The Secret of Lost Things

“I am sorry, I don’t want to read this in English. Thank you for the book,” she said abruptly, and handed it back to me.

Perhaps reading the hurt on my face, she added, “You keep it. You read it for yourself. Fill up your gaps. I have no need of such things anymore.”

Turning away, she put the television plug back into her ear.

I went to my room feeling rejected. I wanted friends, something I’d never had at home. Mother had discouraged such connections; she was fiercely private and secretive about our life. Although I loved the Arcade and New York, the other side of a teeming city was relentless isolation. There was nothing I had been to anyone, no impression I had made, no one to remember me. People here were tricky, and odd—sometimes deceitful. I needed to be careful. I fingered the green amulet at my throat that Chaps had given me.

The exchange with Lillian reminded me that I really needed to live elsewhere, to properly establish myself. Although I had been managing at the hotel for months, I longed for somewhere that didn’t feel like a place of transition. The dirty park, my bellwether on the way to the Arcade, told me that fall was coming, and I knew little about the real winter that would follow. I wanted my own bathroom, free of grubby ghosts, and a stove to cook on, as well as a window I could open that didn’t tease my hunger with the promise of Indian food I couldn’t afford, despite its designation as cheapest cuisine in the city. The Martha Washington was also paralyzingly quiet, up until late evening. Then, the thump-thump of cars and taxis that failed to spot the large pothole directly outside the building’s entrance began. The synchronized double-banging of the front and then the rear of each car, as its tires sank momentarily up to their hubcaps, was repetitive and deadening.

That evening I lay in bed, in darkness, and measured the thump-thump of passing cars against the more predictable beat of my heart. I needed a place to make my own, and determined to ask around at the Arcade to see if anyone knew of an apartment to rent or to share.

Unable to sleep, I switched on the light and took up the Borges I’d found for Lillian, and which she insisted I keep. Why was Lillian so difficult to befriend? The little volume cheered me up. Lillian was right about Borges filling up gaps; he knew all about the lazy pleasure of useless and out-of-the-way erudition; all about the fertilizing quality of knowledge.

The book was arranged alphabetically, and so I started with Abtu and Anet, the Egyptian life-sized holy fish that swam on the lookout for danger before the prow of the sun god’s ship. Theirs was an eternal journey, sailing across the sky from dawn to dusk, and by night traveling underground in the opposite direction.

I lay reading the short entries with interest, and passed the hardest part of the night forgetting about my larger concerns.

Some creatures were familiar, like the Minotaur, half bull and half man, born from the perverse passion of Pasiphaë, queen of Crete, for a pure white bull, and hidden within the Labyrinth because of its monstrousness.

The book’s final entry was the Zaratan, the island that is actually a whale, “skilled in treachery,” drowning sailors once they camped on its back, having mistaken the Zaratan for land.

I finally fell asleep with the book on my chest, my mind full of whales and white bulls, fish-men and girl-lions—a zoology of dreams with a cast made to populate the one I was living.

Arthur Pick was something altogether different. Another foreigner, an Englishman, he adored his Art section and was constantly examining photography books, in particular those that featured naked men, as I had seen him do the day I was hired. Arthur loved paintings as well, but photography was his passion. He gave me a nickname I hated, but he insisted on it, and insisted too that I look at photographs he fancied.

“Hello, my Tasmanian Devil, are you floating today? Are you busy? Come here and look, look at these pictures. Are they not lovely?”

“Well, yes, they’re very, ah, powerful…But I think I prefer the paintings you showed me.”

“Do you? I can’t imagine why.” Arthur turned several pages and my face reddened. I hadn’t seen anything like these men. Ever.

“Don’t you see that the photograph has made them innocent?” Arthur said. The question astonished me.

“They are frozen and unaware that they will change, or die, or even that they live at all,” he went on.

“Innocent?” It was exactly what I thought of Mother’s black-and-white photo, that she was captured in there before her life had overwhelmed her. But innocent? These men were hardly unwitting, they were complicit.

“Innocence is their appeal,” Arthur explained. “Their nakedness is only part of it. I thought you’d see it, my Tasmanian Devil, because that’s a bit like you.”

