“We interrupt this train broadcast to bring you this important message. A book has been lost. If you have seen, or know anything about, a lost leather book, please come forward. Pronto.”
I scan the train for signs and people shuffle a little, glance to the side, to see if the Book has crept among their feet.
“If you know something, don’t sit on it like some lazy punk-ass 4 train,” the conductor warns. “To encourage compliance, I’ll treat you to a little aria called ‘Habanera.’ You may have heard of it.”
The bill wags and the intercom crackles. I find myself on the edge of my seat and I can feel the waiting around me, a collective held breath, and then the conductor begins to sing. Her voice swells with spirited emotion and the bill jabs and feints like a conductor’s baton as her passion rises, and my heart beats faster and the train erupts in applause and everyone is beaming. Milton does not even howl and his muzzle trembles.
When the applause tapers off, she jumps back on the intercom and says in her normal voice, “You can return the favor by looking out for this book.” The bill turns to the side and I imagine her throwing a wink my way.
“Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. I’m Sally Fields, someday-superstar. Next time you’re in Sydney or London with your ticket to Carmen, look for my name in lights. You’ll say to yourself, Sally Fields? And then you’ll know—that’s the day I finally got mine. Here we go, this is Canal Street. All you cheap people, get off here. See you at the Palais Garnieeeeeer. Next stop is Brooklyn Bridge–City Hall.”
The intercom squeals and blinks out, and Milton and I step onto the platform and reenter at the front of the train. There are twenty or so people clumped together in the middle of the car and a man standing in the aisle with a black logoed vest and caterpillar mustache and jolly cheeks, and he has paused in the middle of some kind of speech and everyone is looking at him, waiting for him to resume, and I drop into a seat and slide toward the fringes of the group before anyone can take a rare interest in my presence.
“Now, the station we’re about to see has been closed for over half a century—it was incompatible with the new, longer train designs, and you’ll see why when we pull in,” he says, continuing his introductions without seeing Milton and me slip in.
I keep my expression neutral, leaning over like I belong to the neighboring family carrying matching green whistles, and it is a good thing that people tend to look past me and the tour leader is saying, “You’re among the lucky few. It’s only accessible a handful of times each year through this tour. If you look inside the pamphlet I handed out on the platform . . .”
Milton meanders away to look for hidden things, sniffing and thwacking knees as he works his way down the aisle. I lean against the back of the seat and close my eyes, and the tour leader starts going through the rules, no littering or leaving anything behind, and photography for personal use is permitted but camera stands are not. The space of the car seems flabby without the conductor’s voice stretching it, and it is evident to me that she yearns for a new and bigger stage. Her longing is so different from mine that there should be nothing for me to identify with but I can see how the core is the same, the underlying urge to look, even if it is for different things. I feel a fleeting moment of solidarity as we brush past each other, the voice and I, like lone ships searching in the night.
Milton returns to me and his face scrunches when he buries it in my lap. He peers up at me and the whites show along the bottoms of his eyes. I look back at him and wonder. There are others out there, and how many are they, searching for things that were not owned or advertised in Lost flyers or even known and named? Does that mean that as isolated as I feel, alone on the waters, I only need to cast a light and look around to see that we are all a part of the same ocean, the same story?
Milton sits back and puffs his chest out—We’re on the right track—panting and squinting like a wind is blowing at him, and I can feel it too. I have two pages in my pocket, and I am getting closer to finding the rest of the Book.
The train accelerates and shudders and the fluorescent lights flicker, stabilizing when the train slows and enters the station.
Finally the voice returns—“Last stop. Ladies and gentlemen, get steppin’, get steppin’. I need to get a soda,” and the conductor signs off with a final click.
The doors pull apart and because it is the end of the line, I rustle and prepare to deboard along with everyone else. Throats are cleared, spines straightened, legs braced, bulky cameras cradled at the ready.
