Read Online The Garden of Lost and Found by Dale Peck - Free Book Online

event—and therefore proof of my grip on reality—or if I wanted them to be alive still, still eking out a meager existence in Fort Tryon Park. Still planning their escape.
    “Did you read about them?” My words limped into the shadows of the basement. “The deer? The ones that were on the bridge the other night?”
    “What you yammering about now boy? I swear, your mind runs in so many directions a body can’t hardly follow the thread. You want me to get you that phone or not?”
    “Please. If it’s a push-button. Is it a push-button?”
    Nellydean paused, and even in the shadowy corridor I could see her considering her options. Finally she retrieved her hammer, pulled a nail from her pocket, and banged it into the wall with three sharp raps.
    “Looks a little big to be a safety-deposit key,” she said, hanging her lantern on her nail, “but you never know. The phone’s a dialer,” she added, disappearing into a room. “Like the one you just used.”

    IN THE END I WALKED. Actually I ran first: away from Nellydean, her riddles and poses and meaningless games. I walked to Harlem. I suppose I could have splurged on a real phone—since I wasn’t eating, Trucker’s wad of twenties was just burning a hole in my pocket—but I thought that even if worse came to worst I could make my way uptown, book an appointment, return to have my blood drawn another day. And New York was new to me: what better way to see it than on foot? I’d come from the country, after all, where ten-mile treks were said to be commonplace. I’d never taken one myself, but still, they were supposed to happen all the time—’specially when a storm was a-brewing.
    It was already over ninety when I set out the following morning, my feet melting inside the plastic cocoon of those shoes and the rest of my body barely covered by a peach get-up that was a cross between a unitard and cut-off overalls—a uni-short TM , according to the tag Trucker’d neglected to remove, although what it really looked like was a onesie. Despite the regularity of the gridded streets and avenues I’d seen from the plane, I still got turned around a half dozen times, and in the end I barely made it to the clinic before it closed at four. I was dizzy with heat exhaustion, asked the first person I saw if she would take my blood, and I don’t know, maybe the clinic was slow that day or maybe it was my pathetic appearance—shaved sunburned skull, chest so skinny one of the straps of my uni-short had fallen off my shoulder—but I was ushered straight into a tiny office where I dazedly answered a litany of questions put to me by a middle-aged matronly Latina. Have you ever been the passive, or receptive, partner in unprotected anal intercourse, unprotected meaning anal intercourse in which a condom is not utilized? Yes . Approximately how many times were you the passive, or receptive, partner in unprotected anal intercourse, unprotected meaning anal intercourse in which a condom is not utilized? Forty-three . Do you believe or have any reason to believe that any of the persons with whom you were the passive, or receptive, partner in unprotected anal intercourse, unprotected meaning dot-dot-dot, was HIV-positive? Yes . Approximately how many persons with whom you were the passive, or receptive, partner in unprotected anal intercourse do you believe or have reason to believe were HIV-positive, and approximately how many times were you the passive, or receptive, partner in unprotected anal intercourse with this person or persons? One; forty-three .
    It was only here that my counselor looked up at me. Her left breast sported red, pink, blue, green, and yellow ribbons, a tattered flag of commiseration, and she said, “Dios mio, boy. My God. What are you reading?”
    I blinked. I blinked again. She pointed, and my eyes followed her finger to my chest: there was my mother’s key dangling a few inches beneath my chin, and there, poking from the bib pocket of the uni-short,