The Garden of Lost and Found (27 page)

When I saw it I stopped short, blinking in the headlights, but then I lowered my head and continued toward No. 1. I wasn’t ignoring it, or pretending it didn’t exist. I was just—well, what else could I do? Run? Where?

From this side Sonny Dinadio looked like Sonny Dinadio. The thin elastic strap above his right ear could have been nothing but a shadow. But then, when he turned to face me, I saw the black hole the patch made over his left eye, and then I saw his cheek. Six months later it was still swollen. Sort of: the swelling had condensed and hardened, and even in the dark I could see that the raised welts were mottled red and purple save for a pale crater in the center of each. It was as if Justine had driven the heel of Claudia’s shoe into a wax mask applied to the left side of Sonny’s face, and now only the right side of his mouth could move when he spoke.

“Get in the van.”

The accent was the same—
ged in de van
—and coupled with the half sneer it rendered him less threatening than caricaturish, Edward G. Robinson about to be foiled by Humphrey Bogart, and I had to resist the urge to say, “What’s the big idea, see?”

As my eyes lingered on the left side of his face I remembered the column of bruises that had stained my spine for a week after he’d thrown me against the corner of No. 1. No amount of old-movie dialogue could balance that remembered pain against these palsied scars. Sonny had hurt me, but even I didn’t think he deserved this, and, apologetically, or perhaps just compulsively (by which I mean, I suppose, that getting in his van was as close as I could come to saving him), I reached for the door. Sonny had adorned its window with a patriotic decal. This one showed an American flag in which the skyline of Manhattan had been placed beneath the field of stars. Then a cloud of hot air washed over me, a spicy smell carried on its current. As I sat down I glanced behind the wheel. Up close the sausagey man looked more like a potato. The flesh of his thighs rolled over the sides of his seat like the top of a muffin in a tin, his fingers were so fat they quivered like poached eggs. But that didn’t make him any less formidable.

No one said anything for a long time, then the potatoey man said, “Wanna go for a ride?” Even his voice was heavy—not meaty, but doughy.

“Sure,” Sonny said. “Let’s go for a ride.”

How context changes things: three or four minutes ago I’d walked these streets, head down, heedless of the before-and-after landscape of Ground Zero and its vicinity. But inside the heated bubble of Sonny Dinadio’s van, I couldn’t stop staring at the granite facades, marble, brass, glass, steel, everything packed so tightly together it resembled machine parts more than buildings. Lobbies were lighted but upper floors were dark; the metal mesh cans on every corner had been recently emptied and the wind puffed the dark plastic bags out of the tops of the cans like tubular bladders, so that it appeared as if giant earthworms were emerging from tunnels beneath the sidewalks. The city that never sleeps slept. No Siren sang tonight, neither car alarms nor rescue vehicles, leaving the van
to cruise the scene like a lunar lander exploring an abandoned alien metropolis, and when Sonny finally spoke I jumped a little, because I’d forgotten he was there—by which I mean, I suppose, I’d forgotten
I
was there, with him.

“You see this?” He paused, let me take it in. “This,” he said, “is where you live.”

Six months had changed Sonny. It was impossible to tell if it was the attack on him that had done it, or the attack on the city, but even though his words, his accent, were as rough as ever—
You see dis? Dis is where you live
—there had grown a contemplative, almost entreating undertone to his voice, and I turned from the ravaged landscape of his face and looked back at the ravaged city around us.

The towers were gone of course. The most prominent reminders were the Bankers Trust and Union Carbide buildings, still standing but shrouded in black like mourners at a funeral. Of Ground Zero itself, the only thing I could see was a bright light shining from the pile and snaking its way through the curved streets. The light illuminated hundreds of other buildings, and though there were any number of things you could say about them, the one thing I noticed was that they were all…unchanged. Indifferent. Not just to their lost brethren, but to each other. Like the people who lived and worked in them, every building I looked at possessed the quintessentially New York quality of self-contained disinterest. The new rubbed shoulders with the old, the clean with the dirty. Hollow cast-iron facades abutted burgundy bricks on one side, gray limestone on the other. Each building claimed its tiny share of the island at the expense of its neighbors, and what bothered me was less the implacable continuity that is, after all, common to all architecture, but, rather, the more personal realization that, even though the city hadn’t changed, I had. I had become a different person in the past five months, and somehow Sonny knew it. He knew I was ready to listen to what he had to say.

