The Boy Detective Read Online Free PDF Page B

apartment house, on the south side of Eighteenth, between Second and Third. She wears black sweatpants and a sailor’s pea jacket a couple of sizes too big. I have been watching her for five minutes, and she hasn’t moved an inch. Just stands there in the black arch of the doorway to the brownstone, craning her neck to the left, toward Third, as if she were on a railroad station platform in rural Alabama, or Arizona, or Russia, waiting for the arrival of a train. The night wind could lift her like a sheet of paper and float her on the cold air over the street, over everything. But she stands her ground. Nothing can shake her or divert her from her purpose—the woman at the top of the steps, peering to her left, and waiting for a train. Here is New York.
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    W HO OWNS THIS city, anyway? To go by the self-possessed Fifth Avenue apartment houses and the office buildings on Third, with their shit-eating grins, the answer is easy. Big people own this city. But since there are a lot more little people strolling around in New York, you could say that the city belongs to the vast unnoticed. Yet they are noticed here. Everyone is noticed in New York. You could focus the question on Dominicans. Surely they own the city. Or the Chinese. Or Puerto Ricans, Hassids, Mexicans, Koreans, Muslims. The African Americans definitely own New York. You can tell by the way they walk, the muted swagger. You can tell by the way everybody walks. Every citizen is a Dutch patroon inspecting his property. How about young versus old? Both are well represented on every block of my territory, where a cigar store from the 1940s nudges up against a granite mansion put up last month. Who, then?
    You there! (See that rake standing like Jimmy Walker, his top hat tilted down on his forehead, supported by his silver walking stick? See his spats?) You! Jimmy Walker. Walker. You own this city, don’t you, you sly devil? I thought so.
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    I PUT IT to my memoir students: In what do you believe if not in dreams? The pluperfection of experience? The so-called reality of your life? Surely, you’re not saying that you believe in things you can see, touch, hear—things that happen in the world. The kiss? The firing squad? Who could possibly believe in them? Ask yourself if they ever really happened—the embrace, the knife, the tulip. Take an autobiographical inventory of all the disconnected moments, and they will seem like what? A dream. But dreams themselves, which bind the moments together in a night, and blur the tenses—dreams are real. And one reason to use them in your memoir—daydreams, night dreams—is that it allows others, your readers, to enjoy their own dreams without shame.
    So what is the difference, students, between memory and dreams? Are they not the same, each the other? Or will you tell me that memories are accurate and dreams are mere impressions? Of course, you will not. You have never had an accurate memory in your life, whereas your dreams are always on the money. Which is why you wake up in a sweat. Which is why Nabokov held sleep in such contempt. He claimed to hate sleep as an evasion of reality, but I think he hated the reality of dreams. He, too, did not believe in time. How does one dismiss time and dreams, both, since dreams, too, do not believe in time? Such a strange detective.
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    G INNY HAD A dream in which she learned (she did not say how) that what she was dreaming constituted the real world, and that the world into which she would awaken constituted a dream. Furthermore, it came to her (she did not say how) that this reversal of states of being made sense to her, since she understood so little of the waking life, she might as well be dreaming. To be sure, one does not find that much understanding in a dream, either, though there usually is a moment of calm or distance when one acknowledges that one is, in fact, dreaming. That, I suppose, is a form of understanding. The problem (is there a