The Deed (34 page)

They bent silently over the translation for a few moments: Amanda trying to prise out its secrets through laser focus, Jason’s loyalty torn between the noble quest and the fair princess, his resolve undermined by the emanating warmth of her, the way the couch beneath him torqued when she shifted her weight, and above all her deliriously wafting woman-scent, woody and flowery and dangerously amplified by the torturous proximity.

“It seems to be buried near a building,” said Amanda, tapping a key phrase on the page. “It’s the land itself, it sleeps outside the gates, it dreams beneath a fire.”

Jason took a hormone-dousing swig of his Coke. “This whole thing sounds too general to be a useful practical guide,” he replied. “I was kind of hoping for a ‘Then take three paces and turn left; now art thou stepping on it,’ kind of thing.”

Amanda shrugged. “It’s an old riddle structure. The conceit is that when you have something you want your listeners to guess, you pretend you
are
that thing, and describe yourself. Everything has a spirit, so you’re speaking in the voice of the thing’s spirit.”

Jason nodded.

“It was big in medieval Europe, too,” she continued with a shrug.

“So who’s the ‘I’ of this poem?” he wondered. “In the beginning, it’s ‘I am the land itself, rolling toward you.’ Then it’s buried, and dreaming, as if it’s the deed itself.”

“Probably both,” said Amanda. “For one thing, we’re reading this in translation, so who knows what’s been lost? But remember, it’s poetry, not prose. Multiple meanings are possible. The god and the land are one; the page and the land are one.”

“Is Manahata this red god?” said Jason. “Does that sound familiar? Is he a bloody god of war, like Mars?”

But Amanda shook her head. “The total opposite. He’s the peace that’s always there in the background, the constant presence that makes war temporary, and thus bearable.”

“Like the last three hundred years?”

“If you like.”

Jason ruminated, drank some more soda. “Maybe he’s the embarrassed god,” he mused. “Or the wheezing, asthmatic god.”

“Yuk, yuk.” She leaned away from him and began animatedly riffling through one of her books, on to something. Jason pursed his lips in competitive chagrin.

Outside, the thunder rumbled loudly and ominously, vibrating the glass of the open porch doors.

“I am a loud and gray and puffy thing,” said Jason grandly. “Shitloads of water dump I on your city.”

Amanda smiled without looking up.

They both remained silent for a few minutes as Jason picked up the translation again and Amanda, apparently not finding what she was looking for, switched books and continued leafing through dog-eared pages.

“It’s hard to see what this
doesn’t
include,” said Jason, reading the translation. “It’s touching the sky; it’s between walls; it’s under a fire…confusing.”

“These things always go heavy on the metaphor,” said Amanda.

“I still think the skyscraper’s our best bet,” he went on. “A red god touching the sky—that’s got to be a tall brick building of some kind. What else is red? ‘I am the land itself rolling toward you,’ ‘my walls enclose the blue sky itself,’ um, where is it…‘I hold the doorway.’”

“I’m trying to find that list of tallest buildings by year. It’s here, somewhere.”

Jason nodded absently, setting down the translation page and running his hands through his hair. “Maybe it’s in a cornerstone,” he suggested, brightening. “You know, like a time capsule—”

“Wait a minute,” said Amanda, flopping over the book she was looking in and setting it facedown on the couch, and snatching the translation out of his hand.

“What?” said Jason, mildly affronted.

She ignored him for a minute, and he watched her pupils flit as her eyes worked the page like a high-speed typewriter. “There’s a
pattern
to this thing. Look,” she said, stealing the pen from his hand with even less ceremony and making four horizontal slashes between lines of text. “Here’s the logical division,” she declared. “Four stanzas.”

He stared at her work for a few minutes, then nodded; the logic was inescapable. “Right. Yeah, that’s definitely right.”

The page now looked like this:

“We’ve been focusing on the translation,” Jason pointed out, “which your mom wrote out for us all at once. But if you look back at the original, you can see the handwriting’s subtly different between stanzas.”

She was bubbling over with excitement. “Haven’t you figured out what this means yet, Jason? It’s been
moved.
”

“What’s been—” he began, then broke off as the truth started to dawn on him.

