by Dale Peck
It hit me then: the chain! The chain with my mother’s key on it. It wasn’t around my neck. That was the thread I’d lost. I cupped my neck in my hands, heels under chin, fingertips pressed together just beneath my coccyx. I felt my Adam’s apple on one side and vertebrae on the other, felt muscles, tendons, ligaments, the oily residue of the Hudson River and the lumps of two swollen glands directly beneath each of my ears, but I didn’t feel the chain anywhere. I could only imagine it, falling down through murky water like a bolt of lightning loose in the night sky.
Knute was staring at me with two gray eyes and an inscrutable expression on his face. I took my hands from around my neck and placed them firmly on the table.
Slowly, Knute picked up one of my fingers. He only moved it an inch—not even enough to disturb my palm—then tapped it twice against the table, as though tamping down a cigarette. He said, “You have very small hands,” but he was looking at my neck. “And a very, very thin neck.”
“I lost something,” I said, putting my hands in my lap. Knute’s eyes were still gray and their expression hadn’t changed.
“Your wallet?” As soon as he said it his eyes dropped to the table and he fiddled with his martini glass, and I knew he didn’t think it was my wallet I’d lost from around my neck.
“How did you get my wallet?”
Knute shrugged. “Some pier queen found it, sold it to the magazine for fifty bucks. He said there wasn’t any cash in it, by the way.” He looked up. “Also your, um—those shoes.”
“He said there wasn’t any money in my shoes?”
“He found them. They’re not Prada, are they? They have that slipper look.”
I thought of Divine. Armani Exchange, do you like it? “They very well could be.” I was still thinking of Divine when I tapped the paper again. “This guy. Is he going to be okay?”
Knute sighed. “AIDS,” he said, as if he’d been waiting to say it. “Apparently he failed on his meds, said he couldn’t face another cocktail. I, however—”
As Knute flagged down the waitress I looked at the face of the man who shared the river with me. His cheeks were flaccid and rippled as the water we floated in, and something—glare, or the poor quality of Ben-Day reproduction—made his eyes look like two shiny glass balls. Yet no matter how hard I stared at him I couldn’t remember the feel of his skin under my lips, the weight of his body on my chest. The waitress came while I was examining the photograph, and it occurred to me that she might see the connection between me and the picture. But Knute simply ordered another martini and another basket of bread and the waitress left without saying anything. It was as if the picture had separated the past from the present, the people who lived in it from the people who lived now. The picture was as solid as the wall I’d wanted to build between my life in New York and the life that had come before, and when I looked up at Knute I found myself wondering if he could do that for me. Build the wall I couldn’t build myself. But all I said was, “How did this happen?”
Knute shrugged. “Apparently he’s one of those guys who’ve been positive since the beginning. He’s done everything. AL-721, Compound Q, AZT, ddI and -c and -t, he said he almost went to Mexico for plasma thermopathy or hyperthermia or whatever they called it, blood heating, but his best friend did it the week before he was scheduled to go down, and died. Who knows? He’s tried every combination of protease inhibitors and all he got was diarrhea, kidney stones, and neuropathy, but there are things in the pipeline. Maybe something will work for him. He’s been alive this long.”
I tapped the paper.
“I meant this. How did I end up on the cover of the Post?”
“Oh.” Knute reached again for his elusive pack of cigarettes. “Well, Bloomberg’s got the election sown up, this particular president seems to be better at keeping his hands to himself than the last one, and, you know, nothing’s going on in the Middle East.” He shrugged. “Slow news day. What can I say? You’re not in Kansas anymore.”
Something clicked then. “Are you gay?”
Knute started, just a little. He sat up straighter and reached first for his empty glass and then for that pack of cigarettes, and then he put one hand on his glass and held it as though it anchored him to the table. “How could you tell?”
“Well, Toto,” I said, “pier queen, Prada, and you know your AIDS ‘meds’ a little too well.”
“Oh.” He relaxed the tiniest bit. “I thought it was something…” He limped one of his wrists. Unfortunately it was the hand with the glass in it, and it fell to the table; fortunately, it didn’t break. Knute laughed a little and set it upright. “It’s just, you know, a generational thing.” He tried to take a drink from his empty glass. “Are you?”
