The Fool of New York City

by Michael O'Brien

  “You spent a lot of money for my sake, Billy. I don’t know how I can repay you.”

  “You don’t have to repay me. Money is only numbers on paper. And I have a few numbers on paper in a bank over on Forty-Second Street. The sale of the farm gave me a fresh start in life, you see, and there’s some of it left, not much but enough to get by. Also, there’s my little pension from the insurance company.”

  “But I might never remember who I am. What if you lose all your numbers because of me?”

  “Lose a few numbers on paper? Where’s the harm in that?”

  “It’s harmful if you lose the numbers you need to buy milk, and hamburger for your meatloaf.”

  “Francisco, it’s pure pleasure to see your thoughts flowing like this. You’re using more and more significant words. And ideas. Talking together seems to be helping.”

  “But what if I discover who I am, and it’s not good? What if it’s better I don’t remember?”

  “I remember what it is to have no memory,” he says, looking thoughtful. He pauses. “If you get what I mean.”

  “Yes. I do.”

  “Even if what you discover about yourself is sad or humiliating or even tragic, it’s still better than losing yourself. We have to be who we are, Francisco. There’s no running away from ourselves—not in the long run. And when a person faces himself—truly faces himself for what he is—he can make a new start, deal with the weaknesses and work on strengthening the better parts.”

  “Is that really possible?”

  “I know it is. Besides, I like you staying here. You’re excellent company.”

  “You are a very kind person, Billy.”

  “Mmm. Hey, I have a question for you: Are we the boy in the red suit in the painting, the boy holding the string? Or are we the blackbird tied to the string?”

  “Do you mean you and I, or do you mean human beings in general?”

  “Human beings in general, all of us.” It is a serious question. I strain my mind to understand it, and then when I understand it, I do not know the answer.

  “Any thoughts?” he asks.

  “I can’t. . . I would, but. . .”

  “It’s all right. You don’t need to figure it out all at once. But my personal opinion is, when you painted it you were probably trying to say that we’re the boy and the bird. The bird is part of ourselves. It’s about freedom, you said.”

  Suddenly I am flooded with quiet exultation. More than this—I feel immense gratitude for my new friend. He understands. He sees what I see.

  “Yes, the painting is about freedom,” I say in a choked voice. “But I don’t know why.”

  “Okay, but it’s a good start. You’re remembering more and more.”

  “Maybe. I hope so.”

  “It’s a drawer inside a cupboard of your mind. The cupboard just opened a crack, and you can see that the drawer inside it is open a crack too. We just need to find the light switch so you can see everything in it.”

  “Billy, yesterday you said it was a locked attic, with more locked chambers inside, all locked, everything locked.”

  “Uh-huh, I did. But the attic door is opening now.”

  “Is it? I don’t feel it is. I have scraps, a thought now and then, like a leaf floating on a pond. Some thoughts rise up from the bottom, some sink back down to the bottom; some stay afloat, and when winter comes they are locked in ice. But all my thoughts are disconnected, like the bit of paper the jackdaw is pecking. Why did I paint a bird pecking a piece of paper? I can understand the purpose of the string, its meaning. Yet the paper is a useless distraction in such a painting. Why did I put it there?”

  “You must have had a reason.”

  “Maybe it was a message to my future self.”

  “Hmm, now that sounds a bit complicated. Could it be the bird was just pecking at paper that day, and you painted what you saw? It doesn’t have to have a meaning.”

  “But why does the paper show the skyline of New York City? And why the numbers? It’s all so disconnected.”

  “Everything’s connected, Francisco. We just don’t see the connections. You have to look deeper and farther for that to happen, and you have to wait for the right moment. You can’t make it happen by sheer force of will.”

  Now everything that my mind is straining to understand collapses into obscurity. I hold my head in my hands and rock back and forth. My tears become audible, splashing like stones dropped into a still pond. The ice has melted, but it is black beneath the surface.

  “Are you all right, Francisco?”

