by Dale Peck
We searched the boxes first. There were fifty-eight of them, containing everything from hoarded fashion magazines circa 1946 to moth-holed winter sweaters and sock monkeys, their Curious George expressions nearly rubbed away by loving thumbs. After we’d gone through all the boxes, Claudia sat down just outside the open door and watched as I stacked the boxes in the center of the room. When the walls were clear she went along with her measuring tape and a piece of chalk, ticking off one-foot intervals at knee and shoulder height, and I followed behind, drawing in the wavering lines of the grid with my own piece of chalk. It was a game we’d played a thousand times—well, okay, about forty—but to prolong things a little longer I added one final twist.
“Eighty-sixth and Fifth Avenue,” I said, tapping my way through the squares, “the Met. Houston and Ludlow: Katz’s. Seventy-second and Broadway. There’s the subway station, there’s the Ansonia on the corner of 73rd, there’s Fairway on 74th.”
“What are you going on about?”
I looked at Claudia on her upended bucket. Her slate was on top of the chamberpot and her feet rested on top of the slate; a pair of pencils poked from behind either ear like jaunty antennae. She was even smiling slightly, and seemed to be feeling better than she had in days. I shrugged, turned back to the wall.
“Pawn to queen’s four,” I tapped. “Bishop to knight’s three, rook to king’s one.”
“Are those legal moves?”
“Does it matter?”
“No, I guess it doesn’t.” Claudia laughed, looked at the slate beneath her feet, back up at the room. “God, this is anticlimactic, isn’t it?”
I stared at her. Not because of what she’d said, but how she’d changed. Two-inch-long dreads sprouted where before there’d been only a flat finger wave, Divine’s old shoes had replaced her high heels, and in between them the huge mound of her stomach bulged from her unbuttoned shirt and rested on her thighs like a bag of laundry. She saw what I was looking at and, almost as if she were protecting it, folded her arms around her swollen belly.
“How long have we been at this?”
“Not quite five months,” she answered a little too quickly. She cinched her arms tighter around Chez Divine. “Not quite long enough.”
Afterward, after I’d gridded and tapped my way through the three remaining walls, we used orange-scented oil—we’d found a case of it in Room 2—to rub the chalk marks away as we’d done in forty-one previous rooms. The old wood drank the oil like desert sand sucking up water. Such durable walls: subterranean damp had bubbled the finely turned hundred-year-old moldings like cooked bacon, but they were still level and still firmly in place; the picture rail bore the impress of heavy-framed paintings that had hung off it at some point but it still girded the ceiling, waiting for whatever might hang off it in the future.
With a heave, Claudia lifted the lantern, then let it fall like a lunch box at her side. As the lantern moved it reflected first our heads in the shiny walls, then our chests and arms, our wildly different stomachs, illuminated finally four legs which poked up into a shadowed void. As I watched, one of Claudia’s ankles lifted from the floor and tapped one of mine, and the tingle in my shinbone sent a little shiver up and down my spine.
“What’d you have for lunch?”
I tried to think of the last time I’d had lunch. “Pizza.”
“Want to run out for a couple of slices while I jump in the tub?”
I had pizza for lunch, I wanted to tell her again, two or three weeks ago, but all I said was, “Claudia, this is it. This is the last room.”
In answer, Claudia began picking her way toward the door. “Maybe a veggie supreme, but no onions or peppers or tomatoes. No mushrooms either, or garlic.”
“I think I saw a couple of shovels in Room 18,” I called after her. “No, wait, 23. With the sled, remember? Rosebud?”
Claudia stopped, turned to me; with the lantern by her knees her face was virtually invisible.
“You mean the garden?” Her voice was incredulous. “You mean…digging?”
“It’s not so cold back there. I mean, you did call it buried treasure, right?”
“Jamie.” Claudia’s voice was stern. Parental. “I cannot go digging for buried treasure when there are earth movers digging for bodies six blocks away. That’s, like, profane.”
And there you go. In a couple of sentences she had put the lie to the past five months. Because there was nothing profane about digging for buried treasure if you were really digging for buried treasure. But if you were just filling the days—till, say, your baby was born, or an old woman passed on or a dithering scarecrow withered into chaff and blew away—if you were just killing time when so many people had been killed so close by, sifting through the detritus of the very incident that had claimed their lives, then, yes, it was untenable.
“And I never said buried,” Claudia said as she left the room. “That was Nellydean.”
