The Fool of New York City Read online

  “It is rude to stare,” I gasp, nearly out of breath.

  “They can’t help it,” he murmurs, slowing his pace, allowing me to catch up.

  I come to a halt, distracted by a painting of a man standing on the earth holding the hand of a woman who is floating sideways in the air. It is very beautiful and strange. Is she rising, or is she descending from the heavens? Is he tethering her to the earth with his love?

  “Look at this, Francisco,” says the giant, pointing to a detail in the painting. “Tell me what it is.”

  “It’s the Eiffel Tower.”

  He nods up and down, smiling. “Excellent!”

  “I like it too.”

  “I mean it’s excellent that you recognize it, have a name for it.” He pats me on the top of my head. “It means everything is still there inside your mind, stored away in attics and broom closets and cupboards and cellars. We just need keys to open the locked doors.”

  On we go at a trot.

  When we next come to a stop, I am in a gallery of old dark paintings full of movement and mysterious colors. The colors in the portraits are unique: a tangerine vest above jade-green leggings, a queen in a black dress riding a swollen horse with a too-small head, a flaming red peony on her black bonnet. I know these paintings. These portraits are old friends. I think one of them is a self-portrait of me as a child. I was very gifted, you see, even at an early age.

  The portrait captures me standing with my arms open wide before me. I’m wearing a red pantsuit adorned with a silver-white sash and satin slippers. I am feeling somewhat uncomfortable because of the ruffled lace neckpiece, but I have learned to live with it. On the floor beside me is a green birdcage, full of little birds that seem content enough to remain where they are—well-fed prisoners. The cage’s door is open. At my feet is an Asian jackdaw, pecking at a piece of paper. One of its legs is tied by a string that I hold lightly but firmly in my hands. Yes, this is what the painting is about: the illusion of freedom. Sitting beside my feet are three cats peering intensely at the jackdaw—a detail that tells me it was painted on one of my low days.

  “This is what I looked like as a child,” I inform the giant.

  “I can see the likeness,” he says, pondering the image thoughtfully.

  Suddenly I am feeling very uneasy. I don’t know why.

  “What is written on the paper the jackdaw is pecking?” I ask. “Do you see what I see?”

  The giant peers close.

  “It looks like garbled Spanish, or maybe a nobleman’s crest?” he says.

  “Look closer.”

  “Sorry, that’s all I can see. It’s not very clear.”

  “It’s the skyline of New York City, in the future, the boy’s future, actually my future back then, if you see what I mean.”

  The giant frowns, squinting his eyes. Shakes his head.

  “And the numbers. They don’t make any sense to me. Do they make sense to you?”

  “Are they numbers, Francisco? They look like random strokes of a pen.”

  I bend closer to inspect. My eyes are inches from the canvas surface. No, these are certainly numbers:

  09-11-20-01

  I shake off the inexplicable mood. We move on to other paintings, some with overtly frightening themes: firing squads; battles; monsters; a colossus; a crazed demigod; blood; gore; witches floating in the air, tumbling a disoriented man who is their plaything. He doesn’t know who he is or where he is, and he has forgotten his name.

  “I know all of these paintings,” I inform the giant. “I am fairly sure I painted them.”

  The giant leans over and reads a label beneath a painting of a colossus, a bad giant.

  “The name is yours, all right,” he says in a musing tone. “This is a clue. We are making progress. Do you know how old you are, Francisco?”

  I shake my head.

  “The year you were born?”

  I stare at my empty hands.

  “It says here you were born in 1746. This makes you around two hundred sixty-five years old. Would that be about right?”

  “Yes, it must be. What year were you born?”

  “Nineteen eighty-one.”

  “Are you sure? Is it possible we have all been deceived?”

  “Maybe. But then there are memories to go by. Public records, news events, things you can check against your personal recollections. For example, do you remember wearing fancy clothes in a palace, painting a picture of a princess surrounded by old ladies and a dwarf?”

