The Garden of Lost and Found

by Dale Peck Narrated by Lee Warden

Overview

A man inherits a valuable piece of Manhattan real estate, leading to unexpected consequences, in this “strange and wonderful novel” (Joseph O'Neill, author of Netherland).

James Ramsay is twenty-one years old and he has just inherited a building in New York City. After the death of his estranged mother, he finds that he is now the owner of No. 1 Dutch Street-a five-story brownstone near the World Trade Center.

As James takes up residence there, trying to figure out his next move, he gets to know the only other tenant: an elderly black woman named Nellydean. Under a mounting tide of taxes, James finds himself faced with a stark choice: He can sell the building for a small fortune-which will mean not only turning Nellydean out of the only home she's known for more than forty years, but also forfeiting his only remaining connection to his mother. Then Nellydean's niece shows up, looking for a place for herself and her unborn child-and an older man becomes smitten with James, even as James's health begins to fail.

Prize-winning author Dale Peck's fiction has been called “terrific” by Jonathan Safran Foer, and Michael Cunningham described his voice as “like an angel chewing on broken glass.” In The Garden of Lost and Found, he maps a tangled network of sexual, familial, and financial complications, over which hangs the specter of 9/11, and “tells the quintessential New York story with his delicious style and piercing ability to move” (Martha McPhee, author of Gorgeous Lies).

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Praise for The Garden of Lost and Found
 
"A peculiar, hallucinatory novel . . . violently emotional, frequently unhinged, always interesting."
—EDGE Media

“A strange and wonderful novel [by] a strange and wonderful novelist.”
—Joseph O'Neill, author of Netherland
 
“[Peck] tells the quintessential New York story with his delicious style and piercing ability to move.”
—Martha McPhee, author of Gorgeous Lies
 
“[Peck is a] brilliant writer, and this perplexing, beguiling, pre-and-post 9/11 Manhattan-set fable could have come from no one else.”
—Booklist
 
“Peck delivers a novel that explores family, sexuality, AIDS, and the resiliency of the city, and he does it without kowtowing to the populist sentiment that a character ought to be likable: this one certainly isn't . . . In typical fashion, Peck spares no punches.”
—Lambda Literary Foundation

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172263064
Publisher:	Brilliance Audio
Publication date:	06/27/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The city was dying, you could see it from the air. Those rows of up-thrust gray rectangles: What were they but the markers of an overcrowded cemetery? And the bright lights streaming from within. What could they be but souls, bent on escape? Soul after soul, gravestone after gravestone, so many souls they spilled out of their gravestones and so many gravestones they crowded out the graves, tall ones, taller ones, the tallest ones of all, as if death were some kind of competition: I'm more dead than you are, you son of a bitch.

And my plane shot up the center of this. Straight up Fifth Avenue it seemed, flying against traffic and against gravity, flying so low that the antenna-tipped tops of those tens of thousands of lighted gravestones grazed its bloated belly. The air was rent with crystal spikes and steely spires, their swords sliced right through the substantive world as if it and not death were the dream. They slashed the sky and smashed against each other, and their crashing made a kind of din, the cacophony of souls caroming off each other, so many souls colliding against so many other souls that my plane was rocked by the turbulence of their search for even one person, one dreamer, to give them form, a story, to give them life. They grabbed my plane and shook it so hard that luggage bins snapped open and carry-ons and wrinkled jackets and loose sheets of paper flew about the cabin. Listen to me, they seemed to say, like a parent trying to knuckle some sense into an errant child. Listen to me!

And I did listen. Maybe I only listened because there was nothing and no one else for me to listen to, but through the plane's rattle and the babies crying and the parents screaming Dear God! I thought I heard a softer noise, a beautiful sound, a song of some kind. The song of the dying city. The city was dying but my mother was dead. Maybe six months dead, maybe nine, maybe eleven. Maybe my mother had been dead for more than a year. None of the functionaries who'd managed to track me down through nine cities in eight states knew for sure, but they were sure she was dead. They couldn't tell me how she'd died and they couldn't produce a corpse for me to view, couldn't even point me to a gravestone with the consoling finality of birth and death dates, but they were sure, they were absolutely certain she was dead, just as the city she'd left me was dead. Was dying at any rate, and struggling mightily in its death throes. The dying city unraveled beneath me with the collapsing symmetry of an infantry under siege. I felt it tickle the bottoms of my feet, I choked on the smog of gridlocked souls. I pressed my face to the window and peered down in search of something, some spark, of meaning or at least of sense, to help me understand the manqué my mother had left me in lieu of herself, but all I saw were the innumerable lights fleeing into the night sky. Welcome home, the lights winked at me. Now say goodbye.

From clouds to caves, mausolea above, catacombs below. You fly to the dying city with the birds only to tunnel in the last few feet with the worms. With relentless urbanity they deny the nature of the beast. They call it the train, they call it the subway. But in the beginning at least my eyes were open, and I knew I sailed the underground river on Charon's barge, and the echoed groaning I heard was Cerberus barking in the distance. This was my first New York lesson: everybody takes the A train, but the lucky stick to Manhattan's skinny length, avoiding the endless accumulation of streets and souls that is the outer boroughs.

