by Dale Peck
Suddenly my mind flashed on the mantle in Claudia’s father’s study: Claudia had told me both her brothers were dead, but beside her mother’s brass urn there had only been the one other. I looked at the two boys in the picture again, wondered if their ashes were commingled inside it—but no, I remembered, Claudia had said just the one name, touched just the one picture.
Trucker’s watch caught my eye then: 2:30. I tried the hope chest next, but it was locked, so I padded off to the bathroom, and even as I poked through boxes of toiletries and towels I asked myself if on top of everything else I really needed the encumbrance of this woman I hardly knew, pregnant and penniless, and justifying her presence in my life with some cockamamie story about buried treasure.
That’s when I found the map.
It was hidden inside a box of bath salts slotted into a tightly packed milk crate shoved all the way to the back of her vanity behind a laundry bag. A lavender aroma tickled my nose when I opened the box, followed by the weedy scent of what looked like a full eighth of an ounce of pot. There was also a tiny bag of powder that looked a little too dark to be cocaine; but I reached past the drugs for the sheaf of paper hiding next to it. When I unfolded the pages I saw a floor-by-floor map of No. 1: my apartment (labeled simply “J.”), Claudia’s (“G.,” for Ginny I assumed), “N.D.,” and the shop with the office above it and storage rooms below. Claudia must have used some kind of blueprinting program because the map was laid out with crisp architectural precision: swinging arcs for doors, brackets for windows, Xed-out squares to indicate elevator and dumbwaiter; she’d even marked the electrical sockets on the first floor and the mezzanine. I suppose it wasn’t so much a map as a floor plan, but it felt more exotic because of certain gray-shaded areas (the legend declared these places “already searched”), cross-hatched spots (“likely targets”), a few blacked-out rectangles (“complete unknowns”). Although the map was undated, the extent of “already searched” and the withered, food-stained paper, as faded as the photograph of the teenaged Claudia with her teenaged brothers, indicated a long-term effort, and I let out a wolf whistle that echoed Kevin From Heaven’s from earlier in the day.
“Well, go-o-o-olly,” I said to the empty bathroom. “I guess Claudia really is looking for Momma’s stash.”
Although I hadn’t given it much thought—for a change—I guess I’d assumed that Nellydean had put Claudia up to her story, presumably as a way to keep me from selling No. 1. But now my mind flashed back to a few days ago, to the night I stood on the mezzanine outside my mother’s office after calling Trucker’s answering service. I mean, No. 1 really was a huge building, its basement and shop cram-packed with thousands upon thousands of boxes and crates and chests and piles upon piles of who knew what. Then there was the garden out back: who could say what secrets it contained? And of course the key hanging from my neck: surely there was a promise there. But even as I thought of actually searching each shelf, each box, tap-tap-tapping on every wall and digging in the dark places between the roots of the great old lindens and oaks and ailanthus trees, it seemed to me that the building rumbled beneath my feet, and when I looked down Trucker’s watch caught my eye. Nearly three. K. would be here before I knew it.
K.
All of a sudden I wondered if Claudia might be just as good as K. for whatever it was that ailed me. If, instead of digging my own rabbit hole, I could simply join Claudia in hers. But even as this thought wandered half formed through my brain a different sign made itself manifest on my body. Because when I thought of K. my dick got hard, just as Divine’s had gotten hard when he’d fallen on his knees to show me his appreciation.
I snapped a couple of buds from her pot supply, then went ahead and pocketed the bag of powder as well. I put everything else the way it had been: folded the map and slipped it in the box of bath salts and fit the box back in the milk crate. My fingers left four conspicuous prints on the dusty lid but I wasn’t bothered. This was a bona fide treasure hunt now. The leaving of clues was de rigueur. I pushed the crate to the back of the vanity and heaped the laundry bag in front of it and slipped out of Claudia’s apartment, tiptoeing down the hallway and looking both ways before I snuck out her front door.
