The Garden of Lost and Found by Dale Peck Page B

pixilated apart and I stood upon a geometric plain of cells multiplying around me in ever-widening array. I remembered I’d failed to pick up my test results yesterday, and at the same time I realized there was no need to. The sun was almost directly overhead, and the shadowed lines of my arms and legs poked from my reedy torso like viral ganglia, as if I were turning into the very thing that consumed me.
    I almost fell then, but again Nellydean caught me, and when I’d recovered my balance I stepped back from her, letting my feet land where they would. I opened my mouth to make some excuse but even as I did I saw her: Nellydean in broad daylight. I think it was the first time I’d seen her free of the shadows of Dutch Street or the shop or the basement. It was the first time I saw how old she was. Her face was as lined and brown and pale as a grocery bag that’s been wadded up and smoothed out again, her hair white as late-morning fog and just as thin. A few whiskers sprouted from the knob of her chin and her eyes had receded so far into her skull that not even daylight touched them. Her dress reached all the way to the ground and only her fingertips poked from its dust-cuffed sleeves. It was as if she’d begun to shrink out of the world, to shrink and to fade, but even so her strength was undeniable. She stood in the garden like she owned it, and as I looked at her I knew she hadn’t outlasted her previous landlord by chance: she’d to fight to make it this far.
    I pulled at the jumpsuit’s rags, stuck to my skin like tails mispinned on a donkey. “Belgian blocks?”
    Nellydean turned me around and led me toward the fountain. “Belgian blocks was used as ballast on cargo ships. Merchantmen sailed over with a holdful, then replaced em with whatever they was bringing back, beaver pelts or wheat or apples. Most-a the old streets was paved with em, Dutch Street included. City tries tarring em over every ten years or so, but the asphalt wears away pretty quick and there they are again. What’s old endures,” she added, in case I’d missed her point, and then we were at the fountain.
    She dropped a hand on my shoulder and I sat down on the rim of the basin. I watched, fascinated, as she rolled up each of my pant legs, ripping the left free of my skin in one snap.
    “First time I saw her she wasn’t even as old as you are. She had the look about her of someone who has no idea what she wants but knows she wants something. She used to pick up things in the shop. Funny things, like a eighteenth-century gilded parakeet cage or the logbook from some old steamer that last crossed the Atlantic in 1885. She’d look at em like, Are you what I need? I think she picked up Sonny in exactly the same way. Dip your feet in the fountain.”
    The headless angel lurked over the dank water like the wife of Sleepy Hollow’s horseman.
    “It don’t look so clean.”
    “White people say doesn’t,” Nellydean said, and grabbed my right ankle and spun me so rapidly my whole body nearly fell into the water. She dropped my right foot into the basin, tossed the left in after as if my feet were fish not worth the effort of scaling, gutting, cooking for dinner, and when they splashed into the dark water I saw a flash of gold as a real fish shimmered away. They sank slowly, my feet, in the end just dangled off the ends of my bent knees. But even before they came to rest I’d forgotten them, because I was finally remembering yesterday’s water. Yesterday’s swim. I lifted my sleeve to my nose and sniffed: it had a stale but fishy tang to it. I looked for my feet in the fountain but saw instead the limbs of the man I’d pulled from the river. For an instant I was actually able to grasp everything that had happened yesterday, its order if not its meaning, from the time I got on the subway in the morning until I curled up on my mother’s desk late that evening. Grass! Then comprehension slipped away like the goldfish in the fountain, and I