The Weekend Salvage Unit

Susan Daitch

We were an optician, a seventh-grade teacher, a man who called himself a paracoroner, an entomologist, a professional gardener who had trained in Brussels, and a semiretired loan officer. The group’s director, a former contractor who had lost his license for reasons that were never entirely clear to me, would locate a building about to be demolished and obtain permission for us to gain access and remove anything we were able to extricate: a marble statue of Hermes, red tin Coca-Cola signs like giant buttons, oak railings, spindles and banisters from the birthplace of Winston Churchill’s mother, marble fireplaces, ball-and-claw bathtubs big enough to bathe a pony. Our group always appeared on-site one step ahead of the wrecking ball. Small things: faceted-glass doorknobs, Bauhaus-era tiling, Victorian faucets and spigots, these one could take home. Larger pieces we stored in a warehouse located off an industrial canal. A few gargantuan objects would eventually be sold on eBay or elsewhere to defray our operating costs, though the goal of the group was essentially to preserve these treasures as best we could. Over time the warehouse began to look like a miniature metropolis, as if the city were turning itself inside out. There was no end of buildings about to be demolished. The city could have sustained many groups like ours, easy.

I first met the group one afternoon when walking over the Union Street bridge, where I spied a small cluster of people unloading what looked like body bags. The bodies would have to have been extremely heavy, because several people were required to carry each one into the warehouse. They weren’t really bodies, of course, but marble caryatids from a bathhouse whose time of origin lay in the era of robber barons, Catalonian anarchists, and films viewed via a kinetoscope. The next van to pull up contained balconies from an old movie theater. They were rolled out like gilt chariots and, standing in a meridian of skunk cabbage and dried-out stalks of Queen Anne’s lace, I was reminded of the night P. T. Barnum paraded elephants through the Holland Tunnel at three in the morning because that’s the only time they could get into the city—it was like that—the oddity of watching these behemoths carried into a cinder-block depot was nearly as strange as seeing tropical wild animals loose in northern city streets. My curiosity got the better of my reticence, and I struck up a conversation with the professional gardener, tattoos of choking vines circling her arms, legs, and neck, who told me she dreamed of designing grounds around the mythological creatures, the Poseidons, Persephones, the satyrs, and sphinxes they’d found in the past year alone. Then Alan, the ex-contractor, introduced himself to me. Interested in being part of our little crew? How could I resist? He gave me the emergency contact and medical forms, and I was in.

My husband had departed months earlier for the topmost edge of the Greenland ice sheet, and from there he was to travel to points unknown in search of the semisolid North Pole. His journey, in truth, had begun even earlier, and there was no talk of freezing your butt off on an ice floe. It began with cleaning our apartment, but then the removal of objects accelerated to the disposal of books, photographs, dishes, clothing, until only an empty box remained.

“Will I be next to go?” I asked.

“No, not you,” he said as he prepared to exit, though he packed no bag. In his quest for emptiness, to be rid of all possessions, he planned to travel to the Arctic. I pointed out that in such a climate there would be things he would need for survival. He knew this. He had been there before. His job was to drill through glacial ice, to pull up long cylinders that emerged like clear frost teeming with invisible microbial life. There were viruses, bacteria, pathogens in a variety of forms, shaped like hair combs, soccer balls, sea anemones, the letter Y, all in suspended animation, slumbering in their frozen shelters for nearly a million years. Then, presto, a metal drill, hollow and determined, separates them from their neighbors. They’re flown to a lab where their shelter will be thawed, and they wiggle back to life.

“So these microbes, liberated from their chambers, can now screw their brains out.

“They divide and subdivide. Their dormant genomes will now reproduce.”