When I got back from shopping I slunk up to my mother’s office and locked the door. I stared at the orange penny caroming across the dark expanse of my computer screen until, sighing aloud, I pulled the pot from my pocket, pulled also an empty can of pop from the trash basket and the package of needles from the deli bag. I flattened one side of the can, used a needle to poke a few holes there, then positioned the buds on the pinholes and went ahead and sprinkled the tiniest bit of junk over them, then flicked the lighter and held the flame over the little pile, drew in hot smoke through the mouth of the can and held it in my lungs as long as I could.
Stale cola added its own aftertaste to the harsh fumes, and three tiny hits was all I could manage. While I waited for the high to kick in I unlocked the desk and pulled out the letter from my mother I’d found on my first day here. In the flickering orange light of my bouncing penny I read: “I met your father in the dunes behind Jones Beach. He was one of three black-haired boys.” I stopped when it occurred to me there was no longer any point in reading further, used the lighter to set the sheets of paper on fire, held them until my fingers began to sting then dropped them on the marble surface of the desk and let them burn out there. When the flames were spent I noticed that the penny on my computer had acquired a comet’s tale as it bounced around the screen. I watched it, trying to see if it traced out a message to me less enigmatic than the name Claudia had traced in the dumbwaiter an hour earlier. But the message, suitably for The Garden, came in the form of a riddle:
A train leaves Selden, Kansas traveling east at fifty miles an hour. A train leaves New York City, traveling west at sixty miles an hour. If Selden, KS and New York, NY are one thousand five hundred seventy-eight miles from each other, how long will it be before they collide?
I remembered then: they weren’t called riddles. They were called story problems.
A-ha, I thought. I’m stoned.
I squinted to make the numbers on Trucker’s watch come into focus: 8:17.
Up two flights of pitch black stairs to Claudia’s apartment. No light seeped from under the door, and I pushed it open quietly.
“Claudia?”
Silence. I snuck down the hall to the bathroom. There was no reason for me to return the heroin now, and even through the fog of drugs I knew I was only doing it in the hope that she’d catch me. But Claudia’s apartment was silent as the grave.
On the way out I passed the crib we’d taken from her father’s apartment yesterday. It stood in the hall and I stared at it dumbly, wondering why Claudia had pushed it back out here. Then I realized it wasn’t the same crib. The paint from the one we’d brought downtown had been stripped at one point, leaving it a pale veiny brown, and this one was white, and I realized Nellydean must have dug it out for Claudia. I wondered if she’d just slipped it in the door, or if she’d seen the one we’d brought and left it here anyway, as a reminder—a reproach—that The Garden could provide for all our needs.
In the faint light I could just make out red and blue smudges floating on the white head- and footboards. They could have been stringed balloons or thin-tailed fish—tadpoles, I suppose, although they looked like sperm to me. The idea that the tiny mattress they hovered over would hold a baby in six or seven months’ time was no less fantastic than the idea that the building I’d inherited from my mother contained a treasure hidden within its walls, or that the man awaiting me upstairs was my father, or that he cared enough for my body to lie down with it, not man to boy but man to man, viruses trumping age, experience, history, whether real or invented, whether projected onto you or injected into you. But babies, unlike buried treasure or boyfriends, came whether you believed in them or not, and I abandoned that and every other idea to the future, and set out, once and for all, to eradicate my past.
Fever Dreams
First was the animals. One by one they came and licked my upturned hand. Don’t be afraid is what I thought my palm was saying, I’m not afraid is what I thought the tongues answered. A cat’s rasp, a dog’s sloppy lap, the long curling swipe of a cow. But soon I realized it was the tongues that soothed me. Don’t be afraid, they said, a horse’s velvet muzzle, a deer’s tiny pricks. I’m not afraid, my hand said. A lion’s tongue pillared by curved yellow incisors, the soft mossy bloat of a hippopotamus. Don’t be afraid. I’m not afraid. At the last a mouth opened before me like the entrance to a gaping cave, a tongue scrolled out like a carpet and licked up not my hand but my entire body and took me inside, where the darkness was pink and the tongue pulsed to the beat of a heart as big as I was.
