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The Garden of Lost and Found
The Garden of Lost and Found
The Garden of Lost and Found
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The Garden of Lost and Found

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A man inherits a valuable piece of Manhattan real estate, leading to unexpected consequences, in this “strange and wonderful novel” (Joseph O’Neill, author of Netherland).
 
James Ramsay is twenty-one years old and he has just inherited a building in New York City. After the death of his estranged mother, he finds that he is now the owner of No. 1 Dutch Street—a five-story brownstone near the World Trade Center.
 
As James takes up residence there, trying to figure out his next move, he gets to know the only other tenant: an elderly black woman named Nellydean. Under a mounting tide of taxes, James finds himself faced with a stark choice: He can sell the building for a small fortune—which will mean not only turning Nellydean out of the only home she’s known for more than forty years, but also forfeiting his only remaining connection to his mother. Then Nellydean’s niece shows up, looking for a place for herself and her unborn child—and an older man becomes smitten with James, even as James’s health begins to fail.
 
Prize-winning author Dale Peck’s fiction has been called “terrific” by Jonathan Safran Foer, and Michael Cunningham described his voice as “like an angel chewing on broken glass.” In The Garden of Lost and Found, he maps a tangled network of sexual, familial, and financial complications, over which hangs the specter of 9/11, and “tells the quintessential New York story with his delicious style and piercing ability to move” (Martha McPhee, author of Gorgeous Lies).
 
 
LanguageEnglish
Release dateAug 18, 2015
ISBN9781616955632
Author

Dale Peck

Dale Peck is the author of twelve books in a variety of genres, including Martin and John, Hatchet Jobs, and Sprout. His fiction and criticism have earned him two O. Henry Awards, a Pushcart Prize, a Lambda Literary Award, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. He lives in New York City, where he teaches in the New School’s Graduate Writing Program.

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    The Garden of Lost and Found - Dale Peck

    *

    As soon as we entered her father’s house Claudia set off down the hall, but Kevin From Heaven lingered in the foyer doorway. Shee-it, he drawled theatrically, and a long low wolf whistle gamboled down the hall like a lapdog chasing its mistress. But Kevin From Heaven surprised me with what came out of his mouth next:

    Now this is old New York.

    At any other time, in any other place, Kevin From Heaven would have been whistling at the jiggle of Claudia’s ass beneath the clinging silver fabric of her dress, but faced with a thirty-foot corridor off which opened two, three, four, five, six doors (Kevin From Heaven ticked them off on his fingers, although on the last digit he just grabbed his crotch), square footage beat round flesh hands down. The hallway’s baseboard was so scuffed it was practically black and one of the panels in the fanlight between the living and dining rooms was filled with plywood and a leak had puffed out the ceiling in Claudia’s bedroom so that it resembled an oppressively low thundercloud, but nevertheless this was the real deal. This was old New York.

    I pretended to help for a few minutes, but Claudia’s method was so haphazard there wasn’t much I could do. She ran from bedroom to closet to bathroom then back to the bedroom, high heels thumping like hammerblows in her haste to beat her father back from his bridge game. Even so, her efforts couldn’t have been more inefficient. She carried one thing at a time to eleven boxes lined up in the hallway, and with each object there was a moment of contemplation as she decided which box to put it in, what belonged with what—as if, like a hostess seating a dinner party, she didn’t want to place two guests together who might not get along.

    When, every once in a while, she actually filled a box, Kevin From Heaven or I would carry it down to the van, but this happened so irregularly that soon I ceded the task to him and just wandered from one seventeenth-story window to the next. You could see all the way down to the World Trade Center from the south exposure, all the way across to the Jersey Palisades from the west, while from the east the planes taking off from La Guardia aimed straight for the ten-foot wide oriel in the living room before arcing north or south or simply higher into the sky. The chair from which Claudia’s father took in one or another of these views had a shot cushion augmented with a rump-flat stack of pillows, and beside the chair a copper washtub, green as moss, held a mixed stack of New York Posts and Amsterdam Newses. In the dining room a brownish bit of cutwork sat in the center of a warped round table, in the foyer a Thonet coat tree had been pushed into a corner, as naked and lonely as a hanging skeleton in an anatomy lab. And I mean, sure, it was all a little Miss Havisham, but it was hardly tragic. The person who lived in the midst of this sprawling decay had obviously checked out a long time ago, so it was hard to feel sorry for him. But I could see why Claudia wanted to get the hell out of there.