That sounded alarming. Who knew what diseases could be unleashed? Hand on the doorknob, he reassured me, he and his colleagues weren’t intent on launching new and fatal epidemics. The ice cores, the diameter of an orange-juice can, are memory banks, Pleistocene hard drives. They will, he said, tell us everything about early life, but also how to survive in extreme conditions, the kind that will be found on the moon, on Mars, and beyond. If you, a microbe that looks like a piece of vacuum hose, can survive for a million years in a house of ice, then the lunar Sea of Tranquility will be a piece of cake.

He was seduced by the sheer absence of any markers, the intoxicating glow of light on ice, the idea of extreme cold, all this sent him into raptures. Last communication: a photograph taken from inside an igloo: bright light sliced through a grid of cracks, the space between blocks of ice. A sight rarely seen when you think about it. Most igloos are photographed from the outside.

When he left, I began taking long walks, and this is how I first met the Weekend Salvage Unit. After joining I could actually trespass in some of those apartments I’d walked past in envy, thinking other people’s rooms swarmed with life, only to find the lights were deceptive, a power-company fluke most likely. In many cases the residents themselves had long since departed.

On Saturday mornings we donned bright-yellow construction helmets, packed toolboxes, flashlights jangling from our belts, lunches, water bottles, and thermoses, and we were on our way. Once in a while we arrived at a building that still had occupants, not many, but a few. They shouted at us: Tools of the capitalist hydra, get the fuck out and on and on about eminent domain. We’re on your side, Sol the optician would shout, but you’re going down, there’s nothing we can do about it. We just want to preserve what we can. Residents tend to want to ostrich it out. This never works.

On my first weekend, heavy crowbar in hand, I felt powerful in a way I never had before, like I could take whatever I wanted to from any edifice. I pried loose a marble threshold slab and found a bundle of pornographic postcards, edges moldy and eaten away. The images of Korean War–era pinups barely dressed in nurses’ uniforms, as maids, or in other predictable costumes smelled like penicillin. Each was more or less in the same pose, bent over slightly. Their mouths were shaped in an O of eternal surprise. The cards crumbled in my hands. An old woman came out of her apartment holding a blue plastic colander that dripped water onto the floor, a floor that would never be washed again. A tang of burnt mustard hung in the air, and piles of Christmas icicles blocked one of the doors. She was the only occupant left on the floor, I think, and didn’t say a word to me, only looked through big glasses that gave her eyes an owl-like and startled appearance. I dropped the cards, turned on my heel, and left. As I became more determined, I learned to ignore the squatters and old-time denizens clinging to whatever walls, gabled ceilings, and windows remained to them.

There are dangers involved in what we do. Rooftops can no longer be depended upon to stay parallel and horizontal to the earth. Crumbling water towers, pigeon coops, even a few hives belonging to long-gone urban beekeepers have been known to fall in on scavengers as we make our way through lobbies and corridors. Sol the optician brings goggles and sometimes masks if there’s a lot of dust in the air. He collects these after every job, counting to be sure he has all of them. Also, I never take the elevators in these buildings, a Russian roulette–like experience at best, but there are those who do without a moment’s hesitation. Who would want to take such a chance? I’ll tell you. Alejandro Ocampo, the paracoroner, that’s who. As an assistant to the coroner he sees all kinds of death every day, but the possibility of his own doesn’t stop him. In fact, just the opposite. An unoiled cable snaps, boom, you’re dead, he says, fast and easy, that’s the ideal way to go, believe me. Lingering residents often pirate electricity from lampposts outside on the street. Current goes off, fine, you take a snooze until rescue comes, he mimes sleep as he hops into a dented old Otis. You could die of a heart attack going up stairs that collapse under your feet. Alejandro points at me as the doors close. Someone has to take the loot downstairs in the freight elevators. Ocampo is the chosen one for this task. It’s as if he thinks he has superpowers, from being around death so much, he’s developed immunity.

