The Luster of Lost Things

by Sophie Chen Keller

  This looks like a place meant for something more before plans were scrapped, a terminal deemed unwanted once the earth was scooped out and the concrete hardened to create a lost world underneath the populated one.

  The light is soft and diffuse as a fog, filtering down through clusters of little glass discs embedded into the ceiling. I picture the people on the other side, treading on the iron covers—and me, too, all those times I avoided cracks and fissures in the sidewalk and maybe I stepped on these very vault lights, rows of bubbled purple lenses set in iron frames, and they didn’t look like much from where I was.

  But from the bottom looking up, those plain prisms illuminate everything around us—a patchwork of grays and blues and the occasional roof of red or orange, a city in miniature.

  “Proceed into my kingdom, if you will,” Junker says, turning to climb down the ladder-stairs in the middle of the platform. I follow, breathing through my mouth, and we descend to ground level.

  At the bottom, the concrete floor is covered with clumps of dirt and coiled heaps of rubbery cables like beached kelp and planks of splintered wood and corroded metal, and Junker leads the way through a network of corridors—roads—cleared out of the rubble, lined with mismatched hovels made of scrap metal and tarp and faded posters and string.

  “You’re probably wishing you were somewhere else,” Junker says. “These shacks are going to take a tumble any second now.”

  But we walk on anyway, stepping over bottles and cigarettes, and there are bedsheets and items of clothing hanging everywhere, pants and blouses and undergarments clipped to wires and strewn over roofs and dripping from ledges. I hardly notice the smell anymore because I am straining to hear the babble of indistinct voices, babies crying and pots clattering and dogs barking. The streets should be teeming with life but no matter how hard I look and listen, our surroundings remain abandoned and desolate.

  Like its keeper, this kingdom is the saddest I have ever seen.

  We take a right onto a street riddled with potholes and Junker stoops and picks up a handheld tape recorder half-submerged in a puddle of dust and exclaims, “This must be new. I don’t recognize it. I must’ve picked it up last time.”

  He gives it a shake and presses the button with a sideways triangle carved into it. He cradles the recorder in his hands and holds it up to his ear and waits. After a long crackling moment, he pushes the button labeled with a square. The tape is blank and I wonder how the tape recorder got there and what it is doing there too.

  When I point at it, shrugging to ask the question, Junker cranes his neck back to look at the vault lights.

  “Do you know how many unwanted things are out there, if you look? I find them everywhere, on my excursions aboveground when it gets too quiet around here. That’s how I built this city, scoop by scoop and piece by piece.”

  We continue down the potholed street and Junker fiddles with the tape player, rewinding and pressing the play button. “I quite like these projects, creating something out of—well, worse than nothing, if you think about it. If I didn’t do anything with this unwanted stuff, it would just pile up and it would be a weeping mess, and I happen to have nothing but time on my hands.”

  There is something at once forlorn and noble about it, and I fish out my notebook. FOR EVERY THING NEEDS ITS PLACE AND REASON, I write.

  We take another right. More homes and clotheslines crisscrossing overhead, and lively splashes of yellow and purple run along the side of the road where Junker has planted dandelions and thistles in broken pots.

  “Where are we going?” The ramshackle houses peer back at me, docile and eerie, and I wonder which one the Book is in.

  “Where else would a book belong but in the library?” he says, and somehow this knocks me off-kilter and I laugh.

  Junker’s face lifts. “I do very much like stories.”

  His face lengthens again and he rewinds and plays the tape recorder with increasing agitation. “I don’t suppose you know any stories,” he says halfheartedly, but the tips of his black feathers tremble ever so slightly and his knuckles whiten against the tape recorder clutched between his two hands.

  I shake my head. I wouldn’t tell it right, and he would react in the wrong way like I have learned most people do, and he wouldn’t understand. I can’t look at him, and so I look around. The home next to me has a window made of cellophane. Inside, Junker has set up a table with outdated teacups and plates, and arranged non-matching pairs of chopsticks beside each plate.

  I stop and move closer to the window. The teacups, handles dutifully pointed to three o’clock. Chopsticks carefully laid out on the left. The table, held together with duct tape. Each item unwanted, but once again given a reason for being. Still, in the end, they are only pretending.

  Standing in the home Junker has built for himself in his loneliness, scoop by scoop and piece by piece, I wonder if he is another possible future version of myself.

  The same sad existence, and yet fundamentally different.

  Junker has no other choices and he does not shield himself from his plight. Instead he faces it full and wraps his arms around it and that, at least, is brave and true. He is not me.

  A feathery rustle—Junker stands at my elbow and looks at the kitchen scene he replicated and clenches the tape recorder, and I understand that he wants to give it a purpose, and I also understand the purpose of his stories because mine do the same for me—they take him away from the pain, for a while.

  I can’t fathom how much greater Junker’s pain must be, and for so long, and that means he needs this story more than I need to protect myself.

  I step away from the window and open my mouth, and then I close it. It’s hard to move forward, away from the old lie that speaking will make things worse, even though I know about my voice, and it can be heard. I can try, even if I fail.

