“I haven’t seen it. This is a new spot for me, so I don’t know much about what goes on in the neighborhood. You three are from around here—” He points a finger at me and makes a circle to include Milton and Nico slumbering behind me, and there is a tattoo on the inside of his wrist, a cylinder of meat roasting on a spit. “What can you tell me? Is this a good spot to sell good food?”
I look around us and he follows my gaze. “You’re right, there are a lot of bars. That says to me, this could be a party crowd, relaxed residents. That’s what I’m looking for. Or else they get to complaining—you know, the noise, the smell. You know what, I have a good feeling about this spot,” he decides. He reaches out the window to place a speaker on the counter. The music is frothy pop for parties and shouting along, and he twists the volume knob and the meat tattoo rotates on its spit.
I return to the cardboard carpet and nudge Nico and ask him where the man with no pinkies was going but all he does is mumble. I regard him for a minute, and then I turn sideways and rest my head on Milton’s back and he lifts an ear to listen. Nico hasn’t lost a particular treasured thing and he isn’t looking for anything, so what can my rules and I do when what’s lost isn’t a thing that belongs to him . . . but him?
Nico lost so much along the way that I don’t think it felt like much when he became lost too. I picture the wrist bone jutting out of his sleeve and maybe what he needs is a little hope where he’s run dry, and for that, I can do the finding.
I have an idea for how to help him before I go. I peel the lid off the smoothie and pour it out on the sidewalk in front of Milton, who drools and bats the raspberry hill between his paws and slurps it up. As he laps at the smoothie, I take the pen out of my notebook and write on the back of the sign, BATH, and it takes a long time and my hand aches and the letters are huge but at least they can be recognized.
I prop the sign up next to Milton’s red raspberry paws and the food cart man notices and says, “I have a towel for you.”
He disappears into the cart and a striped dish towel flies out the window and drapes on Milton’s head. I slide the towel off Milton and fold it into a square, and the food cart man reappears beside his cart holding a steaming tin. I think about saying, Thank you for the towel, and I pause to gather the words in my head and he waves them off and shovels rice into his mouth without taking his eyes off the street.
I take out my notebook and watch him for a moment—IN WAIT FOR PASSING GOLDFISH.
He notices me looking and says, “You look hungry,” and I shake my head and look away. His chewing slows and I shake my head again and he plunks the tin down on the ground in front of me. “I can’t eat it all,” he insists.
I spear a piece of browned meat with the plastic fork and he says, “Secret spice blend. High-quality meat.” I take one bite and my mouth floods and I realize I am hungry after all and take another bite.
“Have some white sauce,” he advises, and I drag a forkful of chicken through the white sauce.
“What do you think? The hot, delicious taste of money,” he says. I hand the tin back to him and he scrapes together the last of the rice and meat and his wrist picks up a smear of white sauce.
“Don’t go around telling people about this—I can’t build a street meat empire by giving away my combos for free,” he says around a mouthful of food. “But I’ll work around the clock to make it happen. Once business is booming, I’m going to the Bahamas. It would be my first vacation in years. I’m going to be a rich man.” He licks the white sauce off his meat tattoo.
Years is a long time to work without resting. Every June, Lucy and I take the Metro North from Grand Central to a town sixty miles north of the city. We stay at a bed-and-breakfast surrounded by woods, and the owner makes quiche for breakfast and during the midday lull he draws intricate to-scale pictures of pyramids and coliseums for history books and documentaries. In the mornings before breakfast, I follow the trail down to the Hudson River and if it is early enough, I see herds of short-tail deer, and I roll up my cuffs and stand ankle-deep in the water and out there in the early-morning calm, my silence is, for once, the thing that connects me.
The food cart man spots a woman making her way up the street and retreats back inside. He flips a pile of meat and the fat sizzles, and he cranks up the dance music and the light strip whirls with lollipop colors.