“Generational?”
“Yes. I mean no. I mean gay.”
“Why do you ask?”
“There were three numbers in your wallet. John, Patrick, and someone called Trucker.”
“What?”
“Trucker. Sounds kind of sexy.”
“Look, Knute with K, and an N and a U-T-E, I’m sorry but I have to leave right now. I just remembered I’ve got to cover for Nellydean.”
“Nellydean?”
“Yeah, speaking of names, I mean, whatever, she was the woman working in the shop when you came in.”
“I thought you were working in the shop when I came in.”
“Working? Barefoot? In a ripped flight suit?”
“I was going to ask about that. I was going to ask about your relationship to clothing in general. You have a rather unique sense of style. It goes with your store. Kind of catch as catch can, kind of.”
“Kind of.” I stood to go. But before I could get away: food. A bowl of spaghetti the size of a wash basin, a rack of meatballs piled above it. The bowl was so heavy it clunked from the waitress’s hand to the table, and that clunk pulled me down with it, and I sat there feeding on the odors of garlic and oregano and tomato until Knute picked up his fork, hooked a few strands of spaghetti and twirled them into a knot the size of a golf ball, handed me the spool of food. I managed to stuff the coiled wad into my mouth, didn’t stop eating until the entire bowl was empty. While I ate Knute sipped another martini. A couple of times he patted his breast pocket, and when at last I’d finished I said, “How long did you smoke?”
Knute smiled wryly, or perhaps merely drunkenly. “I knew you were going to ask that.” I started to ask why, but first I had to burp. Then I asked, and Knute said, “Because I’ve been sitting here thinking. I’ve been thinking that I smoked for twenty-two years, and I just knew you were going to make me say that I smoked for longer than you’ve been alive.”
“How old are you?”
Knute shook his head. “I’ll let you pick your own euphemism.”
“You mean, like, old enough to know better?”
“I meant, like, old enough to be your father.”
Something about the way he said the word. Faw-thuh.
“Are you from Long Island?”
“‘Ancient history,’” he said. “Like ‘English major.’ Oh dear,” he said, and the words began to tumble out of him. “You can see why I stuck to 800 scripts. Prearranged questions yielding presupposed answers. I’m no good at finding out what I don’t know, only what I do know. If this then that. If someone hasn’t eaten in two days then why has he been avoiding food. If someone’s mother could afford to leave him an entire building in lower Manhattan then what was he doing at a truck stop in Kansas. And if someone has never read Knut Hamsun then why is he acting out the plot of his most famous novel.”
I blinked.
“Hungry?”
“Hunger,” Knute said. “In which a nameless young man wanders starving through the streets of Kristiana attempting to exchange his stories for food.”
“My name is James Ramsay,” I said, but I said it quietly. “This is New York,” I said a little louder, and then I said, “How did you know about the Big N?”
“This guy, this Trucker? He wr
ote his name on the back of their card.”
I nodded my head. The Big N had a card.
“I never knew my mother. She abandoned me when I was a year old. For No. 1.”
“For no one?”
Had I said that? “She drowned last year. In the Nile. And in her will she left me a building. Number one,” I stressed. “Shop, garden, everything that goes with it. And I lied,” I said, and Knute’s eyebrows went up, furrowing his forehead like the water in the picture on the cover of The New York Post. “I have eaten in the past two days. I ate,” I said, “grass.”
For some reason the word defeated him. He dropped his furrowed forehead into his hands. “I can’t believe I agreed to do this. Journal. Report. Whatever the verb is. I’m only here because Sebastian said I needed to get out of my apartment. Up until a couple of months ago I had my own agency. Besides those goddamn 800 scripts the longest sentence I’ve ever written is ‘Just like real butter.’”
“That’s a fragment.”
“Exactly.” He sighed heavily, reached for the pack of cigarettes that still wasn’t there, put his hand on the stem of his empty glass. He looked around for the waitress, then shook his head and turned back to me.
“Jesus Christ. Grass. As in Splendor in the?”
“As in Leaves of. As in Sea of. As in is greener. As in roots, as in harp, as in Günter. As in,” I finished up, “what deer eat.”
Knute rolled his eyes. His blue blue eyes. “And horses and cows.”
