I am careful not to look for the ground until my foot hits solid dirt. When it does, I breathe a sigh of relief and take a few steps away from the ladder and look around.
My first thought is, I am in the space between stations. But I am not observing the scene from behind a rattling train window anymore; the tunnel stretches forward as far as I can see, a packed-dirt floor strewn with tea-colored puddles and trampled yellow tape and bunched foil wrappers, unfinished stone walls caked with dirt and framed by wooden beams and lined with exposed wires and pipes and dingy lightbulbs that are too weak to illuminate the tunnel—just emitting dense spheres of light that cast everything in shades of gray.
As I set off, I see that the tunnel is not actually the space between stations. It is smaller and there are no rails installed down the middle, no thundering trains and shrill whistles, only a distant dripping, a tense stillness like I am being watched, and I shiver as a compulsion to hide sweeps through me.
I lengthen my stride, staying close to the wall, near the lightbulbs. I wonder where this is, where I am. The tunnel might run under City Hall station and the 6 train track, or above it, and I picture layers upon layers of earth piled overhead, an asphalt lid sealed over the top with people and cars shuttling up and down the street, going about their day.
I look at the wall speculatively. Perhaps the tunnel runs alongside City Hall station, and I stop and lean one ear closer, imagining the platform on the other side, a tourist leaning in to tap a shiny green tile, unaware of this tunnel’s existence, of me on the other side with my head pressed to the wall.
The thought sends a rush of loneliness through me like nostalgia except rain-gray, and I shutter my mind, focus it on the search for the Book. I walk steadily, keeping my eyes open and sweeping them systematically back and forth.
I pass by a closet-sized hollow in the wall, and in the dim light I see that it is bare, maybe a place for resting or storing supplies, although that would require someone who needed to do those things. I shiver and gaze into the shadows, searching for glints of eye and tooth and nail, and I tell myself that it does not mean anything. It was probably carved into the wall when the tunnel was built, a shelter to duck into as cattle streamed past, bound for the slaughterhouse, or maybe it was dump trucks, belching and rumbling toward the landfill, but now this place is just an abandoned tunnel—one where the man with no pinkies has constructed his fort and hidden the Book.
I glance around in case he has left the Book here but the shallow room is mostly dark and empty and Book-less. There is a squeak from the corner and tiny fingers with tiny nails scratching against the ground, and that sends me scuttling back into the light’s orbit.
As I continue my forward progress, I pass another hollowed-out section of tunnel, another room, and this one is a little larger and not totally bare: there are piles of clothing inside, separated by type, tops and bottoms and sweaters and socks. I start to rummage through a pile of shorts, wondering if this is some forgotten lost-and-found room, although, strangely, the shorts I push aside are all child-sized, and stiff and puckered like they were shrunk in the dryer.
My hand strikes the hard surface of the floor and I move on to the T-shirt pile, fishing around for the Book. I shake out a gray-white shirt with a basketball-playing potato on the chest. It bears the marks of its favored status, a rust ring on the front shoulder and a tear along the collar, and the fabric around the stomach has been stretched into near-translucence. I toss the shirt to the side, wondering how it got here and where the owner is, and he must be panicked as he searches to no avail for his favorite T-shirt.
The Book is not buried in any of the clothing piles, and I exit the room and continue down the tunnel and I realize that I am walking too fast and will myself to slow down, so that I miss nothing.
I pass another room, and this one is littered with clocks that are lying on their sides and cameras with cracked lenses and phones with wheel dials and game consoles with dust-choked slots. Another lost-and-found?
But that is two rooms of unusable items collected and categorized and separated like a museum, and I look around the room for signs of the Book and all I see is a graveyard of machines. Once trusted helpers, dutifully oiling and packaging and freezing time, now here and broken and useless. I crash through the room, tossing things over my shoulder as I search, and when I finish I dust off my hands but the smell of forgetting—mothballs and mold—lingers.
