The Garden of Lost and Found

by Dale Peck

  “Why did you make up those lies about me?”

  Knute let the key fall against my chest. “You wouldn’t talk to me, I had nothing to go on. I had to think of something.”

  “But you wrote them down. You published them in a magazine.”

  “I had one of my friends pretend to be you.”

  “What?”

  “For the fact checkers. They don’t just print anything, you know. There are safeguards. But I gave them my friend’s number, they talked to him as if he were you.”

  “But—but why? Why work so hard? Why not just say there was no story, I wouldn’t talk, I was so boring nobody’d want to read about me.”

  “Because that’s not true.”

  “But the key, the candles—”

  But Knute was still speaking over me. He said, “Because,” over and over until I stopped talking, and then he said, “I wanted to see you again.”

  There was a beat, and then another, and then Knute stepped back and gestured nervously at the pile of furniture. “Look, why don’t we—” He whipped the plastic from a swivelly modern chair with industrial-strength upholstery, beet purple. “Here, sit, please.” He waved a hand at the half-painted walls, a gray dawn encroaching on midnight blue. “I was about to open a bottle of wine. It’s just Beaujolais but—”

  “I didn’t come over for a glass of wine.”

  “Then why did you come?”

  “What?”

  “Why’d you come over?”

  “What,” I said again, but Knute didn’t repeat his question a third time. “But, but…you wrote those lies about me.”

  “Then why not go to the magazine? It published them. Look, Jamie—”

  “You must not call me that! Only my mother called me that.” But even as I protested I heard the word in Nellydean’s voice, and then, again, in Claudia’s.

  Knute smiled, and in his wry grimace I could see he knew much more about me than what he’d written, or what I’d read.

  “James,” he said. “I’m at that age when men fall in love with their younger selves.”

  “Did you rehearse that bullshit in a mirror?”

  Knute raised his hands, guilty as charged. “What I’m trying to say is that choices that once seemed mutable have become fixed. Options are limited. I look back at certain times in my life and I think, what if I’d done that instead. What if someone had done that for me.” He shrugged. “When I was eighteen, I used to meet this girl on the dunes behind Long Beach. She was kind of brilliant and kind of crazy and she was a lot more savvy in matters of the heart than I was, or am for that matter. Do you know what she did?”

  “I dunno. Did she marry you?”

  “Uh, no.” Knute’s smile was brief, pained, as if he almost wished she had. “She told me I was gay. And I…”

  “You what?”

  “I want to do that for you.”

  I suddenly remembered: I’d never told him.

  “Knute,” I said, softening at this weirdly chivalric gesture. “I already know. I am gay.”

  Knute shook his head. “That’s not what I meant. It’s just…I mean…I guess I wanted to tell you that you can be who you are. For my generation, being gay was our identity. We ran to New York or San Francisco, Ptown or Silver Lake, and more or less pretended everything in between didn’t exist. But your generation is different. You have to find a way to live in the middle of the country, as well as at the edges. Okay, I’m working this metaphor a little hard. I guess what I’m trying to say is that people your age have to figure out how to incorporate a gay identity into the rest of their lives. I mean, it’s better in some ways. You have more choices. More freedom. But that makes it harder too. Everything’s so goddamned nebulous with you kids. Post-identity, post-gay, post-AIDS.” Knute shook his head, snorting. “I mean, Jesus Christ, every time I woke up sweating in the 1980s I was sure I was seroconverting, but your generation—”

  I must have made a face because Knute stopped, waved his words away. “I’m getting off track. Talking to myself as much as you. What I’m trying to say is, I wanted to save you, James.”

  “From…being gay?”

  Another snort, another shake of his head. “No. From New York.”

  Knute’s face had a look of pleading, as if what he was saying was tremendously important—so important that I had to look out a window. But all I saw was a broken checkerboard of tarred roofs and blanched blue sky.

  Behind me, Knute was still talking. “I know how crazy this sounds. I know. But it’s not real. It doesn’t exist.”

  “What doesn’t exist?”