Alan had worked on nondescript towers—the kind, he would be the first to admit, no future salvage crew would consider. No longer practicing, because once, or maybe more than once, he made a deal with someone who watered down the concrete, because he didn’t think it would make that much difference, structurally speaking, and it was a good way to keep costs low. Alan was fond of balancing abstract concepts in one hand and then the other. Time (we only have, at most, three hours of daylight left) versus potential gain (Rodchenko-like mosaics on the ground floor near the mailboxes). The hands would move up and down, weighing alternatives, which should we choose, then he would turn to the loan officer or whoever was in the passenger seat and say, “OK, let’s go for it,” in a voice like a reality-TV majordomo. Yet I liked Alan. He inspired confidence that the structure at hand still resisted the force of gravity.

I was nervous about the location we were headed to. It was beginning to rain in torrents, and I was afraid of collapsing roofs. I slumped in the seat so my feet were up on the seat in front of me, grazing Ocampo’s legs. Warmth radiated from the side of his body. Despite my anxiety, I could fall asleep here, as if the ride to an unknown site, though under discussion as if it actually existed, would go on forever and I too would end up near the North Pole.

Then I became distracted when the entomologist undid his ponytail and ran his hands through his hair, and I stopped thinking about the euphoria of trekking to the edge of Baffin Bay. In seriously decayed buildings he had found a variety of ants and termites, and even a couple of flaming-red harlequin stinkbugs, rarely found north of Texas. From him I learned that ants, in their subterranean colonies, practiced a kind of slavery; they stole larvae from other insects and raised them to be servants to masters who were as cruel as they were relentless. He showed us their tunnels and storehouses, miniature metropolises riddling walls and under floorboards.

Ocampo didn’t talk about his work much. Discussions of cadavers upset the gardener, who retained her accent from years spent in Brussels. She grew misty-eyed when the entomologist spoke about enslaved bugs. Though she sat behind me in the van, she smelled of salt and lavender. The gardener seemed like someone who had gotten lost in the wrong century, and though she had a history of drug abuse, you could imagine it was the green fairy, laudanum, or opium that she had abused, not a drug with a modern pharmaceutical name. The entomologist stroked the leafy tattoos inside her wrist where blades and tendrils tangled with blue veins.

Seventeen Van Hayden Street had, in grander days, been a residential hotel with a ballroom, a bar, a coat check, and a barbershop in the lobby. Though it ought to have been condemned long ago, Alan warned us, a few inhabitants might still be clinging to their rooms, or perhaps they had never heard the news that the building had been bought by Valhalla Equities. No joke. According to the posters slapped on the blue plywood surrounding the site, it was to be leveled to make way for some kind of missile-shaped tower that would include its own gym, Olympic-size pool, movie theater, convenience store, and chain drugstore. You would never have to step outside, or hardly ever. From the boarded-up windows, chunks of brick missing from its facade, and deeply eroded foundation, the present structure, listing and creaking, appeared to be in such bad shape that I wondered how Alan had gotten permission for us to enter it, or perhaps he hadn’t. The site of the future Van Hayden or Valhalla Towers, he insisted, offered great treasures. We ducked under the scaffolding surrounding the old hotel and met at the main entrance. The loan officer clipped the padlocked chain that held two heavy coffered front doors together.

“This way, folks,” he said, as he held the door open.

Rain poured through the spaces where roofs and ceilings used to be, and we went off in different directions to find what we could. Ocampo’s practice was to take the elevator to the top floor and work his way down. I had no intention of accompanying him on his route. I only joined up with him in small buildings where you could walk up the stairs, and this was not one of those. The entomologist and the professional gardener went off together in search of rare species, beginning with the marble sinks, old barbering tools, and autographed pictures of Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett they expected to find in the defunct barber’s. Alan and Sol the optician paired and, debating the merits of copper versus brass pipe, said they were going into the basement to see if they could find ladders capable of reaching the ballroom’s chandeliers. I was left to wander around by myself. Opening a door behind a bank of elevators I climbed back stairs to the third floor.

