You’re safe here.
Well.
It’s what I had said to Divine, and it had been a lie then too.
four
SSHH.
C’mere.
Closer, closer. Sshh—we don’t want to wake anyone.
I’ll tell you where I went.
After I went swimming, I mean. Before I went back to No. 1.
I went to see the deer.
I needed to see them. Do you understand me? Think of everything that had happened. Not just that morning—that morning!—but in the couple of weeks since I’d moved to New York, the couple of months since I’d received my mother’s letter and those gifts from Trucker, the couple of years since I’d moved to Selden and received
those shoes
from Divine. I doubted everything, believed nothing, but still I wanted to believe, or else know once and for all that it was all a lie. That there was nothing to believe. And so I made my way to Central Park and hid in the Ramble until dusk, then made my way down to the zoo. The deer habitat was just a shed inside a caged dirt yard in front of which a sign had been posted:
Odocoileus virginianus (Manahata)
. The yard was empty when I got there, the zoo deserted, to all appearances uninhabited, but there was a pile of grass and other leafy things pitched in the middle of the yard. I crouched behind a Wych elm (
Ulmis
campestris
according to its own label) and waited, and when the buck poked his nose through the shed doorway I felt a thrill race up and down my spine. He was real! He was so close to me I could practically hear his inhalations as he sniffed the air and, limping slightly, one of his hind legs wrapped in a splint, he walked into the pen. Like me, he looked back at the shed, and a moment later the doe joined us. She was as real as he was, smaller than he but sturdier, a white bandage taped around her head like a compress wrapped around a toothache sufferer in an old cartoon. Slowly, stopping with every step to sniff the air or look around, the deer made their way to the pile of grass in the middle of the yard, and when they got to it they took turns eating, their heads bobbing up and down like targets in a shooting gallery. They bit, chewed, swallowed, bent down for more: they ate. They were real. They ate and they were real and they were one other thing as well. Though the sun was down the light wasn’t fully gone yet. The western horizon was the color of a strawberry the day before it’s ready to be picked, and so were the deer.
The deer were red.
THE FIRST TIME she called my name I opened my eyes. The sun was up, so bright it seemed I floated on it. But then I remembered: I lay on my mother’s desk. The marble caught the light and held it like a puddle.
I closed my eyes.
Then, like a wave washing over me: hunger. It seemed larger than I was. I curled myself into a ball and felt as if I were moving inside my own stomach, as if, if I could, I would digest myself to make this gnawing go away. I tried to remember my dreams but all that came were visions of tunnels and rivers, trains and sharks, timbering trees, bottomless wells, falling falling falling. But then I remembered: the deer. Not just their brilliant vermilion coats but the nearly inaudible sound of their chewing. The vision was so palpable I could taste the grass they ate. I turned then, saw the sun glancing green off the tops of the ailanthus that grew outside my mother’s office windows.
“Jamie.”
I opened my eyes again, raised my head. The first thing I saw was my reflection in the marble of my mother’s desk—saw my face, I realized, in the oval of sweat where it had just lain. I’m not sure I would’ve figured out that my reflection hadn’t spoken if Nellydean hadn’t called me yet again. “Jamie,” she said one more time, and, rolling over, I saw her in the door. She seemed smaller that morning, less threatening, but maybe she was just becoming familiar. I was so hungry I thought I might eat
her
.
I tried to speak but nothing came out of my dry throat. I closed my mouth, swallowed, and tried again.
“Why do you call me that? My name is James.”
“It’s how your momma called you. Can you walk?”
“Can I walk?”
As Nellydean shuffled toward me I noticed a gray roll of newspaper tucked under her arm, but I was distracted from her body by the OSHA orange insistence of my own. My arms and legs splayed across the desk, barely covered by the tattered remains of my jumpsuit. The fabric was snagged, torn, slashed, the left leg ripped open from thigh to ankle, the zipper sealed at neck and waist but wide open in between. The skin that showed through these gaps was stained with dirt and blood, pale white in some places, scratched pink in others, and the jumpsuit’s fabric was similarly stained, as if a map of the previous day’s journey had been stamped on my body. But where I’d gone was as yet a mystery. I couldn’t remember anything about yesterday beyond the deer—and, given the way their fur glowed like a Christmas bulb in my mind’s eye, I had my doubts about them.
“Your feet are a bloody mess,” Nellydean said then. “Best to get them cleaned up.”