  “That,” Knute said, and pointed out the window. “The promises in all of that. They’re not real. They don’t ever come true. People come here thinking New York will help them realize their dreams. But it doesn’t. It only helps them realize its dream. We—my generation—we had to learn that the hard way, and I guess I didn’t want you to have to go through the same thing. At least not on your own.”

  You’re too late, I wanted to say then. But all I did was look out the window again, and what I saw was a column of windows in the building directly across the street from Knute’s. Through each window I could see a television. Some were large and some were small, some were on and some were off, but they were all in exactly the same place, as if in refutation of the options promised by the views opposite them, the alternatives to the New York lives their watchers were leading.

  “Thomas Muirland killed himself the day after you pulled him out of the river. Only this time he did it by cutting his wrists open in the bathtub of his hospital room. You can’t save people, James. Not if they don’t want to be saved.”

  I whirled on him. “Then what the hell are you doing with me?”

  Knute sighed.

  “Each man flies from his own self;

  Yet from that self he has no power

  To escape: he clings to it in his own despite,

  And loathes it too, because, though he is sick,

  He perceives not the cause of his disease.”

  He shrugged. “Lucretius.”

  “Lucretius.” I repeated. “Lucretius?”

  “A Roman poet. Just about the only thing we know of him is that he was driven mad by a love potion. ‘English major,’” he reminded me. “‘Ancient history.’” And then: “You’re only going to make it worse.”

  “What are you talking about now?” But all he was referring to was the fact that I was scratching my rash. I remembered I’d also scratched myself the first time we met; at least this time I had just cause. The itch ivy Claudia and I had sat in had spread to a half dozen places on my body—carried by my hands, which itched most of all.

  I risked a look at Knute’s eyes. Gray as hearthstones. The same color as his walls, the same color as mine.

  “Look, can I, do you mind?” I pointed to the bottle of calamine lotion in his hand.

  “Sure, let me—”

  “No, let me.”

  I put the broken candle in the roomy pocket of Johnson Montgomery Croft’s linen pants, took the bottle and went to the chair. Knute started to say something, then stopped, and I almost didn’t sit down, then sat down anyway. Ruining his priceless collectible was the least he deserved for that article. I slathered lotion on the rash, and only when I’d covered every lump and welt did I speak.

  “Do you know what I’m tired of? I’m tired of everyone having a motive except me. I mean, Nellydean’s never sold No. 1 to Sonny Dinadio because No. 1 means more to her than money, or freedom for that matter, and Sonny Dinadio, I mean I guess he wants the lot so he can develop it or something, and it looks like you wrote that article so you could get in my pants. And Claudia.” I paused. What was Claudia’s motive? What was Claudia doing? I asked myself, but all I heard was her whisper: I’m going to let him fly away.

  I shook my head. “So tell me: why did I move into my mother’s building? Why didn’t I just let the estate lawyer dispose of it and send me a big fat check? And tell me this:
why did I jump into the river after Thomas Muirland? And why did I come here? Would you tell me that, please? Because I really don’t have any idea, and I’m beginning to think that as long I don’t know why I do things I’m going to continue doing them, jumping into rivers and going three or four days without a meal and—”

  I stopped then, because what I’d been going to say was sit down on the cocks of HIV-positive men, but there were all sorts of ramifications to that statement I didn’t want to deal with just then.

  “Knute,” I said, then snorted. “I cannot deal with that name. Do you mind if I call you something else?”

  Knute shrugged. “I suppose you’re entitled. What’d you have in mind?”

  “K.,” I said, so quickly I realized I’d been calling him that in my head ever since Claudia had.

  “It’s a little Kafkaesque, don’t you think?”

  I said it again, experimentally. “K.,” I said, “do you ever get the feeling you’re acting out a script? That someone, something, fate or whatever, has something in store for you, and there’s nothing you can do about it?”

  Then K. was on his knees in front of me, his hands atop my thighs. An image of Divine flashed through my head, but K.’s attention was focused not on my crotch but on my face.

  “You silly boy. Don’t you realize I’ve felt that way ever since I met you?”

