by Dale Peck
And then the miracle happened a second time: the bells of the shop rang.
And I was reeling. I was so empty it was hard to keep my feet attached to the ground. The only thing holding me in place was the fullness of The Garden. With an effort I turned from Nellydean, turned toward the light and life flooding through the windows at the front of the shop. I turned my back on The Lost Garden and its avalanche of possibility, buried treasure and the people who believed in it, turned instead to the definitiveness of a human being, even if it be a stranger. Again I had a sense of that awful void eating up my insides, and suddenly I remembered it had a name: it was hunger. An all-consuming, overpowering hunger, a hunger so great I could have chewed up gold doubloons like communion wafers. A hundred, a thousand gods wouldn’t have filled me. I swiped at my lips even as a voice said my name, and when my eyes were able to make solid the shadow framed by the light of noon I saw the man who had said it. My eyes met his and he smiled uncertainly.
“You’re not James Ramsay?”
As Nellydean had earlier in the day, he had a rolled-up newspaper under one arm, and he untucked it, unrolled it, held it up for me to see. With the light behind him I couldn’t make out the picture, but the headline was clear enough: TAKING THE PLUNGE. I still didn’t get it, though, until I saw what he was holding in the other hand.
Those shoes. He said:
“I think you dropped these.”
five
“THE FIRST THING you have to do is eliminate gender.”
Bread.
“Of course the suits think the caller wants to hear good morning ma’am or good afternoon sir.”
Still hot.
“But the truth of the matter is these terms are problematic.”
Brown crust, salt chunks stuck to it as on a pretzel. Steaming when I ripped it open, the soft white filaments looking just like…like bread.
A basket full, and it was all mine.
I ate it.
“In fact twenty-two percent of the time the operator misses the gender and then you’ve gone and started everything off on the wrong foot.”
A man across the table.
“So good morning, period. Or good afternoon or good evening, period.”
The man from the shop? The man from the shop.
“And then of course thank you for calling insert-product-name-here. It’s always insert-product-name-here. It’s always brand brand brand.”
The man across the table was the man from the shop. The man who had held a newspaper in one hand and my shoes in the other. Now the newspaper was on the table and the shoes were on my feet and the man across the table was holding an empty martini glass and he was talking about—
“—cameras,” the man across the table was saying.
I scratched my neck.
The man across the table twirled his empty martini glass by its stem between the thumb and index finger of his left hand. Spun it so sharply the base vibrated on the table like a top.
The newspaper on the table was dusted with bread crumbs.
“Say someone’s bought a Polaroid and inside the box there’s a brochure for Polaroia or whatever they called it. The magazine devoted to Polaroid photography—to ‘the art and science of Polaroid photography.’”
I had no idea what the man across the table was talking about but I was pretty sure the man across the table had given me the bread I’d eaten and I hoped he’d give me more. In the meantime I used the flat edge of my knife to scrape up the crumbs that covered the words TAKING THE PLUNGE on the cover of the newspaper on the table. I slid the crumbs into my hand and emptied my hand into my mouth and the man across the table stared at me, then waved for the waitress.
“Can we get some more bread here, I think it’s an emergency. And another one of these, Ketel One, thanks. Now where was I? Still at the salutation? You see how complicated this is.”
In fact I didn’t see. Or rather I did: when the last of the bread crumbs was gone I saw that the words TAKING THE PLUNGE appeared beneath the words The New York Post and beneath the words TAKING THE PLUNGE I saw a picture that at first glance looked like a motion-blurred photograph of some kind of speeding object, a car or train perhaps, but which on closer inspection turned out to be an image of sunlight reflecting off furrowed water. For some reason this image felt familiar, as if I’d seen it before, but I’d forgotten where.
The man across the table said: “The thing is, you don’t want to lose the thread. Ideally a skilled 800 operator should be able to channel indecision into a sale without the caller being aware of it, or being able to resist.”
That was it! I had lost the thread! I listened attentively to what the man said next, because I had lost the thread and there was no more bread and I was unable to move from my spot. Meanwhile I scratched at my neck because my collar was chafing. I remembered a rash then, but that’s all I remembered, and so I waited, for the bread or the thread, whichever came first. Whichever came next.
“So: greeting, product name, then the general query. How can I help you? Technically, grammatically, aesthetically, whatever, it should be how may I help you but that didn’t test well. Too formal. ‘Stuck up’ I believe was the most common term, or maybe it was ‘pretentious.’ So how can I help you. Because even though this particular phone number only appears in a brochure that says ‘Subscribe to Polaroia’ every three inches or so, half these jokers are really looking for technical assistance, like what kind of film should I use or where do I take it to get it developed. This from someone who bought a Polaroid.”
The man’s words weren’t helping me find the thread.
In lieu of the thread—and the waitress, who hadn’t returned with more bread—I returned my attention to the newspaper on the table, and when I did I saw that in fact you didn’t have to inspect the picture on its cover too closely to realize it was an image of sunlight reflecting off furrowed water. In fact if you stared too hard at the picture it disintegrated into a broken-up puzzle of black and white oblongs laid on top of each other like pinfeathers, but if you relaxed into it then all of a sudden it popped out at you: a framed square of water, its surface dimpled as though the pellets of a shotgun blast had just fallen into it, and all at once I found the thread. Or rather, my thread.
