“What if the caller says what’s your name?”
“Oh thank God. Thank you for speaking. If I had to keep that up I was going to pop an aneurysm. If the caller says?”
“What’s your name?”
“Right, what’s your name. What’s your—oh. Oh right. Knute,” he said. “Did I forget to say that back at your, what kind of shop was that?”
“It’s basically a junk store, Newt. As in Gingrich, or eye of?”
“
Kuh
-nute. As in Rockne.”
“Who?”
“The Gipper? Win one for the? How old are you anyway?”
I thought. “I’ll be twenty-two,” I said. “In about a month.”
“Jesus Christ.” He pulled the pitted olive from the basin of his empty glass, swallowed it without chewing. His fingers drummed the square of paper river on the table. “Knute. With a K, and an N, and a U-T-E. Do you work there?”
I took
there
to mean the shop and I said, “I own there.” I thought I was beginning to understand the connection between the man and the newspaper, and I said, “Knute. Like Hamsun.”
Knute raised his eyebrows. “You went to college? In Seldom, Kansas?”
“Sel
den
, with an N. A Big N. How did you know that?”
“Your wallet, remember?”
“My wallet?”
“Oh shit.” Knute smacked himself in the forehead, nearly taking out his eye with the toothpick—a pink plastic cutlass actually—that had held his olive. He dug something out of his pants pocket. “This is yours, isn’t it?”
It was mine. It was my wallet. Black, nylon, as flat and thin as the cheek of the ass it had been pressed against—mine, I mean. I hadn’t noticed his ass, although I had noticed that when his arm reached into his pants a tuft of black hair pushed through the open buttons of his shirt.
Knute said, “There was a driver’s license with a Kansas address.” He squinted at me. Gray eyes, crow’s feet. The nose in between was thick and shapely, the lips below thin but broad. “You looked kind of rough back there. How long has it been since you’ve eaten anyway? And how is it that you own that shop?”
His questions, I saw, were braiding our threads together, and in an effort to see if I liked the thicker strand they formed I said, “I haven’t eaten in two days.” I said, “I own the entire building actually. I inherited it from my mother a couple of months ago. And no,” I said, “I never went to college. I just read a lot. Or I used to, before I moved here.”
Knute processed this with three blinks, and then, when he scratched his chin, I saw that it was wide and flat, not stubbly, but shadowed with a couple of missed lines of hair, some black, some gray, and that was his face. He said, “You haven’t eaten in two days?” but I was concentrating on fixing his face in my mind. The thick black hair graying at the temples, the gray eyes, the weathered skin pulled tightly over sharp cheekbones all the way down to a broad dimpleless chin and a neck prickled pink from his morning shave. “I’m sorry about your mother,” Knute said, but by then I was following that neck down to the broad white-shirted shoulders from which it sprouted. The fabric of the shirt was creased with Chinese laundry folds like an opened map—like the maps in all those books I used to read before I moved to New York, those books that always had buried treasure of one kind or another in them, and maps that were supposed to lead to the treasure. But the maps weren’t part of Knute’s face, and I was afraid I’d already lost it—lost his face, I mean, lost the thread—when he said, “You read Knut Hamsun?”
“No,” I replied cautiously. “Do you?”
He waved a hand. “A thousand years ago. College. ‘English major.’” Fingers supplied the quotation marks.
I nodded. “Knut Hamsun,” I said with a little more confidence, “is one of those names you see a lot in provincial libraries and used bookstores. “Joyce Cary, John Gardner, Shirley Hazzard, Malcolm Lowry, Knut Hamsun. He had one book, I think it was called—”
“Hungry?”
At first I thought he meant the book but then I saw that the waitress had finally returned with bread and another martini. The fingers of both of Knute’s hands curled around the stem of the glass and he stared at the brimming cocktail. After a long moment of contemplation he leaned down until his lips touched the liquid’s surface and then he half sipped, half breathed the alcohol into his mouth, and then, when he glanced up and saw me staring, he blushed deeply. He sat up and pushed the drink away.
“Sebastian told me it’s a good idea not to eat when you’re with a subject, all you talk about is the food. I think he forgot to mention not to get sloshed either.”