Don’t be afraid, the tongue pulsed.
I rubbed the tongue. I’m not afraid.
Come with me.
“Jesus Christ, Jamie, not again! Calm down, calm down! Jamie, what the—okay, okay. I’ll rent another car. Good God, do you have any idea where this—Jamie, calm the fuck down! I’m calling now. Look, I’m dialing.”
I lay on the back seat. On the glass above me: Dutch Street, a transparent reflection thin as skim milk or watered-down memory. The embedded lines of the antenna broke up the buildings as neatly as a draftsman’s rendering.
A door opened. A door slammed.
“Damn it, Reggie, get out the car!”
The reflection of the dying city scrolled down the windshield like an afterimage, an afterthought. After Effects was the name of that famous screen saver in which lights illuminate a cityscape one by one, but the dying city was fading—first in the glass, then literally. The buildings fell away like daisy petals, he loves me, he loves me not, but what I heard was he is, he is not, then the buildings were gone and we were on a naked bud of land. The glass above me reflected the asphalt below me, a gray veil so thin you could poke a finger through it.
I poked.
Is. Is not.
Rental cars like Buddhists are constantly reborn, but bits of former lives linger. Magnetized checker in the ashtray, seven of hearts beneath the driver’s seat. Activities to head off the bored child’s Are we there yet? In this car: Scrabble’s Y. Ideogram: fork in the road, jet veeing off runway, hero with upraised arms. Adjective-maker: mess–messy, sex–sexy, word–wordy. Value: 4.
“I told you, I have nothing to say. You want to tag along, fine, but I won’t answer any—what the? Jamie! Stop banging on that glass, it’s driving me—goddamn it, Reggie! Do not light that. Ugh! The two of you! I’m taking the Thruway because the one thing K. told him is that it’s west of the river. No, K. H-I-J-K. No, he wasn’t his girlfriend. I don’t know who he was.”
Was I dreaming? No, I wasn’t dreaming. I was feverish but the fever dreams were in the past. I was looking for someone and the fever dreams tagged along for the ride. What I mean is, I’ve never had dreams more vivid than the fever dreams, but even more vivid are my memories of them. If a dream is a cinematic projection of hopes and fears, then a memory of a dream is twice removed from reality. A counterfeit forgery, body colored in, edges softened, offensive parts painted over with self-censoring fig leaves. Dream: dreamy.
“He just gets like this. One day everything’s fine then bam, he wakes up a raving lunatic: ‘I’ve got to find him, I’ve got to find him!’ I told you, some guy. He disappeared a month ago, two. This is the fourth time we’ve come looking for him. I told you, I don’t know. They had a date and then—damn it, Reggie, I told you: no questions. Trust me on this one. You don’t want to know shit. Not unless you want to end up like him in the back seat.”
Still, I always knew what was happening. Almost always. In the beginning the fever dreams were as strange as soft stones and in the end as familiar as the many colors of my own skin, but I always knew where I was and I always knew what was happening. I always knew I was dreaming.
Almost always.
Six days I lay in bed. After the third the fridge was empty. After the fourth I was: what was in me had poured out through my skin as through a faucet. But all that was preamble. When everything else was gone the dreams began to flee too. That’s what it felt like: my thoughts took material form—balloon, tadpole, bank loan—and floated and floated and floated away. Maybe that’s why I clung so hard. Maybe that’s why I cling still. When even the memory of them is gone I’ll truly be dry.
“How you know this kid?”
“He’s Ginny’s son.”
“You mean that white bitch Parker—shit.”
“I guess he never knew her. Jamie, I mean. He never knew his mom.”
“What’s Endean got to say bout all this?”
“We’re looking for a road called Old Snake. He says it’s in the Catskills.”
“I can’t imagine she’s taking this laying down.”
“Endean can take care of herself.”
“Yeah, but can she take care-a you too? Baby, what is going on?”
“Old Snake Road. I tried looking for it on the map but couldn’t find it anywhere.”