The woman digs a travel-sized bottle of shampoo out of her gym tote and hands it to me, and I stand it on top of the towel. The lights and sounds of the cart do their job, catching her attention and reeling her in, and she orders a bottle of iced tea. After the towel and shampoo, I am given a plastic serving of flea treatment that is nice to have but not necessary for either Milton or Nico, and the lady who gives it to me mentions that there is a self-serve dog wash eight minutes away that she takes Sir Kippleton to sometimes for $1.25 per minute. The lady and Sir Kippleton have the same curly poof of brown hair. She makes a kissing sound and coaxes Sir Kippleton away from Milton.
I elbow Nico and this time he swallows a snore and sputters awake.
“Wall,” I announce over his sputtering. I imagine gargling water to remind myself and repeat, “Walk.”
“Look here, this is my spot. Why I gotta leave my spot? It’s my spot,” Nico protests. I cross my arms and stare at him and let the silence seep in.
“Fine! Fine, you bossy little man. My ass is sore from all this sitting around anyway.”
Pouting, he gathers his things and shakes out his sleeping bag and I goggle at the crumbs and wrappers and smashed leaves and twigs that rain down—every piece glowing, a shower of silver light, and he doesn’t notice the page of yellowed paper that falls out too.
He busies himself tying his bags to a knapsack but I am transfixed by the fallen page, and the nest of debris around it shimmers with raindrop-lights.
I pick up the page and there is a howl of wintry wind, hard and swift as a punch to the lungs, and the edges of the page flap madly like hummingbird wings, sending me spinning back into Lucy’s story, and I see her waking that night in January, blinking sleepily at the falling snow, touching a hand to the dark fogged glass.
The wind dies down and I smooth my fist across the fourth page of the Book, circular motions like clearing the glass and peering through to the emerging illustration—the girl lifting her arms like wings and the wind descending around her and the cloak of ice melting as it comes down, a lake of water like moonlight.
Nico yanks on the strings of his hoodie and the hood puckers around his face. “This better be good, else you’re fired.”
Eight minutes later, we stop in front of a gas station with Nico on the left and me in the middle and Milton on his haunches. We watch a neon sign flicker above a building jutting out of the larger car wash. Dog Wash it says, and a flicker later, Do Wash.
The inside smells like damp fur and fishy lemons, and we hear water running in one of the stalls at the far end and a voice saying, “Atta boy, good boy, don’t shake, don’t shake—”
Milton presses himself into the wall and tries to melt into it and when he doesn’t, he issues a command—No! I reassure him with a scratch behind the ears.
I present Nico with the travel shampoo and striped dish towel and the $10.55 we have collected, and I hang the blue sweater and socks over one of the stall doors. He stares and comprehension dawns and a small miracle occurs: he has no words.
“I’m telling ya, it’s the little silent ones,” he finally says to himself with a broken grin and a rueful shake of the head. He folds himself into the stall and the coins go plunk plunk and the shower hose hisses and spits and Nico warbles. Milton howls along mournfully, man and dog slogging forward with their funeral dirge, and the voice at the far end snaps, “Good grief.”
Steam rises, and it billows out of the stall and envelops me in clouds and the sound of running water, and it’s almost like I am back at the shop, standing at th
e kitchen sink and watching water run over my hands as the dough I’ve kneaded for phyllo cups rests on the counter. Dough coats my fingers, and I soap up my hands and the dough sloughs off in pasty rolls and clean skin materializes, rosy and energized as a fresh start, and I know how much that fresh start can mean.
Most lost things I find are useful, or valuable, or old. It takes time to attach memories and create shared history, which is why it was an unusual day when a customer came back to the shop to see if he had left his brand-new dress shirt there. He had been unemployed for most of a decade, having made a string of unlucky bets in a declining industry. He was due to start a job at a call center the next day, and to prepare for it, he had bought a shirt.
