by Dale Peck
And what, after all, is a map? The only thing a map really tells you is that someone was here before you. And what, finally, is this book? Look at it. Hold it away from you. Forget about the words. A book’s nature is right there in its shape: split down the middle, the real world on one side, the fictional—the invented, the ethereal—on the other, a spine of thread or glue just barely holding them together. It’s a beautiful relationship, a symmetry more perfect than anything a mirror could offer. Think about it: you crack the cover, read the first page, the second, the first chapter, the first half. The left-hand pages represent knowledge while the ones on the right are mystery itself, and as you progress you find yourself wanting now one, now the other. At the beginning you want answers and at the end all you want is bliss, but that crease between the read and unread pages reminds you that one would be nothing without the other, that no matter how many pages there are on the left and how many there are on the right they always add up to the same thing, a single whole, a suspension of art in life, an ever-shifting balance between what waits to be forgotten and what remains to be learned.
What I mean is, I never afflicted my closest surviving relative with my presence. “Does he know he has a grandson?” I asked Nellydean once, and she said, “Do you mean Divine? Or do you mean you?” Then she shook her head. “He don’t know about you. I don’t even think he knows about me.” “Joseph is your brother?” She nodded, and before I could ask her about their different surnames I saw that she was rubbing the ring finger of her left hand. “His name was Granger. He died in the war.” I never asked which war.
Maybe I was being stoic in not contacting Joseph MacTeer, or maybe I’d learned from Claudia’s example. Claudia said that she believed in buried treasure because she didn’t believe in herself. As long as she was able to cling to a thread of that belief she was able to go on, but as soon as she closed the cover on it she gave up. She died. Sometimes things happen at the same time for no reason—that’s called a coincidence, and my life is full of them—but sometimes things happen at the same time and there’s a relationship between them. That’s called a story, and that’s why I can tell you at the end that this isn’t my story, nor, as I once thought, Claudia’s, because stories have to have an audience, and in the end the two of us weren’t actors, but witnesses. No, the only real character here is the city itself, perpetually dying but never dead.
During the last nineteen months of Nellydean's life she mostly ignored me. Tended to the shop or the garden, or to Divine, but sometimes I’d wake up and find something outside my door, usually something to do with food: a fish knife, a melon baller—the one sterling, the other tin—a cut crystal bowl, gold-rimmed and nearly as big as an infant’s wading pool. I found the bowl the morning after I came home from the Ann Street deli with a bag of oranges and mentioned that I didn’t have anything to keep them in; the thing Nellydean gave me was actually a punch bowl, could’ve held a hundred oranges, and the half dozen I’d bought rolled down and around its gently sloped sides like nuggets in a pannier. But Knute qua Knute saw the bowl and said only, “That must be worth a fortune.” I just patted him on the head. I knew the gifts were Nellydean’s way of trying to get me to reverse my decision, to remind me of No. 1’s worth, of what it contained, to save it from the wrecking ball, but I didn’t worry about that either. Instead I wondered if this bowl—“I’m serious, James, you could probably get four thousand bucks for something like this, five, six, seven”—qualified as buried treasure. Not in the fairy tale sense but in the legal sense. Because Knute had also told me: treasure qua treasure exists over and above the laws of property. If one man finds a treasure chest on another man’s property it remains the finder’s to keep. You can’t own something unless you know it exists first, Knute told me. That which is not dreamed of cannot be possessed, he told me, but what you hold in your hands is yours and yours alone. I patted him on the head when he said that too. “Very pretty,” I said, “very poetic.”
But one afternoon in late February Nellydean led me to the garden, where a shovel leaned against the fountain’s basin, my father’s urn sitting next to it. A wet cough bubbled out of her throat and she pulled a cloth from a pocket of her dress and dabbed at her lips, and cloth and dress and lips were the same color as the leaden urn beside her. She pushed up her sleeves then and, age or no age, cough or no cough, reached through the ice-skimmed surface of the fountain’s water and came up with the fallen head of the angel that stood over us. The severed head’s mouth was open but it was the gaping wound at the neck that spilled out water, and with the cloth she’d used to dab her lips Nellydean wiped moss and algae off hollow cheekbones and dull eyes. Unveiled, the face was almost more blank than it had been under water, less human mask than mere anatomical amalgamation. But it also looked familiar too.
“Is this…my mother?”
Nellydean coughed before she answered. “Claudia said you’d never seen her face.” She put one of her hands on mine. The water coating it was cold but the skin underneath was hot, with life, with the fire consuming it. “When the time comes, just don’t send me to the hospital.” She took her hand away and replaced it with the shovel, which, it turned out, was for the urn. I don’t know why Nellydean wanted Parker buried, why she wanted me to be the one who buried him. The earth was frozen and I had to scrape it up a frosty inch at a time. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that when the bulldozers came it would just be unearthed again; instead I added the decapitated head to the hole and covered them both with soil. And believe me, I know: such an image is far too pregnant with symbolism at this late stage in the narrative, but even so I buried the shells of my parents and tried to imagine the steel oak that would grow from their metal seed. Nellydean supervised my work but didn’t mark the grave when I was done, just thanked me and made her way back inside. She lived several more months but it’s that sight I carry with me as my last image of her: her back, slight but straight and walking away from me. She lived in her own head more than any other person I’ve ever heard of (except maybe my mother) and she would not take notice of the real world, and to this day I don’t know if she was the least or most complete person I’ve ever met.
Except maybe Divine.
Less is more is as true of people as it is of buildings. Anything else I could tell you about Reginald Packman MacTeer, a.k.a. Divine—my cousin, my ward—would only diminish the future still available to him, a future made nearly limitless by virtue of my mother’s inheritance.
