The Garden of Lost and Found Read Online Free PDF Page A

when I awoke I found myself on Dutch Street. But when I woke I found, also, that my dream had followed me into the light.
    Or into the dark I should say, because it was nearly two in the morning when I shuffled up to my front door, listing slightly to the right because of my unevenly weighted suitcases—one half-filled with clothes, the other overburdened with books—and even as my eyes lost themselves in the murky expanse of the first floor I realized I’d neglected to procure a key to my new home, which is why I spent my first night in New York under the open sky, my suitcases (books on bottom, clothes on top) cushioning my bony ass, my head resting against pitted brownstone a few feet beneath a brass plaque that bore an address, No. 1 , and a legend, The Lost Garden , and I don’t know, maybe I was tired, or maybe it was the spell of the heat. It had been a long day, after all: a six-hour bus ride from Selden to the airport in Denver, four more hours in the air and the two-hour subway ride, plus three or four hours frittered away waiting for one or another modern conveyance. Or maybe I’d already begun to surrender to the city’s vision of itself. But even as I fished a rubberband out of my pocket and pulled my damp curls into a little pigtail to get them off my neck I felt a prickly energy moving through my limbs, a tickle really, trickling through my veins and vibrating the length of my bones. My eyes closed, my head lolled forward. Dimly it occurred to me that sleeping on a New York City street with all my worldly possessions wasn’t the smartest idea I’d ever come up with and maybe I should try to find something, an internet café, a hotel room, a hotel lobby even, but before I could complete that thought I was asleep. The last thing I remember is a keening noise in the distance. I don’t know why I didn’t recognize it as a car alarm. Certainly they had car alarms in Kansas, and in Arizona for that matter, and North Dakota and Oregon and Florida and every other state I’d lived in; maybe I was just too tired; maybe I was already asleep. Whatever the reason, I could only imagine the sound was a siren of some kind. A Siren I told myself, less warning than enticement to dash myself against the rocks. But exhaustion had lashed my body to my new home and I was able to listen safely to her song—another verse, I told myself, in the song of the dying city—and I let its lullaby croon me to sleep.

    WHEN I OPENED MY EYES the Siren’s song had spiraled away, but the heat seemed if anything to have intensified. I was lost when I first woke up, and I found myself by lifting my wrist and staring at Trucker’s watch until my eyes focused and I saw it was nearly four. The only light was the refracted brilliance of the city itself, a phosphorescent glow the same color as the greenish-white dots marking the hours on the watch Trucker had given me six weeks before. He’d given me the watch, and the clothes I was wearing, and most of the clothes in the suitcase under my ass. Trucker had, after two years of frugality, lavished me with gifts, but none of these things, not even, finally, the computer—or the receipt for it, since he’d arranged to have the machine shipped here—could distract me from what his baggy suit and expensive cologne tried to hide. Images from our last day together whizzed through my mind like bats at nightfall: the shine of sweat atop his head, his limpid smile, the fecal stink emanating from his body, and in the end I had to physically walk away from his specter.
    I gathered up my suitcases and, setting out from No. 1 Dutch Street, walked a few steps south to John, where I turned right and began heading west. The balmy streets were deserted except for a bony-hipped bag lady making her way toward me, her body wrapped in a filthy white dress, her head covered by a thick silver turban, and it was only when I saw the baby carriage into which she leaned her insubstantial frame that I realized its