  I lift the tape recorder out of Junker’s hands and pick my words deliberately. “I know a. Tale.”

  Pretending that I am gazing into the flame of my oil lamp, I recall the end-over-end swirl, the memory made of water and sun—the deep voice all around me, timeless and boundless as the night sky. I concentrate on this, and the shop alive and the flame unwavering, and I hold down the red button.

  “Once upon a time, there was a boy who never imagined he could fly very far.”

  My voice is small and breakable and not like I imagine Walter Lavender Sr.’s to be, and I almost stop right there, hearing it out in the open like that, but slowly, unevenly, as best as I can, I continue to tell him the story Walter Lavender Sr. told me before he became lost, the one I think I can tell best because I’ve told it so many times in my head.

  We turn right, heading into the center of the city, and I keep my eyes glued to the blinking red light so that I won’t accidentally catch a glimpse of Junker’s expression, and as long as the light blinks I continue to tell, and somewhere along the way I start to hear his voice in my head again, little by little, layering over mine until my words become his.

  I tell Junker about what the boy’s life was like when he met the mermaid and what it was like after she helped him find his wings, and I finish, “And one day he did it. Spread his arms and flew over the water,” and it does not feel right to end the recording like that. I am inspired to add something new.

  “And no one saw him for a while. But that is not the end.”

  Like any lost thing, he would have left clues that pointed the way. There would be a silver vapor in his wake, a trail of tears frozen into cloud. I learned everything I could about Walter Lavender Sr.; I knew what to look for, and if I saw the signs, I would recognize them. I looked for the trail he left behind and so far I’ve picked up empty spaces but I know better than to give up, because I’ve had cases where people stop looking right when they are on the verge of finding the lost thing.

  The woman with the pickled fruits business had given up just
a moment too soon, and that was why I didn’t meet her through a Lost flyer. We met at the farmer’s market; I was there with Lucy, who wanted to create a napoleon recipe inspired by the sticky rice and mango she tasted during the month Walter Lavender Sr. was assigned a line to Thailand. At the pickled fruits stall, she placed an order for two dozen jars of pickled mango and the woman apologized for being distracted because she had just lost an assortment of pewter thimbles that belonged to her mother.

  When I interviewed the woman about the lost thimbles, she revealed the secrets only a friend would know—how she found adoption papers stashed inside a pair of mules her mother never wore and how she stopped speaking to her mother because of it, and how her mother got into a car accident while they still weren’t speaking. Since then, she kept her mother’s thimbles close by, and sometimes she wore them on her fingers and had conversations with them about her life and they talked back like little pewter puppets.

  She held up her hand and gazed at her bare fingers and I saw their silver tips, permanent thimbles of light—the larger truth she didn’t say about how she wore them all the time, the regret, the missing.

  The thimbles were not in their box on her dresser, and so I asked her where she kept her sewing supplies. She dismissed the idea, saying that she had already ransacked the pine hutch, and I looked closely at it anyway and noticed what she missed, wrapped around the ring pull of the last drawer—the tail end of a length of lucent yarn, the beginning glowing now too, dangling from the place inside her cuff where she had patched up a rip.

  I found the lost thimbles in the back of that drawer. She had indeed searched the pine hutch, but as she turned out one drawer after another, her despair mounted and by the time she started on that last drawer, she assumed the thimbles were gone and gave up before she reached the back.

  She wasn’t the first one who stopped looking too soon. It’s not an uncommon mistake, but it’s a big one, and I can’t get rid of that itchy, niggling feeling that I am right on the cusp of finding a sign from Walter Lavender Sr., and so I keep looking, directly and indirectly.

  The red light of the recorder blinks a little faster and I finish, for real, “It is to be continued.”

  At last I steal a look at Junker, and he is gazing into the distance with an odd grimace. I release the red button to end the recording and prepare for the slash and the sting. Junker sneezes and slides back into focus. I pass the tape recorder over to him. He puts it into his coat and his feathers tremble and we turn right, moving closer to the center of the city.

  “It’s just the thing,” he says, patting his coat and feeling for the hard plastic corners of the tape recorder, and that’s when I realize that he is happy.

  I imagine him planting weeds in neat rows and setting tables for meals that will never come and listening to his new story as many times as he likes while he labors away, eternally buried. For all the times that weren’t worth it—this time it was, and it has never mattered more that I was here.

  We turn right, and this street is lined with trolleys and buses and vans and I think that we must be close by now.

  Junker coughs to clear the cobwebs from his throat and says shyly, “Here we are. The library.”

  He gestures for me to move ahead of him and I glance around again. There are only deserted vehicles on this street, and not a single dilapidated building in sight. I look at Junker for guidance but he is leaning against a bus with no wheels and glumly stripping off bits of peeling paint like they are hangnails. I wander down the street, peering under bumpers to be sure, and as I pause in the middle of the road, my gaze skips down the line of broken vehicles and plops onto a trolley.

  Junker must’ve recently given it a fresh coat of paint; it is sapphire blue, and it is missing an entire panel along its flank and the inside isn’t empty—it’s filled like some densely ridged lung, and I draw near and they are bookcases, placed end-to-end and crammed with books, and I see what he did—the library he fashioned out of unwanted vehicles.