    At some point I found myself loitering in the hallway next to a short bookcase, its white paint tinged yellow like urine left standing in a toilet, its four shelves lined with a couple dozen books. Two of them were Bibles: a decorative volume as big as an unabridged dictionary, a smaller edition bound in zippered red vinyl. The second Bible wasn’t actually shelved in the case but laid atop it, and it was easy to imagine Claudia’s father picking it up on his way to church every Sunday morning and returning it, unopened, to the same spot every Sunday afternoon. There were three or four children’s books, as many cookbooks. An Agatha Christie mystery whose title I didn’t recognize stood next to Martin Luther King’s Why We Can’t Wait and the same Reader’s Digest condensed edition of Nicholas and Alexandra that I read when I was sixteen and living with Aunt Clara in North Dakota. At least half the books had no name on their jacketless spines, and the entire collection was scattered in random groups of twos and threes bookended by memento boxes of plastic or inlaid wood, river stones, paperweights and other relics of an indiscriminately acquisitive life that had petered out twenty or thirty years earlier. Claudia had told me her mother left when she was twelve, a few years before her brothers died; she was thirty-two or thirty-three now, maybe thirty-four. The math didn’t add up perfectly but it didn’t have to: one box, Valentine-shaped, plastic and candy-apple red, declared You stole the key to my heart! but when I picked up the container (although I knew it was silly, I wanted to see if my mother’s key would fit in the hole drilled through the box’s plump center) I could feel that it was in fact empty—that it wasn’t just the key to Joseph MacTeer’s heart gone missing, but the organ itself. At any rate, my mother’s key didn’t fit.

    I noticed then that the heart-shaped box pinned a single thin volume against the edge of the bookcase: The Complete Poems of Gwendolyn Brooks. When I was in high school—North Dakota, I think, Aunt Clara, or maybe I’d moved on to Lily Windglass by then—I’d read Boy Breaking Glass. There was one line I always remembered: If not a . . . something. If not a note, that was it. If not a note, a hole. I reached for the book then, to read the whole poem, but as I cracked the cover the words surprised me.

    They fell off the pages to the floor.

    At first I thought it was the dust that furzed the book. But no, there they were on the split grain of the parquet: a little pile of thes and bricks and freedoms and a thousand other words I couldn’t make out. The only writing left in the book was block-printed in faint, fading pencil:

    parker macteer

    july 31, 1979

    The rest of the pages were as bare and white as a new diary’s—or yellow, really, like all the other things that had once been white in this house. A little piddle of urine sunk to the bottom of the bowl, the issue of an old man’s weakened bladder and his age-old habit of not flushing in the middle of the night so as not to wake the members of a household that had long since moved on.

    Just then Claudia came out of her bedroom, fanning her face with a well-worn sheaf of papers folded tightly and giving off the air of a love letter saved and reread many times. I smiled brightly, guiltily, shielding the pile of words with one foot. Claudia smiled blankly at me, thumped down the hall.

    In the living room, Kevin From Heaven read a newspaper by the light of a window whose curtain was equal parts lace and dust. A door closed at the end of the hall: Claudia, going into the bathroom. I glanced back at Kevin From Heaven, saw that he was reading The Amsterdam News, his brows knitted together as he looked at his already estranged city through an African-American lens. I knelt down as if to retie my shoelace—never mind that I was wearing sandals. The words hadn’t scattered far, and I was able to gather them up with a few swipes of my hands. How small the stack was: a book’s worth of language fit in one palm like a few dark kernels of rice. I creased the blank book open and poured the words in and slammed the cover, stood it back on the shelf, used the heartless box to prop it closed. I wiped a couple of stray adverbs and articles off my pants, a lone magic, the suffix ible. There, I thought, no one’ll ever open this book again. And if they do, they’ll never connect its incomprehensible jumble of language with me. They’ll just blame Parker, which is apparently what they always did.