The hall would be lit as long as it was daytime, though because of the storm the corridor was fairly dim. I could still make out gold-flocked wallpaper, buckled from water damage, while ocher carpeting patterned with maps of mold stifled the sound of my boots. Some doors were locked, others were open. Under each door a glossy prospectus from Valhalla Towers had been slipped, just in case any current residents wanted to buy into the complex, provided they could trundle up to the developers’ Midtown offices with wheelbarrows full of cash.

In the first room a cut-glass decanter and used glasses remained set up on a tray, residue of an amber liquid dried in crescents on their bottoms. The floor was littered with old programs from plays and concerts. Drugstore plastic bags clustered in corners as if having private conferences. Apparently the same kind of garbage turns up from Spitsbergen to Siberia, demonstrating the kinship of global detritus, even here in this abandoned building. Someone had drawn a winking smiley face on a dust-coated window. Apart from the bottle and glasses, the room contained only the usual hotel-room signposts from souvenir ashtrays to the stripped bed with stained mattress. Further doors led to more bare rooms. Some of the suites were apartments, however, where people had lived for varying lengths of time before they were forced out. I didn’t see anything architecturally special, though one suite of rooms looked as if the last tenants had left suddenly in the wake of a disaster or emergency. The alarm was sounded, and they’d just run out the door. Remains of a half-eaten breakfast lay on a table covered with dust, finally abandoned even by mice and bugs. In a closet I found an assortment of costumes: a gorilla suit complete with head, two halves of a horse costume (front and back), a devil suit, a long silver sequined dress with train and headdress. When I picked up the gorilla head, moths flew out. There was nothing worth taking here. Even the costumes, some in dry-cleaner bags, were well-worn. Whether they’d seen great parties in the ballroom below or had memories of walking blocks in the cold with no money for cab or subway, they weren’t saying. I set down my helmet, put on the gorilla head, and continued to look around. As a gorilla, I lost all inhibition, as if drunk. I hummed “East of the Sun (and West of the Moon)” and thought about how I would scare the pants off Ocampo, maybe even the entomologist too.

After further fruitless exploration I was near the end of the hall and had found no evidence of why Alan had thought the Van Hayden site would be a gold mine. Perhaps the fourth floor would yield Russian constructivist spandrels and Gaudian joists. As Ocampo preferred to operate from the top down, and I worked up from near the bottom, we often met somewhere in the middle, and then we would excavate, and prize out finds together. I liked listening to him talk about how he’d wanted to go to medical school, how his boss who was incompetent had a thing for “lady stiffs,” how he didn’t get along with the medical examiner, and what the fuck was up with the bug guy and trippy vegetation queen? “They’re probably doing it on some stinky bed while we speak, talking about spiders and photosynthesis, and whatnot.” Sometimes I remembered his stories and would laugh while staring into space on a crowded train.

“So one day we get a pair of arms, hands attached, so you think, OK, we got a nice set of prints here we can identify the guy, except it’s a woman’s arms and hands. The nails were perfect: those artificial glue-on nails like an inch long. Each one had a decal on it of a palm tree and a sunset. With each nail the sun set a little more, but never all the way off a finger so you could say the sun never set on this lady’s hands. My boss goes on and on about her nails, how they were one of a kind and could be traced. Well, maybe, but what about the damn prints? Needless to say we never ID’d her.”

After our salvage missions Alejandro would go out clubbing until early Sunday morning. I went with him once to a place not far from the group’s warehouse. Ocampo told me you should always know where the exits are, a piece of advice he gave me as if I would need it on a regular basis. Fire, he said, can do some nasty things. And if there is a fire here, never jump in the canal. It’s full of live gonorrhea strains. Why get it that way? He winked.