“—re-route the losers,” the man was saying, still following his own thread, “only then can you begin to sell product. It’s like programming in Basic. If this, then that. If the caller makes a general inquiry about Polaroid products, then say thank you, let me connect you to the sales department. If the caller asks for assistance with a Polaroid product, then say thank you, let me connect you with tech support. If the caller makes a general inquiry about Polaroia, then say thank you, Polaroia is a quarterly magazine featuring Polaroid photography from the world’s foremost Polaroid photographers. If the caller asks to subscribe to Polaroia, then say thank you sucker, and get their credit card number fast. The point being you have to know every possible question a caller might ask ahead of time so you have an answer prepared for them. The one thing you never want to have an 800 operator say is I don’t know. That’s not my department maybe, let me transfer you, but never I don’t know.”
Because the thread of course was that it was me who had fallen into the water, and me who was falling out of the picture on the cover of The New York Post. In the picture my eyes stared so fixedly upward you’d be convinced I was staring at something besides the sun, and my arm was curled around the dollop of another man’s chest. I wondered if the man across the table was the man in the picture because there had to be a reason why his thread was connected to my thread, but when I looked up I saw he wasn’t the man in the picture and the waitress still hadn’t come with more bread and on top of it all I felt the need to scratch my neck more than ever. I remembered the rash and the Russian barber and the “leetle alcohol” he had sprayed on the back of my neck and I remembered the rash drying up painfully but then fading away. I didn’t remember the rash coming back but even so I was scratchi
ng my neck again, and I scratched at it then cleared my throat and said,
“What if the caller says what’s your name?”
“Oh thank God. Thank you for speaking. If I had to keep that up I was going to pop an aneurysm. If the caller says?”
“What’s your name?”
“Right, what’s your name. What’s your—oh. Oh right. Knute,” he said. “Did I forget to say that back at your, what kind of shop was that?”
“It’s basically a junk store, Newt. As in Gingrich, or eye of?”
“Kuh-nute. As in Rockne.”
“Who?”
“The Gipper? Win one for the? How old are you anyway?”
I thought. “I’ll be twenty-two,” I said. “In about a month.”
“Jesus Christ.” He pulled the pitted olive from the basin of his empty glass, swallowed it without chewing. His fingers drummed the square of paper river on the table. “Knute. With a K, and an N, and a U-T-E. Do you work there?”
I took there to mean the shop and I said, “I own there.” I thought I was beginning to understand the connection between the man and the newspaper, and I said, “Knute. Like Hamsun.”
Knute raised his eyebrows. “You went to college? In Seldom, Kansas?”
“Selden, with an N. A Big N. How did you know that?”
“Your wallet, remember?”
“My wallet?”
“Oh shit.” Knute smacked himself in the forehead, nearly taking out his eye with the toothpick—a pink plastic cutlass actually—that had held his olive. He dug something out of his pants pocket. “This is yours, isn’t it?”
It was mine. It was my wallet. Black, nylon, as flat and thin as the cheek of the ass it had been pressed against—mine, I mean. I hadn’t noticed his ass, although I had noticed that when his arm reached into his pants a tuft of black hair pushed through the open buttons of his shirt.
Knute said, “There was a driver’s license with a Kansas address.” He squinted at me. Gray eyes, crow’s feet. The nose in between was thick and shapely, the lips below thin but broad. “You looked kind of rough back there. How long has it been since you’ve eaten anyway? And how is it that you own that shop?”
His questions, I saw, were braiding our threads together, and in an effort to see if I liked the thicker strand they formed I said, “I haven’t eaten in two days.” I said, “I own the entire building actually. I inherited it from my mother a couple of months ago. And no,” I said, “I never went to college. I just read a lot. Or I used to, before I moved here.”
Knute processed this with three blinks, and then, when he scratched his chin, I saw that it was wide and flat, not stubbly, but shadowed with a couple of missed lines of hair, some black, some gray, and that was his face. He said, “You haven’t eaten in two days?” but I was concentrating on fixing his face in my mind. The thick black hair graying at the temples, the gray eyes, the weathered skin pulled tightly over sharp cheekbones all the way down to a broad dimpleless chin and a neck prickled pink from his morning shave. “I’m sorry about your mother,” Knute said, but by then I was following that neck down to the broad white-shirted shoulders from which it sprouted. The fabric of the shirt was creased with Chinese laundry folds like an opened map—like the maps in all those books I used to read before I moved to New York, those books that always had buried treasure of one kind or another in them, and maps that were supposed to lead to the treasure. But the maps weren’t part of Knute’s face, and I was afraid I’d already lost it—lost his face, I mean, lost the thread—when he said, “You read Knut Hamsun?”
“No,” I replied cautiously. “Do you?”
He waved a hand. “A thousand years ago. College. ‘English major.’” Fingers supplied the quotation marks.