“Not quite yet,” the tour leader says. He hitches up his too-big pants with its hanging key rings and walkie-talkie and regards the group and his gaze falls on me and he dimples.
“For now, picture the year 1904. America is hurtling forward into the new century—to the tune of Joplin’s ‘Maple Leaf Rag,’ merry and bright as an ice-cream truck, and the groaning of hundreds of thousands of immigrants—borne on the steel wheels of industrialization and names like Rockefeller and Carnegie and J.P. Morgan. It is October 27. As the day dawns, as the world grows toward the sky, dwellers in the city of dreams and the city of despair and most of all the city of possibility, go underground for the first time.”
The tour leader’s voice crackles warm as a fireplace and our car fills with a distant clamor and I catch a whiff of shoeshine and sepia-toned anticipation and the shrill keening of a whistle. The train lurches into motion again, its lights hollowing out the black tunnel, slowing to a crawl to take a sharp turn.
“In the next four decades, Model Ts will appear in middle-class driveways and legs will emerge bare and bold and pale beneath shortened skirts, whiskey will be shaken and stirred in hushed quarters and the Second World War will consume the earth and City Hall station will lie still and silent as a tomb, misplaced by time. But on this day in 1904, we are untouched by what is to come, for New York’s first subway has opened and its crown jewel is City Hall station, where the future swells large with promise, glorious.”
The tour leader’s voice diffuses like a misty breath as the tunnel yawns open and our train surfaces from the gloom amid the haunting siren song of wheels on rails. The doors release and open, and he bows with an outswept arm.
“It’s just past eleven. You have an hour, and I’ll be here if you have any questions,” he says, and the group claps politely and files out, and I clap a little harder.
We step out and the air feels like old metal against my skin and Milton noses the platform and sneezes. I face forward and the station uncoils ahead of us like a snake, a tunnel of white and emerald-green tiles, cool and gleaming and decaying in places. The top of the snake’s back is studded with three amethyst glass windows open to the sky outside. Everything is curved—the tracks and the platform wrapped around them, and the arches holding up the ceiling and lining the water-stained brick walls, and the entrances to passages and stairwells and the rusty lead flowers blooming in the skylights; and all the colors of the platform, white and green and blue, are drawn out poison-bright by the light of day falling through the glass and the lit chandeliers descending from the arched ceilings like wrought-iron spiders.
The others fan out around me and behind me, milling about at various intervals with their cameras blinking and clicking, speaking in whispers. One hand trailing along the wall, I wander forward with my head tilted up, mesmerized by the unexpected opulence of the colors and the shapes, the sense of faded grandeur old and fine and palpable as the dust coating the archways and chandeliers, and I nearly bump into a cluster of tourists that have squatted for photos.
I redirect my path and when I take my hand away from the wall the pads of my fingers are dark with steel powder, each smudge containing at its center a bright whorl, an island galaxy.
I follow the tunnel as it veers up into a mezzanine area, elegant with its arching walls and vaulted ceiling, a tiled dome topped by a skylight eye. A shaft of light pours in and I can see dust motes
turning in the rosy softness, and beyond it a ladder leaning against a crumbling part of the wall with a floppy pile of sandbags and a crusted bucket underneath.
I step and turn and step and turn under the dome like waltzing in the ballroom of an aging queen, and it makes me feel a little sad to breathe in what once was, and to see that even something so solid and strong, a place of pride and great affection, could be left behind and forgotten, made to hobble through the unforgiving passages of time alone, no longer useful and no longer wanted.
FILTERED THROUGH THE LENS OF DAYS GONE BY, I take a moment to write as I try to puzzle out why the man with no pinkies would pass through here on his way home.
I put my notebook away. It does not make sense; with its time come and gone, the station is closed and cut off, not connected to anywhere or even open to the public. I note the disquieting sense that something important is missing, a hollow space underneath the quaint chipped tiles spelling CITY HALL, the thoughtful wooden benches and handrails, the informative arrows pointing the way to exits, the stairways with their first and last steps striped with yellow caution paint.