“But how do you know I’m innocent?” I asked him, my face aflame.

“Ah, now you stretch credibility. It is what everyone here sees in you.”

“I really don’t understand you, Arthur…and I told you, please don’t call me that name anymore.” I knew he was being ironic calling me devilish, but just then I couldn’t laugh it off.

Arthur continued to turn the pages of the large book. “It is my gaze that brings the nude alive. They live in my mind, you see. Isn’t that marvelous?”

“So, will you stop calling me that name?”

“Tasmanian Devil? Of course, as you wish. Would you permit just TD then, for short?”

“But not, I hope, for long,” I returned.

“Ah,” Arthur said, surprised. “The stirrings of wit! Delightful! Perhaps, after all, you are not irreparably Tasmanian.”

One October evening, walking back to the Martha Washington, I first experienced a ritual of American fall. Passing my dirty park, I stood to watch as workers blew leaves into tall piles. Autumn leaves were collected up in colorful mounds of brown and orange, a few yellow edges fluttering out, like the slips of paper presented to Pearl for redemption at the register. Time was passing, heaped up on the path, blown into piles for carting off and burning to ash. I shivered.

Looking up into the trees, I noticed that one still had a few dark leaves clinging to the upper branches. Under my gaze, the leaves became a semé of birds, scattering upward and away in a salutary swoop, leaving only a plastic bag, caught and hanging listlessly in the bare limbs.

I hurried to the Martha Washington.

“I’m paying up for this week,” I told Lillian when I arrived. “But I really want to find an apartment. I think it’s time for me to move.”

I had decided to look in earnest, despite a lack of funds.

“What’s wrong with staying here?” said Lillian. “I keep my eye on you. I see you come and go. I make sure you not imaginary,” she joked. “I see what you become after the lion.”

She moved her hands around her head, simulating my messy mane.

I smiled.

“It’s fine here, Lillian, but I’d like to have a place of my own. I want to cook, and feel more settled. Guests come and go here all the time. I’d like to think I had a home. The weather is changing. It’s time I settled a bit more.”

“I don’t think you should go. Not yet. You are safer here,” Lillian said, dropping her hands and looking fretful.

“People, they disappear,” she said. “You have no idea…”

“What are you talking about, Lillian?” I said. “I’m not going away. Finding a proper place to live is the best way to become permanent. I’m not about disappear.”

Lillian shook her head, but not in disagreement.

“I hear you’re looking for somewhere to live,” Jack muttered to me a few days later as I stood talking with Pearl up front. “I’d be happy to oblige…”

“Do you mean you know somewhere?”

“Me mate’s just shot through, and I know somewhere cheap enough.”

“It’ll have to be cheap, Jack, on what they pay here,” I said. “Is it far?”

“Walking distance,” he answered. “If you’re up for a walk. It’s east of here.” He waved his thick arm wildly, not specifying a direction.

East of the Arcade was a notoriously squalid section of the city; the neighborhood was known for its drug dealers and cold-water flats.

The following week Jack and Rowena took me to look at his friend’s apartment after work. They led me down a block lined with several abandoned buildings, past a garbage-covered vacant lot to a dingy storefront, its windows clouded over with swirls of paint and wooden boards covered with graffiti. A battered-looking door opened on the side of what had once been a small grocery store. Inside the dank hall, I took in the hypodermic needles strewn under the stairwell, and the gray paint on the walls peeling off in damp flakes. The room was on the second floor. Jack had the key. His friend, a fellow musician, had left the apartment empty, although he retained the lease and wanted to sublet for only six months.

The door opened on a long, narrow space like a train carriage, with two dirty windows that faced the street. An oven, sink, and old claw-footed bathtub sat in the center against an exposed brick wall. A slightly narrower alcove with a tiny closet (and the toilet) was in the rear behind a filthy curtain. Worn, dark, wide planks on the floor were covered with the detritus of hasty departure: paper, rags, and lumps of clotted dust. The room was cold. The whole building was without heat.

“The boiler’s out just now,” said Jack, rubbing his hands together against the chill of the room. “Me mate used to turn the oven on and leave the door open when it got really cold in winter. Warm as toast after a while.” He attempted a grizzled smile.