  IT WAS LATE AT NIGHT when my cab stopped at the top of Dutch Street (but no sex, no sex; just the bottle of wine and a reheated container of his mother’s chicken Bolognese, the occasional medicinal massage of calamine lotion). I paid the driver with the money K., like Trucker, insisted I take. My hip was sore from his hard floor. We’d eaten supine, like Roman senators on their couches, but our only cushion had been the thin pages of the Metro section: “Prosperity’s Double-Edged Sword Divides Immigrant Neighborhood”; “A New Name for a New Era: Clinton Spruces Up Its Image.” My lips were sore too, from the kisses I’d submitted to, but no sex, no sex: not while angry red welts dotted my body like chicken pox or measles or something more nefarious than mere itch ivy.

  You could put a face on it if you wanted: the windshield’s high brow, the expressionless eyes of the headlights, the silver serrated mouth of the grille, perpetually open like a shark’s. That van. You could even put a face on the man who stood beside those gaping jaws, a face haloed by the words Your father was one of three black-haired boys and Well whaddaya know, Sonny, Ginny really did have that kid.

  She used to run around with him, till she realized what a lowlife he was.

  And Sonny is…your father?

  I suppose I could have run. I could have come back later. But I didn’t. I walked Dutch Street’s plank, my time metered out by the slap of Johnson Montgomery Croft’s sandals against the Belgian block cobblestones. The sandals’ straps irritated the rash on my feet and the chain of my mother’s key cut into the rash on my neck, but my hands, as naked as Claudia’s, itched of their own accord. But I was raised to believe in the brotherhood of man and I could never refuse a gift, and I called out to Sonny Dinadio softly, in case Claudia was still asleep in my bedroom.

  “Are you my father?”

  Sonny Dinadio laughed a little, quietly, as if he too wished to remain undisturbed. “I’m a lotta things, but I ain’t your old man.”

  And you might think I would have been relieved, but the truth is that’s when I began to be afraid. Because K. had reminded me: he was from Long Island. Just like me.

  Sonny Dinadio said, “I can see you’re a man who likes to get right down to business, so I’m gonna get right to business too.”

  “You can’t have it.”

  In the time it took me to glance in the van to see if the sausagey man was also present Sonny Dinadio grabbed me up in two big fistfuls of Johnson Montgomery Croft’s shirt. He lifted me up and pressed me against the hard-edged quoins of No. 1. “I will have what I want.”

  “No,” I said, my voice eerily calm, even to my ears. “You won’t. Not while I’m alive you won’t.”

  Sonny Dinadio held me half a foot off the ground and still my eyes weren’t quite level with his. “What is it with you people?”

  “A compulsion,” I said, and laughed.

  “It must be. Jesus Christ kid, you’d never have to worry about money again. You’d be set for life.”

  “I already am set for life,” I said, and I looked with my baleful gray eyes into Sonny Dinadio’s colorless orbs.

  They’re gray. Just like yours.

  My mother, I’d been told, had brown eyes to go with our brown hair, and I’d always assumed my gray eyes came from my father. Now I tried to imagine Sonny Dinadio’s face heaving over my mother’s but I couldn’t, because I couldn’t imagine my mother’s face. But I could imagine K.’s. “We’d meet on the dunes behind Long Beach,” he’d said of the girl who’d told him he was gay. “Or maybe it was Robert Moses. There must’ve been ten gay guys for every straight one, I don’t know how in the hell she managed to find me. She told me I was gay too, but she never did tell me her name.”

  I meant, like, old enough to be your father.

