The Fool of New York City Read online

  “Long way to go,” says the policeman. “Cost you a fortune by taxi. About two hours by bus. Want me to call them?”

  “No, I’ll find something else,” says the giant. The policeman spreads his arms wide, shrugs. “It’s your life.”

  The giant looks down at you, his face without expression. There is a lot in his eyes, liquid, not cold, not frozen.

  “Hungry?” he asks. You nod.

  You are in a noisy cafe. You are sitting on a stool looking across a counter at a street full of cars, neon lights, people moving past the window, laughing, talking, fracturing layers, and building defense walls around the self. You are lifting a bowl of soup to your lips and gulping it down. There are sandwiches beside you, a basket of fried potatoes, a salad. The giant is too big for one of the tipsy stools. He stands beside you as you eat. He sips from a large paper cup, watching you relieve your thirst and hunger.

  “Triple espresso,” he says. “Keeps me awake for a couple of hours. Would you like one?”

  No, you shake your head. You are grateful for his kindness, but—

  “Water?”

  Yes.

  After more water, more soup, more everything else, you want to go to sleep again. Not to hide. Your eyes are closing. You almost topple, but the hand grabs you and steadies you.

  “Okay, let’s go,” he says.

  You are walking with the giant on poorly lit streets. It is one of the city’s hard places, old places. You pass huddles of unhappy people shouting insults, the new strange creatures in the world. The giant is not afraid. People can shoot you, but when you are as big as he is they do not try to beat you up.

  You come to a four-story, red brick building on a side street. Up the stairs to the top floor, and a hallway full of silent numbered doors.

  Across three of the doors and parts of the walls, the words “Bedbugs. Don’t rent. Don’t squat. This building condemned” are spray-painted in fluorescent orange.

  “Home sweet home,” says the giant, unlocking the one clean door at the end of the corridor. “I debugged my place, and I’ve been working on the others. The landlord says I can give it a try.”

  He stoops to get his head under the lintel, goes in, and switches on a light. You follow him inside. You feel it may not be safe to do this; you may regret it. Who, really, is this giant? Is he a good one?

  “You can stay here for the night,” he says. “It’s cramped and it isn’t pretty, but you won’t freeze, and I can try to help you tomorrow. Sound like a good idea?”

  You hang your head and stare at the floor. You are trembling with apprehension. Goodness has no explanation. You cannot trust it. But you have nowhere else to go.

  The giant closes the door behind you and helps you take off the coat, which he hangs on a hook by the door. You dare not move. The giant kneels, a mountainous back in a tan wool sweater, a strip of white T-shirt at the neck. Blue jeans. He is unlacing his hiking boots. That done, he points to your feet.

  “Sandals in winter,” he says with raised eyebrows. “Your feet are soaked. I suggest you take ’em off. I’ll get you something warmer to put on. Have a seat.”

  The apartment is a single room with a kitchenette and a bathroom. The ceiling is very high. The walls are pale yellow, a sunrise in early summer. There are no pictures or posters on them, nothing at all. There is a chrome dining table and a scarred wooden desk with stacks of books on it, along with a desk lamp, paper, pens, and notebooks. A packing crate is its seat. Two large stuffed armchairs fill most of the remaining space. Their arms are missing, the wounds of their dismemberment gaping.

  You sit down on the edge of one. The giant again kneels and removes your wet sandals and socks. Your feet are blue. He dries your feet with a towel. He brings socks that he pulls over your feet. Like gunny sacks, though made of coarse wool.

  The giant puts a kettle of water on a gas burner.

  Two thick foam mattresses stretch along the entire length of one wall. The giant separates them and slides one across the room to an adjacent wall. He dresses it with sheets, a blanket, and a pillow, and on top of these he pulls a green sleeping bag. He dresses the other mattress in the same manner.

  “I sleep here,” he says, pointing to one. “Even an Abe Lincoln bed is too short for me, but we’ll make do for one night. You sleep there. You can lie down and shut your eyes now, if you want.”

