by Dale Peck
When he finished with whatever he was doing—and whatever it was, it went far past the point of just showering—he stumbled out of the tub and landed face first in my lap. At first I thought he’d fallen, but then I realized he was licking at my crotch. In between mouthfuls he squeezed out words, “Just let me thank you, just let me show you my ’preciation,” and if I’d had the strength I would have smacked him off me. But his body was mottled with pain and I couldn’t find an undamaged place large enough to put my hand. He got my pants open, his tongue on my skin had a feel to it of…of slime I have to say, even though that seems unfair. But it was as though his tongue were coated in oily sludge and he was using it to sheathe my penis in the same stuff and I sat helplessly on the toilet and let him work, and I think he would have labored all day in a vain attempt to get me hard if his lip hadn’t finally split open and begun trailing a thin track of blood along my upper thigh. I put my hands on his head then, as carefully as I could. His hair, nearly dry, was coarse as the unraveled fibers of an anchor rope, and at its touch I could feel the urge that countless other men must have felt: to grab handfuls of it and jerk the face underneath against my crotch, or throw it as far from me as possible. But again I resisted. I pushed him off lightly, and when he opened his eyes and saw the blood he sat back and said, “It’s okay, you don’t got nothing to worry about.” “What are you running from?” I said, and when he didn’t answer me I said, “Are you running from the people who did this to you?” I wanted some kind of connection to him, but he just laughed and stood up, and that’s when I saw his erection. “Listen to me,” I tried one more time. “You’re safe here.”
He smiled when I said that, and when he followed my eyes and saw what I was looking at he laughed again. A smudge of white flour dotted his forehead like the negative of an Easter blessing. He couldn’t have been more than seventeen. His lip curled up on one side and he licked his blood off and turned and looked out the bathroom window. There wasn’t anything to see, just empty sky, not even a hint of ash, but when he turned back to me he said, “It always takes a fire,” and he grabbed his clothes and ran out of the room.
I wanted to run after him but I also wanted to wash his blood off me and in the end I wanted his blood off me more than I wanted to know what he meant. Before I finished—I used soap first, but then I used peroxide and finally I just poured bleach all over my crotch—I heard the back door slam. He’d taken some leftover chicken from the fridge and my shoes as well, but left me his in return. Those shoes. Later I found a sooty outline in the passenger seat of Lily Windglass’s second-best car that never did wash out. When I saw that I thought of him running through the fields beyond Selden in his sopping wet clothes—for some reason I knew he’d avoid the roads—and I thought, what a shame. He worked so hard to scrub himself clean, only to have black soot replaced by brown dust. I thought, he’ll run to the next place, and at the next place he’ll wash himself again, only to dirty his body with something else. Maybe he’ll be at the ocean by then, and it’ll be blond sand that covers him this time, black soot to brown dirt to blond sand is what I was thinking, an ever lighter progression, and it occurred to me that maybe if he dove into the water and swam far enough then maybe, just maybe, he’d finally get clean.
When I washed the crud off those shoes I saw that whatever they had been they’d melted into two black slippers—you know what they’re called, they’re called rubbers—and when I pulled them on they fit me like a second skin.
I kept them.
I THOUGHT DIVINE’S SHOES had found me again when I woke up the second time that morning, but when I sat up I saw that my feet were in fact wrapped in strips of moss or algae or some other water plant. They were also completely numb. I wiggled my toes and saw the green bandages ripple, but I didn’t feel anything at all, and I was trying to decide if that was a good thing or a bad thing when I heard a sound I’d never heard before but still recognized instinctively: the bell attached to the door of the shop was ringing with the simple peal of a fifties urban drama. Clang-a-lang. Someone’s here.