I nodded. “Knut Hamsun,” I said with a little more confidence, “is one of those names you see a lot in provincial libraries and used bookstores. “Joyce Cary, John Gardner, Shirley Hazzard, Malcolm Lowry, Knut Hamsun. He had one book, I think it was called—”
“Hungry?”
At first I thought he meant the book but then I saw that the waitress had finally returned with bread and another martini. The fingers of both of Knute’s hands curled around the stem of the glass and he stared at the brimming cocktail. After a long moment of contemplation he leaned down until his lips touched the liquid’s surface and then he half sipped, half breathed the alcohol into his mouth, and then, when he glanced up and saw me staring, he blushed deeply. He sat up and pushed the drink away.
“Sebastian told me it’s a good idea not to eat when you’re with a subject, all you talk about is the food. I think he forgot to mention not to get sloshed either.”
I didn’t know who Sebastian was and I wasn’t quite sure what Knute meant by subject, but I didn’t care. I was exclusively concerned with the bread in front of me, and as I ate it occurred to me that it was Nellydean who’d reminded me of the buried treasure I used to read about, not the folds of Knute’s maplike shirt, not the bounty of food.
Knute patted his breast pocket—empty—shook his head, reached for his drink. “I’m a little new at this, in case you couldn’t tell. My background’s in marketing and advertising. In case you couldn’t tell. Actually, I’ve never done this in my life.”
“In case I couldn’t tell.”
Knute reached for his drink. The hot innards of the bread melted in my mouth like cotton candy. When his glass was empty again Knute turned the newspaper over, but I elected not to look at it. He spoke as if he were reading aloud. “James Ramsay,” he said. “Of No. 1 Dutch Street, formerly Selden, Kansas. Twenty-one. Brown hair, crewcut. Gray eyes, bloodshot. Both a little fuzzy. About five-seven, five-eight, one hundred…” He let his voice trail off and I nodded at him. “About one hundred pounds,” Knute repeated.
“Sounds like an APB,” I managed to say, still ripping bread into bite-sized chunks and stuffing them into my mouth.
Knute continued as though he hadn’t heard. “The Hudson River. Barefoot and on the run. Orange flak suit. Sunburn. Minor contusions. And, apparently, starving.”
By that point the bread basket was empty, and I closed my eyes. My mouth has eaten, I thought, now it’s my stomach’s turn. I opened my eyes and looked at Knute. Another list of details was forming on his lips, but I headed him off.
“Did you used to smoke?”
“How could you tell?”
I patted my chest as he’d patted his empty breast pocket. The orange jumpsuit felt strange beneath my hand, and I looked down and saw I was wearing something like a tuxedo shirt or a pirate smock, complete with wrinkled ruffles and flounced sleeves—powder blue, though, instead of white. Though I remembered the clothes as among those Trucker had given me, I didn’t remember putting them on. A large napkin covered my legs, and I was afraid to lift it up lest I discover that all of this was one of those pantsless-in-public dreams. But then the bread landed in my stomach and my stomach sent a little message to my brain, and I had a sudden flash of peeling off yesterday’s soiled jumpsuit, running up four flights of stairs, taking a quick bath. No, wait. Reverse the first and second items.
I looked up at Knute again. I was going to thank him for the food and leave, but my words vanished when I looked into his eyes, which were the same color as the water should have been in the picture on the cover of The New York Post. I mean they were blue. Not powder blue like my shirt, but Baltic blue, like the cold northern sea. I had worked very hard to fix the image of his face in my head, I was sure his eyes had been gray a moment ago. But apparently I had failed.
“Hey Knute?” I said. “Can we recap?”
“Recap?”
“You know, our story thus far. What’s happened. How we got here. It’s a little blurry.”
“I thought that’s what I was asking you.”
I tapped the newspaper. “Yesterday I jumped in the Hudson River. This morning I’m on the cover of The New York Post. A lot of things seem to have happened in between, but let’s start with that.”
“Sebastian?
“My friend at the magazine. He got me this gig.”
“Magazine?”
Knute said its name, or he said the name of the dying city, or the name of the dying city was the name of the magazine. “They want me to do a story on you. Back-to-basics hero in the wake of Wall Street and the Worldwide Web. Is there something wrong with your neck?”
“There are too many W’s in that sentence,” I said, scratching my neck. “You,” I said, scraping my fingernails across my skin, “are interviewing,” scratch scratch scratch, “me?”
Knute blushed. He looked into the dry well of his martini glass and said, “Well I’m supposed to be. But I’m not doing a very good job of it, am I?”
Really, what I was doing was less scratching then peeling. I was trying to get my nails under my skin and rip it off. A fever dream flashed through my mind then, the one in which my skin had been a chrysalis I’d shed to reveal a new, better, more beautiful body beneath. It was all I could do to keep talking.
“You want to tell my story?”
“Well, I want to know it. And then I’ll see if I can tell it.”
“Oh believe me,” I said, practically tearing at my neck now, “there’s nothing to tell. Nothing at all.”
“Would you stop that please? You’re starting to disturb me. It’s like you’re looking for something.”