  I cross the street to a van and pull open the back doors. Despite the van’s rusted body, the door hinges are oiled and smooth. Shelves protrude from the sides, piled with books. I swing the doors shut and hop onto what was once a school bus. Instead of pairs of vinyl seats, Junker has installed bookcases, one on each side, and I shake my head in amazement.

  I run down the aisle, brushing my fingers against the shelves, looking for the trail, but no signs jump out at me. Where has he shelved the Book?

  I dash up the street to where Junker is waiting.

  “I told you it would be disappointing,” Junker says immediately, and I shake my head vigorously and he says, “Oh! Do you like it?” and I nod just as vigorously.

  He ducks but can’t suppress the glow radiating from the crown of his head. “I wondered if they might’ve been trying to build a track for the garbage trains with these tunnels. So I looked for boarded entrances in the rail yards and found one that connected.”

  He keeps staring down at his hands, and that is when I notice that he is clutching a book. A tentative warmth burgeons in my chest like pea shoots. Still looking at his hands, he thrusts his arms forward, and supported between his palms, two inches from my nose, is the Book. Joy pours into me like melted sunlight, warm and effervescent.

  I take a deep breath. “This is my lost Book. It is found.”

  I hold out a hand and Junker looks strained. Then he pats his coat, four touches to feel out each corner of the tape recorder, and his expression clears and he gives me a firm nod and unclasps his hands. I hug the Book to my chest and squeeze until my hands stop shaking enough to retrieve the two pages I found earlier.

  I open the Book and balance it on one hand and the first thing I see is the first page, no longer lost, and I shut my eyes and there is a flash of light against my eyelids, white and cold as snow under the moon. I trace the lines of ink from memory, the spidery labyrinth of streets, the shooting stars arcing across the page.

  I flip the page and my stomach drops and I flip back again. The second page is missing. But the third page is there, and I feel my heart quickening like the wheels of the train steaming off the page, into the tunnels, and the wind rushes after it, parting my hair and billowing under my sleeves, and I stand still and captivated as the young man staring at the girl on the other side of the subway platform, her hair whipping across her proud face, her cloak of ice strikingly bright against the mundane scenery of concrete and trash cans and pillars and subway maps.

  The fourth page is the one I found in Nico’s sleeping bag—the girl falling in love too, and shedding her cloak of ice—and I insert the page into the Book and the next part of the story is the one Lan gave me, the girl abandoned and alone, and I flatten and insert page number five.

  I flip—

  And that is it. There are no more pages to flip, and that is not how it’s supposed to be.

  “Most of the story is missing,” Junker says hurriedly. “The middle was missing even before I got it. When I was reading it on my way back, the girl sitting next to me started reading along over my shoulder. She said she saw herself in the second page, and then she also said that endings were the most interesting part. The part that stayed. She wanted them enough that she couldn’t look away, so I couldn’t take those pages here, where they no longer belonged. It was an enchanting story even with the hole, I should have known better than to think—”

  Junker’s feathers shrivel a little and he looks at me despondently and says, “I thought that maybe you would leave right away, if you knew,” and I can feel my heart shriveling too, and the enormous cavern is too small, too tight, so gray.

  I close the Book and hug it once more and tuck it away. Three more pages to go. It should feel like a victory but I am defeated. The Book was found and in the next moment lost again, and I am wrung out from the effort of searching and even more from the effort of speaking.

  �
��Don’t be upset,” Junker says, flapping his arms and looking aggrieved, and feathers drift and light on my high-tops. “You can find her. I’ll tell you what I remember and you can go find her.”

  His words send a shot of energy flashing through my veins. I am halfway there. Milton will be waiting for me and worrying and so will Lucy, and she might have already launched a search for me. Time resumes ticking down and I have to get going, I have to find the rest of the Book before the landlord seizes the shop or a policeman seizes me.

  “How can I find her?” I ask, buoyant once more.

  Junker goes rigid and his eyes roll back and gleam glossy-white as peeled eggs. After a second, they roll forward and he brushes a feather away from his nose.

  “She had black hair in a bun. She was wearing a backpack. The tag on it said Ruby Fontaine. Her T-shirt said Rudolf Steiner School and PE.”

  “Let’s go,” I say.

  Our return journey mirrors our arrival; we take the same route, this time past the yellow and purple lane first and then the potholed road and clothes hanging to dry and scrap-metal shanties, and as we approach the fire escape Junker slows, turns iron-heavy, fighting with each step to keep from sinking into the ground, and the corners of his mouth are weighted down too.

  “You probably don’t want to, but you can stay a little longer,” he says.

  He peers up at the gray window in the ceiling, waiting as if a great hand will reach in and scoop him out, and the wan light filters through like dawn coming and the little city is spilled out underneath it and a fearless energy floods across my skin.

  I can’t stay any longer, with a Book to find and a shop to save, but even more than that, I do not want to. The rat-couple opened my eyes; instead of choosing to wander these tunnels until I, too, am unwanted, I must acknowledge my fear and batter through it so that my mind is open and my voice, my words, come pouring forth.