How long had I been in New York? Eighteen days? Nineteen? In that time I’d seen not a single person in the shop besides Nellydean. And how many times had I walked through the front door without once hearing that bell? Its chime seemed to sound the end of my dream of the dying city. I would get up to find the shop orderly and neat, filled with sun and people and the ca-ching ca-chang conversation of money changing hands. Outside would be not the grimy alley that was Dutch Street but a broad metropolitan avenue teeming with light and life and consumers, and in my haste to greet them I clawed at the seaweed Nellydean had wrapped around my feet. They emerged pale as two unbaked loaves, unscathed by yesterday’s barefoot tramp, and I ran awkwardly on their still-numb pads, catching on to things for balance, a tree trunk, a door handle, a cast-iron column. My feet were numb and heavy but the rest of my body was empty, light as air, and I caught on to these things not because I was afraid of falling over but because I was afraid I might float away, and by the time I made it into the shop the bells were ringing again—ding-a-ling, someone’s gone—and when I got to the front of the building all I saw was a huge moving van outside the window, its side painted with what looked like a reproduction of a mountainous pastoral, the paired breasts of two brown hills and a gray waterfall hanging between them like a string of pearls. Inked over the blue of the sky were black-edged gilt letters:
Merton & Morton
Fine Art and Objéts
Delivery • Removal • Auctions
A cloud of exhaust obscured the landscape as the moving van coughed into life. Nature’s illusion rolled away, replaced by the sooty bricks of the building a few feet across Dutch Street, and then, as always, it was just me and Nellydean.
“Your momma was a fool.”
I turned. She stood silhouetted by a column like a caryatid, inspecting some papers in her hand. But the Merton and Morton van had reminded me of another vehicle, another name.
“Nellydean,” I said, “who’s Sonny?”
Nellydean’s head jerked up. “What you know about Sonny?”
Whatever benevolence she’d manifested in the garden was gone. Her voice was harsh, accusatory, and it was all I could do to stammer, “T-take it easy,” as she shoved the papers into a dusty fold of her dress and advanced on me.
“Don’t mess with me boy. You know something bout Sonny you best tell me right now. You in bad enough shape if you messing with him, but you in worse shape if you messing with both of us.”
“Jesus Christ, Nellydean, settle down. You mentioned his name in the garden. Before, when you was, when you were talking about my mother.”
“That all?”
My eyes betrayed me: some magnet of memory pulled them toward the window and Nellydean rushed to the glass as if he might still be there.
“He been by? You tell me boy. Sonny been by here?”
I didn’t see the point in lying, even if I could have pulled it off. I told her about the confrontation I’d seen outside my window two nights ago, starting with Ay mooderfooker and ending up with Well whaddaya know, Sonny, Ginny really did have that kid, and when I finished Nellydean clapped one flattened palm against the other, as if Sonny were a fly she wished she could smash between her hands.
“Damn it, that is exactly what I didn’t want to happen. Damn it damn it damn it.”
“Nellydean? How did Sonny…” I paused, reaching for a word. “How did he know my mother?”
Nellydean looked at me as if I’d already entered into some pact with him, then practically spat: “She used to run around with him, till she realized what a lowlife he was.”
That seemed to me beside the point, and I was about to ask her to be more specific when all at once feeling returned to my feet. It was as if the minutes-long prick and tingle of pins and needles had been compressed into a single pitchfork stab, and I nearly fell over with pain.
“Ow!”
But by the time the word came out the a
ttack was over. I bent down to my clean feet, already dusty from the floor of the shop. I wiggled my toes, felt the grit on the floor, the split grain of the floorboards. When I stood up I wavered a little, dizzily. Nellydean had turned away from me. She faced a cylinder about eight feet tall and four feet around, lacquered black until it was as smooth and shiny as a funhouse mirror and devoid of any marking besides a gold filigree at top and bottom, and I hope you understand when I say I wasn’t certain that the cylinder was what the moving van had just added to the already overcrowded floor of the shop, but I was pretty sure it was.
“Will you look at this contraption?” Nellydean regarded the shiny black cabinet with the loathing one might bestow upon a cockroach that had made its way onto the dinner table, or the interruption of your favorite family-oriented drama with the news that the nukes are on the way. “Have you ever seen something so ridiculous?”