Suddenly one pain replaced another. My hunger disappeared, leaving me prey to a burning in my feet so strong I thought
those shoes
had finally caught fire again. But when I looked down I saw that my feet were bare and blackened not by melted rubber or smoke but by untold miles of sidewalk filth. I started to say something but Nellydean waved me silent with her paper. I just made out the headline—TAKING THE PLUNGE—before she placed it face down on the desk. Her hand was as cool as my mother’s desk, as solid, but it was also gritty, as if it were wearing away in my grasp. Her face registered not even a hint of unsamaritanical burden as I heaved myself upright, and when I’d stopped wobbling like a newborn fawn she led me not toward the door but toward the windows, and with her free hand, with just one finger, she raised an enormous pane of glass until a hole the size of a vault door opened in the wall of my mother’s office. Outside was a narrow balcony, a long thin row of grated metal steps leading down to the garden.
In the half dozen paces it had taken to cross the room my feet had burst into flames that stretched up the chimneys of my legs and licked at the bottom of my empty stomach. I pitched back and forth, fought back the urge to vomit. “I don’t think I can—”
“Yes,” Nellydean swatted my words away, “you can.” She stopped then, peered at my face. “What’s that on your lips?”
I reached up, felt nothing, wiped them with the back of my hand. It came away smeared with green flecks. “What
is
that?”
Nellydean shifted her gaze from my mouth to my eyes. “Looks like grass to me,” she said, then turned around and stepped through the window and pulled me after her. My feet throbbed beneath me, but underneath them I could feel nothing, and as we descended to the garden it felt as though I trod on hot pillows of air. The sensation echoed in my mind until I remembered I’d thought those same words yesterday. But where? When? Then I remembered: Christopher Street, the juice, the man in his own jumpsuit. I remembered I’d been going to the piers. I’d been going to the river but somehow I ended up in Central Park. How? A bitter taste filled my mouth, though I couldn’t tell if it was real or just the suggestion of Nellydean’s words. Grass!
Nellydean led me as though I were a toddler, one slow step at a time, and as we descended the stairs I was aware of the garden engulfing me: the garden, which I’d avoided for my first two weeks in the city, now took me to its bosom in invisible but palpable embrace. Its air was cool and damp, not humid, but sweet, as though it had just rained, and that wetness was laced with a scent that was less floral than vegetal, the smell of growing things. I breathed in deep drafts and felt its presence all the way down to my feet, which seemed to cool and shrink like just-fired bricks. Their throbbing subsided but they remained insensate, and when we reached the ground I could feel the stones of the patio no more than I’d felt the metal of the stairs. But still I placed my feet carefully, so as not to step on any of the grass-filled seams between the stones. The stones were hardly bigger than bricks, hardly bigger than my feet, and as a result I hobbled across the patio, not realizing that Nellydean had let go of my hand until she spoke from behind me.
“Belgian blocks ain’t exactly the best for that.”
I concentrated on landing my feet. “For what?”
“Step on a crack, break your momma’s back. My goodness James,” she said when I didn’t acknowledge her. “You don’t know the first thing about her, do you?”
I stopped then. I turned toward her. I turned awkwardly, my arms flung out for balance because I didn’t want to lift my feet from their secure berths, and as a result I pitched forward. The patio blocks filled my field of vision, and a little more of yesterday flooded over me. Somehow the gray grid I stood on cast back my own watery reflection, but immediately the image pixilated apart and I stood upon a geometric plain of cells multiplying around me in ever-widening array. I remembered I’d failed to pick up my test results yesterday, and at the same time I realized there was no need to. The sun was almost directly overhead, and the shadowed lines of my arms and legs poked from my reedy torso like viral ganglia, as if I were turning into the very thing that consumed me.
I almost fell then, but again Nellydean caught me, and when I’d recovered my balance I stepped back from her, letting my feet land where they would. I opened my mouth to make some excuse but even as I did I saw her: Nellydean in broad daylight. I think it was the first time I’d seen her free of the shadows of Dutch Street or the shop or the basement. It was the first time I saw how old she was. Her face was as lined and brown and pale as a grocery bag that’s been wadded up and smoothed out again, her hair white as late-morning fog and just as thin. A few whiskers sprouted from the knob of her chin and her eyes had receded so far into her skull that not even daylight touched them. Her dress reached all the way to the ground and only her fingertips poked from its dust-cuffed sleeves. It was as if she’d begun to shrink out of the world, to shrink and to fade, but even so her strength was undeniable. She stood in the garden like she owned it, and as I looked at her I knew she hadn’t outlasted her previous landlord by chance: she’d to fight to make it this far.
