by Dale Peck
But a hole is only visible when you’re right in front of it. For a while the towers were a palpable absence on the city’s horizon: every time I turned onto John I saw their specter as I’d seen them on my first night in New York. After a few months, however, I only thought of them when I emerged from Broadway or Church or West Street into that big empty space and, blinking against the bright light, remembered what had been there—remembered the buildings first, and only secondarily the other things, the planes and the people, the panic. All the while the city was reasserting itself as it always had, rebuilding itself: in bits and pieces. New York’s grid wasn’t a mosaic. It had never cohered to form a single entity but was instead an agglutination held together by its borders, its harbors, estuaries, and rivers. The attack on the World Trade Center didn’t change that. Everywhere I looked I saw tiny sparks of life getting on with itself: in the sun reflecting off a plaque on West 9th Street (Marianne Moore lived here), in the alley between Lafayette and Crosby and Houston and Prince (Jersey it was called, and there was nothing new about its smooth cobblestones and rusted pink shutters), in the hole puncturing a cast-iron column decorating a Centre Street building. A colony of pigeons had roosted in the column when I first moved to the city, but when fall came so did hordes of starlings, and the smaller but more numerous invaders displaced the big-bellied settlers in the same way the Jews had replaced the Irish and Italians, the Puerto Ricans the Jews, the Chinese everyone else. And as I noticed each of these things, I noted also how I’d been changed by my new home—how I’d come to care about it, or, at any rate, grown accustomed to it.
What I mean is:
MY PLAN WORKED.
K. left, and I went crazy. Sort of. Not really. I mean whatever, it was a stupid plan, but it succeeded. My actions made me a stranger to myself—to who I was, who I had been—which left me free to become someone new.
This wasn’t immediately evident. Well, nothing was immediately evident. The rest of the summer was a blur during which I went two, three, four days without food or sleep, walked the streets or hid in the garden or my apartment, until eventually I had, I don’t know what you’d call it, a fit or something. Hypoglycemia and hypertrophy, the first physical, the second mental: that’s not crazy, not really, but it makes for a good facsimile.
I’d make Claudia rent a car and drive me Upstate to look for him. The only clue I had was the name of the road—Old Snake—so I never expected to find him. When I did I didn’t really know what to do. So I left him a note. It was as elusive as this one, but shorter.
Then: 9/11.
It’s hard to introduce an event like that into a story like this. By definition, terrorism is unexpected, external, an interruption; by which I mean that it didn’t really have anything to do with us, but it wasn’t something we could ignore either. But there you go. It happened.
It wasn’t really a coincidence we were all in No. 1 at the time. In the first place, we almost never left, and when we did go out for groceries and such (by which I mean sex) it usually wasn’t till after noon. On that Tuesday Nellydean was already awake; she woke up Claudia, Claudia woke me. By then smoke had filled the garden and was pushing in through the unscreened windows at the back of my apartment, smoke and ash and bits of paper still sparking in the air. At that point we just figured some building was on fire, we thought it was kind of pretty. “Fuck the treasure hunt,” I remember Claudia saying. “We should torch the place for the insurance.” Of course, there wasn’t insurance, and, as well, if we’d burned down No. 1 Claudia would have had to move back in with her father, or Reggie—and then, I mean, the treasure hunt. But that’s getting ahead of things.
By the time we got downstairs, Nellydean knew the whole story. My guess is Justine told her, but who knows. The woman had her ways. She was in the garden spraying the trees down with a hose, “as a precaution.” She seemed more concerned that one of her precious Camperdown elms or Lombardy poplars would catch fire than with, you know, World War III. I tried to log on but my internet connection wasn’t up, and as far as I knew there wasn’t a TV in the building, so we ended up crowding around the radio in Nellydean’s apartment—which is more World War II than III, but felt appropriate to No. 1.
