The Secret of Lost Things

CHAPTER SIX

I returned in the evenings to the Martha Washington, to Lillian and to the closet of my rented room. After two months, the Arcade had become my home, and the city that housed it the larger world Chaps had wished for me and, I realized, that I’d wanted for myself. Tasmania was remote indeed, an ideal of home that merged over time with Mother, with her absence, and with the contradiction of her occasionally overwhelming presence. In the framed photograph, her face at my age returned my own green gaze with dark eyes, projecting a confidence I still hadn’t found.

I dreamed she lived often enough to wake with the kind of longing that makes memory eloquent. While I slept she had lived, and the pain upon waking was as much a fleeting uncertainly of her state as anguish over the clear fact of my own life continuing without her. We are never so aware of those we have lost, and dreamt of, than in that waking moment.

I developed the habit of walking for hours in the early evening after leaving work at six, and invented a zigzagging pattern of one block up, one across, to vary my route, reversing the pattern to return downtown. Something soothing in the process reminded me of picking up a practical skill, like learning letters so as to read, or learning steps so as to dance. It was light for hours then, and hot. The city’s grid ordered my mind. I walked as a way of thinking and, walking, I felt as sturdy and sensible as the shoes I’d change into before setting off.

Following a pattern gave me an assurance I often hadn’t felt during the working day. My lack of knowledge of the Arcade’s vast contents nagged at me, but through my walks I remembered, took note, and played out the day’s events. I was determined not to be lost in the city, and through my walks I mapped more than locations and points of reference. I found a way to manage. I let the city work on me, into me, and I learned that I wanted the freedom it held out.

In the evenings, when the city cleared out, there was room for me in the geometry of emptiness that took over certain neighborhoods. The varied architecture taught me a sense of proportion, a contradictory sense even of scale. As I’d learned in Sydney, there was room in cities. Yes, I was a mote inside New York’s great, swirling energy, but I was there. At twilight, I was even outlined against buildings, my shadow tall and attenuated upon century-old facades. Using zigzagging increments, I measured myself against blocks, buildings, streetlights. Of course, I was overwhelmed by New York, but was at once oddly freed of any requirement to agency. Although my shadow quickly disappeared as night fell, I carried a memory of its shape long against the great buildings: animated and free.

One hot July evening, I ran down an empty street as the peppery smell of city rain rose up from where the rain fell, spotting the pavement. The sharp scent set me sneezing. Seconds later huge heavy drops began to pelt my head and back. I took shelter beneath an awning and watched the storm through an amnion of water. Ten minutes later the rain ceased, as abruptly as it had started. The temperature dropped a few degrees, and I felt the materiality of weather, impervious to the great constructed landscape. Manhattan was at once sealed and, as I watched filthy rainwater disappear into subway grates and down street drains, as permeable as any thing in nature. It absorbed everything, as I was learning.

Summer kept me out quite late into August. I worked at the Arcade every day of the week but one. Evenings I walked. I waited the delicacy of the approaching fall as a seasonal shift I’d never before experienced. Toward September I felt a kind of unfamiliar anticipation. A dirty park on my way to the Arcade, around Twenty-third Street, became my bellwether, its trees gushed out greenly amid the traffic and surrounding buildings. Several people were permanent residents of the park and sat beside their possessions. I just visited.

Beneath the trees, inside their shallow shade, was my only constant reminder that nature was marking time, that trees at least were routine and predictable. Even though, for me, the cycle was reversed and more defined than it ever was at home, the trees in my park were committed to seasons, as I must become as well.

When I returned from walking, Lillian would ask what I’d been looking at, what I had found. Our tentative friendship grew as she used me as her emissary to the larger city. She did not want to go anywhere, except (on certain days) back to Argentina.

“Where my Spanish books, Rosemary? You said you’d find.”

“I’m sorry, Lillian, I’m still looking.”

“Pah, my brother say you can’t find nothing there in that place where you work.”

“I’m sure there’s something there for you, Lillian, I just have to find it. What did you read when you lived in Argentina?”

“I read Borges. Jorge Luis Borges. He think he too good for me, but I love him,” she said. “He was a blind man who see better than anyone.”

“I’ll look,” I promised. “Write his name down for me.”

“You never heard of him?” she scoffed. “What do they read there in Tasmania?”

“They read lots of things, Lillian. But everyone has gaps.”