    A rustle brought my attention back to the apartment. Kevin From Heaven had folded his paper and was looking at me with a slightly nervous, slightly curious expression. I tried to imagine what I looked like to him. My eyes dropped to my hands, but they were their own indictment, each finger thin as a chicken claw, the edges smudged black from scraping dirt off the floor. Kevin From Heaven’s face settled into an expression of unfixed but palpable discomfort, and I was trying to think of something to say when Claudia emerged from the bathroom with a milk crate in her hands.

    That’s it. She wiped a sheen of sweat from her forehead. We’re done.

    In the time it took me to stand Kevin From Heaven had dropped the newspaper and jumped from his chair as if he too had been caught out. He wiped his own forehead as he took the crate from Claudia but was still looking at me out of the corner of his eye, as if I might try to dump a pile of dust down his shirt if he turned away. Easiest job I’ve had all week, he said, hefting the crate in one hand as if to show how light it was, or perhaps just demonstrate the strength of his arm.

    We were in the foyer when Claudia suddenly pivoted and clumped back down the hall. Kevin From Heaven frowned as he stared after her retreating form, then looked cautiously at me.

    Women, he said, in the way that men say women to other men.

    A wry smile followed this word, half request, half challenge. We’d failed to bond through the medium of old New York but perhaps could still find common ground on more straightforwardly masculine turf. I glanced down the hall at Claudia’s ample curves moving up and down in her shiny dress, then down at the stingy flesh that stretched like papier-mâché over my own spindly limbs. A trace of flowery perfume hung in the foyer, under which swirled the rank odor emanating from my own body. I envied Kevin From Heaven then: envied him a view of the world that could envision a union between my flesh and Claudia’s, despite all the obvious arguments against it.

    Women, I said. And I shook my head.

    There was a beat then, then Kevin From Heaven set the milk crate on the floor and we set off after Claudia. Apparently I’d passed his test. But as we passed the bookcase I resisted the urge to look at the thin white volume propped up by the plastic heart, lest its words jump from closed covers and stencil a more explicit accusation across my forehead.

    —my mother’s sewing room, Claudia was saying when we caught her up. It’s mostly storage now. The little room was piled high with boxes, the detritus of her father’s lives as a married and a widowed man. Everywhere dust could settle or seep in it had, and it took us several sneezing minutes before she found what she was looking for: a crib.

    Kevin From Heaven looked at me and looked at Claudia then looked more sharply at me, as if shocked to find his earlier assumption confirmed. Well I’ll be goddamned.

    He pushed the crib toward the foyer like a gurney, and I followed until again Claudia stopped abruptly, this time at a pair of paneled doors. Like the crib, they were mounted on casters, and they creaked angrily when she slid them open, releasing a hot dry smell I was beginning to realize belonged not just to Dutch Street but to all places where pointless memories molder, where nostalgia and self-pity mix to form a gruel as tasteless as overcooked oatmeal. Directly opposite the doorway a wall of shelves was lined with hundreds of vinyl records, 33s and 45s and 78s too, their spines so worn the labels were no longer legible, and on the sagging mantle two urns canted toward each other like medieval towers built on swampy soil, one thick and dull and heavy, lead it looked like, the other light shiny brass.

    Halfway to the urns Claudia stopped, turned back to me; hesitated, then reached out, gave the key hanging from my neck a little pull, as though I were a talking doll from whom she was soliciting benediction. You are the prettiest girl in the whole wide world!

    You’re sure this is okay?

    Her words appeared from thin air, as immaterial—unreal—as the ones that had fallen from Parker’s book a few minutes before. I looked down at her hand but saw only my own, still black with dirt from the hallway. I scratched at something I thought was the letter I and it turned out to be a tiny splinter, scratched again and it relinquished its berth like a starship embarking from its hangar into the vastness of space.

