The Boy Detective Read Online Free PDF Page A

them moving on the streets, dodging cars, and potholes, though for the life of me I can’t see why. What on earth do ghosts have to fear? You wonder if people live with one another or with these spirits. A topic of my memoir class. Everyone dwells in one past or another, and to a greater or lesser extent, is ruled by it. The coarse sleeve of her long black coat. It touches my arm. I shiver. Ghosts address a man on a walk.
    Were I to believe in reincarnation, what would it be like for reborn me to walk these streets again? Would there come to the brand-new mind and body—the Iraqi girl’s, the wheaten terrier’s—a breeze of recollection of my former life, my life as it is now? Would it be a simple flash of déjà vu? Or something more vague, like a tremor of unease, attributed to no objective experience, born only of itself? From time to time, I feel that chill today, so perhaps it is a sign that we live once and again. It better suits me to see such moments as parts of dreams. They may well be dreams.
    In my sleep, my father appears two or three times a year, never confronting me directly. I simply watch him or overhear him as he declaims on one topic or another. Then I wake into dreams, and he is clearer to me. If I concentrate, I probably could see all the ghosts of my life, here at the corner of Thirty-first and Madison, bundled in their winter coats, huddled in a scrum, all of us waiting for the light to change.
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    F OR THAT MATTER, I may be a ghost of my own life. Since we never leave our childhood, I see myself as a boy on these streets I walk now as a man. I am the spitting image of myself. How like myself I am. This is why I do not believe in time. How could I if I feel the presence of the boy as completely as I do the man, in many ways more completely since the boy is more completely realized. He who existed in me over half a century ago walks with me today.
    But it makes sense, doesn’t it? We live through future generations, so why shouldn’t past generations live through us? It may be as much of immortality as we can expect, or bear. On this walk, whenever I pass a restaurant with high marble walls and pressed tin ceilings, I know the building was a bank a hundred years ago. I see the restaurant, I see the bank. Possibly it was a trading house a hundred years before that, dealing in horses or slaves. Might have been a cathouse before it was a trading house. Don’t think of it as history. Rather, see the whores, the horses and slaves, the potbellied bankers and the careful eaters as one—all of life packed into a crowded present, each iteration reachable by a mere flick of the imagination. The point is, though time was invented to keep things from happening all at once, things do happen all at once, and all the clocks in the world, including the one at Greenwich, England, can’t do a thing about it. Boy detective, man detective, writer, god-knows-what. Questions then, unanswered now.
    So you can ask me till you are blue in the face, but I have no explanation as to why I sat at the kitchen window at the back of the vast apartment, day after day, that looked out over the courtyard nine stories below, and beyond, past the blackened wooden water tanks on the rooftops of other buildings to the east, and toward the river. There I would remain for hours at a stretch, parked at the windowsill that was a slab of veined marble, white, gray, and darker gray, studious, purposeful, using a butter knife to chisel away at a crack in the marble until the underneath was exposed like the bones of birds. I gouged a crevice, a dark valley in the shape of a delta that deepened and widened with every day’s effort. It may have appeared that I was digging for something buried in the slab. A clue? A fingerprint? Something. For the life of me, I cannot remember what.
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    J UST ANOTHER CASE. Open and shut or, more like it, shut and open. Everything is a case. A while ago I was chatting