What I mean is: in order to find something you have to lose it first. By that measure, I reckon, I’m the richest man in the world.
That sounds like an ending but I’m not sure, in part because I think the real ending occurred when I left Kansas—that my move to New York was the beginning to a journey that still has years to go before it even begins to hint at a shape, let alone a destination—but also because it feels proprietary, as if I’m still trying to claim my story from the city that spawned it. And so I offer a second ending, one as random as conception (or infection for that matter), but that still feels as inseparable from me, as ineluctable, as my DNA:
It took over a month for Merton and Morton to get everything out of No. 1, unbox it, clean it, identify and appraise it, and even before they finished it was clear that The Garden was asking for one more chance, or Nellydean was. Knute was right: her hoard was worth a fortune. More than enough to pay back what Sonny had given me and eke out two or three or four more years while I tried to find some other way to save the building. Renovate the apartments or transform them into office space, offer the shop to a celebrity chef who could lure diners down Dutch Street’s dark alley, or maybe just keep digging to see what lurked beneath my mother’s jigsawed house in the subbasement. I asked Knute what he thought but he told me the decision had to be mine. “No matter what happens you’ll always have a home,” he said cryptically, because, even though he didn’t live there, didn’t even live in the city anymore, The Garden still had a way of reducing everyone
who came in contact with it to aphorism.
What was it, June, July? Maybe it was August by then, mornings thick as clarified butter, dead wet afternoons during which sunlight beat down in iron bars as heavy as the skyscrapers hemming it in. Yes, August—maybe—but it doesn’t really matter. It was just another hazy day while I ticked away the minutes until I left the dying city behind. Blue-gray skies, burning sun, temperature and humidity both hovering around ninety. The vibration of jackhammers and earth movers on lower Church had become familiar by then, also the crowds gawking at them through chainlink festooned with ribbons, pictures, postcards to the dead or prayers on their behalf. I went there because I wanted to see what No. 1 would look like when I was gone. When it was gone. Would it look like a valley, a crater, a canyon? A grave? A “footprint”? Would it look like something was missing, and would that something belong to the past or the future? Would it look like something had been taken away, I mean, or would it be just another slot in the grid waiting to be filled? A few twisted I-beams littered the hole like bits of yarn and the pipes poking from concrete boulders the size of city buses looked like fossils embedded in shale, but not even the flags and photographs and souvenir sellers and people posing for cameras—mouths set in grim lines but eyes twinkling with the carefree glee of holiday-makers—could give the scene anything like real sentiment. The buildings were gone, the bodies too, and it was just another construction site spewing noise and dust and smoke that settled in lasagna layers around the U.S. Steel Building, the Bankers Trust building, the World Financial Center, and I didn’t realize I’d abandoned the hole in the ground for the latter’s trio of geometric copper cupolas—dome, ziggurat, true pyramid—until a flash of light closer to street level caught my eye. All I could make out was a blurrily colored but extremely shiny ball further down Church where it turns into Trinity Place. Not a ball really, but a blob, big, twenty, twenty-five, maybe thirty feet around, and as I watched the blob lobbed high into the air like something animated—like a cartoon—then slowly slowly slowly floated back to earth. Even the memory of it s’enough to send a shiver of excitement down my spine. My mouth goes dry now as it went dry then, the sweat thickened on my skin, and I was all like Shit.
By then the construction crews had started to notice too, and one by one the earth movers pulled up short in ear-splitting hydraulic squeals. Cautiously, keeping one eye on the machines and people zigzagging their way through the crowded avenue, I started walking downtown, and as I got closer to the bouncing blob I noticed something dangling beneath the shiny mass each time it arced into the air, something smaller and less colorful than the blob itself, and even as the jackhammers ceased their labor like foraging birds looking up from the ground I realized that the blob wasn’t a single unit but a knot of hundreds, thousands probably, of brightly colored balloons, the kind they make from that metallic foily stuff, but it wasn’t until the last operator had switched off the last chugging engine and the street was as silent as a held breath that I allowed myself to accept what I already knew: that the thing dangling from the bunch of balloons was human. Two humans actually. Two teenaged boys laughing and whooping as they leapt high into the air and were carried forward by a breeze as thin as the strings that tethered them to their balloons. Mira, mira, they shouted, shirtless and skinny, their legs poking from pushed-up warm-up pants. A scapula of red white and blue beads in the shape of the Puerto Rican flag hung around the thin neck of one of the boys, from the shoeless foot of the other dangled a sock, gray and torn and ready to abandon him, and that sock, I remember, and that flag, leant a shape to the boys’ pleasure, a palpable sense of effort and purpose so necessary that I pressed myself flat on the ground as they approached me and held my breath as they bounced over me with the slow easy effort of trampoliners on the moon.
They bounced over me; bounced past. The crowd had turned from Ground Zero to the street by then, and even though it was the middle of the day I still found myself imagining thousands of flashes as thousands of cameras snapped thousands and thousands of pictures, although in truth no other light was needed than that which shown off the watchers’ beaming faces, no record than the one etched into our eyes. What I mean is, anything could have shattered the boys’ illusion of flight. A gust of wind could have blown them into the side of a building or a cop could have grabbed them as they came close to the earth—they could’ve just let go—but for as long as they held on we did too. We joined them in the conspiracy of belief, felt their freedom as if we clutched one of their strings in our own hands, and even the memory of it tugs at us, tangles us in its web, balloons and audience merge together and what bounces up the ruined avenue is imagination in its purest kinetic form. This is the key to the city. This is its secret. Though its roadways crumble and its buildings collapse the real monument lives on inside us. It lacks name and shape but not purpose. As insistent as a heartbeat it says only, Forward. Forward.