“Bastards tried to cut the heart out of this city,” he said like a true New Yorker, as if the attack had been on the city first and the country second. “They tried, but they failed. You know why those fuckers failed, James? They failed because they didn’t realize the heart of New York ain’t in one building. Not in the World Trade Center or the Empire State Building or the fucking Statue of Liberty. It’s in
all
of them. From the beginning of time, James, people been knocking down one building so’s they can put a taller one on top of it. One building don’t mean shit in New York. My old man cried like a baby when they knocked down Penn Station to put up the Garden, but even though I was only three or four years old I knew that that was just the way things worked here. You understand what I’m saying, James? Take a look around. This ain’t no place for a
garden
.”

I looked around. We were passing the Cunard building, heading east. Battery Park was on our right; the former island of Castle Clinton sat surrounded by acres of grass now, and a long colonnade of sycamores flanked the mangled brass remnants of The Sphere, a fountain that had once adorned World Trade Center Plaza. Melville’s Custom House, rechristened the Museum of the American Indian, was directly in front of us, and when we rounded a corner there was Broadway, an asphalt arrow making a beeline for heaven or Albany, whichever came first.

The potatoey man let the van idle on the empty street as we took in the view.

“Turn the heat up, Joey. It’s fucking freezing in here.”

Sonny was squeezing his arms around his stomach even though the cab was as hot as it had ever been, but Joey just closed two of his fat fingers on a dashboard lever like a man pinching a mosquito. A fresh blast of hot air shot from the vents, and like Sonny I found myself leaning into it, turning my head from side to side to feel the heater’s breath on both cheeks. When my face appeared in Sonny’s peripheral vision he started a little, twisted his body to the left to get a good look at me with his right eye, and as he uncurled into his seat I felt the weight of Joey’s hand on my shoulder. Effortlessly he pushed me back.

“Sonny don’t like it. People on his blind side.”

He reached up and, in a practiced gesture, adjusted the rearview mirror so Sonny could see my face without crimping his neck.

“I been watching you,” Sonny said now, his voice not threatening, but ruminative, contrite even. “I’ve had a lotta time on my hands these past few months and I seen you come and go a hundred times. You keep weird hours, you know that. You wear weird clothes and you keep weird hours. Your ma used to keep weird hours too. Used to go for a walk in the middle of the night, this before the mayor cleaned up the city, made it okay for a woman to do that. She used to say she could hear the empty buildings talking in their sleep. ‘Talking their dreams.’ She was crazy, your ma, but, you know, I think I understand what she meant. Took me twenty years, but I finally know what the hell she was talking about.”

I had to swallow before I could speak.

“What were they—what did she say they were dreaming?”

“She said they was dreaming us.”

“Dreaming about—”

Sonny found my eye in the rearview mirror. “Not dreaming
about
us.
Dreaming
us. Dreaming us up.” He stopped then. His eye had relaxed as he’d spoken, but now it focused again. “I want you to listen to me, James. Listen to what your ma told me. Your ma told me it was only when she was walking around the city late at night that she understood it was the people who did what the city wanted. You see what I’m saying, James? What she was saying? She said the people didn’t build the city, the city built the people. For a long time I used to think that was just another one-a Ginny’s peculiarities but after everything that’s gone down I think I understand what she was talking about. New York ain’t about you and me, James. It ain’t about these buildings, or all the money that’s made inside them. New York is about itself. You get my drift, James? You understand what I’m saying? James,” Sonny said, “if I don’t get No. 1 someone else will. Either the government or some developer, but the city will
not
be ignored.”

As if on cue, a horn broke the silence—the city’s silence, I mean. A car had turned the corner behind us and even as the potatoey man said, “Yeah, yeah, buddy, hold your fucking horses,” he dropped the van in gear and we lurched up the street. Not fast enough apparently: the car squealed past us and the potatoey man—Joey, I reminded myself—flipped the driver off as it went by. “Fuck you too, sweetheart.”

But I was still looking at Sonny in the mirror, and as soon as it was quiet I said, “Is that why she left?”

In the mirror Sonny smiled, as if I’d made his point for him. “She said she’d stopped sharing in the dream. Said once you did that there wasn’t no point in hanging out in something that was basically just a sculpture.”

“That’s not what I meant. I meant, is that why she left me?”

“You mean—”

“Did the city call her? Is that why she abandoned me?”