I shook my head. “Just deer.”
“As in—”
“Deer,” I said, trying not to look at his eyes. “Plain old deer.”
Knute chuckled…ironically? Ironically. “Deer. Grass eating. The Garden of Lost and Found. This is good, this is front-page stuff. I can see why the Post ran with it.”
“The Lost Garden.”
“What? Oh.” Knute pretended he had a pencil in his hand, and he pretended to write on the table’s surface: “The…Lost…Garden. Yes, that’s great, really super.” He wrote: “The…Gar…den…of…Lost…and…Found. I can get two thousand words out of that, no problem.”
“What happened to your agency?”
“Oh.” Knute sighed the word, exactly as he’d sighed the word AIDS. As if he’d been waiting to say it. “Did you happen to see those commercials for HandiKnife? The ones with the karate guy cutting arabesques out of wallpaper and aluminum cans?”
“You mean that box cutter thing? The ones that all the gangs started carrying because they came in a variety of colors?”
“Your rep’s everything in advertising. Suddenly everyone from Pepsi to Kleenex was imagining their product turned into an instrument of urban violence. It didn’t matter that the campaign increased sales six thousand percent. No family-oriented company wanted to be associated with me.”
“Wow. Bum rap.”
Knute shrugged. “I took it as a sign. I had almost two decades in the business, it treated me fine. And I’d been thinking of getting out of the city anyway.”
“You mean move away?”
“I’ve got a place north of the Catskills. Clean air, clean living.”
“Sounds like a slogan.”
“We focus-grouped it for Lysol but the germ thing tested better.” I started to say something but Knute held up his hand. “James, please. My story. Your story.” I looked at him blankly. “That old woman in the shop, she told me your mother’s name was Ginny.”
“Virginia. Only Nellydean called her that. And Sonny.”
“And Sonny is…your father?”
Faw-thuh.
There was always a map, I remembered then. In the stories about buried treasure there was always a map but the map never led to the buried treasure. You would follow it faithfully and still find nothing, and just when you were ready to give up hope there it was. But first you had to prove your faith.
This time there was no waitress, no bowl of food to sit me back down. I stood up and said, “I have to go now,” and slid out of the booth. The napkin fell away from my legs and I saw that I was wearing pants the same powder blue as the shirt. A tuxedo stripe ran all the way from my waist to those shoes, the same iridescent blue Knute’s eyes were, when they weren’t gray.
“James.” Knute had stood up as well. His plain white shirt reached all the way down to belted khaki pants; his waist was narrow and the tops of his straight lean thighs were dotted with breadcrumbs. “What about my story?”
“You mean my story?”
“Jamie.” Knute leaned heavily on the table, and together we realized just how drunk he was. “Please. I got nothing here.”
“I think you have everything you need.”
“At least tell me why you did it.”
“Did—?” I began, but I stopped when I saw his eyes turn from gray to blue even as I stared at them. Knute’s eyes began glowing as brightly as the single string of cobalt lights Aunt Clara hung on her white plastic tree each of the three Christmases I spent with her, after I left Cousin Benny’s, before I went to live with Lily Windglass. I looked down at the table then, saw that Knute’s hand was pressing on the newspaper cover, pressing down on the chest of the man I was carrying, pressing down on me, but not even his added weight was enough to push us under water. I might not be able to save myself but I had saved him, and nothing could change that.
I looked back at Knute. “What color are your eyes?”
“My eyes?”
“What color are they?”
Knute looked as if he were trying to look at his eyes. “They’re gray. Why?”
“Oh, nothing. I’m just hallucinating, that’s all.”
Knute repeated himself, as if to clarify things. “They’re gray,” he said. “Just like yours.”
six
NO LIFE IS TRULY INSULAR. Peninsular maybe, but the truth is most of us live surrounded by others. I’m talking about the people who make us ourselves—our idealized, our repressed selves—and in my case there’s one person who held that particular role. Her name was Claudia MacTeer, and even though it’s only a few more hours until I meet her I want to introduce her now, because there was a way in which she appeared to me Athena-like, fully formed. From the moment I saw her I knew she wasn’t a passing acquaintance but someone who had a role to play in my life, a walk-on part like Knute maybe, or a recurring role like Trucker’s (or maybe, like Divine, she was someone who meant nothing to me even as the audience at home recognized her from somewhere else). But whatever the case, I knew she was important. Knew that meeting her would change me. What I didn’t realize was that for the first time in my life I would have a similar effect on someone else.
