On my first visit, I had stirred through that flotsam, hoping that something in it would give me a hook for a poignant paragraph about how the Santinello’s ship had run aground on the jagged rocks of progress, their lifelong work and dreams for a better future having been pirated from them. In those early days of my magazine career, I was as enthusiastic as a puppy, capable of a rare but embarrassing mixed metaphor in my earnest efforts to shake readers into an emotional response. That was long ago, and I am much more mature now that, as I write this, I’ve spent a year struggling to stay alive while gradually uncovering and adjusting to the true nature of the world.
Anyway, on that initial exploration, as I’d stirred the flotsam in the kitchen, something bright had reflected my flashlight beam and caught my eye. When I reached to pluck a scrap of yellowing paper off the object to fully reveal it, a disturbed tarantula erupted out of the debris and scampered up my arm. I knew the creature wasn’t poisonous, that it wouldn’t bite, that its kind were said to be gentle, that it was supposed to be the Mohandas Gandhi of arachnids. But when a hairy spider the size of a soccer ball—or so it seemed—is coming for your face, the fight-or-flight response kicks in big-time. I staggered backward, managed to knock the beast off my arm, and lost all interest in whatever bauble had glittered in the trash.
Now, inexplicably, I was back, searching with my flashlight not for the tarantula, to which I didn’t feel the need to apologize, but for the item from which the spider had frightened me away. I found it: a very old coin—judging by its sheen, pure gold.
As I turned the heavy coin between my fingers, I marveled that my subconscious must have recognized what it was on the day of the tarantula and must have held that knowledge for months. However, why I would suddenly be impelled to return here after all this time was even more of a mystery than how such a coin had come to be in an abandoned restaurant in a once-busy crossroads that now led nowhere in four directions.
I left the lifeless snakes to rest in creepy peace and returned to the city, where I visited a shop that bought and sold everything from French antique furniture to Meiji-period Japanese bronzes. The owner, Julius Shimski, knew everything anyone could know about all things old—coins, stamps, paintings—not least of all because he was eighty-nine and had spent his life learning. Julius had a monk’s ring of white hair, eyebrows as lush as albino caterpillars, blue eyes as clear as the water in Eden, and a face that had not lined with age but had smoothed into a semblance of what he must have looked like just before his bris. In a profile of him in Arizona!, he had explained his pink-cheeked appearance by saying, “When you fill yourself with knowledge about any subject, it plumps you.” I didn’t write the profile, because Julius wasn’t dead, but after I read it, I began stopping by his shop now and then to chat.
The place is more than a shop, really. It’s a two-story brick-clad concrete-and-steel building, designed to be so fireproof that even the Devil couldn’t get it to take a destructive spark from his finger. The shop’s stock is worth millions, so to be admitted, you have to have an appointment or be known to Julius. In either case, entry is through a bulletproof-glass vestibule, where you’re scanned for a weapon before being buzzed through the inner door. When Julius was just forty-one, working out of another location, he was robbed at gunpoint and pistol-whipped, whereupon he built a fortress of a shop because, as he said in the profile, “Paranoia I can live with, but not a bullet in the head.”
On that Friday, his granddaughter, Sharona, was staffing the front room, which made me feel doubly lucky when I saw her from the glass vestibule. With her jet-black hair and dark eyes and exquisite arrangement of features, she is one of those women at whom you can’t look for long without losing the ability to speak coherently, or at least I can’t. She’s thirty, eleven years older than me, so from her perspective I’m hardly out of adolescence, while from my perspective she’s my dream girl. Among other things, she’s a philatelist, which isn’t as sexy as it sounds; she knows everything there is to know about collectible postage stamps. Like her grandfather, she is a knowledge sponge. I can’t imagine why she’s not married. Although she treated me with the affection that an aunt might show for a favored nephew, I fantasized that one day I would do something—maybe save a family from a burning house or take a gun away from a crazed terrorist—that would cause her to look at me in a much different way and see me as the romantic figure of her dreams.