  “I do not understand anything,” I groan. “Nothing.” I hit the sides of my skull with my fists. “Nothing.”

  “In time you will. I feel sure you will.”

  “No, no, I am a house with all the doors and windows boarded over and nailed shut.”

  For several minutes after that, nothing more is said. I rock and rock my body, holding my head tightly lest it disintegrate, letting the agony in my chest burst and bleed.

  I hear him thumping around in his sock feet. A light goes on, blinding me. As my eyes adjust, I see Billy standing by the desk lamp, regarding me with some worry.

  “Francisco, everyone has locked rooms in their minds,” he says in his quietest voice. “May I show you mine?”

  “If you wish,” I say out of duty, though I do not really want him to reveal his innermost thoughts, his memories, his lavish abundance of life, when I have so little of these.

  “Okay, stand back. Over here. Sit at the table.”

  I crawl off the mattress, get myself upright, and pull on my jeans. I lurch to the table and sit down on the two-dollar chair.

  A cupboard door opens. A squeak-squeak, a popping cork, and then a dusty bottle is in front of me, with two glass tumblers. Billy fills both with dark red wine.

  “This is a very important day for me, Francisco,” he says. “What I would like to show you hasn’t been seen by anyone else but me.”

  He sips from his glass. I take a sip from mine.

  “I would like you to see it,” he continues solemnly. “But only if you want to see it.”

  I am curious now. Distracted, I feel pain receding into the background.

  “Okay,” I murmur in agreement—a contract, a covenant—and take another sip.

  Billy opens a kitchen drawer and removes a hammer, a screwdriver, and a chisel from it. He goes over to our mattresses and pushes them aside with his foot. Then he kneels down and faces the wall. With hammer and chisel, he taps and pries, little by little lifting off an inch-wide wood strip that covers a joint in the wall panels. When it is off, its nails dangling, he leans it in a corner. Moving three feet to his right, he begins tapping and prying another strip. When he has it off, a central panel is revealed. He removes a bronze pin from a hole in the crack and pushes the panel, and it slowly squeals open on unseen hinges. Beyond is a rectangle of absolute darkness. He steps inside.

  I remain seated, staring at the empty space. I do not move. Will he come out again? Does he want me to go in there without light? And if so, what is waiting for me there?

  Suddenly he is standing in the doorway, smiling encouragement.

  “Come on,” he whispers.

  Slowly I go to his outstretched hand and take it, a child wrapping his fingers around an adult’s. Without haste, without compulsion, he draws me into the lightless void. He closes the door behind me and now I am standing alone, shivering in total black.

  “B-billy, are you here?”

  “I’m here. Don’t be afraid, Francisco.”

  I hear the bellows of his breathing somewhere close, then a click, and a tiny blue light appears above me, followed by a string of lights flickering into life in sequence: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, white, and then the pattern is repeated in loops and coils, the air above my head filling with expanding constellations of them. As more and more become visible, the room begins to glow.

  Billy’s shape looms in the corner. He is standing perfectly
still, his smile tentative, proud of what he is showing me and yet uncertain about my reaction.

  “What is this place?” I ask him.

  “My hidden room of the mind,” he murmurs shyly.

  I turn in a circle, taking it all in.

  The room appears to be at least twice as large as Billy’s apartment. Against the far wall stands a tree in a pot, twelve feet high, its topmost branches brushing the ceiling. Its limbs and myriad twigs are leafless and painted pure white. It looks like the vault of a medieval cathedral, or a too-tall apple tree rooted in mysterious Iowa water. Fine wires are strung from branch to branch. Billy strides down the length of the room and stoops beneath the tree. He pushes an electric plug into a socket, and the tree ignites, filling with white stars. Now the room is very bright.