“Did the city call her?” Sonny cleared his throat. “Huh.” He thought about it, shrugged. “Truth be told, she didn’t talk about you very much. But she did say this one thing. She said—”

“It would have been worse if I stayed.”

Sonny’s eyes met mine—both of them, I mean, both of his. You could see from the way his eyebrows and cheek muscles moved that whatever was left under the patch still turned in sync with his uncovered right eye.

“If
she
stayed,” he clarified, and I nodded at him in the mirror and he nodded back. Before either of us could say anything more I felt the van stop, and both Sonny and I turned to look at Joey as he dropped it out of gear. We were back on Dutch Street.

On my right The Garden’s ochre lights emanated weakly through the windows, on my left was the building across from No. 1, as faceless then as it is in my memory now. Was New York really that small, I asked myself, just five or six pages long?

The van idled in front of No. 1, and I idled too, but neither Sonny Dinadio nor Joey said anything, and I understood it was my turn to speak. It took me a long time to decide what to say.

“I need money.”

Sonny and Joey remained silent for a long time.

“I got money,” Sonny said finally. “Joey, give the man some money.”

In an action that seemed to defy the laws of physics, Joey extracted a wallet from the front pocket of his pants and pulled several bills from it. I took them from him, put them in the pocket of the pirate suit, but still, I didn’t think I could just get out without saying something, so I said,

“Can I go now?”

As soon as I said it I realized I wasn’t sure if it was the van I wanted to get out of, or No. 1, or the city itself. I’d spent five months in a basement, after all, waiting for Claudia to reveal herself. I was angry and wracked by guilt and so fucking hungry I wanted to eat myself, and whatever time I had left was wasting away, literally. Why shouldn’t I take the money and run? But nobody answered me, and I slid the door open, climbed out, slid it closed. As it rattled into place the 9/11 decal quivered, and I realized Sonny hadn’t actually stuck it to his window, only taped it in place.

In the time it had taken me to get out of the van Sonny had rolled down his window, and his left hand, his blind hand, held a thick envelope through the open portal. He held it without looking at me, and in the mixture of arrogance and shame in his gesture I saw two things. I saw first the way he’d pressed Nellydean’s hand to the counter the day I met Claudia, and then, just as clearly, I saw the way my mother had left him. The why: why she might’ve been attracted to such strength, and why that attraction, like Sonny’s strength, would have failed. In the time it took me to think these thoughts I’d taken the envelope and Sonny had rolled up his window, and by the time I made it upstairs and looked outside the van was gone. I stared at Dutch Street, half expecting to see him reappear and demand an answer. Or maybe I was looking for Justine. It felt as though those were the fates I was being asked to choose between: an opportunistic self-justifying thug on the one hand or, on the other, a crazy drag queen who ran away from the world by making one up inside her head. But for the moment they were both absent, and that night all I did was put the envelope Sonny had given me on my dresser and, fully clothed, climb into bed. At twenty-two I still hadn’t mastered eating, but sleeping I could do like nobody’s business.

THE NEXT MORNING I waited for claudia to knock on my door as she had every morning for the past five months, but she never came. Sonny’s envelope sat on my dresser, a white rectangle that seemed to stare at me even when I left the room to take a bath. It was still staring at me when I walked back into the room, naked and shivering, carrying the clean dry bundle of Johnson Montgomery Croft’s clothes. By then it was pretty clear Claudia wasn’t coming and, still conscious of the envelope and everything that might be contained within it, I tossed the clean laundry on the bed, threw on yesterday’s dirty clothes instead, snuck out of the building.

The sun was bright but the streets were cold, and I walked as quickly as I could in a vain effort to stay warm. That was the day I came across the plaque at 35 W. 9
^th
Street (
Marianne Moore lived here
) and when, a little while later, I came to a used bookstore, I went inside. They had a
Complete Poems
, and I took it to a leather chair whose cushion squeaked like a murdered mouse when I sat down. As I cracked the cover I froze, remembering what had happened the last time I’d opened a book of poetry, but Moore’s words were more stable than Brooks’. I was just scanning the table of contents when the clerk tapped a round wooden table on which sat a tent-folded card:
you don’t have to buy anything but you don’t have to sit here either!
The little prick turned around after he was sure I’d read the sign, and behind his back I slipped the book into the hollow flounce of my shirt and walked out of the store.