M Train

  Wind-Up Bird was on the bed next to me but I didn’t open it. Instead I thought about the photographs I was going to take in Coyoacán. I fell asleep and was dreaming I had perfect coordination and swift reflexes. Suddenly I awoke unable to move. My bowels exploding, vomit shooting across my bedding, coupled with a crippling migraine. Incapable of rising I just lay there. Instinctively I felt for my glasses. They were blessedly unscathed.

  In the first light I was able to grip the telephone and tell the front desk I was very sick and needed help. A maid came into my room and called down for medicine. She helped me undress and wash, scrubbing my bathroom, changing my sheets. My gratitude to this woman was overflowing. She sang as she rinsed out my soiled clothes, hanging them over the window ledge. My head was still pounding. I held on to her hand. As her smiling face hovered over mine I was pulled into a deep sleep.

  I opened my eyes and imagined I saw the maid sitting in a chair by the bed, in a fit of hysterical laughter. She was waving several pages of the manuscript I had slipped under my pillow. I was immediately put off. Not only was she reading my pages, but also they were written in Spanish, seemingly in my own hand, yet incomprehensible to me. I thought about what I had written and could not imagine what had propelled her uproarious state.

  —What’s so damn funny? I demanded, though I felt a mounting desire to join in, as her laugh was so appealing.

  —It’s a poem, she answered, a poem completely devoid of poetry.

  I was taken aback. Was that a good thing or not? She let my pages slide to the floor. I got up and followed her to the window. She pulled on a slim rope tied to a net sack that contained a struggling pigeon.

  —Dinner! she cried triumphantly, throwing it over her shoulder.

  As she walked toward the door she seemed to grow smaller and smaller, stepping from her dress, no more than a child. I ran to the window and watched her race across Veracruz Avenue. I stood there transfixed. The air was perfect, like milk from the breast of the great mother. Milk that could be suckled by all her children—the babes of Juárez, Harlem, Belfast, Bangladesh. I could still hear the maid laughing, bubbly little sounds that materialized as transparent wisps, like wishes from another world.

  In the morning I assessed how I felt. The worst seemed over, but I felt weak and dehydrated and the headache had migrated to the base of my skull. As my car arrived to take me to Casa Azul I hoped that it would stay at bay so I could perform my tasks. When the director welcomed me I thought of my young self, standing before the blue door that did not open.

  Although Casa Azul is now a museum it maintains the living atmosphere of the two great artists. In the workroom everything was made ready for me. Frida Kahlo’s dresses and leather corsets were laid out on white tissue. Her medicine bottles on a table, her crutches against the wall. I suddenly felt unsteady and nauseous, but I was able to take a few photographs. I shot quickly in the low light, slipping the unpeeled Polaroids into my pocket.

  I was led to Frida’s bedroom. Above her pillow were mounted butterflies so she could look at them as she lay in bed. They were a gift from the sculptor Isamu Noguchi so that she could have something beautiful to view after she lost her leg. I took a photograph of the bed where she had suffered much.

  I could no longer hide how sick I felt. The director gave me a glass of water. I sat in the garden with my head in my hands. I felt faint. After conferring with her colleagues she insisted that I rest in Diego’s bedroom. I wanted to protest, but I was unable to speak. It was a modest wooden bed with a white coverlet. I set my camera and the small stack of images onto the floor. Two women tacked a long muslin cloth over the entrance to his room. I leaned over and unpeeled the pictures but could not look at them. I lay thinking of Frida. I could feel her proximity, sense her resilient suffering coupled with her revolutionary enthusiasm. She and Diego were my secret guides at sixteen. I braided my hair like Frida, wore a straw hat like Diego, and now I had touched her dresses and was lying in Diego’s bed. One of the women came in and covered me with a shawl. The room was naturally dark, and thankfully I went to sleep.

  The director woke me gently with a concerned expression.

  —The people will be arriving soon.

  —Don’t worry, I said, I am fine now. But I will need a chair.