My distress mounts and I jog toward the next room and the ground crunches under my feet when I enter. It is full of broken cups, chipped water glasses and coffee mugs with missing handles, shattered wine stems and cracked teacups and smashed champagne flutes.
I stomp twice around the room and return to the tunnel, shaking off rogue shards of glass and wondering what this tunnel is—some place for unwanted things? I feel like a burglar, sneaking into a place I do not belong, and then I think of the lunches I spent sitting on the sidelines and the spitballs arcing overhead.
Maybe I did belong here, and what would happen if I couldn’t find my way back? Lost things can be found but the things that belonged here cannot—they are unwanted, meaning no one is attached to them and no one will come looking for them. Milton would come for me, I remind myself. Lucy would find me.
Still, dread rains through me and I break into a run, running as hard as I can to escape the pouring dread of museum-rooms full of sad defective things. I cannot become lost. I have to find the Book so there is no chance of that happening, and it is more important than ever for me to save the shop and keep hold of the last place and people that want me.
The tunnel starts to slope down and I zoom past the next room and have to drag myself back up. It contains a pantry loaded with products in loud, colorful containers that I don’t remember seeing in any grocery store. I comb hastily through the shelves, knocking over cereal boxes and candy packs in my hurry, scanning for ripples of air around the box of Carnation breakfast bars or puddles of light under the radioactive bottle of Squeezit. I see a white-wrappered Caravelle bar sitting on the middle shelf and it tugs my hands to a stop.
The picture shows a bar of crispy puffed rice coated in chocolate, pulled apart by unseen hands to show the flat luster of the caramel as it stretches. I imagine Lan and her husband huddled around a card table with a chocolate bar on a plate, and they pull the bar apart and wrestle over the caramel strings and the crispy rice and chocolate melts in their mouths and they smell like fresh laundry.
I take the bar and put it into my front pocket for safekeeping until I see Lan again, and I press on, still running, but I am running out of steam. The tunnel slopes down for a little longer before leveling out, and I try another room and this one is larger, a cavern dimly lit by its own dingy lightbulbs, and a mountain of stacked cardboard boxes rises up in the middle, discarded toys piled in smaller hills around it.
There are innumerable places here for the man with no pinkies to hide the Book, and who knows how long this tunnel stretches and how many more rooms I have yet to pass and search, and despair licks at me and I smother it as best as I can. I look under the arms of teddy bears with stuffing bleeding out of their seams, and around eyeless rocking horses and behind armless plastic dolls and atop badminton rackets with snapped wires, and there are so many places left to search . . .
Pop! Goes the weasel.
A box by my knee explodes and I swerve away, upsetting a heap of toys, and the toys topple over in an avalanche of sunny plastics and sputtering lights and distorted jingles. A rubber cow grazes my shin and I tread on a gap-toothed keyboard, setting off guitar riffs and drum solos, and a rainbow bear introduces itself over and over through a cacophony of barnyard squawking. I cover my ears, cringing, willing the avalanche to peter out. A donut ring wobbles toward the cardboard mountain and tips over, and the silence that follows is deafening too.
I lower my hands and the air rumbles like darkness gathering and I hold sti
ll, waiting. A faint sound carries over from behind the mountain of boxes, some sort of movement, a weak chirping like a nest of baby birds. This near-silence does not feel like a trustworthy one but the Book could be over there, right on the other side of the mountain.
Slowly, smoothly, I slide around the boxes, out of the dusty light and into the long shadow of the stacks, and the floor beyond is dotted with even darker unmoving lumps—mounds of toys—and the darker square of a small door along the wall. I start toward it and register, abruptly, the dark flicker of movement under the doorway, and a delighted exclamation splits the quiet wide open—“Why, it is a child.”
A rising and a quickening—the room awakens, and a man steps toward the light, toward me, with a dozen rats draped on his arms and shoulders, clinging to his cape like dark lint and curling along the brim of his bowler hat with their pink hands and pulsating bodies and eyes like plump beetles.