She laughed out loud. Lillian had a warm, deep laugh, velvety with intimacy, with experience.

“Then you find Borges for me, but mostly for yourself. For your gaps. He will fill them, I promise!”

That Walter Geist was an albino was a distinction he could neither hide nor help. And he could be difficult. He was consistently unpleasant to both staff and all but a few select customers. He was even unpleasantly obsequious on the few occasions that called for mild pleasantness, mostly in his dealings with collectors whose large libraries Pike was trying to acquire.

But toward me he behaved differently.

I am ashamed now, when I remember how I shrank from him, and from his whiteness. Ashamed, too, of my fascination. Or perhaps just guilty that I longed to stare at him.

At first, Geist would not meet my eyes and spoke to me with such particularity that I became fixed upon his strange speech patterns and upon his lips with their sibilant consonants. He spoke to me very little in the beginning, addressing me only when he was called upon to give directions for the removal of Pike’s priced pile, to instruct me to wait at the rear door to help unload a delivery, or to tell me where to place the “new” books I’d brought down to him in the basement. I suppose a fascination with his appearance was not unusual; he seemed to almost have a dry expectation of it. He was sadly practiced at subjection to close inspection.

Walter Geist’s parents had been refugees from Germany; this much Oscar had told me, but he hadn’t gathered much more of Geist’s personal details, at least that he ever shared. Geist had not, as my imagination initially proposed, been born in the basement of the Arcade, but in Berlin, in the old Kreuzberg section of the city. He’d grown up in Pennsylvania after immigrating with his parents when very young. Walter Geist had never married, and lived a largely solitary life outside of the Arcade.

Geist’s slight lisp was not the result of any actual speech impediment but suggested the palimpsest of languages he had mastered, a hint of them all compressed and vaguely present in his whispered English. It wasn’t an accent like mine, broad and flat and, I feared, ignorant. His diction was subtle, exquisite in its way. According to Oscar, Geist spoke five languages fluently, his father having been a linguist at the university. What Oscar didn’t know of Walter Geist’s personal history, he supplemented with research on albinism. Oscar had his preoccupations and, briefly, Geist had been one, as he would become mine.

Inside the Arcade, Geist affected the use of a thick pair of pince-nez glasses that sat in his shirtfront pocket, attached to a silver chain around his neck. More often, though, they were miraculously affixed to the bridge of his nose, held in place by the folds of skin that his squint made about his eyes and forehead. Geist’s eyes were of an undetermined color, but in some lights, particularly bright sunlight, they appeared violet.

“Actually, Rosemary,” Oscar told me when I mentioned this odd fact to him, “Walter’s eyes are colorless. I looked it up. The violet color is caused by blood vessels in the retina. You can see the blood because his retina is without the color of an iris. I suppose you could say Walter’s eyes are transparent.”

“Transparent,” I repeated, fascinated. Oscar’s golden eyes were beautiful but opaque; the idea that Geist’s eyes were transparent was too whimsical, too curious, not to captivate me.

And yet, the wobbling movement of his eyes confused me as to where exactly to look—how to meet him. His eyes swam. Weak muscles caused this vacillation, and the constant motion gave the impression that his eyes were perpetually averted in a kind of deflection. I wanted to follow his shifting gaze into some other, quieter space—to see what he saw. He appeared particularly sensitive to light and shadow, and to scent.

“Yes, transparent. Interesting, isn’t it?” Oscar smiled, and took out his notebook to write down something that had occurred to him. “I have quite a bit of information about Walter’s condition.”

“Do you?” I asked, curious. “It seems as if Mr. Geist doesn’t want me to look at his eyes. They always move away. I want to look, though. It’s as if I’ll be able to stare right into his brain.”

“Really? How odd,” Oscar said, momentarily considering me.

“I imagine his thoughts might have color, even if his eyes don’t.” I could have added that he was entirely without color, but that would have sounded cruel. I did picture Geist’s thoughts, however, as bright and secret things, moving just behind the transparent plane of his retina like exotic fish.

“I saw him looking at my hair outside yesterday,” I told Oscar. “While we were waiting for that library. When I asked him if something was wrong, he cleared his throat and pretended he hadn’t been looking.”

“Well, Rosemary,” Oscar said matter-of-factly, “perhaps Walter thinks your hair is beautiful.”