All of it is meant for people, for crowds, their liveliness and purposes and ambitions meant to fill and animate the empty spaces—the elderly resting on the benches and the children swinging from the handrails and the commuters hurrying up and down, up and down. Instead, now, the empty spaces gape, with only a curious group of tourists to flit across them and the faded light of yesterday slipping through the cracks.
Footsteps approach, the others arriving to explore the mezzanine, and Milton and I dodge them on our way out. I know that the man with no pinkies was going home and I know that he came here, and now I need to figure out where his home is. I repeat the first rule in my head—look in the obvious places—and could his home be here, in the station itself, and if so, where would he choose to build his house?
I think of the forts I used to build in my bedroom, in the corner with the window and the built-in wall lamp. Since there was no one else, just me, I entertained myself by attaching sheets with clothespins and pitching the sheets over the curtain rod and the lamp and chairs dragged from the kitchen. I weighted down the ends with stacks of books and plugged gaps in the sheet-walls with pillows and turned a mesh laundry hamper with zippered lids into an entrance tunnel. I brought snacks with me, and water, and a flashlight, and with no one else, just me, I played and napped and daydreamed.
I stopped when my forts started making me feel suffocated and abandoned rather than safe; I worried I would be forgotten there, with my limbs all crammed together, but perhaps the man with no pinkies was still in his. A secret nook in the lost station—a fort where he could hide, a place he could keep the Book.
I think of the places it would make sense for a fort to be. Like mine, his would be somewhere out of the way, a small far corner and not a main area, and so I pay careful attention to recesses in the tiled walls, shadowed alcoves and secondary passages.
One passage loops back to the platform and I start over, climbing another set of stairs and poking my head into a second passage, and this one slopes up and ends in a graffiti-covered wall and balled up at the foot of the wall is a mixed clump of plastic bags and softening newspapers and a thin blanket, mottled purple-gray like a sheet of dryer lint.
Milton snuffles down the passage, and at the end he stops and turns to me with the same confused look he wore when Lucy found him surrounded by stuffing torn out of the Easter bunny she intended for a countertop display. His tail thumps against the brick, swings back and bounces off the trash-stuffing.
I slide my gaze down the wall, a canvas of blackened bricks, starting with the bubbled names at the top, JACKIE + JOHNNY, and underneath that a green octopus stretched out like a neuron and a skull with monkey ears, and midway down a thicket of thorny letters.
The crack in the wall is threadlike, barely noticeable, but I can see the mercury-bright insides dribbling out and my heart leaps and I hurry up the passage to join Milton. I pinch my brows and study the bricks beneath the graffiti paint until I catch another glimpse of the sign, the liquid silver-blue light bleeding out of a hairline fracture in the wall. The Book has come this way. The trail runs down the wall and appears to point straight to the ball of trash but that can’t be where it leads.
I kick the trash into a corner and see what was previously hidden, an uneven hole in the base of the wall where someone knocked out what looks like an air vent. I bend at the waist and peer inside like I am four or five again, checking under the bed for monsters, and I see a coffin of space beyond the vent, a two-foot gap between a dirt floor and a cobblestone ceiling, and then, beyond that, darkness.
I stretch out on my stomach and my heart beats against the concrete floor of the passage. I make sharp points with my elbows and knees and pull myself forward to poke my head into the hole, and it smells like gray sand and iron and in these close quarters the darkness feels compressed, settling against the back of my neck like a blanket, warm, with a gentle weight.
I pull my head back out and straighten, sitting on my knees and breathing deeply, the air now light and loose in comparison. I look to my left, which leads back to the platform, and I look up and to my right, blink and shift to catch another glimpse of the silver-blue glimmer, and I lean over and look straight into the darkness of the tunnel. I think again about building forts, and the mesh hamper I tipped over and unzipped. A tunnel leading into my fort—an entrance, a point of departure.
