conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is a description for a book titled The Garden of Lost and Found about James, York, Garden with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Literary?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: From the author, one of the most eloquent voices of his generation (New York Times), comes a novel about the odd entanglements of love, loss, of the impossible realized through generosity. The Garden is the story of James Ramsay, a 21-year-old who discovers hes inherited a building in New York City upon the death of his mother, who disappeared from his life shortly after his first birthday. Jamess childhood was spent shunted from the home of one uncaring relative to another; for the two years prior to his mothers death hes lived on his own in a small town in Kansas, where hes been having liaisons with a 55-year-old traveling salesman he knows only as Trucker. Just before James learns that his mother has died, Trucker tells James that hes infected him with HIV. Confused and shaken, James takes up residence in No. 1 Dutch Street, the five-story brownstone his mother has left him, whose only other tenant is an elderly black woman named Nellydean. The buildings lot is worth millions, but the estate is cash poor. James is immediately faced with a choice: sell the building for a small fortune or attempt to stave off the mounting tide of taxes that will cause him to forfeit his only connection to a mother he never knew. Before he can decide what to do, a chance encounter lands him on the cover of the New York Post, which in turn brings two new people into his life: Knute Lingon, a middle-aged ad exec moonlighting as a reporter; and Claudia MacTeer, Nellydeans niece, who is looking for a home for herself and her unborn child. The strange threesome become tangled in a web of sexual, familial, and financial complications, over which hangs the specter of 9/11. A strange and wonderful novel, in the words of Joseph O'Neill, The Garden is a brilliant interrogation of identity, race, and sexual politics by a writer who appreciates language not for its tricks but for its power to genuinely stir heart and mind. (Booklist)
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the first five paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Garden of Lost and Found
  But Knute was still speaking over me. He said, "Because," over and over until I stopped talking, and then he said, "I wanted to see you again."
  There was a beat, and then another, and then Knute stepped back and gestured nervously at the pile of furniture. "Look, why don't we—" He whipped the plastic from a swivelly modern chair with industrial-strength upholstery, beet purple. "Here, sit, please." He waved a hand at the half-painted walls, a gray dawn encroaching on midnight blue. "I was about to open a bottle of wine. It's just Beaujolais but—"
  Knute smiled, and in his wry grimace I could see he knew much more about me than what he'd written, or what I'd read.
  Knute raised his hands, guilty as charged. "What I'm trying to say is that choices that once seemed mutable have become fixed. Options are limited. I look back at certain times in my life and I think, what if I'd done that instead. What if someone had done that for me." He shrugged. "When I was eighteen, I used to meet this girl on the dunes behind Long Beach. She was kind of brilliant and kind of crazy and she was a lot more savvy in matters of the heart than I was, or am for that matter. Do you know what she did?"
  Knute shook his head. "That's not what I meant. It's just... I mean... I guess I wanted to tell you that you can be who you are. For my generation, being gay was our identity. We ran to New York or San Francisco, Ptown or Silver Lake, and more or less pretended everything in between didn't exist. But your generation is different. You have to find a way to live in the middle of the country, as well as at the edges. Okay, I'm working this metaphor a little hard. I guess what I'm trying to say is that people your age have to figure out how to incorporate a gay identity into the rest of their lives. I mean, it's better in some ways. You have more choices. More freedom. But that makes it harder too. Everything's so goddamned nebulous with you kids. Post-identity, post-gay, post-AIDS." Knute shook his head, snorting. "I mean, Jesus Christ, every time I woke up sweating in the 1980s I was sure I was seroconverting, but your generation—"
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Garden of Lost and Found
  But Knute was still speaking over me. He said, "Because," over and over until I stopped talking, and then he said, "I wanted to see you again."
  There was a beat, and then another, and then Knute stepped back and gestured nervously at the pile of furniture. "Look, why don't we—" He whipped the plastic from a swivelly modern chair with industrial-strength upholstery, beet purple. "Here, sit, please." He waved a hand at the half-painted walls, a gray dawn encroaching on midnight blue. "I was about to open a bottle of wine. It's just Beaujolais but—"
  Knute smiled, and in his wry grimace I could see he knew much more about me than what he'd written, or what I'd read.
