from symbols in the everyday world around him. I too believed that messages were waiting for me somewhere. I simply had to find them.
After Oberlin expelled me in the fall of 2004, I went to live with my mother and stepfather in New Mexico. We agreed that I needed to sober up and get healthier—I’d pretty much stopped eating or otherwise caring for myself at school—before I tried to find a job or, my mother emphasized hopefully, reapply to college. I was all for getting sober and healthy; drugs had taken me as far as they were going to, and my brain felt exhausted and bruised.
In the beginning, my mother tried to get me to talk to her. We would go to brunch or a museum while my stepfather was busy with work, and she suggested on several occasions that I attend counseling. Mostly, though, I just spent time alone, walking through the arroyos. It rained every afternoon for the first month that I was there. In the evenings, the sun set over the mountains, painting an image of fire on the sky. Late at night, the coyotes howled like demons. I slept facing east so the sun would wake me.
Then, after two months in New Mexico, I received two signs. The first was a postcard from my father. Alojzy had not sent a postcard, or communicated with me in any manner, for several years. This postcard had been mailed three weeks earlier but had only just been forwarded from our old address on Long Island.
The postcard depicted a pinup-style tattooed mermaid with the words “CONEY ISLAND” in big block letters. On the back Alojzy had sketched a cargo ship, a heavy freighter set against a New York City skyline. Each cargo container, smokestack, and antenna was detailed, though it wasn’t clear what flag the ship sailed under. The rough waters carried down to the bottom of the card, and the ship’s wake bled off the left edge. Skyscrapers twisted together in the background, forming a latticework. Other than my name and old address, and Alojzy’s signature—which stretched across the starboard side of the ship, where the ship’s name would be—there were no words. A Brooklyn, NY, postmark was printed by the American flag stamp.
Two days after I received Alojzy’s postcard, the second sign, a notecard from a Semyon Goldov of Brooklyn, arrived. It was addressed to my mother and folded into a small envelope:
Dear Mrs. Ruth Edel—
I am writing you to sadly inform you that Alojzy Edel is missing, and can only be presumed dead.
I have known the Alojzy for many years, and this is a great tragedy.
I thought you may want to know of this occurrence, both for the sake of sentimentality as you were once his wife, and also for the fact that there may be issues of estate or outstanding debts or accounts which you feel obligated to settle.
Do not hesitate to write to me if you have questions on these issues.
Yours and truly,
Mr. Semyon Goldov
The arrival of the two cards in the same week couldn’t just be some sad coincidence. There was more to the messages than what I could see on the paper. Was Alojzy telling me that no matter what I heard, he was still alive? Was he saying good-bye? Was he calling for me? One way or another, I was being summoned to Brooklyn, my path lit by two signs. I called my sister, Becca, in Manhattan to ask if I could stay with her, and bought a one-way plane ticket to New York City.
Two weeks later, I found myself back in Alojzy’s world. The Q train stalled at the Brighton Beach station, and rather than wait—I had waited long enough—I got off and walked through my father’s old stomping grounds.
I stepped down the station’s green metal staircase and onto the Brooklyn pavement, where people with angry and haunted faces pushed through me like I was invisible, a ghost. The majority of the people on the sidewalk were fifty or older, and many leaned on canes or folding shopping carts. Some people closer to my age filtered through the throng as well.
Brighton Beach Avenue was disorienting, blocked off from the sun by the elevated train tracks. Businesses refused to be contained by their doors, and merchandise tables, carts, and crates tumbled out onto the sidewalk. Cars and motorcycles wove past each other in the street, occasionally clipping one another, or popping up onto the curb. Though I could read a bit of Russian, it had been a long time since I’d seen so many non-English signs, and I was struck by the sight. Many of the signs were just English words like “food stamps” written in Cyrillic letters. The mixed languages confused my mind.
I didn’t remember how the street numbering worked—Brighton Beach has a completely separate grid from Coney Island, where I was headed—but the area is not that large, and I soon found my way to the boardwalk. The ocean on my left, I headed west past the aquarium and along into Coney Island, all the way up to the old fishing pier. No one was crabbing off the pier. But it was late in the day, and early in the year.
I turned off the boardwalk at West Eighteenth Street and continued north through the more desolate streets of Coney Island, where everything was covered in a layer of sand and grime. Everyone’s heard of the boardwalk side—Nathan’s, the Cyclone, the Parachute Jump—but the neighborhood side is more neglected, unseen except by the immigrants and other poor families in public housing, the desperate souls praying at the storefront churches, and the police officers who patrol the area. Most things in the world are like that: they have a visible side and an invisible side.
A public home for seniors occupied the block closest to the water. Old people, abandoned by their families and forced down to the very edge of the city, milled outside with their walkers. Across the street from the senior home was a somewhat neglected community garden. The tips of green stalks were just beginning to emerge from beds bounded with salvaged two-by-fours or truck tires. A rooster emerged from a doghouse. He puffed up his chest and paraded back and forth on top of his black-feathered boots.
On the next block, I passed a boarded-up bait and tackle shop where my dad used to buy his crab traps and line. The store had been destroyed in a fire, and the bricks were blackened, the giant striped bass on the store’s sign now barely perceptible on the warped metal. I wondered what had happened to the older Chinese couple who had owned the store.
Farther up the street, heroin and crack addicts loitered outside a padlocked Christian mission whose walls were painted with anchors and crosses. They were the undead, their bodies wasted away to skeletons. On the corner of Surf and West Eighteenth Street, a group of teenage boys stood outside a deli. Like many of the businesses on Surf, the deli announced its name and offerings in Spanish on a hand-painted sign decorated with palm trees.
“You looking for something?” one of the teenagers, a tall, skinny kid wearing a basketball jersey, asked me. I shook my head. I was looking for something down here, but it wasn’t dope.
2871 West Eighteenth Street was in the middle of the block. I double-checked the return address on the envelope in my pocket, but there was really no need; I’d read Semyon Goldov’s notecard so many times that I knew the entire thing by heart, including the address.
The building had clearly been a tenement house once, but the windows were now bricked over, and the whole structure painted black. Above the door was bolted a hand-lettered sign that read, “The R. Galuth Museum.” I’d pictured the encounter many times over the past few weeks, and expected that the building would be a residence of some sort, or maybe a shoe repair shop with pocketknives and refurbished radios in the window. Certainly not a museum.
I climbed the two cement steps, took a deep breath, and rang the doorbell. No response. I rang
