He wrote to the PO box she’d written on her postcard, telling her to get away from whoever those people might be, because they had to be loony living out there in the desert, told her to save her money and be prepared to hop a bus when he figured out where he was going. Back then, he was only thinking about leaving. He’s never heard from his sister again, but every month he writes another letter and sends it off, like she might be some kind of wise ghost who can hear what’s buried in his chest.
He left Salinas at 1:15 in the morning, saw California, Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania rolling past his worn seat. The people who sat next to him through California and Arizona slept or sang or smelled, those who got on in New Mexico wanted to talk about aliens they’d met. When the bus reloaded in Tulsa, Oklahoma, close to midnight that second day, a kindly black woman with a picnic basket full of fried chicken took the empty aisle seat next to him and shared the chicken she had flattened and battered and crisped, a succulent breast, a drumstick, then another one, passed from her basket to his hand and into his mouth, and she told him her entire family tree, reaching back eight generations, regaling him with stories that were funny or sad or bittersweet, filled with great moral lessons he never expected, finishing one and saying, “So if you liked that one, let me tell you about this one,” until she said goodbye to him at 8:30 a.m. in Lebanon, Missouri, there to welcome the birth of a second cousin’s fifth baby. He slept alone through the rest of Missouri and Illinois, but in Terre Haute, Indiana, a nice girl got on, headed back to college in Indianapolis, after a weekend at home with a family he imagined as 3000 percent normal. “We always spend this weekend, right after the New Year, talking about what we want the year to bring to us as a family, and to each of us individually.” He had not ever heard anything so lovely.
Still, no matter what he was forced to hear, or respond to, the smiles he had to give, or the grimaces, asking this one or that to please stop talking to him because he just wasn’t interested, except for Gladys of the chicken and the biblical tales, and the college girl because listening to her family life was like eating cotton candy, he figured out his new name. Plucked right from the air, with three parts like his old one, but these three parts he had chosen himself, and they sounded good together when he whispered them aloud, incapable of identifying him as any one thing. When he stepped down from the bus near the tip of Manhattan, on Wall Street, he was Theo Tesh Park.
He’s done every kind of shitty job to get by since landing here—dishwasher, dog walker, market-shelf stocker, a waiter in a bunch of diners owned by big, back-slapping Greek brothers, as a secret, non-union super’s assistant in rundown buildings up in Harlem and out in Red Hook. He’s manned, from midnight until seven, twenty-four-hours-a-day-three-hundred-sixty-five-days-a-year shops that sell tobacco and crap. He’s learned the really upscale neighborhoods of Manhattan, the ones with wealthy people in every apartment, trawling through and pushing away the weak nuts muttering to themselves before dawn, gathering up all the plastic and glass himself, stuff he’s turned in for nickels and dimes at the posh grocery stores nearby. Then he learned there was a far easier way to make money. But in any case, before then, he proved to himself he could survive, and this year’s resolution was to find a place he could call home.
Fifteen interviews to find that place—people thinking they were interviewing him, he knowing it was the other way around. Then the sixteenth place, with all those endless stairs that he now races down and up several times every day, six double flights to the enormous loft on the top floor.
That afternoon, when he stepped across the transom into the huge loft, his jaw dropped when he caught sight of the stone and wood behemoths in the vast middle distance. One in black stone, hovering just above the floor, made him think of some kind of encroaching goddess newly emerged from the depths. A second form, in green stone, rose up from a narrow point, seeming incapable of maintaining its balance, and yet it did, holding a shield for a giant, an off-center hole drilled straight through. The third sculpture made him think of lovers, two incredibly long, slender figures in white stone, nearly entwined, one slashed from top to bottom by a thin, narrow recessed rectangle, the other with a hollowed oval where a face would have gone, neither with any obvious human features, but he felt love surrounding them, from the spaces between them, and from where they nearly, but did not quite, touch. The last sculpture was the tallest, would learn later was the wood of a pear tree, the color flesh-tone pink, carved into multiple spirals, like the inner workings of sea shells, or the geometrics of the body, the insides painted a shocking red that instantly made him think of blood, of life and of death.
He saw the sculptures first, before noticing anything else in the loft, had wanted to run to them, to feel their vibrant angles and curves, to follow the lines of the goddess, put his hand through the shield’s hole, the lover’s oval, run his fingers down the scooped-out rectangle of the other lover, to touch the cold of all those stones, the warmth, he imagined, of the smooth pink wood. The sculptures—The Bones of Dido 1967, Hercules 1970, Gasping Fish 1973, and Silence 1976—stood six, eight, ten, and eleven feet tall, carved by Paloma Rosen early in her career. He didn’t know their names then, or that she had decided never to part with them despite magnificent offers to sell.
He had stared, floating in some distant galaxy, until a mellifluous, husky voice, tinged with an accent, brought him down to earth.
“I am Paloma Rosen,” the voice said, and Theo Tesh Park’s spine shivered when he looked down and found a tiny beautiful old woman patiently waiting for his attention.
“Welcome, Monsieur Park,” she said, and led him into the loft’s living-room area. He sat all the way back on the biggest, deepest couch he had ever seen, his long legs and big feet sticking straight out, jeans pooling around his knees, galumphing tennis shoes horizontal, six inches up from the floor. She had watched him silently as he rearranged himself, until his feet were flat on the white wood planks.
“You’re an artist,” he said, embarrassed by the hunger he heard in his voice.
She said nothing, leaned in closer, her stare so direct, appraising, evaluating, weighing him up for a very long time. He felt she was receiving him within herself, like a cookie, a grape popped whole.
“I am indeed,” she had finally said. “Are you?”
Was he what? An artist?
The way she was looking at him, he thought she had to know he was not much of anything, was certainly no artist, unless there was something artistic about figuring out how to get by, the cons and short shrifts to get what he needed, to keep himself afloat, dressed, and fed, with someplace to lay his head at night.