I opened the door to the last room. This one resembled an archive with old newspapers and magazines stacked from floor to ceiling. A firetrap within a firetrap, it was laid out as a series of rooms off a short hallway. The kitchen and bedrooms looked barely used because of the towers of paper. I took a brittle, yellowed newspaper from the top of one pile; the headline screamed about the Bay of Pigs, April 17, 1961. The paper underneath was from January 28, 1986, the day the Challenger spacecraft exploded. Next came October 31, 1938, Radio Listeners in Panic, Taking War Drama as Fact, referring to the broadcast about a Martian landing in Grovers Mill, New Jersey. The papers didn’t appear to be in any particular order, chronological or otherwise. The funny papers were archived in the bathroom. Aleta lured Prince Valiant. Modesty Blaise put her fighting know-how and expertise on the subject of the London underworld at the service of some MI5-like entity as far as I could tell. Squash-faced social-climbing Maggie chased Jiggs with a rolling pin. At the end of the hall was a small living room. There, sitting in a swivel chair facing bay windows, was a man wearing a suit and top hat.

“Sir?”

No answer.

“Sir?”

I walked over and touched the man’s shoulder. The chair spun around. It was just like the scene in Psycho, except that a monocle was still wedged in the corpse’s eye. He was new dead but past the bad-smell stage. Under one of his hands was the prospectus, turned to a shiny photograph of a couple looking out at the skyline, drinks in hand. On the other side of the fold was a woman in a Jacuzzi. Perhaps the corpse had been studying it, considering making a bid on a condo. I didn’t scream but ran to the elevator bank, yelled for Alejandro, who was able to hear me, and began the descent in the lift. Yellow light appeared under the transom as the car made it to the third floor. The doors made cranky sounds, resisted opening, but finally Ocampo stepped out.

“What the f?”

I removed the gorilla head and tucked it under my arm. Ocampo followed me into the room, snapping on plastic gloves as we entered. We always brought pairs of these, though rarely used them.

The man was still sitting in the swivel chair.

“Who’ve we got here, Mr. Peanut?” Alejandro looked at the body like a pro, I could tell.

“It was bound to happen sooner or later in this business,” he said. “You can’t break into city buildings on a regular basis and not expect to find a stiff or two. I’m surprised it’s taken this long.”

We assessed the man’s clothing. He was wearing a charcoal-gray suit and black vest shot through with purple silk. A monogrammed handkerchief and a tightly whorled rose wilted in a buttonhole.

“I’m not sure how that monocle has stayed in place so long,” Ocampo said. “The guy’s been dead several months, at least, and has no motor control to speak of.”

“Glue?” I suggested.

“I’ve seen it.”

In the course of his work Alejandro had seen everything. He removed the man’s gold cuff links set with opals. “You don’t want these,” he said as he pocketed them. “You have to be careful with opals. They bring bad luck.”

One by one or in pairs, the others arrived in the suite.

Sol and Alan had tried to remove two chandeliers, but many prisms had fallen off in the process, so they only gathered these up and abandoned the main lighting fixtures as unsalvageable. Sol had put the loose prisms in a bag; they sounded like straitjacketed wind chimes as he walked, so he put them on top of a radiator while he examined the man in the chair.

Next, the entomologist and the gardener floated into the room. They were still looking through the rosy lenses of their fresh relationship. Everything appeared beautiful to them. The gardener plunged her hand into the bag of prisms, held one up to the light, then handed it to me before taking another one for herself. She didn’t even notice the body sitting in the swivel chair. Even if, like a fly, the entomologist had thousands of eyes, he only had eyes for her. The gardener promised him an Eden of earthly delights. He pulled her to him, and they leaned into a tower of newspapers, which promptly shifted and collapsed. This seemed to wake the entomologist from his reverie.

“Is your cell phone getting a signal?” the bug man asked. “We should call the police. He had finally noticed that the room had an occupant who was not part of the original Weekend Salvage Unit.

“Wait a minute,” Alan said. “I’m not so sure that’s a good idea.”