I pulled at the jumpsuit’s rags, stuck to my skin like tails mispinned on a donkey. “Belgian blocks?”
Nellydean turned me around and led me toward the fountain. “Belgian blocks was used as ballast on cargo ships. Merchantmen sailed over with a holdful, then replaced em with whatever they was bringing back, beaver pelts or wheat or apples. Most-a the old streets was paved with em, Dutch Street included. City tries tarring em over every ten years or so, but the asphalt wears away pretty quick and there they are again. What’s old endures,” she added, in case I’d missed her point, and then we were at the fountain.
She dropped a hand on my shoulder and I sat down on the rim of the basin. I watched, fascinated, as she rolled up each of my pant legs, ripping the left free of my skin in one snap.
“First time I saw her she wasn’t even as old as you are. She had the look about her of someone who has no idea what she wants but knows she wants something. She used to pick up things in the shop. Funny things, like a eighteenth-century gilded parakeet cage or the logbook from some old steamer that last crossed the Atlantic in 1885. She’d look at em like, Are
you
what I need? I think she picked up Sonny in exactly the same way. Dip your feet in the fountain.”
The headless angel lurked over the dank water like the wife of Sleepy Hollow’s horseman.
“It don’t look so clean.”
“White people say doesn’t,” Nellydean said, and grabbed my right ankle and spun me so rapidly my whole body nearly fell into the water. She dropped my right foot into the basin, tossed the left in after as if my feet were fish not worth the effort of scaling, gutting, cooking for dinner, and when they splashed into the dark water I saw a flash of gold as a real fish shimmered away. They sank slowly, my feet, in the end just dangled off the ends of my bent knees. But even before they came to rest I’d forgotten them, because I was finally remembering yesterday’s water. Yesterday’s swim. I lifted my sleeve to my nose and sniffed: it had a stale but fishy tang to it. I looked for my feet in the fountain but saw instead the limbs of the man I’d pulled from the river. For an instant I was actually able to grasp everything that had happened yesterday, its order if not its meaning, from the time I got on the subway in the morning until I curled up on my mother’s desk late that evening. Grass! Then comprehension slipped away like the goldfish in the fountain, and I squeezed my eyes shut before anything else escaped.
Still, some things leaked out. Dirt mostly, seeping out where it had seeped in, and blood, and pus; but that all happened beneath the water’s surface. Above it, the garden’s cool air burst out of my mouth in a gasp, and then, from my closed eyes, came tears. It wasn’t pain that made me cry. It wasn’t the water stinging my feet. The water was soothing, a salve, a balm. Perhaps it was the memory of that man’s tears, or perhaps it was the pressure of Nellydean’s kneading fingers. It felt as though she were opening the cuts on my feet and, like roots, the cuts were drawing the fountain’s water into them, water that was siphoned up my hollow bones and empty veins until it spilled out of my eyes. Whatever it was, I began to cry as Nellydean massaged my feet under the water. I kept my eyes closed so I wouldn’t have to look at her but made no move to hide what I was doing, to run away. I couldn’t have even if I’d wanted to. I was held there, by her hands, by the water’s suck, by my feet, which had grown large and heavy as ships’ anchors. And as I sat there, half in and half out of the water, the past washed over me as it had so many times in the last two weeks and overwhelmed the present. At first I thought it was a fever dream, but then I realized the heat was in my brain and not my body. Then words formed themselves.
It always takes a fire.
That’s what he said to me, after we were finished, just before he left: it always takes a fire.
I heard later on that the blaze had started in one of those little dirt towns in the northeast corner of the state, six shacks and a grain elevator and a couple-a rednecks trying without much success to spit their chaw past their bellies. Someone told me it was a Fourth of July celebration got out of hand. I don’t know. All I know is that whatever town it was burned to the ground and the fire, still hungry, ate a swath across fifty miles of mown fields until it dead-ended in the Big N. The way the wind was blowing it’s a miracle it didn’t burn up the entire plain, but the flames had a mission, burned a path as black as a highway straight to the Big N’s north lot. A couple of rigs parked out there were consumed, and the blacktop itself melted and waved like a storm-troubled ocean nearly a thousand feet from the fire’s edge. The only thing to reach the buildings in the center of the truck stop, however, were clouds of smoke and ash—so much of the latter that they had to close the bakery for three days to clean it up.