The ride from the airport took two full hours — two hours during which entire families seemed to get on and off the train, black, Hispanic, Asian, sometimes white, but then almost always speaking some glottal Eastern European tongue. What I mean is, the other passengers all seemed foreign to me, alien, whether by dint of skin color or language or custom, yet of the thousands of people who passed before my eyes none was stranger than the pale, skinny, shaggy-haired boy whose hollow reflection stared back at me from the window opposite my seat, and I did my best to avoid his frightened, fascinated face, focused instead on the parade of flesh marching past. According to the watch Trucker had given me it was well after midnight, but nobody seemed to give a damn about the hour, the heat, the entrances and exits. Makeup was put on and shirts were taken off, hands were slipped inside waistbands (sometimes their own, sometimes not), kisses exchanged or stolen or pushed on pouting girlfriends just learning to exploit the power of crossed arms and sealed thighs, toenails pared with stubby knives, babies changed, breast-fed, burped, scolded; and I watched all this with one suitcase flat beneath my feet and another, upright, clamped between my legs, and I was glad the second was there because it hid my dick, which seemed to rise and fall with the opening and closing of the doors. It wasn't the doors that made it rise and fall. It was just the feeling in the air, the heat, the energy, the over-the-fucking-topness of it all. Whatever it was, it was no more sexual than a morning erection — and it was like morning, for me, being on that subway, going into Manhattan, coming from John Fitzgerald Kennedy International Airport, coming down from the sky, coming from Kansas if you want to get right down to it. I was coming in off the farm, I was on my way to the big city to claim an inheritance from a mother who'd been taken from me before I'd ever known her, and even though it was the middle of the night it was like morning to me, it was like a new day dawning. It was like my mother's death had allowed my life, at last, to start, and the place where it was going to begin was called Dutch Street.

Dutch Street. That's a real place. You can look it up on a map, I mean, and it'll be right there, a tiny capillary connecting the eastern ends of John and Fulton. During my first year in New York, when towers collapsed and regimes changed and the City Council passed a ban on smoking in all public buildings, it was the one thing that remained fixed even as everything else disappeared into the haze that choked the city's air.

Dutch Street, Dutch treat: Dutch is a diminutive adjective in English, diminutive and usually pejorative. Dutch treat (paying your own share),Dutch oven (an itty bitty oven), Dutch metal (a zinc alloy masquerading as gold leaf), Dutch cap (not the kind women wore on their heads in ye olde Newe Amsterdamme), Dutch Street: a dozen feet wide, a hundred yards long, just four buildings on the east side and four more on the west, and one of those western four was now mine. The plates of brownstone that made up its facing were mine, and the four mullioned windows set into the plates were mine too, and through the ornately curved wrought-iron bars that protected my ground floor from burglars I could make out a cavern of a room that also, somehow, mysteriously, belonged to me.

The room was both dark and suffused by light, a deep ochre fog that seemed to emanate from the floor itself, making it impossible to tell where solidity ended and shadow began, and through this weave of solidity and shadow and darkness and light I could make out more windows at the opposite end of the room, and through those windows I saw ... something. Jets of spotlit water, or the whirl of a thousand fireflies? Tree trunks, or the legs of elephants? Tangled vines, or a deluge of serpents? What I saw was a garden, enormous, overgrown, but it was impossible to put a name to anything at that time of night, at that distance, through two sets of warped windowpanes and the swirling atmosphere that filled the space between them like some crazed Dutch interior (a painting by or in the style of Pieter de Hooch, who favored rooms that afforded glimpses into other rooms, or the outdoors). You could say I was guilty of Dutch reckoning, that is, faulty reckoning, or you could say I was dreaming a Dutch pink — which is really a yellow — dream, and that when I awoke I found myself on Dutch Street. But when I woke I found, also, that my dream had followed me into the light.

Or into the dark I should say, because it was nearly two in the morning when I shuffled up to my front door, listing slightly to the right because of my unevenly weighted suitcases — one half-filled with clothes, the other overburdened with books — and even as my eyes lost themselves in the murky expanse of the first floor I realized I'd neglected to procure a key to my new home, which is why I spent my first night in New York under the open sky, my suitcases (books on bottom, clothes on top) cushioning my bony ass, my head resting against pitted brownstone a few feet beneath a brass plaque that bore an address, NO. 1, and a legend, THE LOST GARDEN, and I don't know, maybe I was tired, or maybe it was the spell of the heat. It had been a long day, after all: a six-hour bus ride from Selden to the airport in Denver, four more hours in the air and the two-hour subway ride, plus three or four hours frittered away waiting for one or another modern conveyance. Or maybe I'd already begun to surrender to the city's vision of itself. But even as I fished a rubberband out of my pocket and pulled my damp curls into a little pigtail to get them off my neck I felt a prickly energy moving through my limbs, a tickle really, trickling through my veins and vibrating the length of my bones. My eyes closed, my head lolled forward. Dimly it occurred to me that sleeping on a New York City street with all my worldly possessions wasn't the smartest idea I'd ever come up with and maybe I should try to find something, an internet café, a hotel room, a hotel lobby even, but before I could complete that thought I was asleep. The last thing I remember is a keening noise in the distance. I don't know why I didn't recognize it as a car alarm. Certainly they had car alarms in Kansas, and in Arizona for that matter, and North Dakota and Oregon and Florida and every other state I'd lived in; maybe I was just too tired; maybe I was already asleep. Whatever the reason, I could only imagine the sound was a siren of some kind. A Siren I told myself, less warning than enticement to dash myself against the rocks. But exhaustion had lashed my body to my new home and I was able to listen safely to her song — another verse, I told myself, in the song of the dying city — and I let its lullaby croon me to sleep.