I didn’t know who Sebastian was and I wasn’t quite sure what Knute meant by
subject
, but I didn’t care. I was exclusively concerned with the bread in front of me, and as I ate it occurred to me that it was Nellydean who’d reminded me of the buried treasure I used to read about, not the folds of Knute’s maplike shirt, not the bounty of food.
Knute patted his breast pocket—empty—shook his head, reached for his drink. “I’m a little new at this, in case you couldn’t tell. My background’s in marketing and advertising. In case you couldn’t tell. Actually, I’ve never done this in my life.”
“In case I couldn’t tell.”
Knute reached for his drink. The hot innards of the bread melted in my mouth like cotton candy. When his glass was empty again Knute turned the newspaper over, but I elected not to look at it. He spoke as if he were reading aloud. “James Ramsay,” he said. “Of No. 1 Dutch Street, formerly Selden, Kansas. Twenty-one. Brown hair, crewcut. Gray eyes, bloodshot. Both a little fuzzy. About five-seven, five-eight, one hundred…” He let his voice trail off and I nodded at him. “About one hundred pounds,” Knute repeated.
“Sounds like an APB,” I managed to say, still ripping bread into bite-sized chunks and stuffing them into my mouth.
Knute continued as though he hadn’t heard. “The Hudson River. Barefoot and on the run. Orange flak suit. Sunburn. Minor contusions. And, apparently, starving.”
By that point the bread basket was empty, and I closed my eyes. My mouth has eaten, I thought, now it’s my stomach’s turn. I opened my eyes and looked at Knute. Another list of details was forming on his lips, but I headed him off.
“Did you used to smoke?”
“How could you tell?”
I patted my chest as he’d patted his empty breast pocket. The orange jumpsuit felt strange beneath my hand, and I looked down and saw I was wearing something like a tuxedo shirt or a pirate smock, complete with wrinkled ruffles and flounced sleeves—powder blue, though, instead of white. Though I remembered the clothes as among those Trucker had given me, I didn’t remember putting them on. A large napkin covered my legs, and I was afraid to lift it up lest I discover that all of this was one of those pantsless-in-public dreams. But then the bread landed in my stomach and my stomach sent a little message to my brain, and I had a sudden flash of peeling off yesterday’s soiled jumpsuit, running up four flights of stairs, taking a quick bath. No, wait. Reverse the first and second items.
I looked up at Knute again. I was going to thank him for the food and leave, but my words vanished when I looked into his eyes, which were the same color as the water should have been in the picture on the cover of
The New York Post
. I mean they were blue. Not powder blue like my shirt, but Baltic blue, like the cold northern sea. I had worked very hard to fix the image of his face in my head, I was sure his eyes had been gray a moment ago. But apparently I had failed.
“Hey Knute?” I said. “Can we recap?”
“Recap?”
“You know, our story thus far. What’s happened. How we got here. It’s a little blurry.”
“I thought that’s what I was asking you.”
I tapped the newspaper. “Yesterday I jumped in the Hudson River. This morning I’m on the cover of
The
New York
Post
. A lot of things seem to have happened in between, but let’s start with that.”
Knute looked at the paper. “Japanese tourist.” I must have made some kind of face because he said, “Sorry, that was Sebastian’s joke. The kid
was
Japanese, but he was a student at NYU doing some kind of photo-documentation project of the West Side for his thesis.”
“Sebastian?
“My friend at the magazine. He got me this gig.”
“Magazine?”
Knute said its name, or he said the name of the dying city, or the name of the dying city was the name of the magazine. “They want me to do a story on you. Back-to-basics hero in the wake of Wall Street and the Worldwide Web. Is there something wrong with your neck?”
“There are too many W’s in that sentence,” I said, scratching my neck. “You,” I said, scraping my fingernails across my skin, “are interviewing,” scratch scratch scratch, “me?”
Knute blushed. He looked into the dry well of his martini glass and said, “Well I’m supposed to be. But I’m not doing a very good job of it, am I?”
Really, what I was doing was less scratching then peeling. I was trying to get my nails under my skin and rip it off. A fever dream flashed through my mind then, the one in which my skin had been a chrysalis I’d shed to reveal a new, better, more beautiful body beneath. It was all I could do to keep talking.
“You want to tell my story?”
“Well, I want to know it. And then I’ll see if I can tell it.”
“Oh believe me,” I said, practically tearing at my neck now, “there’s nothing to tell. Nothing at all.”