  I got up and put on my boots and gathered my pictures: the outline of Frida’s crutches, her bed, and the ghost of a stairwell. The atmosphere of sickness glowed within them. That evening I sat before nearly two hundred guests in the garden. I scarcely could say what I talked about, but in the end I sang to them, as I had sung to the birds on my windowsill. It was a song that came to me while I lay in Diego’s bed. It was about the butterflies that Noguchi had given to Frida. I saw tears streaming down the faces of the director and the women who had administered to me with such tender care. Faces I no longer remember.

  Late that night there was a party in the park across from my hotel. My headache was completely gone. I packed, then looked out the window. The trees were strung with tiny Christmas lights though it was only the seventh of May. I went down to the bar and had a shot of a very young tequila. The bar was empty, as nearly everyone was in the park. I sat for a long time. The bartender refilled my glass. The tequila was light, like flower juice. I closed my eyes and saw a green train with an M in a circle; a faded green like the back of a praying mantis.

  Credit 8.2

  Frida Kahlo’s crutches, Casa Azul

  Credit 8.3

  Dress, Casa Azul

  Credit 9.1

  How I Lost the Wind-Up Bird

  I GOT A MESSAGE from Zak. His beach café was open. All the free coffee I wanted. I was happy for him but hesitated to go anywhere, as it was Memorial Day weekend. The city was deserted, just the way I like it, and there was a new episode of The Killing on Sunday. I decided to visit Zak’s café on Monday and spend the weekend in the city with Detectives Linden and Holder. My room was in a state of complete disarray and I was more unkempt than usual, ready to be comrade to their mute misery, swilling cold coffee in a battered car during a bleak stakeout coming out equally cold. I filled my thermos at the Korean deli, deposited it next to my bed for later, chose a book, and walked over to Bedford Street.

  Café ’Ino was empty, so I happily sat and read The Confusions of Young Törless, a novel by Robert Musil. I reflected on the opening line: It was a small station on the long railroad to Russia, fascinated by the power of an ordinary sentence that leads the reader unwittingly through interminable fields of wheat opening onto a path leading to the lair of a sadistic predator contemplating the murder of an unblemished boy.

  I read through the afternoon, on the whole doing nothing. The cook was roasting garlic and singing a song in Spanish.

  —What is the song about? I asked.

  —Death, he answered with a laugh. But don’t worry, nobody dies, it is the death of love.

  —

  On Memorial Day I woke early, straightened my room, and filled a sack with what I needed—dark glasses, alkaline water, a bran muffin, and my Wind-Up Bird. At the West Fourth Street Station I got the A train to Broad Channel and made my connection; it took fifty-five minutes. Zak’s was the only café in the lone concession area on the long stretch of boardwalk along Rockaway Beach. Zak was glad to see me and introduced me to everyone. Then as promised he served me coffee free of charge. I stood drinking it, black, watching the people. There was a happy, relaxed atmosphere with an amiable mix of laid-back surfers and working-class families. I was surprised to see my friend Klaus coming toward me on a bicycle. He was wearing a shirt and tie.

  —I was in Berlin visiting my father, he said. I just came from the airport.

  —Yeah, JFK is very close, I laughed, watching a low-flying plane coming in for a landing.

  We sat on a bench watching small children negotiate the waves.

  —The main surfer beach is just five blocks down by the jetty.

  —You seem to know this area pretty well.

 
Klaus was suddenly serious.

  —You won’t believe this, but I have just bought an old Victorian house here, by the bay. It has a very big yard and I’m planting a huge garden. Something I never could do in Berlin or Manhattan.

  We walked across the boardwalk and Klaus got coffee.

  —Do you know Zak?

  —Everybody knows everybody, he said. It’s a real community.

  We said our good-byes and I promised to come see his house and garden soon. In truth I was swiftly falling for this area myself, with its endless boardwalk and brick projects overlooking the sea. I removed my boots and walked along the shore. I have always loved the ocean but never learned to swim. Possibly the sole time I was submerged in water was during the involuntary throes of baptism. Nearly a decade later the polio epidemic was in full swing. A sickly child, I wasn’t allowed to go in shallow lakes or pools with other kids as the virus was thought to be waterborne. My one respite was the sea, for I was allowed to walk and frolic by its edge. In time I developed a self-protective fear of the water, which expanded into fear of immersion.