  You remain seated, uncertain, clamping your hands between your knees. The kettle whistles. The giant pours steaming water into a white teapot. He is rummaging in the kitchen to find cups, spoons, a jar of honey. He lifts the window and brings in a carton of milk from the outside sill. From the corner of your eye, you see him gathering a handful of kitchen knives, very dangerous knives, and standing on tiptoe to put them on top of a cupboard, high above human reach.

  He turns and notices you watching him. He lifts his shoulders as if in explanation or apology. Now you see that he is not only a titanic human being, a continent of bone and muscle, but is excellent in all ways. If you were to see him at a distance, not knowing his height, you would say, this is what a man should be. Yes, this. For here is immense strength, and it is mastered. Here is perfect form and balance, yet it is without vanity. This man does no harm.

  Now the giant brings you a cup of tea. It looks like a thimble in the palm of his hand. You take it in both of yours. You sip its sweetness. He sits down on the other chair, which, despite its missing arms, is too small for him. It creaks and groans beneath his weight. When everything has settled, he swallows his tea in a single gulp. He looks up with bright eyes, and laughs gently.

  “I went out to buy a loaf of bread,” he says. “Little did I know what I would bring home.”

  You lower your eyes. You understand, suddenly, that you are a burden. You are an unsolicited weight upon the world. You have misread the world somehow; something in it was wrong. And now you are not where you should be. Though the giant is sturdy enough, it is not good to add burdens onto others.

  Some people become rescuers, you think. Some become this in order to strengthen what they are. Some become rescuers in order to become what they hope to be. And yet there would be no rescuers without those in need of rescue.

  Silently you begin to weep, because you understand now that you are in need of rescue.

  The giant looks at you without speaking, his eyes sorrowing with you, his face sympathetic, listening, waiting. Rescuers, too, contemplate phenomena.

  “It is hard for you,” he says. “I was once like you. A long time ago, I too forgot my own name. The name love gave to me, and breathed into my ears, and called me to supper, and scolded me, and taught me my path in life. And when I lost that name I thought I had lost everything. But it was only a beginning. A losing can be a better kind of finding.”

  “What is your name?” you ask the giant, though you remember that he told you before. There is reassurance in names. There is identity and integrity.

  “My name is Billy Revere,” the giant replies. “Before and after, though I lost it for a while. Are you sure you can’t remember yours?”

  “I don’t know,” you say, staring into the distance, a horizon obscured by smoke and dust. “I sense it, but I cannot hear it. I remember I was afraid and I was running from something. I fell through ice, and I fell through frozen leaves below the ice, and then through the ring of fire underneath all layers of phenomena.”

  “There is a kind of poetry in what you say,” replies the giant. “Maybe you are a poet.”

  “I do not know for certain.”

  “You do not know what you are or where you should be. I understand. But you are here. And you are you.”

  You are warm now. The tea has helped, and the giant’s words. You hear something faintly in the distance, beyond the sound of police sirens, the clinking of the radiator, the soft bellows of the giant’s breathing. It is coming closer and closer.

  You look up at him and say:

  “My name is Francisco de Goya.”

  2 />
  The Metropolitan Museum of Misplaced Memories

  “Bacon and eggs, Francisco?” asks the giant.

  I open my eyes. Where am I? Oh yes, I am lying on a mattress on a floor in the lair of a giant.

  I have a memory of saying my name and then toppling sideways, unable to keep my eyes open. I felt myself scooped up and carried, laid gently down onto a mattress, blankets pulled over my shoulders, a light going out, and I was gone.

  Now I am here again. There is natural light in the apartment’s single window. The giant is standing by the kitchen stove with a spatula in hand and a big smile on his face. The frying pan is spitting.

  I sit up, kicking off the sleeping bag, preparing to run if I have to.

  “You really slept. Fourteen hours,” he says. “If you want to shower and shave, breakfast should be ready when you’re finished. I’m making waffles too. Maple syrup. Coffee. Do you drink coffee?”

  “Yes,” I say, though I don’t know how I know this.

  “I went out this morning and bought you some clothes, also a coat and boots. I think I got your sizes right. The clothes are on a hook in the bathroom. Put your old ones in the hamper. Make yourself at home.”