  Straining as hard as I might, I can’t recall any such experience. I shake my head.

  “Okay,” says the giant. “But that doesn’t prove it didn’t happen. The memory may be locked away temporarily.”

  “Yes, that could very well be the case.”

  “Genetically and theoretically, it is possible that many of our presumptions about human life are broad generalities, which ignore astonishing exceptions. For example, I myself am something of a genetic and theoretical anomaly. Yet here I am before you, standing in my size eighteen Nike jogging shoes—breathing, emanating heat, desiring a cup of espresso. By the same token, Francisco, the aging factor in our genetic makeup is a tag on our double helix. If something in your helixes was amiss, or in advance of most of mankind, it would explain it.”

  “It does not explain why I look so young now.”

  “But it does, Francisco. It’s simply that you age more slowly than the rest of us. Let’s do some math here. You appear to be twenty-four or twenty-five. Yet if you made these paintings all those years ago, you are about two hundred sixty-seven years old. Thus, it looks to me like you age ninety percent slower than most people.”

  “I don’t believe the figure is accurate, Billy.”

  “Probably,” he sighs. “I failed math in high school, which is why I never graduated. Thank heavens for basketball.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A university gave me a full basketball scholarship and let me in without a high school diploma. But that’s beside the point. The important thing here is we now have an indicator that science doesn’t get everything right. For all we know, there are countless extremely old people living among us.”

  “And you think I am one of them?”

  “What’s your earliest memory? Does anything come into your mind? It might turn a key in a lock.”

  In a flash I see a scene.

  “A boy in winter. It’s me. I’m surrounded by snow. I’m wearing ice skates, holding a hockey stick. I’m wearing a blue hockey team sweater with a white maple leaf on it. My cheeks are flaming red. I look about eight years old.”

  “Hmm, if it’s a memory, how would you be able to see yourself?”

  “Maybe I saw a photograph of myself.”

  “Or maybe it’s some other boy you saw with your eyes. That could explain it. Anything else?”

  “A television set, black-and-white pictures. Outside on the street there are old cars. Television antennas on the houses.”

  “No satellite dishes?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, this is progress. It’s not Madrid in the seventeen hundreds. It’s probably the 1950s. And maybe you’re a Canadian. The sweater is the Toronto Maple Leafs.” The giant regards me with a look of penetrating deduction. “And your accent is definitely not one of New York City’s dialects, nor anywhere near it.”

  “Bedford-Stuyvesant?” I ask. “Rude Babylon?”

  Where did these names come from?

  “Doubtful,” he says. “Besides, you speak with a whiff of English accent. Not New England and definitely not Brit. Close your eyes again. What comes into your mind?”

  “I’m walking on thin ice. It’s splintering under my feet. I can see my boots, which are black rubber with red rims. I’m carrying a tiny yellow racing car in my mittens. The ice breaks, and I fall straight down into the water. Fortunately it’s not over my head, only up to my chest. I push away the floating chunks of ice and struggle toward shore, breaking more and more ic
e with each step. I am crying. It is not a man’s crying, it’s a child’s. Somehow in all of this I have lost the car.”

  “The tiny yellow car, you mean?”

  “Yes, a yellow Matchbox car.”

  “Good. Now we have another clue. We’ve narrowed down your origins to an Anglo-Saxon country north of the warm zones of our continent.”

  “I don’t think it helps identify me. A lot of people live there. Millions.”

  “You mean in Canada?”

  “I don’t know whether or not I come from Canada. But it’s a fact that thirty million people live in that country.”

  “That can’t be true!”

  “I do not tell lies, Billy.”

  “Then you fabricate in order to evoke a deeper truth.”

  “That is lying.”

  “Okay, you embellish.”

  “Truly, there are that many people in the north.”

  He grins like a detective who has discovered a trail of blood.

  “How, may I ask, do you come by this information?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He chuckles, a rumble of distant thunder.