Even if I missed the clue pointing the way, where else would the Book be but in there?
I kneel in front of Milton and make a gesture, Stay, because I know him, and I know that his first instinct will be to come with me, ears swiveling and nose twitching, alert to potential dangers. One rainy afternoon when I returned from school, I hurried across the street to reach the shelter of the shop as he watched from the window, and a horn blared and tires screamed and suddenly, before anyone else had time to react, he was there, quaking as he braced himself against my shins, and I blinked and saw the full flag of his tail turned limp and scraggly from the downpour and the minibus swerving harmlessly away.
Milton may shy away from fort entrances and tunnel slides at the playground and kennels at the veterinary clinic and gopher holes when they collapse and threaten to swallow him, but I know that he will go where I go even though enclosed places are to him what high places are to me. I resolve to go forward alone, to spare him that terror, and I repeat the gesture, Stay, and he cocks his head, not understanding why, and I turn away before I can lose my nerve.
I sprawl out and push forward, scrabbling over the dirt like a sand turtle, and as the light starts to slip away I clamp my jaw shut and breathe dry and tight through my nose and try not to think about the cobblestone ceiling pressed low over me.
After a few feet, I crane my head back to remind Milton not to follow, and sure enough, he has inched his way into the mouth of the hole, dragging himself slowly through the sticky syrup of his fear.
Stay, I think, holding up a palm, and his eyes beam back an anxious gold. He slides another paw forward, gingerly, like he is afraid the crawl space will implode, bits of rock and mortar pattering down around him like hail.
I repeat the command, more firmly, and he whines and wriggles out and plants himself in front of the tunnel to keep watch. I’ll be here. I can see the proud feathering of his chest, his tail stiff, frozen to the ground as he holds himself straight and still.
I crawl forward until I can no longer see Milton when I look back for reassurance, or even my own forearms braced underneath me. In the absence of light, my head seems to inflate like a balloon and drift away, and the sound of my breathing is too loud and muted at the same time, the woolly darkness soaking up my breaths as quickly as my lungs can press them out.
I twist onto one hip and fumble for the two Book pages in my pocket to remind myself of what I am looking for, and I reach past the
lump in my throat, feel the shape of the steel in my chest and the Moo that lives there now too, and I move forward, one arm in front of the other, one knee in front of the other, eyes stretched open, blind and unblinking.
My arms and legs tremble from the strain of holding up my weight and propelling myself forward. My head grazes rock and maybe I am imagining it but it feels like the space is tightening around me, the ceiling pressing closer.
I continue on, another ten feet—twenty—there is no stopping and I crawl forward in the darkness and microscopic hairs rise and prickle in my ears and nostrils and soon the prickling is everywhere, under my fingernails and behind my eyes, as my senses stretch and fine-tune. I guess that I am about forty feet in when they pick up an almost imperceptible shift in the air, a watery colorless quality spreading through the inky dark like just before dawn, when night and day touch and start to overlap.
I crawl forward and the darkness recedes until I can see the blot of movement when I pick up my left arm and put it back down, and the dizzy swelling feeling subsides, my head deflating back to a normal size, and then I see where the dirt floor drops away, a fuzzy cone of yellow light sent up by some light source below.
I inch closer and a damp chill emanates from the bright hole, a slight breeze, the exchange of air from different places. I lean over the edge and promptly withdraw from the blast of light, blinking rapidly as my eyes well up, and I wait a moment before leaning forward again and squinting over the edge.
This time I can make out a crude shaft, round and narrow like a straw jammed into the dirt and rock, with a rusted metal ladder leaning against one side. The light is coming from somewhere in the shaft and it is too bright to see the bottom, which is for the best.
I flip over and swing my legs over the edge, searching with one toe. I find a rung and hook my feet around the sides of the ladder and test my weight. The ladder squeaks in protest but it does not move, does not snap down the middle, and so I suck in a breath and start to climb down into the shaft.
The Luster of Lost Things Page 12