The Luster of Lost Things

by Sophie Chen Keller

  When I finish explaining, the rat-man reaches for the rat-woman like she is going to keel over and she shakes him off. From the folds of her cape, she produces a fire truck that has been leached of color and holds it out to me. I look down at her shortened sleeve, the ends jagged as shark teeth above her wrist, the line of scars that I recognize now as cigarette burns.

  “Keep going,” she says, running the truck up my arm. “Past the rest of the rooms. Until you reach the end.”

  She parks the truck on my shoulder and says, “That’s where you’ll find the Junker.”

  Through the swell and swim of her irises, she smiles.

  She tugs at the rat-man and he turns and shambles ahead to pick up the bucket. He extends his free hand, waits for her to catch it, and together they approach the side door and the sea of rats parts and closes and sweeps them away.

  I skirt the base of the cardboard mountain, keeping an eye on the side door, and there is no sign of movement, no kitten-sized rat bounding back into the toy room. Once more, I am alone in the silence, and this time it is deep and still and I figure out what the rat-couple reminds me of—the time I lifted the trash-can lid and saw, in the dark humidity, two gentle brown caps sprouting out of the slimy floor despite lacking nurture, lacking light.

  I return to the front of the toy room and my scraped knee throbs with a dull heat. I tilt my head and sight down the length of the tunnel. The rat-couple is content to stay here, thriving on love and solitude, waiting for their one missing thing to come to them. As for me, there is no time to wait and I have to keep moving forward, running, running, running without stopping, without looking back, away from the dread and toward the Book, and as long as I find it I will not become like them, forced to be content with being unwanted.

  The thundering in my chest becomes the rush of the wind, and even though I know the rat-couple will keep the rats from following—still I keep running with my lungs aflame, because I know that as long as I keep moving, the tunnel will lead me straight to the Book, and to the place where I belong and there is no becoming lost.

  I open my mouth to drink in the air and it tastes like rock and earth, damp and mineral, but in my mind I am already back in the shop and the sigh of the oven is warm and buttery-pure, and I have never tasted anything so delicious.

  15

  Gradually, I slow to a jog and then a walk, and the lightbulbs in the tunnel grow fewer and farther between, and I pass under eye-watering patches of light and I pass through stretches of darkness and I pass by more rooms but I don’t bother to search them anymore now that I know the Junker is at the end of the tunnel.

  I walk, placing one foot in front of the other, and I walk in a straight line and the line I walk is so straight that my senses warp.

  I have walked to the ends of the earth.

  I have gone nowhere at all.

  Time melts into a seamless loop, a figure eight. The tunnel stretches before me, unbroken, the stone impenetrable, and my knees ache and I don’t know where I am or where I am going or how long it will take to get there, and that confirms my inkling that I might be lost.

  The notion that a person could lose a piece of himself without realizing it had seemed fantastic and abstract when I was sitting beside Nico. Wouldn’t you feel it the moment after you took a wrong turn—the chill down your spine, the urgency of being lost, the danger?

  But maybe it is something like this, where the journey to being lost goes on for ages and there isn’t much to alert you of treacherous territory, just miles to go in an endless tunnel of banality. Still, I put one foot in front of the other, because I have started, and so I must finish.

  The tunnel goes on, and has it been five minutes or an hour? The tour group will board the train again at the end of the hour but it does not matter if they leave without me; I am not leaving until I find the Book.

  My feet start to throb, and then I hardly notice them moving anymore and I have to train my gaze on them to make sure they are working. The next time I look up, I see the chain links of a fence growing out of the tunnel walls in front of me, and beyond the fence is a swing set in shades of black and white and gray, and farther down the tunnel is a hopscotch grid inhabited by painted kangaroos.

  I know this place, those cartoon kangaroos: it is the playground of my elementary school. I consider the fence and step through it. The swings are deserted except for a little boy rocking absently with one toe and tracing melancholic patterns on the ground with the other, and I hear a metal squeak and remember how rusty the swing set was and how the squeaking grew louder when the air turned humid before rain.