The rats strain in my direction, taut and trembling and screeching like violin strings, and the rat-man shifts and I notice that he is holding a bucket, and he thumbs his nose and starts to say something else and a rat scrabbles onto the top of his hat to keep from slipping off. Another rat the size of a kitten loses its grip and somersaults through the air, and it lands on its feet and bounds toward me and the panic touches down all at once like a bolt of lightning, and I run.
Before I know it, my legs are shooting out from under me and a plastic rattle spins away and the ground rushes up and my knees plow into it. Behind me the squeaking intensifies into a blanket of shrill noise, thick as the screaming of cicadas on a muggy evening.
I push my cheek away from the floor, trying to find my legs, and I know the rats will arrive any moment now, digging their nails into my back, gnawing at the roots of my hair, but instead two hands seize me by the armpits and I open my eyes, see five stumpy fingers, and I twist—a woman’s face looms over me, a broad square with two eyes pressed like wrinkled raisins into pasty flesh, a rat balanced on her shoulder—and my vision darkens and I thrash like a hooked fish.
I manage to flip over, breaking the rat-woman’s grip, and I scuttle back until I am pressed against the boxes, eyes rattling like dice in their sockets as I cast about for an escape, and I think of the side door but I’d have to wade through the rats, and over the great lungfuls of breath crashing against my ears, someone pleads, “Stop—look—we mean no harm—”
My eyes land on the rat-man. He is standing in the same spot as before only he has turned around and all I can see is the back of his hat and the threadbare billow of his cape around his stooped shoulders as he swings his bucket.
“Just hungry,” he pants over his shoulder, tossing the bucket in short frantic swoops like bailing water. “Look, they’re eating, they’re leaving—don’t be frightened—”
He tosses the bucket again, launching a spray of vegetable trimmings into the air, and the rats stream off him, away from him, retreating to follow the arc of corncobs and watermelon rinds and cauliflower leaves.
He sets the emptied bucket on the ground and shuffles around to face me, and his boxy pant cuffs sway as he rocks from one side to the other. He looks like he wants to dart away and hide but he stays and looks back at me, and his face is smooth and guileless as a child’s.
He stretches his shoulders back and then he gives me a tentative smile and it is open and clear as a flash of blue sky. I am taken aback, disarmed.
He looks down at the ground. “We didn’t mean to startle you. Welcome to our home,” he mumbles, stuffing his hands into his pockets.
I shift my attention to the woman crouched in front of me, and now, with the rats a comfortable distance away, I can clearly see the shy apology in her squashed face and wrinkled eyes.
I remember the rat-man stepping out and me charging away in a blind panic. I am flooded with sudden shame. It is just a rat-couple who never meant any harm, and I didn’t even give them a second to say hello.
“Are you hurt?” the rat-woman asks.
I notice the raw buzz around my knees and roll up my jeans and it is nothing, really; my knees are red where the skin has been shaved off and a few beads of blood-dew are forming but otherwise I am fine, and I shake my head to say no.
“You’re bleeding,” she says, crouching closer and sweeping her cape to the side, and underneath it she is wearing a flannel shirt and woolly pants and hairy shoes in clashing plaid patterns, like samples from a warehouse of moth-eaten sofas.
She hooks her fingers through a hole in her sleeve and yanks and the sleeve rips. She shakes out the strip of fabric and I see three round scars on her forearm before she reaches into her cape and brings out a flask with a rusted underside and a dented belly.
She unscrews the flask and tips it over and a dark spot spreads across the plaid. She leans over my knee and I gasp at the sting and she works in silence. I look at the ceiling to forget the stinging, and then at the rat-man as he plods over. He stands next to the rat-woman, rolling his weight from heel to toe, and he takes off his hat and holds it against his stomach and I note that he is not missing any pinkies.
“What drives you underground, child?” He winces as if remembering something painful and runs his thumb across the brim of the hat.
“I am finding,” I say. I lift my hip to slip the flyer out of my pocket.
The rat-woman pours more alcohol onto the fabric and moves to the other knee.
