The Luster of Lost Things by Sophie Chen Keller

Author:Sophie Chen Keller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-08-08T04:00:00+00:00

15

Gradually, I slow to a jog and then a walk, and the lightbulbs in the tunnel grow fewer and farther between, and I pass under eye-watering patches of light and I pass through stretches of darkness and I pass by more rooms but I don’t bother to search them anymore now that I know the Junker is at the end of the tunnel.

I walk, placing one foot in front of the other, and I walk in a straight line and the line I walk is so straight that my senses warp.

I have walked to the ends of the earth.

I have gone nowhere at all.

Time melts into a seamless loop, a figure eight. The tunnel stretches before me, unbroken, the stone impenetrable, and my knees ache and I don’t know where I am or where I am going or how long it will take to get there, and that confirms my inkling that I might be lost.

The notion that a person could lose a piece of himself without realizing it had seemed fantastic and abstract when I was sitting beside Nico. Wouldn’t you feel it the moment after you took a wrong turn—the chill down your spine, the urgency of being lost, the danger?

But maybe it is something like this, where the journey to being lost goes on for ages and there isn’t much to alert you of treacherous territory, just miles to go in an endless tunnel of banality. Still, I put one foot in front of the other, because I have started, and so I must finish.

The tunnel goes on, and has it been five minutes or an hour? The tour group will board the train again at the end of the hour but it does not matter if they leave without me; I am not leaving until I find the Book.

My feet start to throb, and then I hardly notice them moving anymore and I have to train my gaze on them to make sure they are working. The next time I look up, I see the chain links of a fence growing out of the tunnel walls in front of me, and beyond the fence is a swing set in shades of black and white and gray, and farther down the tunnel is a hopscotch grid inhabited by painted kangaroos.

I know this place, those cartoon kangaroos: it is the playground of my elementary school. I consider the fence and step through it. The swings are deserted except for a little boy rocking absently with one toe and tracing melancholic patterns on the ground with the other, and I hear a metal squeak and remember how rusty the swing set was and how the squeaking grew louder when the air turned humid before rain.

The little boy regards my approach with eyes round as dinner plates and the ends of his scarf bump lightly against his chest as he rocks. The sweater he is wearing is a medium gray but I know by the three fish on the front and the starfish on the elbow what time and scene we are in.

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