  The little boy regards my approach with eyes round as dinner plates and the ends of his scarf bump lightly against his chest as he rocks. The sweater he is wearing is a medium gray but I know by the three fish on the front and the starfish on the elbow what time and scene we are in. It is the first day of first grade, when I thought I could become friends with Vara Mae.

  “Hi,” I say to mini-Walter.

  “What are you doing?” he says suspiciously.

  I sigh and lean against the side of the tunnel. “I’m looking for the Book. It’s lost.”

  Mini-Walter stands up, aghast. The swing bumps the backs of his knees. “You have to find it,” he says.

  “I know. If I don’t, we’ll lose the shop. But don’t worry. I know how to find lost things.”

  “Okay.” He looks doubtful and does not move, does not blink.

  I try again. “Do you remember the wings pin you lost? I found that. Remember the last time you had it? You were sitting at the table by the bookcase. You unpinned it and held it in your hands and polished it with your shirt. You pinned it back, and it became lost.”

  “Where was it?”

  “It was under the bookcase, behind one of the feet.”

  “That’s good.” Mini-Walter sits back down. “Did you find him, too?”

  “Not yet. I’m still looking, the oil lamp is still in the window.”

  “Are you close to finding the Book?” His expression says it all, his eyes wide and wondering, worlds of crossing lights and hidden patterns and all of it revolving around the Book, the shop.

  As I study mini-Walter’s face and the three fish on his chest, I feel a skimming sensation under my skull followed by a cool clarity.

  “I think so. But I don’t know if finding it will fix everything,” I admit. “Being here has made me see some things I’ve been tricking myself into not seeing.”

  I’d told myself that I was alone because I was different—I had a disorder, I had no dad. Because of who I was, I would always be lonely, separated. I could not be any other way. But I have met the rat-couple and I am forced to see how I, like them, have chosen to give up and be alone, and to be content in a world of my own. This was not how I was meant to be; it was how I decided to be. I am more like the rat-couple than I first thought; in a way I have been wandering these tunnels for a long time, from the moment I made my choice to stop trying six years ago. Are they what I will become if I continue on in my silence? I think about the buried fear that I would become unwanted, the unleashed dread, and I imagine myself cutting pants out of one sofa and shoes out of another, with rats swinging from the overgrown garland of my own hair.

  At least they accepted the reality of their choice and did not try to convince themselves otherwise. I wrapped myself in the warmth of the shop and I convinced myself that when I learned about people through their lost things, these temporary, one-sided reprieves meant that I was not actually alone.

  I run a hand over the rough stone of the tunnel and barnacles of dirt crumble under my touch and I see, clearly, where I have put myself, the kind of life I have learned to be happy with. That is not something the Book can fix. I swallow and force myself to continue. “But I also know that I can’t stop looking for the Book.”

  Mini-Walter’s expression is serio
us. “I hope you find it,” he says.

  “Me too. More than anything.”

  Mini-Walter draws a circle with his toe.

  “What are you doing?”

  “You know,” mini-Walter says, and I do. He looks down and fades away a little, wanting to forget about the first day of school, but I think of it now because that was, I understand, when the seed was planted.

  It had taken me an hour to decide what to wear, that sea-blue sweater with the starfish on the elbow and the three fish swimming together across the front, each one a different color and shape. When Lucy dropped me off in the first-grade classroom, she pulled the teacher aside to tell her about my talking and I looked around the room at the planets orbiting the rug and the desks pushed together in groups of four and the girl wailing over glue on her dress. I did not know her name but I recognized her immediately.

  She rode her bike by the shop sometimes, and it was white and powder blue with manes of blue streamer coming out of the handlebars, and they galloped alongside her in the wind. Her hair was straight and shiny under the classroom lights, strawberry and gold, and at lunchtime I saw her across the playground and decided to introduce myself. I was a little nervous but she seemed familiar to me and I had spent the summer rehearsing the movements for my greeting with Lucy.

