The Garden of Lost and Found by Dale Peck Read Free Book Online Page B

given birth to me, suckled me and changed my diapers and seen me through a bout of pneumonia that nearly killed me when I was three months old. But after I read her letter the idea that I had a father became yet another unanswered, perhaps unanswerable mystery about my origins. Before, my father had been not anonymous exactly, but erased: I’d always assumed it was my mother who’d drawn the line through the space where his name would have gone on the birth certificate. Now she’d given him back to me, not as one man, one name, but as any man—or any man with dark hair in, what, his late thirties, early forties? The average child has his hands full with one mother and one father, but I had no mother and, now, hundreds of potential fathers, thousands. The streets around me were filled with plausible candidates: Asian, Hispanic, Jewish, Italian, “Black Irish.” Was there any black-haired man around forty whom my mother might not have fucked?
    But such an idea was too vague for me to hold on to, and almost as soon as it came it dissipated, and my mother’s story became nothing more than an abstract version of the lockless key I’d found in the folder that contained her letter: it opened nothing. But at least the key was a solid thing, and I hung it around my neck off its silver chain as, clearly, I’d been intended to. Finding its lock in the overstuffed ruins of my new home seemed no less daunting a task than plucking a father from the streets of New York and, torn between two impossible tasks, I decided to tackle a more concrete problem: my head. What I mean is, I might have attempted to scissor my past away, but I’d done a pretty shitty job. The top of my head looked like a lawn attacked by an epileptic mower; what’s more, it crowned the scrawny body of a boy who began his first full day in New York dressed in tie-dyed MC Hammer pants held up by Mork from Ork rainbow-striped suspenders. The boat-necked (read: woman's, or at any rate womanly) T-shirt I put on started out white until a sidewalk jostle emptied half the contents of a shark-suited yuppie’s cranberry juice all over my chest. The stain resembled South America cut loose from its oppressive northern neighbor (the yuppie, of course, resembled my father) and, what with my ragged haircut and those shoes , I must have looked like an escapee from Bellevue.
    It took an hour of wandering before I finally found a barbershop. As I settled into the chair it sighed beneath me, and for some reason I froze, half in, half out of the seat. My eyes in the mirror were wide with a fear that registered plainly on the face of the boy in the glass but I myself didn’t feel. I took a good look at him: the crazy-man clothes, the stick-skinny limbs that barely held them up, let alone his ragged skull. There was a story there anyone could understand—anyone except me, who noted the details yet kept them separate from myself, as if the boy in the mirror were a person I wasn’t yet ready to recognize.
      The old Russian barber laid a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry, I make nice for you.”
    A white sheet settled over my shoulders, the jagged outline of my head floated atop it like smoke from a snow-covered volcano. I took a last look in the mirror, then closed my eyes.
    The clippers ran over my head with smooth strokes, the vibrating metal plate first, the barber’s hand following, raising the nap of my hair for another pass. I felt myself drifting off and, though I’d’ve preferred to dream about someplace pristine and cool, what I got instead was Trucker’s Cadillac, which overflowed with Trucker, and Trucker’s presents, and the unmistakable smell of fear. Not a dream but a memory, and even though it was only six weeks old it was already starting to feel like something that had happened in another life, to another person—to the boy in the mirror maybe, but not to me.
    “Trucker,” I remembered saying. “What happened to you?” I hadn’t seen him in more