  A wail pierced Dutch Street. It was loud as a car alarm, irresistible as a Siren’s song. Sonny Dinadio let go of me and I fell to the Belgian blocks and from their ballast I watched him scream as a wraithlike figure loomed out of the darkness with a glinting spike raised above the perfect silver sphere of its head. The spike came down in Sonny Dinadio’s eye and I could see the spatter of dark drops outlined against the phosphorescent sky like antistars. Sonny Dinadio staggered and nearly fell, smashing his head against the side of his van. He was clutching his face with one hand, the door handle with the other, and the wraith drove the spike into the meat of his cheek again and again. A putrescent stink filled Dutch Street, and Sonny Dinadio’s bellows, and a keening like Aunt Clara used to make when she called the pigs in for the night. The stench was like that too, like a foot of hoof-churned offal, and when the wraith turned from the closed door of the van and descended on me the stench came with it. The van lurched into life and headed north on Dutch Street even as the wraith laid itself atop the length of my body, and here are the facts of the situation: the wraith was the homeless woman and the turban enveloping her head was actually a football helmet wrapped in silver duct tape. The bloody spike she still clutched was one of Claudia MacTeer’s high-heeled shoes and the filthy dress that draped her body had once belonged to Nellydean. That body was as bony and hard as a man’s. The flopping appendage at its groin was as soft as a man’s and the voice that issued from within the helmet’s depths reeked of rotting fish and a drag queen’s sibilant whisper.

  “Your name is James Ramsay,” the voice of the dying city sang in my ear. “You’re the man who saves people. My name is Justine, and I’m the man who saves you.”

  seven

  HERE’S A TABLEAU:

  Kitchen table. Round, made of thick oak slabs with a scalloped edge, varnish rubbed away by years of elbows and plates—elbows, plates, the blunt ends of cutlery, the untriveted bases of soup bowls and gravy boats and coffee cups, the soft bottoms of paper bags full of groceries and the flat-footed legs of candlesticks and all the other accoutrements of countless meals, preparation and serving, decoration, consumption, and, inevitably, clean up. The table’s grain is split from being washed with water, the open seams dark with a century of grit, and scattered about its grooved surface are a half dozen splotches of wax, the remains, apparently, of tiny candles set directly on the wood. In the center of this molten constellation is a single silver shoe, its sharp heel darkened by something that could be moisture or mud or the albumen of a man’s eye, and seated in a chair facing this scene—an observer? an element of the tableau?—is a statue of a slack-chested boy, bright pink, as though Pepto-Bismol had been poured into a mold. There’s no overhead light in the room, and it’s only as a distant dawn trickles in that it becomes apparent that the pink isn’t what the statue’s made of, but a paste applied to its skin. It’s cracked like p
arched earth, scaly, and when at one point the statue scratches his throat—no, he’s not scratching it, he’s just fiddling with a key hanging off a necklace—the dried mucilage falls away, powdering the concavity of his naked chest.

  That’s how morning found me. Or perhaps I should say that’s where morning found me: in the dead center of my apartment, as far from an open window, from the outdoors, as I could get. I don’t think I’d slept. At any rate, I don’t remember the stubs of the candles burning out, but I don’t remember breaking them into pieces or lighting them either, and I think I’d’ve sat there all day if the effects of the calamine lotion hadn’t worn off, if scattered itches hadn’t gradually spread over my body like a connect-the-dots willing itself to completion. I went to the bathroom first, sat on the edge of the tub and tried sponging my itch ivy rash with a cold washcloth, and when that didn’t work I filled the tub with cold water, climbed in, stretched out, left only my nose poking above the surface. But within a few minutes I was scratching, my chafing arms and legs churning the water’s surface and turning it the color of strawberry Quik until finally I decided there was nothing for it but to go out for more lotion. When I checked Trucker’s watch I saw that its buttons and knobs were mired in pink goo, and I took it off and rinsed it under the tap. As I put it back on I saw it had left its pale outline on my tanned wrist, and I thought: this is how long it’s been since I’ve seen him. This is how long I’ve been in New York. I moved here on the first of the month; it was now a little before nine in the morning on Friday the 29th of June, 2001.

  I found Johnson Montgomery Croft’s clothes in the hallway between the front door and the kitchen. I remembered peeling them off when I’d finally made it upstairs last night, when I’d finally managed to heave Justine’s fetid flesh off mine, and as I reached for the pile I could smell his body’s rank odor on them, so I took them to the tub as well, washed them and hung them up in the back room where I dried my sheets—which weren’t where I’d left them, I realized, and when I went to my bedroom I stared blankly at the neatly made bed until I remembered: Claudia. I wondered when she’d gone, and when she’d return.