    Jamie? Still with me?

    The weight of Claudia’s hand on my neck was barely noticeable, yet I felt that with the tiniest of tugs she could jerk me to the floor or, who knows, pull the thin chain right through my neck like piano wire. I loosened her fingers then, lifted the key free, wrapped my fingers around its sharp teeth as if it were Claudia I was shielding, not myself, not my mother’s key. Deep breath. Big smile. Then:

    Come on. We’ve got a treasure hunt—

    Oh my God.

    The panic and wonder in Claudia’s voice: it was my hand that nearly snapped the key from my neck, even as Claudia’s right palm slapped her forehead and her left went, more tenderly, to her stomach, and then she lifted her left hand and looked at the splayed fingers wondrously, as if they were responsible for the miracle of life.

    It just hits me sometimes. I’m going to have a baby.

    An old riddle popped into my head: a train leaves Selden, Kansas traveling east at fifty miles an hour . . . Claudia’s face shone as brightly as a convert’s but her eyes were grim, a mixture of fear and determination. They defied me to say anything—as if there were nothing to say to this most basic of facts. She was going to have a baby. End of story.

    You are, I affirmed tentatively. Then, more confidently: You’re going to have a baby.

    Without another word Claudia turned to the urns on the mantle. In front of each was propped an old snapshot, both as curled as the board they sat on, a bitter widower’s spine or his pregnant daughter’s belly, and the hand that had touched that belly and touched my mother’s key now touched her lips and reached for the mantle, and with one fingertip she transferred the tiniest of kisses to the premature deaths memorialized there.

    Momma, she said to the bridal-veiled woman in front of the brass container, Ellis, to the bright hopeful young face in front of the leaden. Her damp finger removed the film of dust that had covered the faces in the pictures and they stared down at Claudia, heads ringed by tiny shiny penumbras, as if haloed by her touch.

    i blanked out then, or blacked out—is it a blackout if you haven’t had anything to drink (or eat for that matter) or taken any drugs? At any rate I was at Dutch Street when I came back to myself. I was sitting in the chair in my bedroom, my fingers clutching the key around my neck. But even as I tried to remember how I got there I felt a thump under my feet and immediately knew it was Claudia on the floor beneath me, swabbing a decade’s worth of cobwebs from the ceiling of my mother’s old apartment with a stringheaded mop. Another thump and

    everything fell into place—the ride downtown, unloading the van, walking to the hardware store to pick up a fresh mophead. The events were vivid in my memory, save for the fact that I saw myself as you do in a dream: from the outside, as a stranger, with no idea what thoughts had passed through my doppelganger’s head.

    I glanced at my wrist: Trucker’s watch said that it was 4:05. It had just passed noon when we left Claudia’s father’s apartment. I splashed some water on my face, then, like Claudia, spent the rest of the day cleaning, or at least stuffing dirty clothes and books and food tins into closets, shelves, trash bags. More than once I felt Claudia bang the ceiling below me as if we followed a parallel track, one atop the other, an iron filing tugged by an invisible magnet through a sheet of paper. But which of us was the magnet, which the unwitting sliver of metal?

    Before I went out for groceries I ran an extension cord down the dumbwaiter to see if the dining room chandelier still worked. Waves of heat floated up the dumbwaiter’s shaft but when I tried to wipe the sweat from my eyes it felt as if the air itself held my hand back, and I jerked my arm free. Even as I did so, however, I realized all that had happened was that Trucker’s watch had caught on the chain around my neck. I felt the thin links strain against my skin, heard a snp!, saw a metallic flash as my mother’s key flew past the glowstick I’d tied to the bottom of the extension cord, and when it hit bottom a thin sound, the sound a mouse might make jumping from one place to another, floated back up at me. Damn thing, I thought. I should let it stay lost.

    I swiped at my eyes again, and when they were clear a catlike face stared up at me. It took me a second to realize it was Claudia, all the way down on the shop floor.

    Hey, could you—

    Don’t worry, I got it.