Then, seeming to lose interest as quickly as he had found it, he continued to write in his notebook.

“Oscar,” I ventured, my heart hot in my chest. “Do you think so?”

But he didn’t answer or even acknowledge my question, absorbed as he was in his own note taking. I watched him, writing away, and felt ill with longing. His sculpted head bent over his task, his face expressionless.

Occasionally, I would come upon Geist in the stacks of Oscar’s section, holding books close to his face, his white fingers splayed against their covers like spread wings. The volumes he held at the tip of his nose had the compressed heft of textbooks, and their weight made him stoop with effort. Walter Geist was a lonely figure even within the world of the Arcade, and as Pike’s designated other, he remained on the fringes of staff camaraderie. He was management, after all: George Pike’s pale avatar, some variation of a shadow. But he also held himself separate, certain that he would always be distinct and removed from that which defined the lives of others. In this respect, he knew better than any of us the condition of his life, and I suppose, like everyone else, I assumed he was reconciled to that condition. It wasn’t compassion on my part that made him so interesting to me. It was curiosity. My imagination was always overactive, and I made him a figure of significance in the fairy tale I was inventing, in the one I was living. Perhaps, as well, I just couldn’t reckon with his humanity.

The staff at the Arcade played a game to pass the time, a game prompted unwittingly when customers asked a question that was exceedingly difficult to answer. The game was called Who Knows? and it did make a long day pass more quickly, but it also served the practical purpose of sharpening the skills required to work in the Arcade. A sense of humor was necessary as well, particularly about the demands placed on one’s memory.

There were no reference guides, save Books in Print (the place most likely not to list a book sought by a customer at the Arcade), so the only reliable source of reference was the staff and their collective memory. Memory was the yardstick of achievement at the Arcade, the measure of one’s value to Pike. Memory housed the bookstore’s contents like a constantly expanding index, an interior, private library organized by some internal, fleshy variation on the Dewey decimal system.

There were customers who knew only the title but not the author, or only the author but not the title, or even only the color and size of the volume but neither its author’s name nor its title. A customer’s hands might move apart as if to say “It’s about this thick.” The game became a way to address how difficult it could be to find anything in the Arcade. For the staff, each obscure question seemed like another bead in a string of non sequiturs. These inquiries demanded an equally nonsensical response, the standard Arcade response. Hence the name of the game: Who Knows?

Jack Conway, his friend Bruno, along with the huge Arthur (Pike seemed to think it amusing to have hired an Art for the Art section), liked to shout out, sometimes with real belligerence, the name of the game. At first I thought they were really serious, and angry, but I caught on eventually.

“Who knows?” they would call out to each other across the heads of inquiring customers, and then, if no echo returned, call with greater rancor, with a full, open throat: “Who the FUCK knows?”

I learned that this was actually a challenge, a call for others to help, and could even draw Oscar from his stacks if he wasn’t already occupied. Oscar’s recall of his section was practically infallible, but if the book didn’t fall into the shapeless category of nonfiction, those with a slightly less remarkable memory needed to be found and consulted. Even Pike would participate, particularly as it often meant the certain sale of a book.

Where is the book I saw here once on the history and design of Russian nesting dolls? Can you tell me where I might begin to look for a monograph on Franz Boaz’s dissertation entitled “Contributions to the Understanding of the Color of Water”? Do you have the classic gay novel Der Puppenjunge by Sagitta in English? I must have William D’Avenant’s Gondibert—you know, it has fifteen hundred stanzas? Do you have a book of patterns for Redwork? Where are the decorative planispheres based on Mercator’s projection? Listen, I know you have Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect by Robert Burns, but where is it?

Customer inquiries were like cartoon thought balloons making visible what was on the mind of the city. They were as random, as subjective, as experience itself, and our only defense against the arbitrariness of the questions was our game.

Who Knows? helped find the most obscure books, and after several months even I became blasé about the astonishing capacity of longtime employees to place their hand on a slim volume, seven shelves down, nine books in—miraculously pulling out just the book a confounded customer had been seeking. Occasionally, I had seen Chaps performing in this way in her tiny, tidy shop in Tasmania, but the scale of this game was entirely different, as was the range and variety of interest. At the Arcade, finding the improbable was an act best accomplished with an impassive air, a bland repudiation of the feat of memory it displayed. The magical act of finding anything, let alone a specifically requested book, within the Arcade’s repository was actually a point of pride. This rabbit-out-of-a-hat trick was the single exhibition the Arcade staff could perform that rivaled Pike’s mysterious pricing.