  Fred didn’t swim either. He said that Indians didn’t swim. But he loved boats.

  We spent a lot of time looking at old tugboats, houseboats, and shrimp trawlers. He especially liked old wooden boats, and on one of our excursions in Saginaw, Michigan, we found one for sale: a late-fifties Chris Craft Constellation, not guaranteed to be seaworthy. We bought it quite cheaply, hauled it back home, and parked it in our yard facing the canal that led to Lake Saint Clair. I had no interest in boating but worked side by side with Fred stripping the hull, scouring the cabin, waxing and polishing the wood, and sewing small curtains for the windows. Summer nights with my thermos of black coffee and a six-pack of Budweiser for Fred, we’d sit in the cabin and listen to Tigers games. I knew little about sports but Fred’s devotion to his Detroit team obliged me to know the basic rules, our team members, and our rivals. Fred had been scouted as a young man for a shortstop position on the Tigers farm team. He had a great arm but chose to use it as a guitarist, yet his love of the sport never diminished.

  It turned out that our wooden boat had a broken axle, and we didn’t have the resources to have it repaired. We were advised to scrap it but we didn’t. To the amusement of our neighbors we decided to keep her right where she was, in the better part of our yard. We deliberated on her name and finally chose Nawader, an Arabic word for rare thing, taken from a passage in Gérard de Nerval’s Women of Cairo. In the winter we covered her with a heavy tarp and when baseball season opened again we removed it and listened to Tigers games on a shortwave radio. If the game was delayed we would sit and listen to cassettes on a boom box. Nothing with words, usually something of Coltrane’s, like Olé or Live at Birdland. On the rare occasion of a rainout we would switch over to Beethoven, whom Fred particularly admired. First a piano sonata, and then with the rain steadily falling, we’d listen to Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, following the great composer on an epic walk into the countryside listening to the songs of the birds in the Vienna Woods.

  Credit 9.2

  Toward the end of the baseball season Fred surprised me with the official orange-and-blue Detroit Tigers jacket. It was early fall, a bit chilly. Fred fell asleep on the couch and I slipped on the jacket and went out into the yard. I picked up a pear that had fallen from our tree, wiped it off on my sleeve, and sat on a wooden lawn chair in the moonlight. Zipping up my new jacket, I felt the satisfaction of a young athlete receiving his varsity letter. Taking a bite of the pear I imagined being a young pitcher, coming out of nowhere, delivering the Chicago Cubs from their long championship drought by winning thirty-two games in a row. One game more than Denny McClain.

  One Indian-summer afternoon the sky turned a distinct chartreuse. I opened our balcony window to get a closer look; I had never seen such a thing. Suddenly the sky went dark; a massive thunderbolt filled our bedroom with a blinding light. For a moment everything went completely silent, followed by a deafening sound. The lightning had struck our immense weeping willow and it had toppled. It was the oldest willow in Saint Clair Shores and its length stretched from the edge of the canal to clear across the street. As it fell, its massive weight crushed our Nawader. Fred was standing at the screen door and I at the window. We watched it happen at the same moment, electrically bound as one consciousness.

  —

  I picked up my boots and was admiring the stretch of boardwalk, an infinity of teak, when Zak suddenly appeared with a large coffee to go. We stood there looking out at the water. The sun was going down and the sky turned a pale rose.

  —See you soon, I said. Maybe sooner.

  —Yeah, this place gets into your blood.

  I checked out the surfers and walked up and down the streets between the ocean and the elevated train. As I walked back toward the station I was drawn to a small lot surrounded by a high, weatherbeaten stockade fence. It resembled the kind that secured the Alamo-style forts that my brother and I built as kids. The remains of a cyclone fence propped up the wood palings and a hand-drawn For Sale by Owner sign was tied to the fence with white string. The fence was too high to see what lay behind it, so I stood on my toes and stole a glimpse through a broken slat, like peering into the peephole in the wall of a museum to view Étant donnés—Marcel Duchamp’s last stand.