I glanced down at myself, the jumpsuit, the blood, the feet so recently wrapped in algae. “Um, what is it?”
Nellydean’s voice dripped with sarcasm. “It’s a magician’s cabinet.”
“You mean, like, step inside and abracadabra, you’re gone?”
“I mean, like, step inside”—and even as she reached toward the cabinet I saw the seam of a door, and she pressed a tiny button and a latch snapped and a door squeaked open—“and abracadabra, you lift a hatch in the floor, and if you lucky enough to be on a elevated stage and fool enough to cut a hole in it then you can clamber down through.” She reached into the cabinet’s shadowy interior and pulled on something, and a circular panel came up with her hand; in its place I could see the plain wooden planks of the shop floor. A column of thin silver rungs descended the inner wall of the cabinet.
“See what I mean? Half the audience could see that ladder. And look at this.” She gave the cabinet a shove and it wobbled back and forth. “No ballast. Unless it was bolted down it would-a shook like a sapling in a storm.”
“Let me get this straight. Your objection isn’t so much to the idea of a cabinet, it’s just to this particular—”
“Piece-a crap,” she finished for me. “And my objection is that we already have one.”
“We already have a magician’s cabinet?
Nellydean paused just long enough for me to realize her we referred not to the two of us, nor even to her and my mother, but to her and the shop. “Come here,” she said, and turned, and led the way into the stacks.
She turned down one tiny zigzagging corridor after another, until we ended up where we’d started: in front of the magic cabinet. Except somehow its door had closed, and the front door—the door to the shop, I mean—was gone.
“Wha—” I began, but I couldn’t even finish that tiny word. In answer, Nellydean simply touched the cabinet, and its own, heretofore invisible door slid silently open. I squinted, but couldn’t make out any rungs in the shadowy cavern beyond. “Wait a minute. Is this a different cabinet?”
“You getting weird on me boy?” Nellydean said. Once again, I let my bizarrely clad filthy body be its own answer. “This has been sitting here for twenty-seven years. This,” she said proudly, “is the original your momma’s cheap forgery is based on.” She stopped then, and smiled. “Step inside.” And, when I didn’t respond: “Don’t tell me a man who’ll jump in a river is afraid of a little box-a wood.”
“How did you—”
But Nellydean’s mocking expression silenced me. Her hands were folded inside the sleeves of her dress. If the fine white hairs on her chin had been a few feet longer and she’d been wearing a conical hat she would’ve looked just like that magician in the cartoon.
Defiantly, I put one foot in the cabinet. “If you lock me in here I’ll kick the door down.”
“You can try,” Nellydean almost laughed. “Come on, we tarried enough today.”
I stepped all the way in. The chamber was strangely spacious. I could stand up straight, put my arms out to either side and rest my palms against the walls, which felt lined with velvet. Then, suddenly, it was black: Nellydean had closed the door. There was only the faintest of clicks then nothing, not even a line of light to mark the door’s edges.
“Grab on to something.” Nellydean’s voice was faint, as if she were across the room, and I wondered what the cabinet was made of. Before I could ask there was a sickening lurch as the floor twisted and I fell against the padded wall. I threw my arms out, expecting the cabinet to fall over, but when my shoulder struck the wall it was as sturdy as the building itself. The air filled with my gasps, but when I realized the cabinet had come to a stop and that I was okay I managed to get my breathing under control. I heard a second, muted click. Somehow I knew it was the sound of the door opening, but no burst of brightness blinded me. Not a glow. Not even a glimmer. Nellydean’s voice, when it came, was faint as a whisper.
“Presto. You’re gone.”
I lowered myself to the floor. Sitting restored a kind of equilibrium, but I felt another feeling too, a familiar sensation. I couldn’t give it a name but I could feel it growing inside me, and, hurrying a little, I called out, “Nellydean? When did my mother die?”