Amanda was kicking herself, and wouldn’t let it go. As Jason pointed out, and a closer look at the original confirmed, the handwriting, and even the ink color, changed slightly along the fault lines Amanda had drawn. This clue had been there, in a sense, all along. Divided into quatrains, the poem became much more digestible, with a more or less obvious sea change between stanzas.

She was taking the oversight too hard, he thought. They had both blithely assumed the deed had been put in one safe repository for all eternity. But that assumption betrayed a European bias, she now recognized, the notion of founding something in one place and trying to maintain it there forever, like a cathedral or a college. Her people had been nomadic, which was the very point of the deed, of course; it was only natural they’d have moved the deed to keep up with the changing city, so it would remain safe in every era.

His pity was tempered by amusement, but he tried to maintain focus. “So each of these stanzas defines a separate place,” said Jason, trying to coax her out of her funk with the bait at hand. “Maybe that’s another role for the sachem—to figure out where the last generation put it, then hide it all over again for the next generation.”

“Maybe,” she replied.

“On the plus side, it does narrow the search,” he continued. “We only really have to figure out the last stanza. What?” he added when this brought an unexpected twinkle to her eye.

“Typical guy,” she said. “Jump straight to the payoff.”

Jason raised an eyebrow. “Let me get this straight. You want the
fore-play
of solving the nonessential stanzas?”

“Maybe there’s some sort of helpful progression.”

He decided to let it go. “Okay, then, let’s go back to the 1600s. Your people get the deed; they’re trying to keep it someplace secure.”

“Some concrete expression of permanence,” she agreed.

“Well put,” said Jason. “Only there can’t have been many choices in the early days, right?” said Jason. “So they chose a wheel of fire and death.”

“The fort!” she yelped, then blushed. “Of course. Fort Amsterdam was laid out in a rough circle…”

“Man, is this easy,” said Jason. “Fire and death.”

“It’s ‘at the hub,’” said Amanda. “I wonder what was at the exact center of the fort.”

Jason shrugged. “No offense, but who gives a rat’s ass? It’s not there anymore.”

“Spoilsport,” said Amanda. “Okay, you take the second stanza; I’ll take the third.”

“Why don’t we keep doing them together?”

“Because I’ve already got mine,” she said excitedly, jumping up and heading for her bookshelves.

He was amazed. “Bullshit.”

“I’ve had it all along,” she said, quickly seizing a fat encyclopedic tome; she flipped pages furiously, back to the index. “It was my original guess for the whole thing, but it didn’t square with stuff from the other stanzas.”

He reread the stanza she was solving as he waited: the mountains and sky enclosing water, a doorway keeping back the flood. The rain pounded the deck outside in sympathetic harmony as he watched her thumb riffle the pages like a Vegas dealer, then jam itself rudely into a break.

“The Croton Reservoir,” she announced at last, bubbling over with glee as she returned to plunk herself back on the couch and summarize from the book splayed open on her palm. “Built in 1840. It was a twenty-million-gallon aboveground reservoir at Sixth Avenue and Fortieth, on the site of an old mass graveyard. It was a whole city block long. Here, look.”

A veiny woodcut showed an imposing windowless fortress taking up an entire tree-lined city block. Period line-drawing families strolled by, unconcerned.

“It was torn down in 1902,” she continued. “It’s where Bryant Park is today.”

“Nice work,” he said. “Food break?”

“Look at you!” she replied, highly amused. “You’re jealous!”

Amanda’s delivery menus, a photocopy tour of the world’s delivery cuisine, packed the kitchen’s junk drawer like uranium in a warhead. But Amanda hankered for regular-old Chinese, and Jason was far too hungry to argue.

“Ain’t I smart?” said Amanda as Jason chivalrously dialed the number. “A four-hundred-year-old puzzle, and we’re halfway there.”

“The unimportant half,” he reminded her. “What do you bet your mom figured the whole thing out years ago, and this is all just part of your test?” he said. She stuck her tongue out.

He fed their order into the phone, repeating the difficult parts to the thick but patient restaurant gal on the other end of the line; meanwhile Amanda drifted back and forth with plates and forks and so on, setting the small table by the doors to the rooftop porch, which the rain was lightly drizzling now. His eye wandered to the doors themselves, open and spilling a little water inside the apartment; he suspected she didn’t care. She interrupted his view with yet another kitchen-to-hall run, this time carrying nothing but napkins; four trips so far that could have been accomplished, with the tiniest bit of forethought, in one.