The Garden of Lost and Found (11 page)

But whatever. I don’t think that’s the fire he referred to.

He was a thin sort of pretty black kid with hair dyed gold and coppery skin and a black eye swollen to the size of a chicken egg and streaked under the skin with yellow pus-filled stripes. He was wearing a tight white long-sleeved T-shirt and white jeans, and when I asked him about it he said through cracked lips, “Armani Exchange, do you like it?” What I’d been referring to was the fact that his entire body was stained with soot. His shoes were tar-black lumps unrecognizable under an inch of caked-on creosote, and from his singed ankles all the way up to his skinny neck he was tie-dyed in gradually lightening layers of black and gray and ash. When I asked him what happened he turned and pointed at the black scar in the fields stretching beyond the horizon. The fire was out but the wind blew the ash around like smoke, and would until next year’s crops went in the ground. “I walked,” he told me, and he lifted his shoes and I saw that their soles had melted into flippery smoothness. As if it explained everything, he said, “My name is Divine.”

He was standing at The Well. When I came upon him he was working its handle vainly and when I rolled down the window of Lily Windglass’s second-best car he said with complete candor, “Looks like it’s dry today.” I believe that’s what they call dramatic irony. At my house he took his ruined shoes off but wore his clothes right into the shower and soaped them up. He asked me if I had a nail brush—“Preferably boar bristle, though badger’ll do”—but all I had was the plastic-handled thing I used to clean the floors, and I gave him a bottle of bleach when he asked for that too. He didn’t draw the curtain, and I sat on the toilet and watched as he scrubbed at his clothes. Black water rolled endlessly off him and it was easy to pretend the water streaming from his eyes was just shower water as well, or tears caused by the bleach’s harsh fumes, but then he began to sob aloud. But even so, he didn’t ask me to leave. He kept up a constant stream of patter in fact, and eventually his clothes and the water running off him were both clean, the water clear and the clothes bright as windshield glare, and he peeled them off. Underneath were rashlike patches I assumed were bleach burn, but the bruises were undeniably older than those afflictions. They—he let on it was a
they
that had done this to him, though whether
they
were two or a whole mob he never said—had beat him on the shoulders and the small of his back and up and down his arms. They’d pummeled his chest, punched his stomach, kicked his ass and his groin, and you could practically see the treadmarks running along both legs as if they’d literally walked all over him, but somehow they’d managed not to draw blood, and when I commented on that he laughed a little and he said, “Oh, they knew better than that. They knew better than to draw
Divine
blood.” He scrubbed viciously at his body, as if bruises like soot could be washed away with soap and water, and every time he pressed into a swollen patch of skin he moaned and swore a “Sweet Jesus” and cursed white and black man alike.

When he finished with whatever he was doing—and whatever it was, it went far past the point of just showering—he stumbled out of the tub and landed face first in my lap. At first I thought he’d fallen, but then I realized he was licking at my crotch. In between mouthfuls he squeezed out words, “Just let me thank you, just let me show you my ’preciation,” and if I’d had the strength I would have smacked him off me. But his body was mottled with pain and I couldn’t find an undamaged place large enough to put my hand. He got my pants open, his tongue on my skin had a feel to it of…of slime I have to say, even though that seems unfair. But it was as though his tongue were coated in oily sludge and he was using it to sheathe my penis in the same stuff and I sat helplessly on the toilet and let him work, and I think he would have labored all day in a vain attempt to get me hard if his lip hadn’t finally split open and begun trailing a thin track of blood along my upper thigh. I put my hands on his head then, as carefully as I could. His hair, nearly dry, was coarse as the unraveled fibers of an anchor rope, and at its touch I could feel the urge that countless other men must have felt: to grab handfuls of it and jerk the face underneath against my crotch, or throw it as far from me as possible. But again I resisted. I pushed him off lightly, and when he opened his eyes and saw the blood he sat back and said, “It’s okay, you don’t got nothing to worry about.” “What are you running from?” I said, and when he didn’t answer me I said, “Are you running from the people who did this to you?” I wanted some kind of connection to him, but he just laughed and stood up, and that’s when I saw his erection. “Listen to me,” I tried one more time. “You’re safe here.”