  I am desperate for the bathroom. I close its door and take care to slide its bolt into locked position. Are there dimensions to the personalities of giants that are better left unknown? He could have overpowered me but has chosen not to do so. This tells me something. Though I do not feel safe, neither do I feel unsafe. His name is Billy, like a little boy strolling through a wheat field. My name is Francisco, like a little boy on a donkey revolving around a grape press. Or a darker Francisco wrestling with the witches embedded in oil paint. Beyond that, nothing is certain.

  My face in the mirror is disturbing. Who are you? The eyes tell me nothing, large and brown with black lashes and brows. A head full of heavy dark curls. Olive skinned. Am I Italian? Or Middle Eastern?

  There is a fresh safety razor and soap on the sink. I shave myself carefully. A new toothbrush in its cellophane package, a tube of minty white. I brush my teeth. I rinse and brush again.

  The bathroom is floored with a chessboard of black and white ceramic tiles, many of them cracked. The walls are peeling plaster. The bathtub is ancient and deep, an oval quadruped on four lion paws poised as if to leap. An iron ring suspended from the ceiling surrounds it, with a curtain to keep the water from spilling all over the floor and out into the apartment, and then into the corridor and down the public staircase, making rapids and waterfalls and hazards for those who live in the building, and when the water freezes as it reaches its estuary on the sidewalk, an extremely dangerous zone for unsuspecting people passing by. How full of treacheries, follies, mistakes, is existence. Is it safe to take a shower?

  After disrobing, I stand under a jet of steaming hot water and remember, before it is too late, how to master the curtain engineering in order to keep the water within the chamber (slide the rusty rings on which the curtain hangs and completely surround yourself; do not forget this). I am also learning that life is fluid; I am liquid, not frozen. I move. I can speak. I possess my small morsel of identity, and on the other side of the door is a giant who, for reasons known only to himself, wishes to help me.

  There is no shampoo, only a bar of orange carbolic soap. When I am clean and have dried myself with a towel, I put on the new clothes: white boxer shorts and T-shirt, jeans, a thin dark-blue pullover, a bulky maroon cardigan. There are new socks too, which are slightly too large but smaller than the giant’s. Everything is stapled with price tags: Hospital Auxiliary Thrift Shop—New to U.

  New to me. Everything is new to me. The world. My name. My face. The face is certain. The name may be something pulled down from the swift-flowing currents in the sky. It is close to my true name, I think. It must be. It is meaningful to me though not quite right.

  We eat quietly, facing each other on opposite sides of the kitchen table.

  “I found a two-dollar chair at the flea market,” he says. “It’s yours for the duration.”

  “There is little space in this room,” I reply. “I take up too much of your space.”

  “I take up too much of my space,” he says with a grin, chewing on bacon, his face looming over me, though he is feet away.

  “I will leave after breakfast. I am sorry to have been a burden to you.”

  “You aren’t a burden, Francisco.”

  “You have spent money on me. And you are too tall for one mattress.”

  “I’ll get another. You can stay as long as you need to.”

  “I will go after breakfast.”

  “Of course. If you wish. However, I have a suggestion.”

  I look at him curiously.

  “We need to find out who you are. We could have an interesting time of it. Like a game or a mystery story.”

  I shake my head. “You must go to your work or to school,” I say. “You have spent your money to feed and clothe me. You own nothing. I do not wish to offend you, but I think you are poor.”

  “Oh no, Francisco. I am very rich. I have a small pension that pays for everything I need, and then some. I’m studying too, but there’s no time pressure on that.”

  “You are a student?”

  “In a way. I wanted to be a paramedic, but my size was a deterrent and they wouldn’t let me into the course. And no one would have hired me even if I had graduated. I don’t fit easily into ambulances, you see. And sometimes people in crisis are frightened of me. So I study paramedicine on my own, and I volunteer at shelters on weekends, but most of the time I walk around the city looking for people in trouble.”

  “You help them?”

  “Uh-huh, I try to.”

  “As you helped me.”

