The Garden of Lost and Found by Dale Peck Page A

dozen spools of thread, but when I attempted to unroll them they turned out to be the thinnest metal wires I’d ever handled, aluminum, copper, zinc, lead; in another I found a dozen giant eggs, each painted a different color and inked with Cyrillic hatchmarks that could have been letters for all I knew, words, an Easter parable perhaps, an inspiring story of resurrection’s second chance. The eggs were unseamed but when I shook them they thudded dully. Already I was learning that anything you might find in the shop was as fruited with false promise as the tree in that other, original garden, but it was an old black Bakelite telephone, the handset heavy as a dumbbell, the cradle large as a typewriter, that reminded me of my original errand. When I glanced at Trucker’s watch I saw two hours had gone by and I hadn’t even begun to look for a phone book, and it was another hour before I found one in a little back office that must have been Nellydean’s, and a half hour more before I found a line that I traced around corners and behind furniture until I came upon the jack, hidden in a closet. One end of the cord was plugged into the jack, the other dangled over the back of a chair, but I couldn’t find any trace of a phone in the closet or in Nellydean’s office. I was just about to give up when I remembered the ancient apparatus I’d seen in the shop, and when I’d recovered it and plugged it in I was rewarded with a simple familiar sound that seemed the most normal thing I’d encountered since arriving in New York. A moment later a recording informed me that even though there were free testing centers scattered throughout Manhattan, the only one without a two-month backlog was in Harlem. But in order to make an appointment I needed a touchtone phone.
    That’s when I heard the tapping.
    The beats came in slow repeated bars— tap-tap-tap , tap-tap-tap —and after the third or fourth measure I realized they issued from somewhere below me. I suppose the noise could have been caused by plumbing or, I don’t know, rodents or something, but for some reason I knew it was Nellydean. The sound was clear enough that I could track her progress as she inched toward the middle of the building, and I think I might have left her to her own devices if my eyes hadn’t landed on the phone book. ¡Llaman! it commanded, red letters against a yellow background, and so, against my better judgment, I decided to ask Nellydean if there happened to be a phone in the building younger than I was.
    It took ten minutes to find the basement door—just long enough for anger to get the better of me—and, jaw clenched, I tiptoed down the dark stairway. And it wasn’t like it was hard to sneak up on her: there were no more lights in the basement than there were in my fifth-floor apartment, and my steps were masked by the echoes of Nellydean’s tapping, which came at me from several different directions. I had to wait before my eyes adjusted to the darkness and I could make out a dim flicker off to my left, and I walked slowly toward it, immersed in noise and darkness and the thin wet smell of mildew, for if the shop smelled like history then the basement smelled like something older, or other: like evolution, or simply rot. Then I poked my head around a corner, and there she was.
    It was hard not to giggle. In an atmosphere of haphazard anachronisms, Nellydean, draped in flowing robes, old-fashioned lantern in one hand and tiny hammer in the other, was the most ridiculous of all. Yesterday I’d thought of her as motionless, but today I saw she was really timeless, immersed in it as we all are but distinct from it too, as the spoon is distinct from the soup it stirs. Oh, she milked the witch thing, bubble bubble toil and trouble, but even though it was a bit camp there was also something about her act that made me angry. In my thirty-six hours here she’d done nothing but assault me then hide from me, denying me not just companionship or the