  We make a stop at the New York Public Library, farther south on Fifth.

  “Excuse me,” the giant says, addressing the crown of an information clerk’s head. He is trying to keep his voice down. Even so, it booms. She looks up from an index she has been perusing and stares at him through her thick glasses. She jumps a little when she beholds the questioner. She is a sweet girl in a calf-length dusky-rose dress and a pink angora button-up sweater touching her collarbone.

  “You remind me of a portrait by John Singer Sargent,” I tell her, hoping to normalize the atmosphere. “You’re standing by a lake with cobalt-blue waves, melon hues on your rose dress, your bare feet in the white sand, and the closest wave is kissing your toes.”

  But this doesn’t really help. She looks at me for a second and then back to the giant, swallowing hard, her eyes blinking rapidly. The other clerks along the information counter have dropped what they are doing and are staring at us. They are cynical or indifferent young maidens with exposed bodies. Our maiden is not, and in the silence of our hearts we treasure her. Nevertheless, despite her graces, she is frightened of the giant.

  “Can you please tell us where we can find information about Canada?” he asks.

  She looks way up into his face and chokes out the necessary catalogue numbers.

  We go off to find a book about the country we have been discussing. In one of them we learn that Canada has thirty-five million people. I thought it was thirty. Which could indicate that I have been out of contact for a while, or, alternatively, did not have my statistics correct in the first place.

  We are heading home now, going deeper into the regions of darkness southwest of Central Park. The giant tells me it is called Hell’s Kitchen. He insists that we stop at a cafe, because he needs a cup of espresso badly. On the roof of a structure that looks like a railway car, a green neon light flashes a name, on and off and on: Dina’s.

  “I love this place,” he says as we go in. “It’s so retro. Nineteen thirties.”

  After we have squeezed into a leatherette booth, a saucy woman in a polka-dot minidress and red high heels, with a bow in her hair, purple lipstick, purple fingernail polish, heavy purple eyeliner, and an elephant tattoo on one of her bare forearms, the name Alexander in India beneath it in Greek letters, takes our orders.

  “Do you know what year you were born?” I ask her timorously.

  She cocks her head and grimaces, as if now she has seen and heard everything.

  “Never ask a girl her age, honey,” she says wryly.

  With a sinking feeling, I realize I have been insensitive. If she is an extremely old person, born in the golden age of the Macedonian empire, she might not wish to discuss her past with strangers.

  “Your orders, boys?”

  I ask for water. She frowns.

  The giant asks for coffee. She smiles.

  “Ultra-mega-espresso for me,” the giant elucidates. “Five cream, no sugar.”

  “Comin’ right up, Billy,” says the woman, and off she goes to fetch it.

  “You know her,” I comment, somewhat in awe.

  “Most everyone knows me in these parts. At least by sight. I stop in here nearly every day, usually after my jog around the park.”

  “It is a very large park.”

  “It is. I run around it three times per day. Not three separate times, you understand, but three in one go. One of the problems with an ultrasize body is that sometimes hearts don’t quite fit the job they have to do. Don’t grow as fast as other parts, and in some cases stop growing before they should. That’s what a doctor told me once.”

  “Do you have a heart like that?”

  “Mine is on the more hopeful end of the spectrum. But I take no chances. Ever since high school I’ve been training it and forcing it to expand.” He pauses, inspecting me with a riveting look. “By the way, are you as hungry as I am?”

  Are you as hungry as I am? I consider this carefully. What, really, does it imply? Will my growing trust of him be shattered in an instant? Is the truth of the matter that he is hungry? If there are no other food sources than me, will he. . .?

  “Yes,” I say, swallowing a lump of fear.

  “Me too. I’ll have you for lunch.”

  My heart jumps and begins pounding. Is he telling me he is going to eat me? How could he be so blatant about it! No, no, he’s only saying he wishes to have me as a guest. I cannot get used to his voice, kept at low volume but pitched so deep. Such a voice, such a tone, might or might not indicate sinister intentions, and yet his face is set in a guileless expression, his eyes twinkling with habitual benevolence.