“What are you talking about, man?” Ocampo feigned a shocked look. In reality he probably didn’t care one way or another about Mr. Peanut, but he knew we needed to report the body. “The weekend shift coroner is going to have a busier than average Saturday night.” Alejandro was looking forward to seeing the expressions on their faces when the man in the top hat was wheeled into the morgue, or so he said.

“Well, you know we’re not really here legally.” Alan, the excontractor, stroked his beard, and I believe he was completely serious.

“We need to report this body.”

“The Van Hayden isn’t very sound, structurally speaking,” Alan said matter-of-factly as if we all knew this, since risks were part of our weekend thrills, it was a given, no one should make a fuss. He tossed a prism up in the air; a ray of light hit the spinning glass before he caught it while waiting for someone to say something.

“What other kind of speaking is there?” Ocampo asked. “I mean when you’re talking about buildings?”

“You know, but we really shouldn’t be here. What’s left of the roof’s not going to fall in, but worse, technically, we’re trespassing, and the police, once they’re called in, could arrest us for that alone. You, Ocampo, are a state employee. You could lose your job.”

“We can’t just leave the body here,” Ocampo said.

Alan was afraid Ocampo would rat on him. Some of the scavenging expeditions had been legit, with permits and passes signed by whomever, but others certainly were not. If Ocampo decided to turn him in, there wasn’t much he could do about it. Serving time just for salvaging a gargoyle here, a statue of Mercury there, all because of a body found by accident would be a kind of terrible revenge, a final insult on the part of the profession that had ousted him. He had been in jail, and he didn’t want to go back.

The corpse’s face had a chiseled, starved look. Apart from his clothing, his face reminded me of the deflated Goering in the box at Nuremberg. Perhaps he was a fugitive from Serbia or Argentina, I volunteered.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Alan said.

The optician handed me another prism from the ballroom’s chandelier, a booby prize for invoking Alan’s disdain, the bitter aftertaste of Sol’s weekends.

“We have to do something about this poor guy.” The gardener spoke in a little-girl voice, momentarily distracted from the entomologist, who had clearly come to believe every small thing she did or said was spellbinding. Attracting his attention had taken her a while, but keeping him magnetized was easier than she had imagined. She wanted him to think of her as a selfless, caring kind of person. Her voice reminded the entomologist of Marilyn Monroe’s voice, which was exactly what she had intended. He’d seen Some Like It Hot for a college film class and remembered Marilyn Monroe waving gloved fingers one at a time at the camera. He didn’t want to risk getting arrested over a dead man either. He wondered if the gardener had a green card and, if not, would she marry him to get one, then ditch him as soon as the ink was dry. Was that her plan from the beginning? He didn’t really suspect her of ulterior motives, but it was a thought that crept up on him.

“What are we talking about here?” Alan sputtered. “He’s nobody. Who cares? He’s only dead and getting deader.”

“No one else is going to find him. In a few weeks the building will be torn down, and this fellow will be buried under piles of rubble. No one will ever know.” Sol was trying to bolster Alan’s position, but the ex-contractor’s face turned into a wad of mashed wood putty.

“Shut up, Sol.”

“You’ve buried bodies before,” Ocampo began, referring to the watered-down concrete.

“If you want to get arrested, then by all means, call whoever it is you want to call.” Alan stormed out, followed meekly by Sol.

The bug man’s fingers traced petioles of ivy circling the gardener’s neck while she said in her high voice, “Maybe he’s happy where he is, where he’s lived his life out. Let him be.” She had changed her tune, but no one particularly noticed.

“I don’t think Alan’s right about getting arrested,” I said. “I don’t think the city would bother.” But in pairs everyone left the room until only Ocampo and I remained.

“Sorry, son,” Alejandro said to Mr. Peanut. “Maybe you deserve a decent burial, maybe here where you sit is just fine. Maybe someone’s desperate for news of you. Maybe nobody gives a shit and hasn’t for a long time.” He shrugged. “My nephew was in the police academy. One night his buddies persuaded him to go to an after-hours club and guess what?”