The lost shirt wasn’t in the shop and we moved the search to his apartment and the shirt wasn’t in any of the closets or trash cans, either. I met with his wife and the cleaner and the tailor and at that point I suggested he wear one of the other shirts in his newly organized closet, but he wouldn’t do it. This was a new chapter, and he wanted to start it as a new person, and he could only do that with his new shirt, which I ended up finding in the briefcase he had packed ahead of time with all of his first-day items, so that he would be ready to go.
Nico can’t start fresh with so many weeks of dirt and oil and sweat accumulated and hardened around him like second and third and fourth skins. When it is stripped off and scrubbed away and he feels clean at long last, like something new . . . maybe it will give him the push he needs to find himself.
The water clicks off and the steam-clouds disperse and I look for Nico. His head and shoulders appear above the stall and water sluices down his back and heat rises from his skin. His shoulders bunch like he’s bracing for a ghost weight, and he cracks his neck, rolls one shoulder and the other. Abruptly, he straightens and sets his shoulders free.
“Ya know what, little man?”
He towels off, turning pink from the scrape of the towel. “I think—” He changes his mind. “I’ll try—” He gives a quick shake of his head and turns to face me. “I got this,” he says, and he’s clean and dry and I see the beads of hope clinging to his skin like water, irregular, glistening, weightless, and I almost break into applause. He wouldn’t like that, though, so I take out my notebook and lean nonchalantly against the wall to write, A DIP IN THE INFINITE WELL, and he throws the sweater over his shoulders.
“Always did my best thinking in the shower,” he says, balancing on one foot and pulling on a sock. “So I’m crouched there with the water streaming and I practically fall over, I’m hit by this idea. I gotta do it. You’ve inspired me, little man.”
He flings the stall door wide open and he’s still wearing his smudged black jeans but he has the sweater buttoned up and his feet are fresh in their new dress socks.
“You’ve inspired me,” he repeats as we emerge from the dog wash and raise our arms against the runny light of day. “No, really, listen to this. Picture this—Silence Is Golden. You listening? I’m serious, I’m gonna march right in and take my job back, and that’s gonna be our next production. We’ll have the pounding music, the bass, the flashing lights, and out of nowhere, boom!” He explodes his fists and wriggles his fingers and drags out the silence. “They’re plunged into total silence, blinded by pure light. It’ll be shocking and unsettling and fucking transcendent.”
We walk and Nico elaborates on his plan and even his voice has changed, animated, fuller, and now that there is no reason for me to stay, my thoughts turn to my own search. Two pages out of seven and five more that make all the difference, with the possibilities scattered endlessly like stars and the way gone cold if Nico has nothing else to tell me. I shiver and wonder.
We pass Nico’s spot and he shrugs off his knapsack and stands over it. The line for the food cart has doubled to four and the food cart man is holding court, slapping balls of rice rapid-fire into a row of tin containers. He leans out to take the next order and sees me.
“What did I tell you?” he says.
Nico nudges his knapsack with his foot and hugs himself. “There’s one more thing I thought of in the shower. About that guy with the hamburger. Mr. Needs Pinkies. He was heading home, said your book reminded him of it. Didn’t make no sense to me because he was headed to the City Hall subway station, which I never heard of, but hey, what do I know?”
He moos in farewell and I moo back and descend with Milton once more into the subway station.
14
I don’t know anything about City Hall station and when I run my fingertip over the subway map, tracing its network of capillaries in primary colors, I find a Brooklyn Bridge–City Hall but City Hall is nowhere to be found, a no-place, a lost place. I consult with the attendant who sits in a glass box across from the turnstiles. Her face is smooth as black coffee and as I approach she leans into a silver microphone. Where is City Hall station? I tell myself. The din of an incoming train engulfs the station and she yells, “What?” into the microphone.
Leaning back and sucking in a breath through my nose, I bellow the words I prepared, “Where is City Hall station?”
“City Hall station,” she yells back, except the train has stopped moving and her voice rings in the sudden quiet. She winces and readjusts her volume. “You’re here for the tour? You’d better get going, they’ve been gathered on the platform for a while now. They’ll be in the first car.”