  Back in his apartment he parks me on a chair and tells me he has to go out again for eggs. We’re going to have an omelet for lunch, he explains. We had eggs for breakfast, I remember.

  “Is that a good idea, considering the state of your heart?” I ask.

  “These are free-range eggs. Good for the heart. If I don’t get a lot of protein, I start to go downhill.”

  He goes out and is back within three minutes, carrying eight brown eggs in a wicker basket. He shows them to me in passing. The shells have rusty speckles and a few dark smears that don’t look healthy to me. He washes them off at the kitchen sink, slaps a frying pan onto a burner, starts cracking eggs.

  “The girls are being generous,” he says over his shoulder. “They know I have company.”

  “Your neighbors gave you the eggs?”

  “No, my hens gave ’em to us. I’ll introduce you later.”

  Out in the corridor, he leads me to a door in the wall at right angles to his. He unlocks it and we enter a stairwell. He flicks a switch, and a naked light bulb illuminates wooden steps leading upward to a trap door, which he opens with his head and shoulders. Above this is a plywood cabin containing metal rubbish bins. He opens one of their lids and scoops up a can full of seeds.

  “Combination laying mash and scratch,” he explains. “They love it. Plus all the household table scraps. I also get throwaways from the restaurant two blocks south of here. The girls go crazy over anything green. But they don’t like sushi paste. In summer I collect bags of grass whenever the park is mowed.”

  We step out onto the flat roof. The outer rim is fenced with high chicken wire. An extravagantly colored rooster is strutting around, crowing, looking sinister. He spots me, arches his neck, spreads his wings, and darts toward me with intent to kill. The giant steps between us, and the rooster and I slowly back away from each other.

  The giant scatters seed and makes strange high-pitched calls, incongruous with a throat like his—until now, I have heard only his basso profundo. The girls come running helter-skelter, a crew of disparate breeds, large and small. Also a speckled black-and-white game hen with a long fantail. Their coop is a lean-to affair built onto the side of the shack. It has a row of nesting boxes. On the other si
de of the shack is a pigeon coop. Twenty or so pigeons of mottled coloring, mostly white and caramel, are huddling there against the cold. A few of them fly out their open door and wheel up into the sky. From other directions, shimmering blue-gray pigeons swoop down, hover, and enter the coop. The giant fills their trough with seed. A frenzy of cooing and pecking ensues. Here too there are nesting boxes.

  “They’ll be laying again a few weeks from now,” says the giant with a paternal smile. “Small eggs, but lots of them.”

  I walk to the edge of the roof and stare out over the rooftops of nearby buildings just like ours. A few streets away, office towers and apartment blocks shoot upward, steel and glass crystals rising from shadowed canyons. I lean through a hole in the fence to catch a glimpse of the street below. A hand grips the back of my coat and gently tugs me upright.

  “Let’s get out of the wind,” murmurs the giant as he frowns over the hole, weaving it closed with strands of wire.

  We go back down to his apartment. Like many colossi, he is accustomed to striding across the face of the earth, forgetting that lower ranks of creatures must move at a different pace. I am exhausted. I drop onto my mattress and fall asleep.

  When I awake again, he is coming in the door, jiggling a key in its lock. He closes the door and waves at me. He is wearing jogging pants and a hoodie, sweating, his cheeks enframed, a frosting of frozen moisture on his forelock. He is carrying a large piece of foam slab. He grins in triumph.

  “Huge discount, the price is right. They were tossing these into a dumpster. Clean as a whistle and long enough to complete my bed. What a day this has been. What a truly great day!”

  He is deliriously happy over the discovery of a trifle. Tumbling in a vortex of disproportion, I am being cared for by a child. I am lost in a strange land, peopled with creatures I have never seen before. There are giants in the world, but now I know that some of them are good.