“I found this for you, Lillian. But it’s in English.”

I handed her a small paperback by Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings, uncovered inadvertently while I waited at the paperback tables.

“Ah, I like this one. I read it a long time ago. You and me, Rosemary, we are like this, no? Imaginary beings, here, no?”

“What do you mean?”

“It is like we are made up, like these creatures in here. See?” She opened the paperback at random. “The Lunar Hare—this is the man in the moon, you see? The Mandrake, the Manticore…” She smiled. “We are like these things. No one knows we exist, except a few people. And if we disappear, there is no Borges to make a little story of us, to remember us. Who knows you are here? No mother, no father. And look at you, already so different. You do not look like the girl that came here weeks ago. A girl from Tasmania.” She screwed up her eyes, assessing me. “You look like a lion. Where is that other girl now, eh? Now she is imaginary being!”

I had changed. Tall, and long-boned, I’d become physically strong working at the Arcade, developing muscles in my arms and back for the first time in my largely sedentary life. Helping out in Remarkable Hats hadn’t required much physical effort. But the carting of boxes of books, mostly overpacked, strengthened me, as did my walking and the strictures of a diet confined to what could be bought cheaply, and eaten uncooked in my room at the Martha Washington.

“But we are real to each other, Lillian,” I told her. “We aren’t imaginary.”

“You not know anything about me,” Lillian said frankly, thumbing through the paperback.

“Nothing,” she added, with a finality that hurt me. “I might not even exist.”

“Well, it takes a while to know someone, Lillian, but I hope we will be friends.”

“I am sorry, I don’t want to read this in English. Thank you for the book,” she said abruptly, and handed it back to me.

Perhaps reading the hurt on my face, she added, “You keep it. You read it for yourself. Fill up your gaps. I have no need of such things anymore.”

Turning away, she put the television plug back into her ear.

I went to my room feeling rejected. I wanted friends, something I’d never had at home. Mother had discouraged such connections; she was fiercely private and secretive about our life. Although I loved the Arcade and New York, the other side of a teeming city was relentless isolation. There was nothing I had been to anyone, no impression I had made, no one to remember me. People here were tricky, and odd—sometimes deceitful. I needed to be careful. I fingered the green amulet at my throat that Chaps had given me.

The exchange with Lillian reminded me that I really needed to live elsewhere, to properly establish myself. Although I had been managing at the hotel for months, I longed for somewhere that didn’t feel like a place of transition. The dirty park, my bellwether on the way to the Arcade, told me that fall was coming, and I knew little about the real winter that would follow. I wanted my own bathroom, free of grubby ghosts, and a stove to cook on, as well as a window I could open that didn’t tease my hunger with the promise of Indian food I couldn’t afford, despite its designation as cheapest cuisine in the city. The Martha Washington was also paralyzingly quiet, up until late evening. Then, the thump-thump of cars and taxis that failed to spot the large pothole directly outside the building’s entrance began. The synchronized double-banging of the front and then the rear of each car, as its tires sank momentarily up to their hubcaps, was repetitive and deadening.

That evening I lay in bed, in darkness, and measured the thump-thump of passing cars against the more predictable beat of my heart. I needed a place to make my own, and determined to ask around at the Arcade to see if anyone knew of an apartment to rent or to share.

Unable to sleep, I switched on the light and took up the Borges I’d found for Lillian, and which she insisted I keep. Why was Lillian so difficult to befriend? The little volume cheered me up. Lillian was right about Borges filling up gaps; he knew all about the lazy pleasure of useless and out-of-the-way erudition; all about the fertilizing quality of knowledge.

The book was arranged alphabetically, and so I started with Abtu and Anet, the Egyptian life-sized holy fish that swam on the lookout for danger before the prow of the sun god’s ship. Theirs was an eternal journey, sailing across the sky from dawn to dusk, and by night traveling underground in the opposite direction.

I lay reading the short entries with interest, and passed the hardest part of the night forgetting about my larger concerns.

Some creatures were familiar, like the Minotaur, half bull and half man, born from the perverse passion of Pasiphaë, queen of Crete, for a pure white bull, and hidden within the Labyrinth because of its monstrousness.