I Have Lost My Way(6)

“I have lost my way,” he says to the stream of pedestrians. “Can anyone tell me where the A train is?”

But they keep moving, a million-limbed organism rather than individual people, and then there’s Nathaniel, the amputee.

On the plane, in the guidebook, he’d read that Manhattan was a grid, avenues running north-south, streets east-west, street numbers going higher as you go north, the avenues dividing into east and west with Fifth Avenue running down the middle like a spine. If you were lost, the book said, the landmarks could help you get your bearings: the Twin Towers to the south, the Empire State Building to the north.

The Twin Towers, he knows, are gone. It’s a sort of hubris to put something like that in a book as a landmark, a guidepost, to assume it will always be there.

“One day we’ll go to New York City,” his father had promised him, scratching it onto the list on the inside wall of his closet. “One day we’ll go to Mount Denali,” his father had promised him.

“What about the Shire?” Nathaniel had asked when he was too little to know the difference between places real and imagined.

“Sure,” his dad had promised. “We’ll go there too.”

Yellow taxis pass by, looking like they did in the TV shows he and his father used to occasionally watch in between the documentaries. He could just take a taxi to his final destination. He pulls out his wallet, furtively counting the rest of his cash (the guidebook warned: “Be wary of pickpockets and scam artists”). After emptying out the bank account, there had been enough money for the plane ticket, the bus fare to and from the airport, and about a hundred and twenty bucks left over. Part of him had known that going anywhere, let alone New York City, with so small a cushion was folly. But that was just the point. Remove the net. Eliminate the possibility of backtracking.

Still, after so long being prudent and frugal, he can’t completely shed his old ways. He decides against getting a taxi. He has no idea how much the trip will cost. He smells like country, like a rube, and maybe the driver will rip him off. (“Be wary of pickpockets and scam artists.”) And besides, he doesn’t know how to make a taxi stop. He sees how other people do it, stepping into the street, sticking out a hand, but suspects if he did that, the cars would pass right by.

He pulls out his phone, missing his father so much it aches. He dials the number. Three rings before the call goes to voicemail. “Tell me something good,” his father’s recording says.

“Hey, Dad,” Nathaniel says. “I made it.”

He hangs up the phone, opens the guidebook, and thumbs through for the big map in the middle. He finds Forty-Second Street and draws a line across it until he finds a square block of green, amazed, relieved, ebullient, even, that there’s some representation, some proof, of where he is.

The patch of green is Bryant Park. Sixth Avenue, which runs up the west side of the park, dead-ends at Central Park. Central Park! That was one of the places in the book. To the left of the park he sees the big blue circle for the A train. He could walk there. Why not?

He sets off, feeling the same lightness he’d experienced when he’d made the decision to come here. He passes Fiftieth Street, the signs blaring for Rockefeller Center, more people crossing at a single intersection than in his entire graduating class. He passes Fifty-Fourth Street and sees signs for the Museum of Modern Art, and though he’s not visiting it, he feels like he’s seen some of it. (“One day we’ll see the Mona Lisa,” his father had promised, and though Nathaniel is fairly certain the Mona Lisa is not here, it still feels like he has made a little good on that promise.)

He gets to Central Park faster than he thought. Too fast. He can see that the western edge reaches the big circle where the A train is, but he opens up the map in his book again. The park itself runs to 110th Street. He can walk there. Or all the way up. On the bus before he’d fallen asleep, he’d caught a glimpse of the looming Manhattan skyline from across the river just before they’d entered the tunnel. It seemed inconceivable that he could breach such a fortress, but here he is. He can afford to take his time. His father will understand.

Entering the park, he’s surprised by how familiar it seems. It’s an entirely different kind of nature from what he grew up in, but it turns out that trees are trees, flowers are flowers, birds are birds, wind is wind.

Overhead, the sun is a little west of high noon. He knows where he is. He knows which way is north. He abandons the main roadway for one of the smaller paths. He might get a little lost, but the sleep has shaken away from him. He feels more awake and alive than he has in days. He knows where he’s going.

The path winds under a small arched bridge, a tunneled portal into the park. He examines the bricks. They’re so old, the keystone binding the two seams is almost invisible. Under the bridge the air is dark and musty. He holds his breath, like he used to when they would drive through tunnels, his father encouraging him in the longer ones (You’re almost there, buddy).

I’m almost there, he tells his father as he steps out of the tunnel. He feels a rush of air that turns out to be Freya falling, but he doesn’t have time to see that, much less comprehend it, because she has landed on top of him and everything has gone black.





THE ORDER OF LOSS


PART I





FREYA