“I am in need of wings,” I say, borrowing a little time before each word so that I can gather it and sculpt it into something clear for Karl. I leave it at that and imagine the questions and concerns and excuses clouding his square glasses.
Karl takes them off and polishes them with his cloth, and he replaces them and beams at Carrie. “What do you know, I am prepared for a copilot,” he says, and I think back to the extra shoes and coffee mugs, the two toothbrushes, one for him and one for Carrie, and then I am jumping, the packed grass a hard cushion under my feet, and I am surprised to feel so thrilled.
“Let us get this show on the road,” Karl says, and the reality of what I am going to do sends me crashing and I land the wrong way and my ankle twists, and I gulp and panic coats my throat and it is thick and oily. I do not really want to leave the ground. I do not want to be up there at all, with so far to fall.
Karl Safety Dances to the hang glider but I find it hard to move. I pretend that I am somewhere else, that I am in the shop, but the clean tiled floor and the lush displays have all dried to desert because the Book is not there.
Karl picks up his harness and it looks like padded ski overalls on the top and an unzipped sleeping bag on the bottom. He steps into the leg loops and buckles across his chest and around his waist and when he pulls down the zipper to close the top he looks like a wasp with his legs sticking out and the sleeping bag puffing out behind him like an abdomen.
He turns to detach the hang glider from the sign pole and I see a pack on the back of his harness—a parachute?—and he drags away the cement block and motions me over and my legs move and take me forward and I can’t decide if they are being traitorous or loyal.
I stand under the nose, still lingering over the empty dunes of the Book-less shop, vast and bleached and lifeless, watching from a safe distance as Karl buckles me into the harness. My harness also looks like ski overalls with a parachute pack on the back but instead of a sleeping bag on the bottom it has loops that wrap around my knees.
He steps through the metal triangle and hooks his harness into the loops and straps of the hang glider, and he gestures for me to step through the metal triangle next to him, on his left side, and he hooks me in too.
“I am now doing the preflight checks,” he announces, tugging on straps and loops, checking zippers and buckles, straightening the lines, and he crouches and kicks his feet into the bottom of his sleeping bag, hovering horizontally over the ground, suspended in the metal triangle.
He puts his hands and knees on the ground and kicks his feet back out.
“Once we are airborne, you will rotate down toward the control bar so you are like Superman. You will put your right arm across my neck and hold on to my harness.” He tugs on his right shoulder strap. “That way the two of us will become one weight.” He spreads his arms to grab the side legs of the triangle and says, “You grab the control bar,” and the wind surges and pops my distance-bubble and sends me tumbling back into my body, and I crouch to grab the control bar and he says, “We pick it up—”
And before I can say, Wait, before I can change my mind and say, Give me a minute—I am yanked to my feet by the wind pushing against the wings of the hang glider. I grip the control bar and I am not carrying any weight at all—I am the one being picked up, and my toes skim the ground and it feels like the only thing keeping me from being blown away like the Book pages is Karl fighting to control the hang glider.
“Walk,” he calls, and we start forward and then he calls, “Yog,” and the wind rises and all at once he is shouting, “Run run run,” and my toes are groping, searching for something solid, and I don’t even have a second to close my eyes—the world bouncing crazily—grass, tree—light—cars—I bite on my tongue and warm salt dissolves in my mouth, and the world goes silken smooth.
I squeeze my eyes shut. Karl roars into the night and it pours out of him like a cleansing, elation and grief and triumph, and blood roars in my ears or is that the wind? I sense the inexorable upward pull of the harness, the wings of the Carrie sturdy and solid above me, lifted higher by an invisible hand. My fingers are locked in a slippery death grip around the bar and I tell myself it is safe now to loosen them. One at a time. Right eye. Left eye. See.