I heard another click. Nellydean had shut the door. “Eight, nine months ago,” she said, her voice thin as a stretched rubberband. “End of October, beginning-a November, as near as I could find out.”
A void was growing in me. An emptiness as black and blank as the inside of the cabinet that held me. I could feel Nellydean’s words swirling inside that void harmlessly, painlessly, like smoke dissipating into the night sky.
“Nellydean,” I called out, “how did my mother die?”
Nellydean’s faint voice was filled with resignation. “She drowned.”
The only thing that confused me, really, was the fact that the void should have been radiating from my empty stomach but instead—and I don’t know how I knew this—I felt it pouring down from my head. But the cabinet’s spin beneath me felt real enough, and when Nellydean spoke again the edges of her voice were a little sharper.
“She was on a buying run to Cairo. I gather she went up-river on safari with some-a her contacts there. Blue Nile, White Nile, something like that. Said she wanted to go all the way to the source. They, well, you know. They never found no body.”
Directly in front of me I saw the thinnest seam of light marking the bottom edge of the door, and I rushed a bit, feeling my words acquiring substance and choking the air that held my body.
“If my mother died eight or nine months ago, why is her magic cabinet just showing up today? Even if it did have to come all the way from Cairo?”
A shadow crossed the line of light. “This cabinet came from Hungary. The movers told me she shipped it three years ago, but there’s bound to be hold-ups when you try to mail something the size and shape of a nuclear warhead outta Eastern Europe.”
A click, and the door opened. Confusion clouded Nellydean’s face as she peered into the cabinet. When her lowered eyes found mine she frowned, and she didn’t help me up as she had earlier in the day. “Go on. Get outta there.”
I stood up, wobbling a bit, stepped into the shop. For some reason it was difficult to remain upright, and I leaned on the cabinet for support.
Nellydean looked me up. Nellydean looked me down. Separate actions, as if the person she saw on the way down wasn’t the one she’d seen on the way up.
“Jamie,” she said then, using the name she used when speaking for my mother. “Your momma walked away from you. She walked away from me, walked away from The Garden, walked away from anything and anyone that ever reached out to her because she couldn’t bear the idea of something having a hold on her. I’m sure someone was reaching out to her when she did whatever it was she did that got her killed and I am just as sure she’s dead now, and asking me the questions I can see in your eyes won’t do no good, and”—she raised her voice when I opened my mouth—“and I believe you know that too. You been here more than half a month and in all that time you ain’t asked me one thing
about her. I suspect there’s some might take your lack of interest as a sign of something off about you, but I prefer to see it as a piece-a you that you maybe ain’t fully in touch with yet, a right instinct that ain’t found shape in words. I know you want to know about your mother. What she was like. Why she left you and why she didn’t come back. So I’m gonna tell you the one thing I think you should hear. I hate to be the one to break it to you but I guess there ain’t no one else. Jamie,” Nellydean said, and I heard a trace of emotion in her voice, and I could have sworn that emotion was helplessness. “Your momma didn’t believe in people. She only believed—” Nellydean paused, as if resisting the words she was about to say, then took a breath and said, “In buried treasure.”
My mouth fell open, a sound burst from it. Gasp-snort-laugh. At last, I thought, the old bat tells a joke. But Nellydean wasn’t joking. Her solemnly uttered syllables filled the shop like a gas, and her eyes on mine were so dead I had to turn away. The first thing I saw was my funhouse reflection in the magic cabinet’s lacquered wall, a watery skeleton stripped of even the illusion of flesh. My eyes fled that phantom to the nearest shelf, where the snout of a terracotta pony poked from the folds of a cardboard box like a joey from its mother’s pouch. Then my head and my body rotated a full three hundred sixty degrees as my eyes moved from shelf to shelf, box to box, floor to ceiling, from Dutch Street to the wings of the headless angel in the garden, and as I took in each shrouded form I began to imagine what they might mean to someone who didn’t believe in people. To someone who only believed in buried treasure. When I’d made it all the way back to Nellydean’s waiting face, I said, “You mean—”