  Credit 9.3

  Willows, Saint Clair Shores

  The lot was about twenty-five feet wide and less than a hundred feet deep, the standard size allotted for workers constructing the amusement park in the early twentieth century. Some built makeshift dwelling places, few surviving. I located another weak spot in the fence and got a closer look. The small yard was overgrown, liberally strewn with rusting debris, stacks of tires, and a fishing boat on a bent-up trailer nearly obscuring the bungalow. On the train I tried to read but couldn’t concentrate, I was so taken by Rockaway Beach and the ramshackle bungalow behind the derelict wooden fence that I could think of nothing else.

  —

  A few days later I was walking aimlessly and found myself in Chinatown. I suppose I had been daydreaming, for I was surprised as I passed a window display of duck carcasses hanging to dry. I badly needed coffee, so I entered a small café and took a seat. Unfortunately the Silver Moon Café was not a café at all, but once entered, it was nearly impossible to leave. The wood tables and floors were wiped down with tea and its mild fragrance hung in the air. There was a clock with the hour hand missing and a faded picture of an astronaut in a baby blue plastic frame. There was no menu except a laminated card showing four dishes of similar-looking steamed buns, each with a small, raised red, blue, or silver square in the center, like stamps of faded sealing wax. As to the filling it seemed to be a crapshoot.

  I was disappointed as I was dying for a cup of coffee, yet I could not get up. The scent of oolong seemed to have the dozy effect of the poppy fields of Oz. An old woman poked me in the shoulder and I blurted: Combo. She mumbled something in Chinese, then left. A small dog sat dutifully beneath a table watching the movements of an elderly man with a yo-yo. He repeatedly tried to lure the dog with his yo-yo skills, but the dog turned his head. I tried not to watch the motion of the yo-yo, up and down and then sideways on the string.

  I must have nodded off, for when I opened my eyes a glass of oolong tea and three buns on a narrow bamboo tray had been set before me. The middle bun had a faded blue stamp. I hadn’t a clue as to what that meant but I decided to save it for last. The ones on either side were savory. But the filling in the middle one was a revelation—an elegantly textured red-bean paste that lingered on my breath. I paid the check and the old woman reversed the Open sign as soon as I closed the door, although there were still customers inside as well as the dog and the yo-yo. I had the distinct impression that if I doubled back there would be no trace of the Silver Moon.

  Still in need of coffee I stopped at the Atlas Café then walked over to Canal Street to get the subway. I bought a MetroCard from a machine, knowing I wou
ld eventually lose it. I much prefer tokens, but those days are gone. I waited for about ten minutes, then boarded the express train to the Rockaways, feeling oddly exhilarated. My brain was fast-forwarding at a speed that could not be translated into mere language. The train was pretty empty, which was good, since I spent much of the ride interrogating myself. By the time it reached Broad Channel, just two stops from Rockaway Beach, I knew what I was going to do.

  —

  I stood in front of the fence on tiptoe and peered through the broken slat. All kinds of indistinct memories collided. Vacant lots skinned knees train yards mystical hobos forbidden yet wondrous dwellings of mythical junkyard angels. I had lately been seduced by a piece of abandoned property described in the pages of a book, but this was real. The For Sale by Owner sign seemed to radiate like the electric sign Steppenwolf comes across while on a solitary night walk: Magic Theater. Entrance Not for Everybody. For Madmen Only! Somehow the two signs seemed equivalent. I scribbled the seller’s phone number on a scrap of paper and walked across the road to Zak’s café and got a large black coffee. I sat on a bench on the boardwalk for a long time, looking out at the sea.

  This area had thoroughly bewitched me, casting a spell that originated much further back than I could remember. I thought of the mysterious wind-up bird. Have you led me here? I wondered. Close to the sea, though I cannot swim. Close to the train, as I cannot drive. The boardwalk echoed a youth spent in South Jersey with its boardwalks—Wildwood, Atlantic City, Ocean City—more active perhaps but not as beautiful. It seemed the perfect place, with no billboards and few signs of encroaching commerce. And the hidden bungalow! How quickly it had charmed me. I imagined it transformed. A place to think, make spaghetti, brew coffee, a place to write.