The river is wide and motionless as a picture, a dark swath swiping cleanly through the star-dusted banks of New Jersey on the right and Manhattan on the left, dotted with the moving lights of boats, and we pass over the connecting thread of the George Washington Bridge, a strand of red beads on one side and orange on the other. I reach around Karl and grab hold of his shoulder strap, and he rearranges his arms on the bar and shifts his weight. The air is ice cold and we bank to the left and everything tilts and I am not sick with terror but so alive and weightless that I could explode and dissipate until I am in every breath at once, invincible.
“There’s the campus,” Karl yells in my ear as we pass over the darkened roofs of Columbia, and I look ahead of us, around us, and from up here things look smaller and bigger at the same time, the opposite from how they seem on the ground: New York a miniature city on a finger of land, bristling with toy buildings that sprout upward—swallowed by land and sea and sky, the rest of the world, without end.
Upper Manhattan scrolls by underneath us and my ears are hot and cold and swollen with blood and wind and we soar through the night, flying on wings like eagles. I think, This is what he felt. Clear as that day, clear as his voice in my ear—close by, right here. I overlooked it, the very first and most basic rule for finding.
I had forgotten to look in the obvious place. I waited for him to follow the oil lamp to the doorstep and combed through his stories for information and scoured the city for the sign that pointed to him; I was too busy looking for an ending, and then I learned to say good-bye without it, when he had never really left.
The hang glider approaches the enormous unlit rectangle of Central Park and I fill it with the things I see now—my eyes in the display glass reflecting the nuanced depths of his, and my hand reaching out for Mister Philipp’s while his larger one reached out to offer a handkerchief stitched with playful planes, and now here I am, two thousand feet in the air, watching and observing with Walter Lavender Sr.’s thirst to see far and wide. My view of the world below, the same one he saw.
He is everywhere I am, a luminous connection that spans the darkest ocean.
I look to the left, and somewhere in the darkness of Central Park is where I met Karl, and I see the lights twinkling on the other side of the expanse and somewhere over there is where I met Ruby and Sammie and Roman, where I sat beside Mister Philipp. We pass over the ring of Columbus Circle and the sprinkling of light becomes a living thing, dense and lustrous and cut through with running bloodways, Times Square in the center awash in blue light like a strange heart.
The buildings of Midtown rise up in clusters, trying to grab us as we pass, and there are buildings encrusted from top to bottom with windows like crystals and skyscrapers topped with blue caps and green spires and gold pyramids and arched crowns, and the tiers of the Empire State Building are lit in red and orange and as we pass over its blinking antenna I look down and see the crowds of tiny people milling around the illuminated decks.
We pass over the round eye of Madison Square Garden, rimmed in red, and next to it the solid rectangle of the old post office. The topography falls off for a while as if pressed flat by irons of darkness, and rising up at the end—the tip of Manhattan—are the light-capped towers of the Financial District, densely packed along the water, and somewhere there, under the ground, is where I met Junker.
I look at the darkness ahead and to the left, sparingly quilted with strings of light, and I see the orange strand of Delancey leading to the Williamsburg Bridge and somewhere there in the Lower East Side is where I met Nico, and there’s Chinatown, where Lan sleeps.
I see the dimly lit elevated strip of the High Line and the surroun
ding darkness that masks the Meatpacking District partygoers roaming underneath, and then I see the brighter arch of Washington Square Park and somewhere there in the West Village are Lucy and the shop, the place where I started and the place where I will end.
“Central Park,” I yell in Karl’s ear, because that is where the pages were blown away and that is where I should search.
Karl shifts his weight. The hang glider makes a looping circle and when the nose is pointed back uptown, he leans forward and we pick up speed. As we approach Central Park, he leans back, slowing down, and traces a lazy circle in the air. I look into the black rectangle laid out underneath me and scour the darkness.
We make another circle, drifting lower, and I catch a swivel of light in the bottom quarter, close to Fifth Avenue, and then another, not too far away. A few other points of light catch my eye but on closer inspection they are streetlamps, and they are not what I am looking for.