  But when I walked up to her and went through my sentences with painstaking care—My. Name. Is. Wal. Ter. Who. Are. You—she stared blankly and she didn’t say, “Hi, Walter. I’m Vara Mae,” or “I’ve seen you at the shop,” or “Do you like riding bikes, too?” Instead, she did something I had not thought to prepare for.

  She scrunched her nose and didn’t say anything.

  My throat tightened and I tried again. It came out worse the second time and I tasted the fear and dismay curdling at the back of my tongue. Gagging on the sourness, I forced myself to try a third time and she opened her mouth and blurted, “You talk funny!” with mingled bewilderment and disgust and excitement, and that was the beginning of the commotion.

  A circle of children gathered around us as Vara Mae stomped her feet and shrieked, “Say it again! Tell him to say it again,” doubling over with the force of it.

  I couldn’t escape; I staggered toward gaps in the circle but each time the circle tightened, buffeting me back, trapping me in. I wheeled about, searching for a friendly face, and the children lunged at me, snapping with laughter, and someone taunted, “Talk normal.”

  And, “He’s going to cry.”

  And, “You’re so stupid.”

  And, “Dumb crybaby.”

  The words they hurled were hard and small and I flinched and my jaw opened and my throat tightened but I couldn’t get it out, not a single word that I could hurl back to defend myself with. I shrank and wilted in the center of the circle, wrapping my arms around myself to hide the three fish on my sweater.

  The mob didn’t disperse until a teacher marched over with a laborious pigeon-toed gait and Vara Mae promptly burst into tears. I tried to explain to the teacher that I only wanted to talk to her and she wailed over my stammering so that she would not get into trouble, howling louder whenever I spoke.

  “Enough,” the teacher said, grabbing my shoulders and giving them a little shake. “That’s enough from you.”

  She turned to Vara Mae and tried to console her, and I tried hysterically to say, I talked to her, I talked to her, and that made Vara Mae cry so hard that a butterfly clip fell out of her hair, and the teacher swiveled around.

  “I don’t know what you’re saying. Stop talking, you’re making it worse,” she said sharply over the sobbing.

  I jerked back, stung. She reached to brush a lock of strawberry hair out of Vara Mae’s wet eyes, turning away before she could see the words latching onto my skin and growing veins, faint speckles of black, like a patch of ugly warts.

  I never saw Vara Mae again after that year but the memory lingered, and after that, whenever I tried again and failed, I wondered if the teacher was right. That day was the beginning of the fear that drove my choice. I stopped trying because I did not want to open up and bare the tender blue-purple of my insides and that is what real bonds require—not just listening and taking in but also giving back some of yourself in kind. There is a risk to connecting that way and I decided it wasn’t worth it, not when I could mimic the feeling of the real thing without the risk.

  I thought I found an easier way to connect and a place to belong, but even as I longed for friendship I was secretly unwilling, the entire time, to face the truth of what real friendship required.

  My face must have crumpled for a moment, because mini-Walter’s voice is alarmed when he stands and says, “You have to go.”

  He sweeps his arms. “Keep going,” he urges, over and over until I do, moving past the swings and over the hopscotch grid.

  One . . . two . . . three . . .

  I put my head down and count each step, the scene fading, mini-Walter too, as I leave him behind.

  Twenty-three . . . twenty-four . . . twenty-five . . .

  “I’m not much to see, but you’re going to crash into me if you don’t look up.”

  The voice is nasal and polite and morose, and my eyes slide away from my high-tops, up to the saddest man I have ever seen, sitting in a chair in the middle of the tunnel and shifting gingerly like the chair has been molded uncomfortably in just the wrong places. He has a basset-hound face and a lumpy little belly that rests on his lap. He is wearing a long coat of bedraggled black feathers and a stray feather makes him sneeze, setting his drooping eyes and nose and jowls aquiver.