When the order came to evacuate lower Manhattan we all looked at each other, but none of us actually voiced the decision to stay. For the first time we were united. A threesome. Even if each of us had different reasons, we all knew there was nowhere else we’d rather be. We closed the shutters over the front of the shop, ate out of Nellydean’s pantry. On a couple of occasions we heard someone rattle the grates, and one time someone beat on them with something that sounded like a baseball bat. For a good half hour the building redounded with metallic thuds and echoes, but whether it was the police or looters—or, who knows, Sonny Dinadio—we had no idea. The garden was shrouded in a perpetual ashen fog and the tang of smoke was thick in the building, more so on the upper floors than the lower ones; on the second night I had to sleep in the shop because the smoke in my apartment gave me nightmares about the fire that had brought Divine into my life. But then the rain came, the air cleared. After a few days everything coagulated into a sodden gray paste that coated the ground and dried into something that looked like felt. That’s when we saw the paper: thousands of sheets of paper that must have blown from people’s desks and filing cabinets and metal shelves, from briefcases and in-baskets and outboxes and piles on the floor, credenzas, printer stations, supply rooms, clipboards, board rooms, bulletin boards in communal kitchens, from fingers too stunned to hold on to them. The ground was so thickly covered it looked as if the trees had sprung from the pages of an eviscerated library—or, alternately, as if the sheets were last year’s leaves fallen from the branches and slowly mulching into fertilizer. In either case, Nellydean swept the patio clean, skimmed clear the surface of the water in the fountain, but other than that we left the trash where it lay. I don’t know if this was out of superstition or respect or laziness, but I do remember praying it would hurry up and snow, so there would be a natural reason for the ground to be as white as the surface of the moon. But, though it snowed in other parts of the city that winter, it never snowed in the garden.
It was during this period that Claudia and I started talking again about my mother’s treasure. Like I said, the summer’d been a wash; and as June gave way to July and July to August everything that had come before felt less and less believable. I don’t just mean the things that had happened since I moved to New York: K., Thomas Muirland, the deer on the GWB. I mean everything. Trucker and Divine and Selden, all those aunts and uncles and cousins who’d taken me in and tossed me out over the years. My mother. Me. My pre–New York existence had become nothing more than a prequel to the fever dreams that consumed me the week I seroconverted, and in their wake the only things that remained were Claudia and No. 1. Oh, and Nellydean, but there was no Nellydean without No. 1, so she didn’t really count. I had turned myself into a body without a past. Whether I had a future was anybody’s guess.
After a few days of being cooped up we began to grow housebound. Neither of us was what you’d call a social being, and we spent most of our time apart. While Nellydean hid out in her apartment or, I don’t know, wandered the astral plane, Claudia and I rooted through the shop in search of things to distract us. On the second or third day of our confinement I came upon her seated on a wooden chest with a small blackboard. She was drawing with a look of intense concentration, and when she heard me she looked up with a startled, slightly guilty expression. I smiled sheepishly, started to back away, but instead she held up her slate. The chalk lines were so faint I had to step beside her to see what she’d drawn, and even then it took me a few seconds to realize it was a floorplan. She knew the twists and turns of the basement hallway by heart, the location of the main stairs to the shop and a second set that led directly to the garden; the other doors and walls she had filled in “by instinct,” but something told me it was pretty close to perfect.
&n
bsp; “It’s not to scale though.”
Her “though” had an odd sound to it, as if she was completing a sentence she knew was in my head, and I wondered if she suspected I’d seen the other map. It was another week before I could sneak into her apartment to look for it, but it was gone, along with the marijuana and the heroin. The box of bath salts was wiped clean of fingerprints and dust, as were the other boxes under her vanity, bottles of ammonia and hair conditioner and shoe polish all shiny as knickknacks in a curio cabinet. I wondered why she’d moved the map until something else occurred to me, and I ran down to the first floor, but after fifteen minutes of sifting through the foot-thick tangle of extension cords at the bottom of the dumbwaiter all I found was an unopened package of needles, and I realized Claudia’d found my mother’s key, and taken that too.
Or, who knows, maybe Nellydean had. It’d been two and a half months, after all. A mouse could’ve carried it off for all I knew. I suppose I could have just asked her, but that would’ve opened the door to reciprocal questions—questions about my own actions, my own motives. Questions I was as unwilling to answer as she was. Because it was like I’d told K.: I’d never really understood why I did the things I did. But now, for the first time in my life, I had a single small consolation: I wasn’t doing them alone. Claudia had secrets too. Claudia was trying to escape a past as buried as mine, and perhaps together we might accomplish what neither of us had been able to do alone. My plan had worked, but it was over now, and Claudia’s plan—whatever Claudia was planning—was just beginning. And so I never asked her about the map I’d found or the key I’d lost, never prodded her about her need to hide her pregnancy from her baby’s father or her own, just as she never questioned me about what had happened with K., or about the body that withered inside Johnson Montgomery Croft’s linen clothing.