I floated. On a green raft, a leaf, an iceberg, a pinprick of land that poked through the water’s surface from a floor too distant to be seen; on my own buoyancy. It didn’t matter: a dream needs no transition. Or rather a dream is nothing but transition. The water was cold but the fever warmed it. Where waves rolled into me they sizzled and sighed into the sky. Once I tried diving down but roiling water shot me out like a ball from a vapor-charged cannon. Eventually I turned on my back and let the water hold me. Clouds of steam enveloped me: it was the fever itself, pushing out of me, making shapes in the water. The shapes were the ghosts of all the lives I would never lead now, now that the one life I would lead had chosen me. One by one my alternate futures shimmied out of me and shimmered away, a great rushing horde that slowed to a hissing trickle. The last ghosts were tiny, almost embarrassed. They lingered near me as if afraid of the long search for another body to inhabit. The final one was just a thin limbless snake rising from my navel, and when it had curled all the way out of me the first fever broke and I woke up in Selden and knew that whatever I had been and whatever I was now, I was myself and nothing more.
A thousand stalks of goldenrod advancing on an equally vast army of purple loosestrife, a stand of Queen Anne’s lace waving its delicate pennant in surrender. Then the colors were gone and it was just grass again, and trees. Now a swamp. Flatter than mere water, a level expanse of phragmites, sawgrass, cattails, a white tree trunk poking up like a spoon in the earth’s stewpot. How many seasons had it taken, how many rainstorms to wash off leaf, limbs, bark like a patient housewife scouring a burned pan, how many sunrise-to-sunset sunbursts to bleach it the color of an old man’s hair. Then I saw them breaking on the horizon like a wave: the mountains. Purple as deoxygenated blood, thick as clots bled by the land. That’s where we had to go.
Darkness. But pink darkness, and I wasn’t alone. It was there too, floating blindly, unconscious of everything from me to the innumerable horde surrounding it. At first I thought it was me and then I thought it was my traveling companion—I thought it was beside me but in fact it was inside me, carried along in the other’s wake, a bit of undead flotsam waiting for the kiss of contact to come to life. I saw the other too, saw that chance rules infection just as it does procreation (allow me this: it’s not the metaphor that’s mixed, just my synapses). Conception believes in the chaos of activity whereas sickness puts its faith in sloth. Both sperm and virus desire a berth but the former is the shark and the latter the remora of the microscopic world. The one seeks while the other waits. But this wasn’t even waiting. It wasn’t…even. It wasn’t me but soon would be. The most that can be said is that it was possibility manifested in its smallest corporeal unit.
It wasn’t hungry. It was hunger.
Fifty acres garlanded by a lazy loop of water, a long narrow spit on which grazed horses and dairy cows; the mountains in the background and the sky above it all; blue and
gray and brown. There was the peak-roofed house with its eyebrows and eaves, the gambrel-roofed barn, red of course, or once red and now the color of bisque. The farm was an accumulation of walls: board-and-batten on the barn, clapboard on the main house, paint-flecked drop-siding feathering the ancient kitchen wing. And there if you needed it was the sign: Rt. 27C (Old Snake). He’d only left out one detail. Spanning the two hills behind his little white house was the New York State Thruway, stilted above the land on pillars thin as a daddy longlegs’s legs. History’s equation reversed: here was the pastoral sprung up in urban shadow. Still, just as skinny boys dream of becoming Charles Atlas, the farm was the garden’s dream of itself. What I mean is, this had to be the place.
She pointed at me from the prow of her ship, her finger pulled me from the fishless sea. Red velvet, white lace, purple suede. Breast a double row of brass buttons running from an endless artificial mane of golden curls all the way down to her ankles. A silver buckle clasped one black boot but in place of the other a single column of teak. She thumped along in front of me on the hollow wooden deck, offered only glimpses of her face. My Virgil: Virago. She pointed at something and it came into being.
“But why baby? What’s he got I don’t?”
“Besides his own apartment, and a dick that don’t get hard when he comes within ten feet of me? Let me tell you, Reggie, it’s what he doesn’t have that matters. He doesn’t have any ties to me.”