Mr. Peanut, the body in #17, had no idea.

“It got raided on just that night when he decided he would step out. No more police academy for him. Once you’re out, you’re out. That’s what happens when you work for the city.”

We left the Van Hayden quickly in order to catch up with the others. Our salvage unit drove back to the warehouse in silence. Alan didn’t offer to stop for food, and once he parked he didn’t even propose that final customary act of kindness, dropping people off at their subway stops. It was night and the blocks around the warehouses were deserted. In our director’s silence I feared lay the termination of our unit. The optician counted his goggles and mentioned buying special respirator masks with filters for environments with high levels of particulate matter if everyone would chip in to cover costs. We said our good byes, Alan promised he would find a better site next time, and everyone melted into the air.

When the hotel on Van Hayden Street was torn down, there was nothing in the paper about it at all. You’d think if they’d found a body it would have been in the news, so it’s probably safe to assume when the walls came crashing down everything was carted away unexamined. I even walked by the site from time to time, but no, nothing. The body was never found or identified. It could happen to anyone, I suppose, getting swept away with no identity to speak of, no one to claim you or remember who you were. It was as if the man had never existed. The Weekend Salvage Unit didn’t meet much during the winter. The optician joked that all worthwhile buildings had been torn down, there was nothing left to salvage, and then the group seemed to peter out.

A postcard arrived from Ellesmere Island. Cores had been drilled and sent back. Had he made it to the North Pole? No, but he was not far from it. There is no pure north, he had decided. No pure sublime moment. Eventually you get grabbed by the lapels and slammed against a wall whether the wall is made of brick or compacted snow. There were stories of people who became lost, snow-blind, delirious, took off all their clothes and ran naked into the tundra night abandoning huskies, anorak, freeze-dried camping food. In a place where your spit freezes into an amoeboid glob way before it hits the ground, the fragile don’t last long. He stayed indoors.

The following winter I saw Alan working as a volunteer guide at the seaport dressed as an old salt. He was giving a speech about the real pirates of the Caribbean and looked at me sharply, as if to say, This is no time for a reunion, I’m working. Another time I saw the loan officer behind the plate-glass window of a bank explaining what appeared to be unpleasant business to a couple in down jackets. He patted one stack of papers, then another, indicating, because of this circumstance, we have this situation. The man looked angry, and the woman actually stared in my direction uncomfortably, so I quickly moved on. Sol’s office was part of a medical pavilion that was not easy to get into unless you had an appointment. Security guards stopped you at the desk. The entomologist wrote to tell me the gardener had left him to do a course on Mexican botanicals, which, he could see now, had more to do with plant products than botany. I meant to write back to him, but never did.

Once I saw Ocampo in the subway on the other side of the platform, but he didn’t see me. I was in a hurry to catch my train, so didn’t run upstairs across the mezzanine, then downstairs to the uptown side, and later felt bad about it. The following week I waited on the same platform at the same time, hoping to see him again. I did this as often as my job would allow, which wasn’t much, but I tried.

One last postcard arrived, this time from the Arctic, or so I thought. It was of a cartoon polar bear holding a martini. The bear looked happy. Then it occurred to me, Where do you mail a postcard when the nearest mailbox is a thousand miles away? I looked at it under a magnifying glass. Though the postmark was smeared, if you looked closely, the letters around the circular stamp read: Lake Placid. Cold in the winter, but not the site of glaciers and permafrost.

Nobody wants to end up like Mr. Peanut, doomed to be a collection of microbes in some future ice core, but it’s more easily accomplished than you might think. I had one of the prisms in my jacket pocket and rubbed it like a rabbit’s foot or some other talisman that could retrieve the cracked from the brink, revive the tired, and in very extenuating circumstances (or so I liked to believe as the ghosts of the Van Hayden flew over the city), possibly even nudge the delirious back to earth.