I suppose I thought of it as a conspiracy, by which I mean I supposed we were on the same side, fighting the same enemy: memories, legacies. The past.
I thought we stood together. I thought we held each other up.
Of course I was as wrong about that as I was about everything else, but by the time I figured it all out Divine had been born, and Claudia was gone.
SO. AS A KIND of preamble we counted the rooms. We chalked the numbers on each doorframe like mezuzahs, and, given the darkness and the twists and turns of the hallway, we ended up with two 16s, and then again two 39s, but eventually we arrived at Room 41—really 43, as Claudia pointed out, when you factored in the two doubles. She gauged the walls with a corroded metal tape—“Eight-two by nine-seven by nine-one” (she measured the ceiling “just in case”)—then copied the dimensions onto a big sheet of brown paper. We poked around the closet-sized chambers, sifting through boxes as if one of them might surrender a scroll bearing the magic phrase This Is It!, ran our fingers along moldings as though they might conceal hidden levers—as though a full-sized door might spring open, yielding a full-sized room into which we would saunter and pluck our prize from its plush velvet plinth. But as soon as Claudia began fitting her map together it became clear there wasn’t room in the basement for a secret chamber. And so, inevitably, we began to tap: on walls and floors and ceilings and every piece of furniture big enough to contain a single cached coin or banknote (“T-bonds,” Claudia said, “stock certificates. Think big, Jamie”). We tapped carelessly at first, but soon enough we pulled out our chalk and graphed twelve-inch-by-twelve-inch grids across the walls and floor and ceiling of each new room. We worked by lantern light, because when you get right down to it they’re handier than flashlights—they leave your hands free for chalk and hammers—and, as well, because their flickers and shadows seemed better-suited to a task as anachronistic as a treasure hunt. We didn’t actually find any treasure, of course, but we found plenty of other things. In Room 8 we discovered ten dissembled shield-back chairs, their curved, tapered legs resembling a dog’s hip joint, their lathe-turned arms split like driftwood. In Room 11 we found boxes of mush it took us two days to recognize as the remains of books pulped by rodents and bugs and a water pipe whose leak had been sealed by its own rust and calcium deposits. In Room 26 we found gears and cogs, eight iron arrows, two boxes full of numbers; it was Claudia who finally figured out they were the pieces of a bell tower’s four-faced clock. Room 17 was full of rolls of wallpaper, faded but still psychedelic swirls of sixties color and pattern; Room 12 was empty, so were 24 and 36, though whether this constituted pattern or anomaly we never found out. Room 31 turned out to be Room 5 entered from the opposite side. In Room 3 we found nearly a dozen owl pellets beneath a jagged hole in the ceiling plaster, but when I climbed on the peeling veneer of an Empire game table I dragged in from Room 16—16B, as Claudia reminded me—I found nothing in the ceiling but a few naked twigs, their bark scored off long ago by beak and talons, and as I dismounted the table Claudia sighed. “We could always try eBay. I’m sure someone would buy this shit.”
It was early winter by then, September 11 had faded from the headlines as the nation’s attention shifted to the war in Afghanistan; behind that lurked our own history, equally removed, invisible. The only thing that was showing was Divine.
“Claudia.” I pointed to a rounded wedge of skin protruding between her shirt and pants. “Shouldn’t you be seeing a doctor or something?”
Claudia didn’t look up from her map. “Black women been having babies without doctors for four hundred years.”
“What about Reggie?”
As far as I knew she wasn’t seeing him either, or, for that matter, told him she was pregnant. He’d shown up about two weeks after the towers came down—it turned out he’d been the one pounding on the closed shutters—and the following morning I was awakened by a particularly loud fight, not between him and Claudia, but him and Nellydean. She’d caught him in the stairwell, “sneaking out” as she put it, and accused him of ruining Claudia’s life. Reggie countered that Claudia never listened to nobody but herself and now she would have to live with the consequences. That was the last I’d heard of him for five months, but all Claudia said was:
“I’ll worry about my body if you worry about yours.”