When I opened my eyes the siren's song had spiraled away, but the heat seemed if anything to have intensified. I was lost when I first woke up, and I found myself by lifting my wrist and staring at Trucker's watch until my eyes focused and I saw it was nearly four. The only light was the refracted brilliance of the city itself, a phosphorescent glow the same color as the greenish- white dots marking the hours on the watch Trucker had given me six weeks before. He'd given me the watch, and the clothes I was wearing, and most of the clothes in the suitcase under my ass. Trucker had, after two years of frugality, lavished me with gifts, but none of these things, not even, finally, the computer — or the receipt for it, since he'd arranged to have the machine shipped here — could distract me from what his baggy suit and expensive cologne tried to hide. Images from our last day together whizzed through my mind like bats at nightfall: the shine of sweat atop his head, his limpid smile, the fecal stink emanating from his body, and in the end I had to physically walk away from his specter.

I gathered up my suitcases and, setting out from No. 1 Dutch Street, walked a few steps south to John, where I turned right and began heading west. The balmy streets were deserted except for a bony-hipped bag lady making her way toward me, her body wrapped in a filthy white dress, her head covered by a thick silver turban, and it was only when I saw the baby carriage into which she leaned her insubstantial frame that I realized its squeaking wheels were what had awakened me. The carriage's paper-capped cargo spilled out of the bassinet like a scoop of vanilla ice cream from a cup, and as we neared each other I could hear her muttering curses under her breath, and I crossed the street to avoid her. In the distance the two towers of the World Trade Center marked the north and south poles of the urban defile, and then my eye was caught by a newspaper crowning a trash can on the corner of John and Broadway. My first New York headline screamed at me from atop its pile of refuse: CARNAGE ON THE GWB!

The GWB turned out to be the George Washington Bridge, the carnage was of animal rather than human flesh. Somehow in the pre-dawn hours of the previous morning nine deer had wandered onto the middle of the lower level of the bridge, where they ran into a wave of early commuter traffic coming from New Jersey. According to all reports the deer had stood there as deer do when confronted by headlights, and the drivers, more afraid of the cars behind than the hapless creatures before them, had had no choice but to mow the animals down. The effects were devastating. In some cases the deer had literally burst into pieces. Decapitated heads smashed through windshields, severed limbs sawed the air like batons, great swaths of blood painted a gooey calligraphy across the asphalt. Four deer were killed outright, two more were so badly injured they had to be destroyed on the scene, and the remaining three were rushed to an animal hospital. But according to the veterinarians the real threat to the deer's survival wasn't their injuries but malnutrition. The three survivors were bloated, mangy, pocked with sores and loose-toothed with something that would be called scurvy in human beings, and these details, combined with the fact that all of the commuters insisted the deer had been walking toward them, suggested the animals were leaving Manhattan's concrete forest in search of greener fields. One of the people quoted in the article insisted he'd seen hoofprints in Fort Tryon Park all his life, and —

And then, with a roar and squeal of brakes, a garbage truck appeared. I'd set my suitcases down, taken the paper out of the trash to read it, but the truth is I didn't want to hear about diseased or dying deer or anything else fleeing the city on the day of my arrival, and I tossed the story back into the can and watched as the trash collectors dumped it into the gullet of their wheeled leviathan. I considered throwing my suitcases after the paper and starting my new life with a completely blank slate, free of stolen possessions and unwanted gifts, but even as I considered that option my knees locked and my fingers tightened their grip on the suitcase handles, my entire body went rigid with the refusal to reject what had been given to me, and I retraced my steps to my most recent acquisition, my most miraculous and troubling gift: Dutch Street. My reflection in the window was just one of a thousand shapes in that yawning space until I remembered: these shapes had belonged to my mother. They had been placed by her hand, the shadows they cast were in effect her shadow, and I stared at them as if I might spy her crouched behind something, ready to jump up and laugh off her death and twenty-year absence as a practical joke I'd finally seen through. The feeling was so strong that I found myself wondering if I was still sleeping — I hoped I was, because on some level I knew that a dream was as close as I'd ever again come to my mother, and it had been years since I'd even thought of her, let alone dreamt of her. What I wanted more than anything else was for her to appear and tell me everything was going to be all right. That even though she was gone, even though I was only making her up in my sleep, the strange, wondrous inheritance she'd bestowed on me would make up for everything that had gone wrong up to that point.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Garden of Lost and Found"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Dale Peck.
Excerpted by permission of Soho Press, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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