    As Claudia’s voice overlapped mine I remembered again the riddle I’d thought of in her father’s apartment: a train leaves New York City, traveling west at sixty miles an hour . . . I felt a tug in the extension cord like a dog straining at its leash. Vibrations thrummed in my fingers, in my arms and shoulders and stomach and ass, and for a moment I considered relaxing my muscles and letting my plans tumble down the shaft after my mother’s key. But there was Claudia’s voice again, catching my thoughts, stuffing them back in my brain.

    What do you think? She waved the glowstick around, tracing filigrees in the air. Three letters in I realized what she was writing.

    Claudia, come on. That’s a terrible name for a baby. And what if it’s a boy? Did you ever think about that?

    Claudia continued tracing letters in the air. So. Tonight’s the big night, huh?

    I must have made some kind of face—and Claudia must’ve been able to see it four stories down—because she dropped the glowstick. Look, tell me to butt out if I’m butting in, but are you sure you want to get with this guy? I mean, he is a little old for you.

    You mean, like, ‘old enough to be my father’?

    God, is he that old? Man takes care-a himself. She shook her head. Look, maybe I’m being over-protective. Mommy hormones, all that shit. It’s just, I don’t know. You been a little weirded out since you came back from his place is all. I mean—she smiled to ease the sting of her words—you’re always a little weird, but you’ve been even weirder the last few days.

    Before I could think of something to say I felt another tug on the extension cord.

    I’m-a go plug this in. She heaved her upper body out of the dumbwaiter, leaving the glowstick curled in the space where she’d lain, its arc as delicate as the initial of her name. A moment later a light came on behind me: I guess the chandelier still worked. I waited for Claudia to return but nothing disturbed the silent waves of heat floating up the shaft. C., the glowstick taunted me. C.? See?

    I decided to head out for groceries before it got too late. As I made my way up Dutch Street I sniffed at my underarm. A day of moving and cleaning hadn’t exactly left it first-date fresh. I checked the time to see if I’d be able to bathe before K. got here—eight after seven already, although that hardly seemed possible—then reached a hand up to fiddle with the key around my neck, and even as I did I realized the two gestures had become paired for me: first Trucker, then my mother. But the key wasn’t there, of course. It was at the bottom of the dumbwaiter. I thought of running back for it but didn’t have time. Oh well. As far as I knew it hadn’t opened anything in at least a decade. One more night could hardly make a difference.

    The fetid odor of fish hit me as soon as I turned on William. It was hard to believe anything could be edible after a day on these scorching sidewalks, but I couldn’t afford the fancier fish places up in the Village, and besides, I preferred the wordlessness of Chinatown shopping. You point, the fishmonger hefts a foot of ice-shiny perch, you frown as though actually looking for flaws, then nod, and even as the fishmonger folds your selection in a Chinese newspaper he holds up five fingers and you count out the wrinkled singles one at a time.

    But the silence was disconcerting as well. Fountains of words were building up in me, and in the Korean deli on the corner of Ann and William I did speak, lest something burst from my mouth like the words that had spewed out of the book in Claudia’s father’s apartment. What I said was:

    Sewing needles?

    The woman behind the counter handed me a package containing twenty silver slivers, their spiked ends aligned like the teeth of a lethal comb, then rang me up and stared vacantly into space while I counted out the last of my change.

    I glanced at my wrist: 7:32. The setting sun was just beginning to smear the horizon with streaks of industrial red and orange on the Jersey end of Ann; over Brooklyn the sky was the color of blue steel. Dutch Street, as always, was hotter and darker than the rest of the city, the entrance to No. 1 hotter still, and darker, but I didn’t want to turn on a light in case it drew Claudia’s attention or, even worse, her aunt’s. I ran up the stairs, wondering how K. would negotiate them in the dark; I doubted Nellydean would take him in the elevator. But when I got to my apartment I was surprised to find the door standing open.

    I walked toward the dining room, barely illuminated by three flickering bulbs in the sixteen-armed chandelier.

    K.?

    I set the groceries on the table and unplugged the chandelier and the room went dark, padded back down the hall.