  Everywhere I look, I see more and more novelties. There is an antique dressmaker’s manikin to my left. To my right is a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf loaded with old dusty volumes and ribboned ledgers. Beside it is an unpainted oak cupboard, its doors missing, its shelves displaying clay gallon pots with obscure blue symbols baked in their glaze, and liquor jugs stained by sun and age to pale hues of blue and amethyst. On one shelf there is a white ceramic vessel in the shape of a whale, its tailfin smashing down on a sailing ship. Other shelves display arrowheads and a thumb-size stone carving of a man riding on the back of a dolphin. Interspersed with these are numerous natural items, such as giant pinecones, a brown lotus pod with its black beads rattling inside like a child’s toy made by gods, a tarnished silver bowl containing the seed casings of a eucalyptus tree. There is so much more, I cannot take it all in at once. . .

  A gilded birdcage with an open door hangs from the ceiling on a wire.

  On an ornate dining room table, its varnish like rosewood or tinted ebony, sits a large antique mantle clock. Billy winds a key in its back, and it begins to tick.

  “It was broken when I found it in a dumpster,” he explains. “I turned it into something else.”

  When he opens the circular glass door on its clock face, a light goes on within it, revealing the absence of hour and minute hands. In their place are nine planets orbiting a sun. Each of the planets is a colored marble held on a rigid spoke revolving on an axis behind the central sun, which is a semitransparent glass sphere, orange, with a light inside it.

  “You made this?” I exhale in wonder.

  Billy nods, pleased by my reaction, but diffident.

  He reaches over and flicks a switch on the clock’s back side.

  Music begins to rapidly plink and plunk from somewhere inside. It is a music box. I know the melody, I know it, I know it! Out of the waters of memory a song rises to my lips, and with my untempered voice I hoarsely sing a verse:

  “Boys and girls together,

  me and Mamie O’Rourke,

  trip the Light Fantastic,

  on the sidewalks of New York.”

  I sing it again and again, because it is the only verse I remember. But it triggers something, and suddenly I know it is not a verse but a refrain. Then an actual verse surfaces:

  “East side, West side,

  all around the town,

  the tots sang ‘Ring-a-Rosie,’

  ‘London Bridge is falling down.’

  “Boys and girls together,

  me and Mamie O’Rourke,

  trip the Light Fantastic,

  on the sidewalks of New York.”

  Billy whistles along, his notes perfectly in unison with my voice and the mechanical melody. He begins to dance around the room in slow motion, his arms held out as if he is waltzing with a giant bride. He is smiling beatifically with eyes closed, yet he never misses a step or bumps into things.

  When the music clock falls silent, I rewind its spring. Again I sing, and Billy dances. After the third time around, he lowers himself onto a horsehair sofa, eyes still closed.

  I sit down on a voluminous horsehair chair facing him.

  “A lot of these things are very old,” I say.

  “They are,” he says, nodding in agreement. “I’ve collected them from garbage bins, flea markets, dumpsters. It hardly cost me a penny. Except I had to carry the tree on foot, because I found it in the Connecticut woods and it wouldn’t fit on a bus. A long walk home but worth it.”

  “It is very beautiful.”

  “Isn’t it! Like a tree in a snowy woods, catching stars in its branches.”

  Billy gets up and opens a window near the tree. Gusts of blizzard blow in, with sprays of snow crystals, making the branches sway and tinkle. He turns off the colored overhead lights, leaving only the tree’s white stars. For a time, we savor an enchanted winter’s eve in the forest. However, the room grows swiftly colder, and he is forced to close the window. The radiator is clanking.

  “How long have you lived here, Billy?”

  “Since I got out of the hospital. That’s twelve years ago. Little by little I’ve added to my collection, whenever I find something that has a story—or looks like it’s hiding a story, like a secret or a cherished memory.”

  “What kind of story?”

  “For example, inside the old clock, under the floorboard of the spring chamber, I found a letter written in 1898, penned by a young lady to her beau. Would you like to see it?”

  Presuming that I would, he gets up and turns the colored lights back on, as well as an Atlantic seaman’s lantern that has been outfitted with a light bulb and wires. Now the room comes further alive with the emerging reds and purples of the tattered Persian rugs carpeting the floor, and the gold-brown paintings on the walls. I also notice black-and-white framed photographs of indeterminate subject matter. I will look at them closely when I can.