She pointed with her pencil, and I looked down at my limbs, pencil thin inside Johnson Montgomery Croft’s voluminous clothes, chalk white, conspicuously unmapped. I laughed a little, picked up my hammer, turned back to the wall. The hammer’s vibrations filled the hollow spaces then, hollow walls and hollow rooms, hollow stomachs and hollow stories sustained like balloons on a thin thread of hot air. I hammered my way through grid after grid, wall after wall, month after month, tapped my way across each square with Sisyphean determination, and if you’d asked me what I was listening for, and if I could’ve been bothered to answer, I’m sure I would have said a hollow sound, of course, what else do you listen for when you tap on walls in search of buried treasure? But the basement walls were of paneling and plaster: virtually every one of my taps reverberated with a hollow echo, and the truth is I don’t think anything would have caught my ear besides an answering tap from the other side (which happened once, but it was only Nellydean, looking for a place to nail her lantern) or maybe a voice: Eureka in the basement!
But still, I went about my task diligently, and for the first couple of months Claudia worked right behind me, if anything even more diligently. But there were more and more days in which the rhythm of her taps would become irregular, as if her hammer’s weight had grown too heavy, and soon after that she’d take a break to “rest her stomach,” as she always put it, and eventually she’d always say, “Tell me something.”
“Tell you what?”
“Tell me a story.”
“Well I tell you what,” I’d sass her, and Claudia would laugh a little, faintly, giving me just enough time to marshal up a fable of life in Oregon or Idaho or North Dakota. I think those subterranean stories surprised me as much as they did her, not so much for their content as for their distance. Their innocence. Their joy. Had these stick-thin limbs really been s
ubstantial enough to swing me on the vines of the Louisiana bayou or hoist me above the mist in the redwoods of Oregon? Had I ever been as driven as the high school rebel who organized the students in North Dakota and Arizona? In my own mind, my childhood was an endless series of awkward arrivals and forced departures, but when I narrated it to Claudia it wasn’t so much the variety that came out—the kaleidoscopic settings, the myriad accents and vistas and school districts—but the continuity, the persistence of me, and so I talked to myself as much as I talked to her, surprised at how much I’d seen and done, how much of it I’d assimilated, how much of it I’d enjoyed. I talked until I was blue in the face, all the while tapping on walls until the vibrations from the hammer literally buzzed the feeling out of my fingers, and then I tapped with my knuckles until the skin chafed and threatened to bleed, and even after I stopped work and dropped down on the spongy carpet across from Claudia I kept up my spiel, because one thing I did know about her—the only thing I knew for sure—was that she was desperate for distraction from what she called “the scourge of baby-carrying.”
When I was nine Aunt Ann in Florida got pregnant and announced she was naming the baby James (after her father) and it would be too confusing to have two Jameses in the house: hello, Louisiana. When I was fourteen in Umpqua, Aunt June found out she was pregnant with her third child and didn’t let me stick around until it was born—although the truth is my exit had less to do with the baby than her oldest son, my cousin Drew, which is how I ended up in Idaho with Cousin Benny. But Claudia’s experience bore little resemblance to what I’d seen of those two pregnancies. I remember one day: Claudia sat on a bottom-up metal bucket she’d been using as a chair since Room 6 (this despite the fact that the basement contained dozens of chairs in as many styles, from gnarled scarred thrones that looked like they’d been looted from medieval castles to camp stools, one of which bore the spraypainted stencil T LOUISE). The lantern cast ghastly shadows across the strange contours of her body and sweat coursed her face even though the basement was so cold we wore coats, scarves, hats, everything but gloves, whose muffling layer might hide the telltale thump of a trapdoor. Her head hung between the triangular struts of her knees, a few inches above a chipped enamel chamberpot (also courtesy of Room 6), and somewhere behind the story spilling out of my mouth I could imagine another tale, one in which Claudia finally managed to spew up the thing that was causing her so much agony. She rubbed the ball of her stomach as if nudging it toward her open jaw, which hung slack sometimes but just as often stretched grotesquely wide. But all that ever came out was a thin line of saliva that glistened in the lantern light as it descended from her lips to the basin below. She never did vomit in front of me, neither a baby nor what little food she managed to get down, and the only reason I remember that particular day is because that was the day we explored Room 41—or 43 if you took into account the two doubles, or 42 if you took into account the fact that rooms 31 and 5 had turned out to be the same room entered through two different doors. However you numbered it, it was still the last room.