I open my eyes and search for more signs, and they tell me that most of the Book pages are scattered, as expected, throughout the lower half of the park, not too far from the model boat pond, although one has been pushed all the way down to the southeastern corner.
The hang glider completes another revolution and I take another look, and when I close my eyes the picture is seared against my eyelids, six beacons pointing the way. I signal to Karl with a thumbs-up and he stops looking around at the landscape and fixes his gaze to a spot on the ground.
We circle lower and skim over treetops and the irregular shape of the Lake. Karl kicks his legs out of the harness and pushes his weight down, holding his body perpendicular to the ground, and then I feel the stall of the hang glider and a flash of fear savage as lightning—the ground rising up too fast like we are going to crash, and I brace myself with all my might and clench my teeth.
The impact is jarring but not unbearable. Karl digs in his heels to bring the glider to a complete stop.
“There you have it! A successful flight and landing back on the Great Lawn,” he trumpets, and as he unhooks us from the hang glider and unbuckles my harness, I feel an odd sense of recognition, like reaching the end of a story I haven’t read in a while—both of us landed, safe and sound.
“Good night and good news,” I manage around it.
It is the best way I can express my gratitude, a small bit of lightheartedness to acknowledge what the flight meant to me, and Karl’s face splits into a wide grin.
“Good night, Copilot Lavender,” he says. He turns back to the Carrie and I can see his mouth moving but I can’t hear what he is saying because I am backing away to give him all of this moment, this moment that belongs to him and Carrie.
I face away from them and break into a run, and the night air streams through my hair and whistles past my ears and I see the beacons in the back of my mind, the six pages I have to gather.
25
With the map in my memory as my guide, I know the approximate area of each page, the landmarks they are located in or near, and I know the directions I need to go to form a trail from one page to the next, but I do not know the exact locations, and so I have to run while keeping my eyes open and my head swiveling.
Two of the pages are located close by, between the two middle transverse roads. I run across the darkened Great Lawn, past the dormant ball fields, my footfalls echoing, and I am alert for signs, places that want my eyes to slide by. I find the first page lying on the ball field at the end, its glow dampened by the mud. I wipe it off with my sleeve and it is fine, whole, and I insert it into the Book.
I keep running, down a poorly lit footpath that leads south, past a pond covered in algae that smells of rotting leaves, and on the other side of the water I see the castle illuminated by spotlights. I dart from one spot to the next, rummaging through bushes, the spaces between and under, telling myself that it is like the Easter egg hunts Lucy used to take me to before I outgrew them—but I can’t conjure up the fresh warmth of spring and the pleasant buzzing rising from the grass and the voices filling the air and the bright patterns and pastels of the hard-boiled eggs.
The night air is frigid as it whips past, stinging my face, goose bumps rising on my arms and underneath my scalp, and I am alone in a pocket of darkness, the footpath silent as I scramble from bench to tree to bush. The lack of light invades my mind too, and my breathing grows louder, panicked, as images emerge like monsters—pages being destroyed, landing in puddles, torn apart by speeding cars; my body collapsing, hunger gnawing through the walls of my stomach, my feet coated in blisters like pebbly sand; Lucy waiting all the while, growing more scared than I am, pacing, searching, consumed—
Then I hear the rustle of something thicker than a leaf, and I find another page wedged between the slats of a bench, dry and unharmed. I envision my map and the next page is somewhere in the unlit wilderness bordering the Lake. I cross the Seventy-ninth Street transverse and the rumbling of engines, the parade of headlights cutting across the park, are a soothing reminder that civilization is not far away.
I keep running in the direction of the next page and the shadowed footpath curves around trees and hills and leaves crunch under my feet and it smells a little like fireplaces, a smoky undertone to the night air, and I see the lights and buildings of the city like a silent looming mountain range beyond the trees.
As I continue racing downtown, I notice that my footsteps are not echoing so much anymore. The wood is secluded but brimming with nocturnal sounds, owls hooting and insects scratching and small animals rummaging, and the sounds of my running, my breathing, are absorbed into the darkness.
