Sometime in late winter of 1978, a woman walks across the Williamsburg Bridge. She has dimples on her cheeks and carries with her a suitcase full of other peoples’ things, and she disappears into the city to return them. No one knows what they are missing, but they will soon.
Three years later, a construction worker leaves a bar looking out over the Hudson River, the same bar that woman stopped in on exactly a year ago to tuck a note surreptitiously into the seam of a seat in one of the booths. He leaves that bar with something in his mouth; not a prayer, but something close, like his tongue is compelled to speak the words of a god and his lips haven’t caught up to the revelation.
A hundred years before that man leaves the bar, another man in a beautifully tailored suit brings his hand abruptly to his mouth and in doing so, he brushes against a bottle of wine. It wobbles and then falls, breaking with a crash to mimic the thunder outside. It spills over the tiles of his kitchen floor and fills with a reflection of his horror. He records this night in a small journal he can’t remember purchasing, with a dip pen a stranger pressed into his hand in the street. He becomes frenzied, pulling things from shelves in the kitchen and trying to understand, just trying to understand. It was not supposed to be here, and it wasn’t, but it always had been.
In the early spring of 1999, a building on the park is condemned. When the demolition team breaks earth under the foundation they find a series of roots as though the building itself was trying to suck the nutrients from beneath the concrete, like it was trying to grow. At the center of the largest ball of roots, a heart, almost human and beating, when they cut it out it slowly ceases function and the coroner pronounces the building deceased. There is a man in the crowd of stunned spectators who expected this, he was waiting for this.
When the century rolls over, a sleeping giant slowly turning in its sleep, there is a woman with long brown hair who steps into an office for the first time and is, effectively, invisible. At first this is disheartening, but she soon learns that if her coworkers don’t see her, then she can do as she likes. She begins looking through files kept at the office, files no one has looked at for fifty years, and amongst the papers and legal jargon in one, she finds a single photo which, like a stone falling on a glass table, collapses her ideas of reality; she sees a face, her own face.
In 1947, a war veteran settles into a small, pastel house in suburbia with his dog. This is a new house, the first time anyone has lived inside it’s walls. It takes months before his leg gives him a day of little enough pain to ascend the ladder into his attic, and what he finds there is confusing, a heart dripping pastel pitch hangs suspended from the ceiling, waiting for something, beating. He reaches out a hand to touch it, and he forgets. It’s a pleasant feeling. He’s been wanting to forget.
Six months later there is a knock on his door and he remembers everything, looking at the woman on his doorstep, he remembers everything, and from the horror on her face he was supposed to wait until she was done knocking and long gone, but he catches her before she slides the note she carries into the crack between the door and the doorframe, and when he asks her, incessantly, urgently, for answers, she has none, she looks lost. Her dimples disappear when she frowns.
Midsummer 1983, something comes to the East River, impermeable and nebulous it snakes across the surface of the water. It wants, and wants and wants, it begins to devour the shore, slowly, an inch in a year, and in 1990 it disappears back into the ocean like it came, quickly and quietly, but not before a young girl sits at the shore and watches it, every day after school. She watches it, and sometimes it watches her back. The day before it leaves, she reaches a hand out to touch it. It flinches away from her, but lets her do it. She forgets, but it dissappears.
She sits in an office, remembering, for a long, long moment, struck by the realization of what she must do, struck by the realization of what she has always done. She gets up, she leaves the office, goes home to pack her suitcase and she slowly makes her way to the Williamsburg Bridge. She climbs down the treacherous slope at one edge, and she disappears into the water, nebulous and then gone.
Six days later, a woman walks across the Williamsburg Bridge. She has bare feet, and dimples on her cheeks, and a suitcase full of other peoples’ things. They do not remember that these things are theirs, but she does. She remembers, and she knows her duty.
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