He smiled when I said that, and when he followed my eyes and saw what I was looking at he laughed again. A smudge of white flour dotted his forehead like the negative of an Easter blessing. He couldn’t have been more than seventeen. His lip curled up on one side and he licked his blood off and turned and looked out the bathroom window. There wasn’t anything to see, just empty sky, not even a hint of ash, but when he turned back to me he said, “It always takes a fire,” and he grabbed his clothes and ran out of the room.

I wanted to run after him but I also wanted to wash his blood off me and in the end I wanted his blood off me more than I wanted to know what he meant. Before I finished—I used soap first, but then I used peroxide and finally I just poured bleach all over my crotch—I heard the back door slam. He’d taken some leftover chicken from the fridge and my shoes as well, but left me his in return.
Those shoes
. Later I found a sooty outline in the passenger seat of Lily Windglass’s second-best car that never did wash out. When I saw that I thought of him running through the fields beyond Selden in his sopping wet clothes—for some reason I knew he’d avoid the roads—and I thought, what a shame. He worked so hard to scrub himself clean, only to have black soot replaced by brown dust. I thought, he’ll run to the next place, and at the next place he’ll wash himself again, only to dirty his body with something else. Maybe he’ll be at the ocean by then, and it’ll be blond sand that covers him this time, black soot to brown dirt to blond sand is what I was thinking, an ever lighter progression, and it occurred to me that maybe if he dove into the water and swam far enough then maybe, just maybe, he’d finally get clean.

When I washed the crud off
those shoes
I saw that whatever they had been they’d melted into two black slippers—you know what they’re called, they’re called rubbers—and when I pulled them on they fit me like a second skin.

I kept them.

I THOUGHT DIVINE’S SHOES had found me again when I woke up the second time that morning, but when I sat up I saw that my feet were in fact wrapped in strips of moss or algae or some other water plant. They were also completely numb. I wiggled my toes and saw the green bandages ripple, but I didn’t feel anything at all, and I was trying to decide if that was a good thing or a bad thing when I heard a sound I’d never heard before but still recognized instinctively: the bell attached to the door of the shop was ringing with the simple peal of a fifties urban drama.
Clang-a-lang. Someone’s here
.

How long had I been in New York? Eighteen days? Nineteen? In that time I’d seen not a single person in the shop besides Nellydean. And how many times had I walked through the front door without once hearing that bell? Its chime seemed to sound the end of my dream of the dying city. I would get up to find the shop orderly and neat, filled with sun and people and the
ca-ching ca-chang
conversation of money changing hands. Outside would be not the grimy alley that was Dutch Street but a broad metropolitan avenue teeming with light and life and consumers, and in my haste to greet them I clawed at the seaweed Nellydean had wrapped around my feet. They emerged pale as two unbaked loaves, unscathed by yesterday’s barefoot tramp, and I ran awkwardly on their still-numb pads, catching on to things for balance, a tree trunk, a door handle, a cast-iron column. My feet were numb and heavy but the rest of my body was empty, light as air, and I caught on to these things not because I was afraid of falling over but because I was afraid I might float away, and by the time I made it into the shop the bells were ringing again—
ding-a-ling, someone’s gone
—and when I got to the front of the building all I saw was a huge moving van outside the window, its side painted with what looked like a reproduction of a mountainous pastoral, the paired breasts of two brown hills and a gray waterfall hanging between them like a string of pearls. Inked over the blue of the sky were black-edged gilt letters:

Merton & Morton

Fine Art and Objéts

Delivery • Removal • Auctions

A cloud of exhaust obscured the landscape as the moving van coughed into life. Nature’s illusion rolled away, replaced by the sooty bricks of the building a few feet across Dutch Street, and then, as always, it was just me and Nellydean.

“Your momma was a fool.”

I turned. She stood silhouetted by a column like a caryatid, inspecting some papers in her hand. But the Merton and Morton van had reminded me of another vehicle, another name.

“Nellydean,” I said, “who’s Sonny?”

Nellydean’s head jerked up. “What you know about Sonny?”

Whatever benevolence she’d manifested in the garden was gone. Her voice was harsh, accusatory, and it was all I could do to stammer, “T-take it easy,” as she shoved the papers into a dusty fold of her dress and advanced on me.