  “It makes me happy when I can do any small thing. So you see, you’re doing me a favor. And if you’re worried about me, uh, hurting you, you don’t need to be. I’m not unbalanced. I’m not a crazy person. I used to be, but I’m not now.”

  “But I am now.”

  “I don’t think you are. I think you’ve suffered some kind of trauma.”

  “Which is why you were right to hide the knives on top of the cupboard. I do not know if I am good or evil.”

  The giant blushes mightily.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “You were a stranger.”

  “I am still a stranger.”

  “But not as much as you were last night. We’re sharing a meal and having a good conversation.”

  The giant stands up and in one step crosses the room to the cupboard. He retrieves the knives and puts them back into a drawer. He sits down and smiles.

  “Another waffle, Francisco?”

  “Yes, please.”

  We are walking north out of the regions of fear.

  “You are very big,” I say to the giant. “That is why people do not try to hurt you.”

  “You’re wrong there,” he says. “I’m a challenge for some guys, you see. They jump at the chance to bring me down. Good story to tell after the fight. David and Goliath, except the bad guys are David.” He walks another half block before he adds, “They aren’t really bad. Just angry. They feel trapped, without choices. They know me now and there’s no more trouble. I’ve got nothing to steal, and I’m the last person in town who’s likely to be an undercover cop.”

  Now we are walking along Fifth Avenue, the most expensive street in the world, the giant tells me. We are going to a museum.

  “The Metropolitan Museum of Misplaced Memories,” he says. “The lost and found of the human soul.”

  It’s a cold day, but the boots he bought me are fleece lined, and the coat is warm enough. It’s corduroy fabric, striped vertically in a variety of colors. It is not a pattern I would have chosen—I realize now that my tastes are sober and conservative, despite my vagrancy.

  “What city is this?” I ask.

  “It’s New York. One of the biggest cities in the world.”

  “Oh, now I remember. Yes, I know the name
. There was a giant ape here—on top of a building. I can see it in my mind. Did I see this with my eyes?”

  “You might have seen it in a movie.”

  We meet other pedestrians. Those who are not distracted by their own affairs, or the sidewalk at their feet, always blink rapidly and stare at Billy as we pass. Most of them stop and watch him from behind. They do not see me. At traffic lights, every head in every car turns and stares at him.

  “Am I a child?” I ask the giant. “Truly, you can tell me.”

  “Children do not shave, Francisco,” he says, lumbering along without a pause.

  “Then am I a dwarf?”

  “No, I’d put you at just over six feet tall.”

  “How tall are you?”

  “Ah, the question I’m asked by every human being I have conversed with since I turned fourteen. I haven’t measured lately, but last I checked I was seven feet eleven and a half inches high.”

  “You,” I declare emphatically, “are a giant!”

  “Technically, medically, no. I don’t suffer from gigantism or acromegaly. Mythically, imaginatively, I suppose I’m a giant in most people’s eyes. In reality I’ve inherited a genetic code that made me grow normally in every way, just somewhat more in terms of quantity.”

  “Were you a very large baby?”

  “Quite ordinary, nine pounds something, I think.”

  “Are your parents exceptionally tall people too?”

  “They were. Both under seven feet, though. They had me when they were older, in their forties. They passed away some years ago.”

  A cloud washes over his face and is quickly gone.

  “I am sorry. Are you alone in the world?”

  “Brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, you mean? None. I’m without any family now. But I never feel alone in the world. Do you?”

  “I feel as if I have always been alone. But not today.”

  “Good!” he says, thumping me on the back, making me stumble forward. A hand flashes out and steadies me.

  “Here’s the museum.”

  This is a very big building, ceilings a hundred feet high, just the right size for the giant. In a place like this he can be comfortable. Straighten. Stretch. Advance without a stooping neck and a nagging fear of banging his head on lintels, drawing blood, creating dizziness, falling down, hurting people he would bury beneath his body. In order to keep up with him I am forced to trot. He knows where he wants to go. Through gallery after gallery, annex and alcove and more Minotaurian galleries, people stare at him. He never seems to notice.