  Billy fetches a cigar box from one of the cupboards and puts it on my lap. I open it and find a packet of flattened cigar bands from numerous tobacconist companies, plus an old-fashioned shaving razor, ivory and steel. Beneath this is a mauve envelope, smelling of centuries-old bookbindings. Inside is a slip of rag paper, also mauve. Penned on it in a flowery hand is a message.

  I read:

  “New Year’s Eve, 1898.

  “My dearest Roger,

  “Mama and Papa will understand one day.

  “Will you meet me tonight at eight, the rink in Central Park? Bring your skates, as shall I. There will be music, I hear ~ a band playing Viennese and John Philip Sousa. My brother Pip will drive me in the horse and cutter and has promised to keep our secret.

  “Thank you, beloved, for the book of Christmas poems, which I read and reread avidly, with a thought of you on every page.

  “Your faithful

  “Phoebe.”

  The envelope also contains a yellowed newspaper clipping, a column of text beneath a photo of a handsome man in military uniform, with medals on his breast. “Roger Bennadine, 1880~1918, R.I.P.” is written above the photograph in the same flowery script as the note. The clipping is an obituary. The deceased was a member of the American Expeditionary Force and fell at Cantigny, the Somme, France, on May 28. He is mourned by his beloved wife, Phoebe, and their six children. The newspaper lists their names. Phoebe’s home address is given.

  “I visited the house once, not long after I found these,” Billy says. “It had been turned into apartments, with a bagel shop on the ground floor. No one knew where the family had gone. I spent some time researching in the NYC archives and finally located one of Phoebe and Roger’s grandchildren, a retired schoolteacher living in the Bronx. I phoned her and arranged to meet with her, because I wanted to give her the clock and the documents I found inside it.”

  “Did she not want them?”

  “Sad to say, she didn’t. I think she felt nervous about my size when I showed up at her apartment door. She wondered what I wanted from her. I reassured her that my only intention was to give her a family heirloom. But she told me the clock wouldn’t match her decor, and she already had trunks full of old family papers. Then she politely but firmly closed the door. So I brought it home.”


  “That is sad.”

  “People are afraid of many things—sometimes of the past.”

  “One must have a past in order to be afraid of it.”

  “It’s not always so, Francisco.”

  I sigh, thinking, Let’s not talk about that right now.

  Looking around, I say, “You have many treasures here.”

  “Yes, many pasts. Most of the messages and stories are embedded silently in these objects, which were so dear to people long since departed from the earth. Some of them must be interpreted, deciphered; others we can simply read. Here, look at this.”

  At the bottom of the cigar box he finds another piece of paper, and hands it to me. It is brittle, mottled as if long ago stained by moisture, its fold lines badly frayed. “I found it when I cut through the wall to make the door.”

  I read:

  “My name is Elizabeth Rose Walcott.

  “Today, September 11, 1901, the workmen are replastering a wall of my room, after installing the new knob-and-tube wiring for electricity. Papa has purchased for me a lovely porcelain lamp in the shape of a ballerina. Its incandescent bulb is very bright, so I won’t need the gaslight anymore.

  “Today, also, I am reading Plato. I do not like it. Tomorrow is my fifteenth birthday.

  “If you are reading this in the future, please remember a girl who once lived in these rooms and thought about you. And would you also kindly say a prayer for me?

  “Sincerely,

  “Elizabeth.”

  I look up.

  “Where did you say you found it?”

  “In the laths—the strips of wood behind the plaster. The note was tucked between two of them. She must have been an ingenious kid. Imagine trying to sneak a letter into the kind of thing those workmen were doing. I like to think of her getting up in the middle of the night, tiptoeing into the room holding a candle, then scooping out the wet plaster, hiding her letter, then re-plastering the hole with her hands, spreading it softly with her fingertips, giggling. Maybe she finished the job by flattening the surface with the edge of a book or something—maybe her Plato.”