  “You don’t like my tunnels.” His pink eyes are doleful and I shake my head and misery seeps out of him so thick that I almost expect him to deflate at my feet. I look down at his hands, splayed over his kneecaps, and when I count four fingers on each hand, I know that I have reached the end of the tunnel and I have found the Junker—or, rather, the other way around. I avert my gaze before he notices, shifting it back to his face, but he has been studying me the whole time.

  “Cleaning out a meat slicer I picked up behind a deli,” he says, holding up his right hand. He holds up his left. “Unjamming a saw while cutting out another entrance. It was unavoidable.” He heaves a sigh and drops both hands. “This is not a place for things that are missed. So what are you doing here? You’re alone and dusty but you’re buoyant. Purposeful,” he accuses. “Who are you? What do you want?”

  “I am looking for this.” I take the flyer out of my pocket and unfold it.

  “If you’re looking for it, it wouldn’t be here,” the Junker says, but he scoots cheerlessly to the edge of his seat to inspect the sketch of the Book. I wait for the flicker in his pink eyes, and to my horror they retract like window shades into the back of his head and his misshapen body seizes and shivers. I hurl myself forward and he holds out a palm to stop me, and I watch with alarm as his whites jerk from left to right. They lock and unroll and he cracks his neck and stands, and the feather coat induces another teary sneeze.

  The sneeze echoes and I look past the Junker, following the echoes, and I see that he is sitting with his back to an empty hall wallpapered in sheet metal and tiger-striped signs, like he is guarding the entrance to a construction site.

  The Junker says, “I recognize that book. It belonged to a foul-smelling young man who had no use for it, and so it belongs here now, to me. You probably don’t know who I am, do you?” The bags under his eyes sink lower.

  I nod to say that I do, which is not what he expected.

  “Junker, at your service.” For a moment he almost looks pleased, and then his face settles back into its plaintive lines.

  I ask him if I can see the Book, prepared to cross my arms like Lucy and fight through his reluctance, and instead he shrugs and says, “It’ll probably be a letdown, but there’s no reason why you can’t see it. Follow me.”

  16

&
nbsp; We cross to the other end of the hall and my mind surges and still a thousand thoughts gallop ahead of it, too wild and half-formed to be caught. We stop in front of three doors. They are identical, plain and white with fresh iron doorknobs, and they are firmly closed and it would only take a split second, the slightest shift, for Junker to change his mind. Worry builds inside me and I say without thinking, That Book never belonged to Nico and it doesn’t belong here and it’s only missing and you have to give it back.

  Too long, too rushed; I hear bursts of sound issuing out of my mouth, swapped consonants and dropped syllables and odd groupings.

  “Datdoover. Blongtoo. Iico-an?” Junker repeats carefully, frowning and not understanding what I have said, and embarrassment broils under my skin.

  “It’s just as well. I knew it would happen someday—grip already impaired, then the hearing scrambled. Soon enough it’ll be the sight and smell going haywire,” he mutters, and cuts himself off with a brisk flap of his coat. “You don’t want to hear about that, of course. Choose a door. Your fate is in your hands.”

  I look among the three doors and none of them stand out as being better or worse than the other two. I point to the door in the middle and my calves tense, threads and wires coiling tight, but Junker only twists the knob and pushes the door open and ushers me through and closes it behind us.

  “They lead to the same place,” he confesses as we set off down a short tunnel toward a circle of light. “Everyone’s building houses these days. With all the extra doors lying around, I thought I might as well install them.”

  A smell like burnt rubber and rotting eggs wafts into the tunnel as we near the end, and Junker steps out into the light and beckons for me to come with him. I tug my sleeve down and cover my nose and join him on what looks like a fire escape, and I immediately lift my chin and my eyes, so that I do not see through the steel gratings of the platform underneath my feet. A vast space opens up before us, a concrete shell the size of a football stadium, and I forget the smell and inhale sharply.