At the restaurant I ordered a veggie supreme for Claudia, hold the onions, hold the peppers, hold the tomatoes, hold the mushrooms, hold the garlic, a pepperoni for myself, hold the pepperoni and the sauce and the dough. When I glanced at the watch on my wrist, it casually informed me that it was just after six in the evening on January 10—that time, however tenuous my connection to it, was going by just as it always had. Then I saw the little spot of pink between the winding knob and the body of the watch, just a pinprick of pigment, but it was all that was needed to knock me out of the restaurant. The spot of calamine lotion was only half a year old but my mind went all the way back to Idaho, and there, almost as if he were waiting for me, was Cousin Benny. Despite his pumpkin-sized belly, Cousin Benny had been a finicky eater, and despite my age—I think I was fourteen when my great aunt Amy’s daughter June’s husband Bill sent me to live with his brother—he made me cook him dinner every night. He wanted to teach me responsibility, he said, but the results were so unappetizing I developed an antipathy toward food that’s continued to this day. For his part, Cousin Benny always pretended to enjoy my meals, but after nearly every bite he made a big show of taking his napkin from his lap and fastidiously wiping his lips, and it was only afterwards, when I cleared the table and did the dishes, that I would discover a mound of half-chewed food folded into the square of paper.
“Hey buddy?”
I fell out of the memory and back into the pizzeria, and as I did it occurred to me that Claudia and I had done the same thing with the last half year: we’d pretended to live it but in fact we’d only chewed it up and spat it out in a surreal treasure hunt, folded up a chunk of our lives in the basement and left it to molder away with a century and a half of other refuse.
“Slice to go?” The counterman held a white bag that already had a grease stain on the bottom. “Veggie supreme, hold the onions, peppers, tomatoes, mushrooms, and garlic? That’s basically just a cheese slice, ya know?”
I nodded sheepishly, reached for some cash. Was surprised to find my pockets empty.
“That’s all right,” the counterman said. “You already paid for it.”
two
DURING THE FIVE MONTHS Claudia and I spent in the basement I allowed myself to leave Dutch Street once every two weeks. I don’t count trips to the pizzeria or the Chinese place on Fulton, the deli at Ann and William, errands that kept me safely tethered to No. 1. I mean the bimonthly trips I felt compelled to take across the length and breadth of the city. I say “compelled,” yet at the same time I had to force myself to go, because my first attempt at sightseeing—my long walk to the STD clinic in Harlem—had led somehow to Christopher Street and the Hudson River, Thomas Muirland and the cover of The New York Post and finally to K., and that wasn’t a trip I wanted to repeat. By which I mean I didn’t want to hurt anyone else, but I still wanted to get laid.
Like I said: every two weeks. Just like Trucker.
I called it laundry day. Every fourteen days I washed the basement’s dust out of Johnson Montgomery Croft’s clothing, and while the ancie
nt linen dried I donned one of the garish costumes Trucker had given me. I chose my partners based on geography more than anything else, hit the outer boroughs first, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island, then did Manhattan from top to bottom (no puns intended; my own position never changed), Washington Heights and Inwood, the Upper East and Upper West Sides, Chelsea and Murray Hill, Tribeca and Chinatown. It wasn’t until after Claudia and I finished searching the basement that I had a trick who lived further south than I did. He’d moved into Battery Park City to take advantage of the rent credit the city was offering in an effort to repopulate downtown and he spent all the money he saved on crystal meth. I declined the pipe when he passed it to me, concentrated instead on trying to get him to put on a condom—a moot point, as it turned out, since he couldn’t stay hard. Still, watching him jump around and wipe his nose and pull on his penis, all the while saying, “Hold on, buddy, just give me a sec, I’ll get it back, you wanna invite someone else over, make it a party?” was its own kind of distraction, and I hung around till I could assume Claudia was safely in bed. It was a short but frigid walk home—I hope you don’t think I’d spoil the effect of a powder blue pirate suit with a coat or anything—and by the time I turned off John onto Dutch Street my hands were folded under my arms and I was hunched over, shivering. I was looking down is what I mean, so what I noticed first was the way the frost glittered on the Belgian blocks as if a light shone on them. Then I realized a light did shine on them, and I looked up.
When I saw it I stopped short, blinking in the headlights, but then I lowered my head and continued toward No. 1. I wasn’t ignoring it, or pretending it didn’t exist. I was just—well, what else could I do? Run? Where?
From this side Sonny Dinadio looked like Sonny Dinadio. The thin elastic strap above his right ear could have been nothing but a shadow. But then, when he turned to face me, I saw the black hole the patch made over his left eye, and then I saw his cheek. Six months later it was still swollen. Sort of: the swelling had condensed and hardened, and even in the dark I could see that the raised welts were mottled red and purple save for a pale crater in the center of each. It was as if Justine had driven the heel of Claudia’s shoe into a wax mask applied to the left side of Sonny’s face, and now only the right side of his mouth could move when he spoke.
“Get in the van.”
The accent was the same—ged in de van—and coupled with the half sneer it rendered him less threatening than caricaturish, Edward G. Robinson about to be foiled by Humphrey Bogart, and I had to resist the urge to say, “What’s the big idea, see?”