“Would you stop that please? You’re starting to disturb me. It’s like you’re looking for something.”
It hit me then: the chain! The chain with my mother’s key on it. It wasn’t around my neck.
That
was the thread I’d lost. I cupped my neck in my hands, heels under chin, fingertips pressed together just beneath my coccyx. I felt my Adam’s apple on one side and vertebrae on the other, felt muscles, tendons, ligaments, the oily residue of the Hudson River and the lumps of two swollen glands directly beneath each of my ears, but I didn’t feel the chain anywhere. I could only imagine it, falling down through murky water like a bolt of lightning loose in the night sky.
Knute was staring at me with two gray eyes and an inscrutable expression on his face. I took my hands from around my neck and placed them firmly on the table.
Slowly, Knute picked up one of my fingers. He only moved it an inch—not even enough to disturb my palm—then tapped it twice against the table, as though tamping down a cigarette. He said, “You have very small hands,” but he was looking at my neck. “And a very, very thin neck.”
“I lost something,” I said, putting my hands in my lap. Knute’s eyes were still gray and their expression hadn’t changed.
“Your wallet?” As soon as he said it his eyes dropped to the table and he fiddled with his martini glass, and I knew he didn’t think it was my wallet I’d lost from around my neck.
“How
did
you get my wallet?”
Knute shrugged. “Some pier queen found it, sold it to the magazine for fifty bucks. He said there wasn’t any cash in it, by the way.” He looked up. “Also your, um—
those shoes
.”
“He said there wasn’t any money in my shoes?”
“He found them. They’re not Prada, are they? They have that slipper look.”
I thought of Divine.
Armani Exchange, do you like it?
“They very well could be.” I was still thinking of Divine when I tapped the paper again. “This guy. Is he going to be okay?”
Knute sighed. “AIDS,” he said, as if he’d been waiting to say it. “Apparently he failed on his meds, said he couldn’t face another cocktail. I, however—”
As Knute flagged down the waitress I looked at the face of the man who shared the river with me. His cheeks were flaccid and rippled as the water we floated in, and something—glare, or the poor quality of Ben-Day reproduction—made his eyes look like two shiny glass balls. Yet no matter how hard I stared at him I couldn’t remember the feel of his skin under my lips, the weight of his body on my chest. The waitress came while I was examining the photograph, and it occurred to me that she might see the connection between me and the picture. But Knute simply ordered another martini and another basket of bread and the waitress left without saying anything. It was as if the picture had separated the past from the present, the people who lived in it from the people who lived now. The picture was as solid as the wall I’d wanted to build between my life in New York and the life that had come before, and when I looked up at Knute I found myself wondering if he could do that for me. Build the wall I couldn’t build myself. But all I said was, “How did this happen?”
Knute shrugged. “Apparently he’s one of those guys who’ve been positive since the beginning. He’s done everything. AL-721, Compound Q, AZT, ddI and -c and -t, he said he almost went to Mexico for plasma thermopathy or hyperthermia or whatever they called it, blood heating, but his best friend did it the week before he was scheduled to go down, and died. Who knows? He’s tried every combination of protease inhibitors and all he got was diarrhea, kidney stones, and neuropathy, but there are things in the pipeline. Maybe something will work for him. He’s been alive this long.”
I tapped the paper.
“I meant this. How did I end up on the cover of the
Post
?”
“Oh.” Knute reached again for his elusive pack of cigarettes. “Well, Bloomberg’s got the election sown up, this particular president seems to be better at keeping his hands to himself than the last one, and, you know, nothing’s going on in the Middle East.” He shrugged. “Slow news day. What can I say? You’re not in Kansas anymore.”
Something clicked then. “Are you gay?”
Knute started, just a little. He sat up straighter and reached first for his empty glass and then for that pack of cigarettes, and then he put one hand on his glass and held it as though it anchored him to the table. “How could you tell?”
“Well, Toto,” I said, “pier queen, Prada, and you know your AIDS ‘meds’ a little too well.”
“Oh.” He relaxed the tiniest bit. “I thought it was something…” He limped one of his wrists. Unfortunately it was the hand with the glass in it, and it fell to the table; fortunately, it didn’t break. Knute laughed a little and set it upright. “It’s just, you know, a generational thing.” He tried to take a drink from his empty glass. “Are you?”