    K.? Are you here?

    8:19. Had he come and gone? Surely he wouldn’t have left so quickly? And how had it taken me almost fifty minutes to walk one block, climb four flights of stairs?

    Suddenly Trucker’s watch felt too heavy for the thin bones of my wrist and I had to rest my hand on the ledge of the wainscoting. I would have taken it off but it seemed to me that the metal band held my hand to my arm like a heroine in a Hawthorne story, and if I loosened the clasp my hand would fall off and something would spew from the fissure, not blood but some poisonous goo that would reveal me for what I was.

    I found him in the bedroom. He stood in the window, a silver-edged shadow. On a horizon precipitous as Dutch Street the distance between sunset and nightfall is measured in inches and minutes. In the city beyond the narrow alley in which I lived the sun was only just starting to set, but my room was already so dark I could hardly make out K.’s face—his mouth, his eyes, the hair at his temples, silver like our dinner’s shiny flukes.

    He was still looking out the window when he spoke. Quite a setup you have here.

    It’s a roof over my head.

    I suppose that’s one way to put it. He nudged something on the floor, and I had to squint to see that it was an extension cord, its cracked plastic coating bandaged by fraying duct tape.

    Do you get all your power through these?

    Only on the top three floors.

    You do realize that’s a fire— He shook his head, took a step toward me. I can’t understand why you don’t accept this Manny person’s offer. Even if you want to stay in the city you could buy something a lot nicer than this junk heap.

    He was close enough to touch me, but he didn’t touch me, as if he were waiting for something—permission maybe, or maybe an excuse to call it off.

    His name is Sonny, I said, my voice louder, faster than I’d intended, and I haven’t accepted his offer because Claudia told me my mother buried some kind of treasure on the property before she died. It’s in the building or maybe out back, in the garden, and it’s worth a fortune. More than anything Sonny could ever pay me. Claudia offered to help me find it if I let her live here till she has her baby.

    The words tumbled out of me, ridiculous, unbelievable—and the most honest thing I’d ever said to him. K.’s face took on a tinge of distant, almost anthropological curiosity, as Kevin From Heaven’s had earlier in the day, and then, as Kevin From Heaven had done, he shrugged the evidence away.

    His nose wrinkled. You smell like—

    Fish, I finished for him, even as he said, Pot.

    He sniffed a second time. That too.

    All at once his palms were on my shoulders, and when he spoke again his voice was quieter, calmer. You’re shaking like a leaf. Is something wrong?

    When I answered him my voice was quieter too, but sounded no less shrill to my ears. I said, Why? to K., and he studied me a moment.

    Is that a joke?

    I pulled myself close to him as if for warmth. I’m just cold.

    K.’s palm brushed the crewed expanse of my skull and a cool mist filled the air. You’re sopping wet.

    I shrugged. It seemed too early to mention night sweats, or maybe too late.

    The shirt under my cheek was starchy smooth, and K. himself smelled freshly laundered, as if his body had been unfolded from a dry cleaner’s plastic with his clothes. I sniffed deeper and there I was, the clothes I’d worn through three—four?—blistering days, the skin beneath, unwashed for the same length of time.

    You’re hot too, K. said, tipping my head back and laying his hand against my forehead, running a fingertip the length of each of my eyebrows. I think I’m running a little fever, I said, or thought I said, but maybe I didn’t say it because K. was kissing me before I could have said anything. It was ten after nine when I pulled away to tell him I had to get the condoms. In fact they were in my pocket, and when I got to the dining room I pulled them out. I pulled out the perch too, the needles. The tiny spikes were aligned just like the skeleton of the fish beside them, and before I knew it I’d pushed one of my fingers through the skin of the perch and ripped it open and extracted a toothpick-thick bone I found just behind the head. I was afraid the bone might not be strong enough, or sharp enough, that my shaking fingers might not be equal to the task, but the bone pierced each of the foil-wrapped condoms easily, and afterwards I threw the package of needles down the dumbwaiter and washed my hands, not because they smelled but because they were even dirtier than they had been before, and I hurried back down the hall.

