PEOPLE ARE ALWAYS LEAVING things behind. Umbrellas. Wallets. Coats. Shopping bags filled with souvenirs: I LOVE NEW YORK T-shirts, snow globes in which replicas of the Statue of Liberty or the Freedom Tower stand suspended in perpetual winter. Sometimes the objects are more uncommon, hinting at the lives of the strangers who have forgotten them. A bouquet of sunflowers, a note attached with twine: Evelyn, forgive me. A Senegalese driver at the garage once had a customer jump out at a red light, abandoning a tank that held a lime-green snake. Years ago, when he was new to this job and the job itself was so much more dangerous than it is now, he found a switchblade wedged between the seats at the end of his shift. He still has it, in the plastic bureau where he keeps his belongings, along with a jumble of other objects acquired over the years. A child’s pink plastic watch. A ring with a translucent white gemstone, which flickers with rainbow flecks when held up to the light. A camera with a finished roll of film inside.
You were supposed to turn these things in at the garage, but it was no secret that Larry and his numbskull son with the gold chains around his pimply neck just kept the items for themselves or sold them. What he’s doing is stealing, too, he supposes, but it doesn’t feel wrong. Just the opposite—he is rescuing these things from the careless people who have forgotten them. Though on some nights, after a few beers or a blunt ashed into a Coke can, he wonders if this notion of the righteousness of his thefts is just a bullshit justification. Lately, it seems to him that he keeps these objects as compensation, pitifully insufficient, for his own lost things.
Today he returns home from his shift with an iPhone, the latest model, in a light-gray case, not something he can keep. Anytime now the phone will ring and he will speak to the person to whom it belongs. Maybe it will be the banker he picked up in midtown, who shouted into his phone the whole drive to La Guardia. Or perhaps it will be the Park Avenue mother in those tight black leggings with SOUL in big letters down the thigh, with the little boy in the blazer and the little girl in the blue jumper; he’d dropped the girl at Brearley, the boy at St. Bernard’s, the mother in front of a cycling studio on Eighty-third. Or it will be a Russian tourist he drove to Chanel, or a sixteen-year-old girl he picked up in Dumbo who probably has no clue how much her phone costs, or a chef bound for Williamsburg, a tattoo of a pig’s butchery cuts on his own fleshy hock. And when he confirms that, yes, they left their phone in the taxi and he has it, has held on to it for safekeeping, they will tell him how grateful they are, and that old feeling will come over him, a feeling that is not so much annoyance or anger as dispassion: You are invisible to them, you are the back of a head, and then suddenly you are indispensable. Suddenly they are, like, super-appreciative. Suddenly you are a lifesaver, boss. When he meets whoever it is this time to return the phone, and they try to hand him five bucks, or fifty (how variable, their sense of the value of what he has done for them), he will shake his head and politely refuse, as if it is pleasure enough just to be of service to them. His refusal will trigger a shift in the way they look at him, and he will know that they are thinking that he is a deeply good person. Probably they will tell this story: the taxi driver who returned their phone and wouldn’t even accept a reward, though surely he could use the money. When they look at him in this approving way, he will simultaneously feel so good and so disgusted with himself for feeling good, for wanting that look, for chasing it, for giving one shit what they think, that he’ll regret not taking the money in the first place. Because they’re not wrong—he could use it.
It is early autumn, the days still mild, the trees just beginning to turn. But already he can detect faint signs of what is to come. Soon dead leaves will cover the sidewalks, revived for brief moments by swells of wind. At night the sky will turn blue-black as the open ocean, with that same tumbling depth and pitiless beauty. Then the cold will come, and with it the snow, and he will spend his shifts grinding through ice and slush, getting slammed by wakes of snow cast off by passing plows, maneuvering through the city in search of some sorry bastard in ruined wing tips trying to make it to Grand Central before the tracks ice over and the trains north shut down.
From the kitchen comes the click, click, click of a burner failing to ignite—his roommate Les reheating takeout on the stove. Through the thin wall that separates his bedroom from the next one, he hears Leon making his nightly call to his wife. Cecil has taken up residence in their small common area, the television blaring one of the reality shows the rest of them can’t stand but Cecil loves, or at least seems to require, for he never exactly appears to be enjoying himself as he watches; rather, the shows seem to be a way of making time pass without feeling the granularity of each moment.
He has lived here for two years, replacing a man from Trinidad who returned home to live out his retirement in the house he’d built for his family. Les and Cecil were already living here when he moved in. Leon arrived four months ago, from Carriacou by way of Canarsie. Of these men he knows only what can be gleaned through proximity: who has a family to phone and who does not, who works the day shift and who the night. Their eating habits. The sounds of their sleep.
It is his ninth apartment in nearly two decades, all of them more or less alike—nondescript buildings in Flatbush, grease-encrusted kitchenettes, radiators that clang and keen and hiss. In his early years in New York, he had bothered to befriend his roommates. When he moved in here, Les and Cecil had tried to make conversation with him. Where was he from? How long had he been in New York? Did he have a wife? Children? To these questions he gave gruff answers or dodges, and they quickly learned to leave him alone. Now he comes and goes like a ghost. His roommates step aside when he wants to use the stove, the bathroom. They are a bit afraid of him, a big man with a look of warning in his eyes. Let them be.