“I know what you’re here for. Out there, I, too, was rejected and shunned. Out there, they tried to hurt her. But here, you will find the peace and love you are looking for, as we did.”
I shake my head and show him the flyer, and the rat-woman presses the fabric down and I curl up tight, hissing at the burn.
“I didn’t think it possible, either,” the rat-man says, worrying at the brim of his hat and watching me with wide, steady eyes. “I fed the rats, befriended them, and they led me to her, sitting in the tunnels with a lump of leftover candle wax and a dish of burnt tagliatelle.”
That smile again, a flash of open sky, and he licks his thumb and leans over to rub at a constellation of cucumber seeds dried to the rat-woman’s cheek. She pauses, pulling the fabric away from my knee, and they gaze at each other and a story tugs at me and I remember where I have seen that expression before.
There was no candlelight and tagliatelle when Lucy and Walter Lavender Sr. met, but Lucy’s eyes softened all the same when she told the story, her voice rising and falling around the rhythmic wick-wick-wick-wick of the mixer as it whisked egg whites for soufflés.
They met on a ship that once patrolled the coasts of North Carolina and had since been docked and restored and converted into a bar and restaurant in New York City. It was a sunny afternoon and half of the ship’s patrons were already unsteady on their feet.
Lucy found out earlier that day that she had landed an internship with the pastry chef at a two-Michelin-starred restaurant. She wanted to stay in the kitchen and practice until she could reliably produce soufflés that rose high enough and didn’t taste so eggy, but the woman she shared a stovetop with vetoed the plan and dragged her out to celebrate.
So that was why Lucy was there, standing with her elbow propped on the rail, holding a bottle of beer and basking in the salt and light. Next to her a ruddy-faced man danced the foxtrot with himself, slow, slow, quick-quick—right into Lucy. The bottle of beer plunged straight into the water and she might have followed if Walter Lavender Sr. hadn’t been so quick on his feet.
“I’ve got you—I’m here,” he said, holding her upright as she reeled from the near-disaster.
She scraped her hair back and he took a good look at her and laughed at the mutinous look she shot at the oblivious dancing man. He invited her and her friend to join him and some friends from flight school over their bucket of beers, and before Lucy knew it, the stars were out and their knees were touching under the table.
There is
a tap on my own knee and I shake my head to erase the stars and the rat-woman says, “There.”
I bend my leg experimentally, and the rat-man coughs and touches the edges of his dusty cape.
“It’s no trouble,” he says. “We’ve longed for a child of our own and here you are, the answer.”
He bows lower as if embarrassed by his admission and the rat-woman rises and wraps her arms around him, beaming into his stooped shoulder, and they could be any couple gazing at the life they built together—farmers looking out over the lands they tilled, parents watching their child take the first unsteady steps.
A viscous sick feeling rises in my throat and I put my head down, busying myself with unrolling my jeans. They think that I have come here to stay and I am like them and I am their answer, and none of these things are true. I already have a mom and, even if he is lost, a dad, and I have an urge to insist I don’t belong with them until we all know that it is true.
I swallow instead and push the urge down, because I can see how much they have wished for this. Lucy tells me that I am her answer, a blessing, and I know how long she and Walter Lavender Sr. waited for me, talking about the future to pass the time, carving out the details of our would-be lives like an intricate diorama and their disappointment each time it did not work out and their joy when the wait was over and I became real.
I climb to my feet to show them the flyer again, and I explain that I am looking for a book and a man with no pinkies. He mistook the Book for unwanted and spirited it away, and I need to find him and insist he return it because it is not unwanted but rather lost, missed, which looks the same but is fundamentally different.
The rat-woman’s beaming face slides into darkness like a solar eclipse and it is hard to watch because I know what it is to yearn for a missing piece and the two of them are something like me, people who do not belong, even though it seems like they do not even want to anymore. They have chosen to confine themselves to a world of their own, and that is not like me, since I long for the opposite.
The Luster of Lost Things Page 13