were on the bridge the other night?”

  “What you yammering about now boy? I swear, your mind runs in so many directions a body can’t hardly follow the thread. You want me to get you that phone or not?”

  “Please. If it’s a push-button. Is it a push-button?”

  Nellydean paused, and even in the shadowy corridor I could see her considering her options. Finally she retrieved her hammer, pulled a nail from her pocket, and banged it into the wall with three sharp raps.

  “Looks a little big to be a safety-deposit key,” she said, hanging her lantern on her nail, “but you never know. The phone’s a dialer,” she added, disappearing into a room. “Like the one you just used.”

  IN THE END I WALKED. Actually I ran first: away from Nellydean, her riddles and poses and meaningless games. I walked to Harlem. I suppose I could have splurged on a real phone—since I wasn’t eating, Trucker’s wad of twenties was just burning a hole in my pocket—but I thought that even if worse came to worst I could make my way uptown, book an appointment, return to have my blood drawn another day. And New York was new to me: what better way to see it than on foot? I’d come from the country, after all, where ten-mile treks were said to be commonplace. I’d never taken one myself, but still, they were supposed to happen all the time—’specially when a storm was a-brewing.

  It was already over ninety when I set out the following morning, my feet melting inside the plastic cocoon of those shoes and the rest of my body barely covered by a peach get-up that was a cross between a unitard and cut-off overalls—a uni-shortTM, according to the tag Trucker’d neglected to remove, although what it really looked like was a onesie. Despite the regularity of the gridded streets and avenues I’d seen from the plane, I still got turned around a half dozen times, and in the end I barely made it to the clinic before it closed at four. I was dizzy with heat exhaustion, asked the first person I saw if she would take my blood, and I don’t know, maybe the clinic was slow that day or maybe it was my pathetic appearance—shaved sunburned skull, chest so skinny one of the straps of my uni-short had fallen off my shoulder—but I was ushered straight into a tiny office where I dazedly answered a litany of questions put to me by a middle-aged matronly Latina. Have you ever been the passive, or receptive, partner in unprotected anal intercourse, unprotected meaning anal intercourse in which a condom is not utilized? Yes. Approximately how many times were you the passive, or receptive, partner in unprotected anal intercourse, unprotected meaning anal intercourse in which a condom is not utilized? Forty-three. Do you believe or have any reason to believe that any of the persons with whom you were the passive, or receptive, partner in unprotected anal intercourse, unprotected meaning dot-dot-dot, was HIV-positive? Yes. Approximately how many persons with whom you were the passive, or receptive, partner in unprotected anal intercourse do you believe or have reason to believe were HIV-positive, and approximately how many times were you the passive, or receptive, partner in unprotected anal intercourse with this person or persons? One; forty-three.

  It was only here that my counselor looked up at me. Her left breast sported red, pink, blue, green, and yellow ribbons, a tattered flag of commiseration, and she said, “Dios mio, boy. My God. What are you reading?”

  I blinked. I blinked again. She pointed, and my eyes followed her finger to my chest: there was my mother’s key dangling a few inches beneath my chin, and there, poking from the bib pocket of the uni-short, was the paperback I’d packed that morning with the notion—hopelessly naive as it turned out—that I’d read for a bit when I got to Central Park, which I’d somehow managed to miss on my journey uptown.

  I took the book out of the pocket and put it in the counselor’s outstretched hand: We Have Always Lived in the Castle. She smiled at me, waited for me to say something, and when I didn’t she set the book on her
cluttered desk and handed me an accordioned string of condoms. It was a ludicrous barter, apples for clockwork oranges, but I took the condoms and put them in the pocket where the book had been. Then there was the phlebotomist, Vietnamese, nonverbal, and the grizzled security guard, black and equally silent, although he did nod gravely—perhaps I should use the less loaded solemnly—as I left, and then I was outside in the heat and the crowd and the rattle of the Number 1, elevated above Broadway and 125th, and within minutes the gauze atoll bulging from the hollow of my elbow was the only reminder of the little drama I’d just enacted. But that was easy enough to peel off, and even before the bandage had landed in a trash can a ketchup-splattered headline—DEERLY BELOVED—caught my eye. One of the survivors of the disaster on the George Washington Bridge had died “on the table,” but the other two were in stable condition, and soon to be “habitated” in the Central Park Zoo.

  Because in the beginning it was like that. In my first weeks in New York the postcarded city that had been in my head grew like a lizard exposed to radiation into a moving image of Godzilla-like proportions and temperament. New York shook the ground when it moved, belched fire when it was angry or scared or sometimes when it was merely bored. It was too much. It was so much it was almost enough. For a while anyway—for two weeks, the two weeks I needed it—the city’s spectacle was enough to overshadow everything else that was going on in my life, what was missing and what had been newly substituted; and when I wasn’t scanning the headlines for the latest episode in the saga of the city’s last native deer or the mayoral election my days were filled with the idiosyncrasies of moving into No. 1.

  For example: power. I had the entire fifth floor of the building to myself, a sprawling warren of grand Victorian rooms whose wallpaper patterns had been parched by time to a few muted colors: rose, mauve, dun, beige, baby’s breath blue. But only the first floor and the mezzanine had been wired for electricity. Nellydean’s apartment on the third floor, and my mother’s, which had been on the fourth, and the fifth-floor apartment all relied on a braid of extension cords that scaled their way down the unused shaft of the building’s dumbwaiter. I spent the better part of a week tracking down and stringing together dozens of wires. By the time I gave up I had light and power in my bedroom and bathroom and living room and kitchen, but I still needed a flashlight to maneuver between them at night, and the half dozen other rooms in the apartment became useless after sunset.