As my eyes lingered on the left side of his face I remembered the column of bruises that had stained my spine for a week after he’d thrown me against the corner of No. 1. No amount of old-movie dialogue could balance that remembered pain against these palsied scars. Sonny had hurt me, but even I didn’t think he deserved this, and, apologetically, or perhaps just compulsively (by which I mean, I suppose, that getting in his van was as close as I could come to saving him), I reached for the door. Sonny had adorned its window with a patriotic decal. This one showed an American flag in which the skyline of Manhattan had been placed beneath the field of stars. Then a cloud of hot air washed over me, a spicy smell carried on its current. As I sat down I glanced behind the wheel. Up close the sausagey man looked more like a potato. The flesh of his thighs rolled over the sides of his seat like the top of a muffin in a tin, his fingers were so fat they quivered like poached eggs. But that didn’t make him any less formidable.
No one said anything for a long time, then the potatoey man said, “Wanna go for a ride?” Even his voice was heavy—not meaty, but doughy.
“Sure,” Sonny said. “Let’s go for a ride.”
How context changes things: three or four minutes ago I’d walked these streets, head down, heedless of the before-and-after landscape of Ground Zero and its vicinity. But inside the heated bubble of Sonny Dinadio’s van, I couldn’t stop staring at the granite facades, marble, brass, glass, steel, everything packed so tightly together it resembled machine parts more than buildings. Lobbies were lighted but upper floors were dark; the metal mesh cans on every corner had been recently emptied and the wind puffed the dark plastic bags out of the tops of the cans like tubular bladders, so that it appeared as if giant earthworms were emerging from tunnels beneath the sidewalks. The city that never sleeps slept. No Siren sang tonight, neither car alarms nor rescue vehicles, leaving the van to cruise the scene like a lunar lander exploring an abandoned alien metropolis, and when Sonny finally spoke I jumped a little, because I’d forgotten he was there—by which I mean, I suppose, I’d forgotten I was there, with him.
“You see this?” He paused, let me take it in. “This,” he said, “is where you live.”
Six months had changed Sonny. It was impossible to tell if it was the attack on him that had done it, or the attack on the city, but even though his words, his accent, were as rough as ever—You see dis? Dis is where you live—there had grown a contemplative, almost entreating undertone to his voice, and I turned from the ravaged landscape of his face and looked back at the ravaged city around us.
The towers were gone of course. The most prominent reminders were the Bankers Trust and Union Carbide buildings, still standing but shrouded in black like mourners at a funeral. Of Ground Zero itself, the only thing I could see was a bright light shining from the pile and snaking its way through the curved streets. The light illuminated hundreds of other buildings, and though there were any number of things you could say about them, the one thing I noticed was that they were all…unchanged. Indifferent. Not just to their lost brethren, but to each other. Like the people who lived and worked in them, every building I looked at possessed the quintessentially New York quality of self-contained disinterest. The new rubbed shoulders with the old, the clean with the dirty. Hollow cast-iron facades abutted burgundy bricks on one side, gray limestone on the other. Each building claimed its tiny share of the island at the expense of its neighbors, and what bothered me was less the implacable continuity that is, after all, common to all architecture, but, rather, the more personal realization that, even though the city hadn’t changed, I had. I had become a different person in the past five months, and somehow Sonny knew it. He knew I was ready to listen to what he had to say.
“Bastards tried to cut the heart out of this city,” he said like a true New Yorker, as if the attack had been on the city first and the country second. “They tried, but they failed. You know why those fuckers failed, James? They failed because they didn’t realize the heart of New York ain’t in one building. Not in the World Trade Center or the Empire State Building or the fucking Statue of Liberty. It’s in all of them. From the beginning of time, James, people been knocking down one building so’s they can put a taller one on top of it. One building don’t mean shit in New York. My old man cried like a baby when they knocked down Penn Station to put up the Garden, but even though I was only three or four years old I knew that that was just the way things worked here. You understand what I’m saying, James? Take a look around. This ain’t no place for a garden.”
I looked around. We were passing the Cunard building, heading east. Battery Park was on our right; the former island of Castle Clinton sat surrounded by acres of grass now, and a long colonnade of sycamores flanked the mangled brass remnants of The Sphere, a fountain that had once adorned World Trade Center Plaza. Melville’s Custom House, rechristened the Museum of the American Indian, was directly in front of us, and when we rounded a corner there was Broadway, an asphalt arrow making a beeline for heaven or Albany, whichever came first.
The potatoey man let the van idle on the empty street as we took in the view.
“Turn the heat up, Joey. It’s fucking freezing in here.”
Sonny was squeezing his arms around his stomach even though the cab was as hot as it had ever been, but Joey just closed two of his fat fingers on a dashboard lever like a man pinching a mosquito. A fresh blast of hot air shot
from the vents, and like Sonny I found myself leaning into it, turning my head from side to side to feel the heater’s breath on both cheeks. When my face appeared in Sonny’s peripheral vision he started a little, twisted his body to the left to get a good look at me with his right eye, and as he uncurled into his seat I felt the weight of Joey’s hand on my shoulder. Effortlessly he pushed me back.