    A creak in the lintel of the bedroom door stopped me. I felt it before I heard it, the weight of my wasted body bending the hundred-and-fifty-year-old wood and the sharp report of its protest, and it was the sound coupled with the sensation that stopped me. For the past seventy-two hours I’d moved through the world as if I were just outside my body, beside it, behind it slightly, watching it wend its way around various obstacles like a dust-hungry Roomba while I kept my gaze focused squarely on K. and Claudia, Nellydean and Sonny and Justine. But that creak impressed my corporeality upon me, reminded me that the body I was about to offer K. was as real as his, as solid and heavy, not only with sweat and grime but with history. With blood. That something was buried in my blood, and it wasn’t treasure—or words for that matter, that could be shaken out of a book like sand from a shoe. I’d made up a few stories about K. in order to get myself to this threshold and doubtless he had his own fantasies of me. But none of those stories was about to sleep with him. Only I was.

    K. didn’t get off the bed. His voice was light, unconcerned. James?

    I clutched the three pierced condoms in my left hand like a cross between poker chips and loaded dice, stood before K. as white and empty as the book of poems I’d held in Claudia’s father’s house. But K. only looked at me quizzically.

    Jamie?

    In a way that made it easier. K. called me by the name my mother had used when I was still an infant—when she was still alive, when she was still here—and when I took that first step into my bedroom I didn’t feel like I was walking into the future as much as I was surrendering, one more time, to my past. Still, by the time I made it to the bed I was shivering so badly that K. asked me again if anything was wrong.

    It’s just that I’ve never done this before.

    He laughed. I find that a little hard to believe.

    I mean I’ve never had sex in a bed before.

    Oh. K. laughed again. Oh my.

    In the end I let him go first because I was selfish, or maybe I was perverse. Was it perverse to want to enjoy him, just once? Maybe. But in retrospect I think it was just proof that I’d been deceiving myself all along—that I was no more crazy than my mother had been, and every bit as selfish. Whatever the case, I unwrapped the condom myself, unrolled it on him myself, I rolled over and wrapped my sighs in a faceful of pillow and the worst part of it was that I did enjoy it. I’m haunted by that pleasure still.

    It was only after he’d slipped out of and off me that I climbed on top of him.

    I don’t do that. K.’s voice was sleepy and self-mocking, syrupy with the sound of lust satisfied.

    Tonight you do.

    I heard his breath catch. Felt him stiffen beneath me, then, a moment later, relax.

    I suppose I owe you. Just go easy on me, kid, it’s been a long time.

    If I squinted I could see the hole in the foil, but the hole in the condom was invisible. But the hole I was looking for was the one I’d sought earlier in the day—if not a note, a hole—and I found myself wondering if even a virus could squeeze through something that small. I should’ve used my mother’s key, I thought, reaching for my chest reflexively. But the key still wasn’t there, and I laughed under my breath.

    Self-consciously—was he doing something wrong? how could he make it better?—K. asked me what was so funny.

    Oh, nothing. I was just thinking of that story you told me.

    What story was—aaah!—that?

    The one about that girl. On Long Island. The one whose family sent her away. After you got her pregnant.

    I didn’t . . . I mean . . . what made . . . you think—of!—that?

    Trucker’s watch said it was 12:30 in the morning when I found the chain on the bedside lamp and pulled it, and even as light added its shadows to the room I felt the ghostly tug of Claudia’s hand around my neck, and I wondered if this was the lock the key had been meant to open.

    Oh, Jamie, please, K. covered his eyes with one hand, why would you want to do something like that? Then he took his hand from his eyes and looked at the semen dripping onto the wet hairs of his stomach through the perforated tip of the condom. James?

    That girl? She was my mother.

    1: Fort

    Ah, bear in mind this garden was enchanted!

    —Edgar Allan Poe

    quoted in Jorge Luis Borges,

    "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote

    1

    the city was dying, you could see it from the air. those rows of up-thrust gray rectangles: what were they but the markers of an overcrowded cemetery? And the bright

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