The Garden of Lost and Found by Dale Peck Page A

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