I approach a turnstile and swipe my MetroCard—too quickly, in my hurry to catch the train, and the machine beeps twice as I slam into the solid turnstile bar. Frantically, I lean back and swipe the card through another time and the machine beeps twice and I grit my teeth and force myself to swipe a third time, unbearably slowly. The machine burps and lets me pass, and Milton and I make a run for it.
The train dings and the doors begin to slide shut, and the front of the train is too far away, on the other end of the platform, but if I can just get in I can get off at another stop and move to the first car. I wave my arms at the conductor hanging out her window and she points at the still-open doors of her car. I push my legs harder and the doors are just out of reach, they close—they open, and the conductor is saying, “And we’re down to the final seconds of the quarter . . . will he make it?”—and I dive forward, I’m slipping in, and Milton bounds in after me and the door closes on his tail.
“Gooooooooal,” the conductor belts, her opera voice vast and rich and earthy. She reverts to her normal tone, dusky with a bite. “For the little boy and his dog. Ladies and gentlemen, let’s give them a hand.”
Milton wags his tail at me and is confused when it doesn’t respond, and he thrashes harder.
“Whatever you have hangin’ out, pull it in!” the conductor barks, and the door opens a sliver and releases Milton’s tail with a final ding of disapproval. Flushed from the dash and the smattering of hand-clapping, I wrap an arm around a pole and drop into an open seat across from the conductor’s box. Milton crawls under the bench and rests his head on the floor, pushing his nose through the fence of legs.
I sit and let my shoulders sway with the train as it rattles and picks up speed. There is a small square window in the door of the conductor’s box and I can see the bill of the cap she wears backward. It moves to the side.
“That was Broadway-Lafayette,” she says over the intercom. “The next stop on this Brooklyn Bridge–bound 6 as in ‘Six-pack abdominals’ and ‘Six feet under,’ is Spring Street, where you can spend your money, hunt for celebrities, and feel the art ebbing away. If that sounds appealing, the next stop is for you.”
People exchange looks with their neighbors and smiles break out across the car like rays of sunlight lancing through the clouds. She is just another voice to them, nameless and faceless, and such is the power of that voice that it has stirred their emotions and found a small place in their memories. I do not know if she grew up catching fireflies in the grass like Lucy or if she skirts high places like me,
or the shapes of the people and places and habits that comprise her day and the stories that become her life. But her voice has arms and legs, like it can do things and go places all on its own, and with it she has shared with me something of who she is, and she has made me want to listen. With a pang, I acknowledge that I would be the perfect foil to her—the fearless voice.
The bill dips and stills as she gazes into the space between stations, and I wonder what she looks like, the set of her face as she watches the train burrow deeper into its snug tunnel, a metal worm chomping through damp concrete and earth, blinded by little yellow-white suns wired at ten-foot intervals. Perhaps her expression is meditative as she ruminates over the occasional undershirt or gym sock. Maybe she wonders who consumed the cookies and orange sodas and pistachios and left their shells in heaps next to sections of rail where no one is supposed to be, and then she pulls into the platform and watches the way people come, and then go, and then wait.
I shoot to my feet, unfolding my flyer and steadying myself against the pole, and Milton shakes himself off and braces himself against my other side, in case the pole lets me down. Among all those people, maybe the conductor has seen the man with no pinkies; maybe she saw him tottering for the train with the Book hugged between his hands and she waited an extra beat before shutting the door so that he could slip in.
I inch forward and the train shudders and I balance myself, letting the floor roll under my soles like riding a wave. I knock on the door and she raises a finger and the bill bobs to the left as she announces the next stop.
The doors ding and close—“Toot tooooot,” she sings in lusty victory—and when the train moves, I knock again and press the flyer into the window, and I think I can see the smudge of her head through the paper, turning and growing larger as she approaches, and after a moment it turns and shrinks. I remove the flyer from the window and the bill leans to the left.
The Luster of Lost Things Page 11