Right now, though, she’s still sleeping. The morning sun’s strong on her body, coming straight in the high-up windows of her father’s apartment rather than reflecting off the metal surfaces of the skyscrapers that hem in No. 1. It streams into the bedroom she’s slept in since she was born—can you imagine!—and warms her flesh, burns it even, kindles a fire and stokes it until it flames red hot in her stomach, breasts, thighs. In her sleep she thinks it’s Reggie, and her fingers wander across her skin looking for his. Surely it must be his hot hands that burn her so! But their search turns up nothing—nothing except Claudia—and soon enough they begin merely to scratch, idly at first, then more determinedly, as the fire inside Claudia burns hotter and hotter. The heat bellows up and down her body, she can feel it pounding against her skull, and the fingers that try to dig it out of her are themselves pincers that have been stoked in the belly of a coal stove. Even her toes seem to leak steam, and eventually she abandons her scratching and begins simply to toss and turn, stop-drop-and-roll as the adage has it: Claudia’s already stopped and dropped and now she rolls and rolls as what is inside her begins to become what it will be. She’s so hot the metal of her parts, her mysterious biological gears and levers, has become molten and sloshes back and forth until, as suddenly as it came, the fever breaks, the fires die so rapidly that a chill replaces them, what was liq
uid becomes solid again, but not quite. One piece snaps off even as the rest coheres, one tiny piece refuses to cool and become insensate. It’s been forming for weeks, virtually indistinguishable from Claudia herself, its presence as intangible as a dream, but this morning it comes into its own. It becomes something. Something else. Something other. Other than Claudia. Even in her sleep she knows—she’s been late before, and she’s been waiting for a sign, one way or the other. Now she knows. She turns and roots out Reggie on the bed, ends up with her nose buried in the deep cleft between his shoulderblades, and straight into his lungs she whispers, Damn you Reggie. Damn you straight to hell.
OVER THE COURSE of a week The Garden absorbed my mother’s magic cabinet as greedily as my body absorbed the pasta Knute had fed me. It was impossible to imagine Nellydean shouldering the huge thing around; nevertheless it migrated a few feet each day, ending up half concealed by a couple of tubed rugs and a wooden barrel filled with rusty horseshoes. No. 1 cast a different spell on the computer Trucker had sent me: antiquity didn’t defeat technology so much as put it through its paces, and what should have been a straightforward plug-in job ended up taking seven days. And in case you’re wondering: he’d bought me a Mac. A dual processor G5, 2.00 GHz with a 160-gig hard drive and half a gig of RAM, CD/DVD-RW drive with wireless internet capability and something called Bluetooth I never did find a use for. Twenty-inch flat-screen monitor, DSL modem, external speakers, laser printer, enough software to run a Fortune 500 company. And of course that email account.
Screen name: NYBiSon.
Password: GetNaive.
Personally I’d’ve been happy with an iMac. Seven days it took me to set up Trucker’s gift—one more day than it took the Lord to make the world. They say the Lord formed the world out of darkness but in my case the darkness had a name, and on the eighth day I decided to look him up.
According to Trucker’s watch it was a little before midnight when I tiptoed down the stairs and unlocked my mother’s office and saw those huge humming husks atop the dark marble of her desk, a space-age city sprung from desert dust. The screen saver was an old-school copper penny that caromed from one edge of the gigantic monitor to another, and its bounce lent the room a liquid, golden ambiance. The leather of my mother’s chair was cool against my bare back and the backs of my thighs when I sat down. I was wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts: what looked like a pattern of yellow happy faces proved on closer inspection to be cleverly shaded prints of rolled-up condoms, and whatever conscious or unconscious irony had driven Trucker to pick them out was beyond my comprehension, and now I sat in front of my new computer, nearly naked but still shivering in the heat and clutching my wallet to my chest like a scapular, because a week after Knute had returned it to me I’d finally worked up the nerve to look at what he’d said was inside.