At work it is the same. When he first started driving, there were many others at the garage from the West Indies, but the population has turned over several times since then, and now it’s almost all Gujaratis, Sikhs from Punjab and Chandigarh, Bangladeshis, and West Africans. Their foreign tongues draw a curtain around them, leaving him to himself.
At night in bed he feels waves, mild and gentle, against his skin.
Sometimes he misses the water so much his bones ache with longing. Yet it is, ironically, all around him. In New York, he has never lived more than five miles from Manhattan Beach, hardly farther from the water than his grandmother’s house had been. During his shifts, he shuttles passengers over the East River on the coral steelwork of the Williamsburg Bridge, under the Hudson through the Lincoln Tunnel, crosses the Harlem River on any number of quaint bridges. New York is a city of islands. When he was freshly arrived, he’d purchased an old guidebook from a dollar cart outside of a used bookshop. In the back of the book, along with sections on tipping and local slang (“flying rat,” “bridge-and-tunnel,” “yooz”), there was a map. Manhattan and Long Island and the glassy-sounding Staten Island—these he knew. But there were other islands he’d never heard of: Randall’s, Roosevelt, Ellis, Wards, Hart, Governors. Over his years here he has learned many more: North and South Brother, South and East Nonations. Goose and Hog and Rat. Hunter and Shooters and Swinburne. Mill Rock and Heel Tap Rock. The Blauzes, the Chimney Sweep Islands, Canarsie Pol. Ruffle Bar and Rulers Bar Hassock and Hoffman. U Thant and Mau Mau and Isle of Meadows.
But though in New York he lives on an island surrounded by islands, sometimes—as he walks from the fleet garage to the N after his shift, or wrestles a bunch of grapes into a plastic bag at the Korean grocery on Beverley, or scrubs the toilet on a Tuesday—it will occur to him that he is, at this moment, on an island, and he will find this impossible to believe. He cannot feel the islandness of New York.
One day when he had been in the city two months, he took the subway out to Coney Island. He’d never seen a roller coaster before and he watched as load after load of people careened shrieking over the wooden tracks. He strolled the boardwalk, got fried clam strips and a hot dog with onions at Nathan’s. It was September, and warm. After lunch, he walked down the boardwalk steps to the sand and slipped off his loafers. He walked to the water’s edge, cuffed his pants, and waded in a few steps. But even then, with the water lapping against his ankles and the seabirds circling overhead and the vegetal scent of shallow water in his nostrils, he did not quite believe it was the ocean he was feeling and seeing and smelling.
Back home, whether you could see the sea or not, you sensed it. He’d sensed it in the schoolyard, tasted it in the blood from his split lip after a boxing match with his friends. When he bicycled down the road to work at dawn, the ocean was a magnet, pulling his feet through their slow revolutions until he crested the rise by the radio tower and there it was, the sea, tossed before him like a net. He’d felt it in the island’s interior spaces, too, in his grandmother’s kitchen with the white curtains and the refrigerator rusted by the salted wind, at Paulette’s Place where he and his friends drained bottles of Cruzan and Bounty, and especially within the walls of the eggshell-blue prison on Commerce Street, where he sometimes put his cheek to the moist concrete floor and thought of wet sand warping silkily beneath the weight of his steps.
He found it impossible to separate his life there from the sensation of being surrounded by water, a sensation he hadn’t realized he’d felt all day, every day, until he touched down in New York and felt its absence for the first time. It wasn’t just that at home he could smell salt everywhere, or feel the humid breezes tossed off by the sea, or gauge his nearness to the water by the way the light shifted, while in New York, so remarkably, arrogantly immune to its environs, he could not. At home, the sea was consciousness itself. Always, you knew it was there, and that within it was everything else: answers and mysteries, that which could be seen and that which could not, those things that were remembered and those that had been forgotten. In New York the ocean was an irrelevancy, a vestigial thing beyond and apart from the thing itself, the city: the buildings packed in tight as tissue stanching a nosebleed, a glass-and-steel rising that pierced the sky.
THERE IS another life he lives. It flows beneath this one. He feels it like being far out in the water and sensing all that depth beneath you. In this other life, he has never driven a taxi through the snow-hushed streets of New York. He has never spent a birthday eating stale samosas in the holding lot at JFK. He has never lain awake at night listening to his roommate’s snores. He has never been to New York at all. He never took a plane away from his home, never watched the island disappear into the sea as the plane lifted into the sky. Never the eggshell-blue prison. Never the shocked faces of everyone he’d ever known. Never that night and never that girl. Never and never and never.
On the table, the iPhone in the gray case rings. The ringtone is that maddening banana song. Six foot, seven foot, eight foot bunch. Go fucking figure. He picks it up and says hello.