“Don’t mess with me boy. You know something bout Sonny you best tell me right now. You in bad enough shape if you messing with him, but you in worse shape if you messing with both of us.”

“Jesus Christ, Nellydean, settle down. You mentioned his name in the garden. Before, when you was, when you were talking about my mother.”

“That all?”

My eyes betrayed me: some magnet of memory pulled them toward the window and Nellydean rushed to the glass as if he might still be there.

“He been by? You tell me boy. Sonny been by here?”

I didn’t see the point in lying, even if I could have pulled it off. I told her about the confrontation I’d seen outside my window two nights ago, starting with
Ay mooderfooker
and ending up with
Well whaddaya know, Sonny, Ginny really did have that kid
, and when I finished Nellydean clapped one flattened palm against the other, as if Sonny were a fly she wished she could smash between her hands.

“Damn it, that is exactly what I didn’t want to happen. Damn it damn it damn it.”

“Nellydean? How did Sonny…” I paused, reaching for a word. “How did he know my mother?”

Nellydean looked at me as if I’d already entered into some pact with him, then practically spat: “She used to run around with him, till she realized what a lowlife he was.”

That seemed to me beside the point, and I was about to ask her to be more specific when all at once feeling returned to my feet. It was as if the minutes-long prick and tingle of pins and needles had been compressed into a single pitchfork stab, and I nearly fell over with pain.

“Ow!”

But by the time the word came out the attack was over. I bent down to my clean feet, already dusty from the floor of the shop. I wiggled my toes, felt the grit on the floor, the split grain of the floorboards. When I stood up I wavered a little, dizzily. Nellydean had turned away from me. She faced a cylinder about eight feet tall and four feet around, lacquered black until it was as smooth and shiny as a funhouse mirror and devoid of any marking besides a gold filigree at top and bottom, and I hope you understand when I say I wasn’t certain that the cylinder was what the moving van had just added to the already overcrowded floor of the shop, but I was pretty sure it was.

“Will you look at this contraption?” Nellydean regarded the shiny black cabinet with the loathing one might bestow upon a cockroach that had made its way onto the dinner table, or the interruption of your favorite family-oriented drama with the news that the nukes are on the way. “Have you ever
seen
something so ridiculous?”

I glanced down at myself, the jumpsuit, the blood, the feet so recently wrapped in algae. “Um, what is it?”

Nellydean’s voice dripped with sarcasm. “It’s a magician’s cabinet.”

“You mean, like, step inside and abracadabra, you’re gone?”

“I mean,
like
, step inside”—and even as she reached toward the cabinet I saw the seam of a door, and she pressed a tiny button and a latch snapped and a door squeaked open—“and
abracadabra
, you lift a hatch in the floor, and if you lucky enough to be on a elevated stage and fool enough to cut a hole in it then you can clamber down through.” She reached into the cabinet’s shadowy interior and pulled on something, and a circular panel came up with her hand; in its place I could see the plain wooden planks of the shop floor. A column of thin silver rungs descended the inner wall of the cabinet.

“See what I mean? Half the audience could see that ladder. And look at this.” She gave the cabinet a shove and it wobbled back and forth. “No ballast. Unless it was bolted down it would-a shook like a sapling in a storm.”

“Let me get this straight. Your objection isn’t so much to the idea of a cabinet, it’s just to this particular—”

“Piece-a crap,” she finished for me. “And my objection is that we already have one.”

“We already have a magician’s cabinet?

Nellydean paused just long enough for me to realize her
we
referred not to the two of us, nor even to her and my mother, but to her and the shop. “Come here,” she said, and turned, and led the way into the stacks.

She turned down one tiny zigzagging corridor after another, until we ended up where we’d started: in front of the magic cabinet. Except somehow its door had closed, and the front door—the door to the shop, I mean—was gone.

“Wha—” I began, but I couldn’t even finish that tiny word. In answer, Nellydean simply touched the cabinet, and its own, heretofore invisible door slid silently open. I squinted, but couldn’t make out any rungs in the shadowy cavern beyond. “Wait a minute. Is this a
different
cabinet?”