I spot the glow of the third page coming from the bottom of a large rock, sheltered under a jutting corner, and I rescue it and push myself to keep running for the next, which will be somewhere around the lighted boulevard of the Mall. My lungs constrict, tight with pain, and I slow to a walk as I cross a bridge, passing two people sitting on the banister with their legs dangling over the water.
I make the gentle descent to the other side, following the line in my mind to the fourth page, and before I see the fountain I hear the burble of falling water and I can feel the dampness in my nose and then I smell something dry, but without the freshness of fallen leaves. It is musty and sweet and I sprint out to the fountain on the terrace and find a page pressed against the base.
It was a close call. I look at the statue in the middle, an angel casting a purifying hand and water spouting into the surrounding fountain, and if the wind had blown the page a little higher, a little farther, it would have been destroyed.
I try to keep running but my legs are too heavy, my feet like cement blocks, and I walk across the street to the Mall, a noble hallway of elms where people congregate to take walks and eat their lunches and read their newspapers with dimes of sun spilling through the leafy branches. Rows of lamps blaze now, an eerie corridor of deserted majesty, and I struggle down the length of it, gulping down air, clutching my ribs.
How far have I come? Half a mile, a mile—and the rest of the day, miles of street and tunnel and subway, and many more miles of focus for searching and speaking, and the strain of the shop closing, the search closing, too, around me. I drop onto a bench, surprising myself, and my heart hammers against my throat, churning up a sticky glue, and I clear it out, swallow. My high-tops feel too small, my feet swollen. I am not cold anymore but my fingers are stiff and I wonder if it is possible to fall apart like a plastic doll, my limbs hanging down, heavier and heavier, until they pop free from the dead weight.
Three years ago, I had a case with a New York Marathon runner who lost the puka shells he wore to every race. As we went backward, retracing the course, he pointed at a tree and said, “Mile 22. That’s where I almost stopped running.”
When he struggled into Mile 22, he looked around and saw the runners who had dropped out, cramping and vomiting and bandaging blisters in the shade, and he felt the sheer number of miles in h
is legs and doubled over and clutched his knees and thought he was done. We found the puka shells tangled at the base of the Mile 22 tree, and that is how I learned about the crippling heaviness of being so close to the end. He had kept limping along, even without his shells, and managed to finish, and that means I can do it too.
I stand, walking and then running under the bright lights of the Mall, and I stop and look both ways to cross a street, waiting for a horse pulling a carriage to clop by. I set off down a footpath and the city sounds drop off immediately and it is graveyard quiet here, close and uncomfortable. There should be a page around here, not far from Fifth Avenue.
I push through sleeping places and under a little bridge and I hear the hushed winging of a bat. A clock tower chimes, the night stirring and bearing me to a different time and place, and a carousel of bronze animals cranks to life, playing their pipes and tambourines and gliding around the clock, trailed by silver wisps. I find the fifth page there, outside the zoo, under the music clock.
That leaves one more page to collect, the one in the southeast corner. Walking along the curb, I follow a street out of the otherworld of the park and return to the ordinary one, a bronze monument in front of me and the trees behind it draped in holiday lights and a procession of cars rolling under the flags of the Plaza. A horse is standing on the corner of Central Park South, a muscled boulder rising out of a river of pedestrians, and the sixth page is pinned under one of its hooves.
“Ho ho, our Barb kept it safe for ya,” the driver says, nudging the horse’s ankle, and the horse does not move at first. With a queenly snort, it shifts its weight to the other side and daintily lifts the hoof.
I insert the page into the Book, a little trampled but intact, and I linger there with the six pages nestled in their rightful places between the Book’s covers, feeling uneasy. I borrow a rubber band from the driver and snap it around the Book, and I feel better as I hail a cab back to Ruby.
The Luster of Lost Things Page 24