  Knute raised his hands, guilty as charged. "What I'm trying to say is that choices that once seemed mutable have become fixed. Options are limited. I look back at certain times in my life and I think, what if I'd done that instead. What if someone had done that for me." He shrugged. "When I was eighteen, I used to meet this girl on the dunes behind Long Beach. She was kind of brilliant and kind of crazy and she was a lot more savvy in matters of the heart than I was, or am for that matter. Do you know what she did?"
  Knute shook his head. "That's not what I meant. It's just... I mean... I guess I wanted to tell you that you can be who you are. For my generation, being gay was our identity. We ran to New York or San Francisco, Ptown or Silver Lake, and more or less pretended everything in between didn't exist. But your generation is different. You have to find a way to live in the middle of the country, as well as at the edges. Okay, I'm working this metaphor a little hard. I guess what I'm trying to say is that people your age have to figure out how to incorporate a gay identity into the rest of their lives. I mean, it's better in some ways. You have more choices. More freedom. But that makes it harder too. Everything's so goddamned nebulous with you kids. Post-identity, post-gay, post-AIDS." Knute shook his head, snorting.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is five more paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: She laughed, gleeful, triumphant; to this day I've never met a woman who enjoyed being desired as much as Claudia MacTeer.
  Claudia burst out laughing. "Oh, shit! I didn't even think about that. That room's been empty for so—oh shit, you must think I'm a total ho."
  She snickered. "I imagine we did it like you do. I must have looked like some slack-bellied sow at the trough."
  I hadn't been referring to sex actually, but I took a moment to enjoy the image, then said, "So I guess he took it okay?"
  Cuchifrita turned out to be cheap Spanish food: Claudia was pushing open the door to a brightly lit little restaurant from which wafted the odors of grease and garlic and some kind of peppery spice. My empty stomach knotted at the thought of jalapeños but I followed her in. There was the business of ordering: the waitress greeted us in Spanish and the menu was in Spanish and Claudia even ordered in something that sounded like Spanish—"jamon y huevos, por favor"—and after the waitress had gone I said, "Can I ask?"
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the last five paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: That sounds like an ending but I'm not sure, in part because I think the real ending occurred when I left Kansas—that my move to New York was the beginning to a journey that still has years to go before it even begins to hint at a shape, let alone a destination—but also because it feels proprietary, as if I'm still trying to claim my story from the city that spawned it. And so I offer a second ending, one as random as conception (or infection for that matter), but that still feels as inseparable from me, as ineluctable, as my DNA:
  It took over a month for Merton and Morton to get every-thing out of No. 1, unbox it, clean it, identify and appraise it, and even before they finished it was clear that The Garden was asking for one more chance, or Nellydean was. Knute was right: her hoard was worth a fortune. More than enough to pay back what Sonny had given me and eke out two or three or four more years while I tried to find some other way to save the building. Renovate the apartments or transform them into office space, offer the shop to a celebrity chef who could lure diners down Dutch Street's dark alley, or maybe just keep digging to see what lurked beneath my mother's jigsawed house in the subbasement. I asked Knute what he thought but he told me the decision had to be mine. "No matter what happens you'll always have a home," he said cryptically, because, even though he didn't live there, didn't even live in the city anymore, The Garden still had a way of reducing everyone who came in contact with it to aphorism.
  What was it, June, July? Maybe it was August by then, mornings thick as clarified butter, dead wet afternoons during which sunlight beat down in iron bars as heavy as the skyscrapers hemming it in. Yes, August—maybe—but it doesn't really matter. It was just another hazy day while I ticked away the minutes until I left the dying city behind. Blue-gray skies, burning sun, temperature and humidity both hovering around ninety. The vibration of jackhammers and earth movers on lower Church had become familiar by then, also the crowds gawking at them through chainlink festooned with ribbons, pictures, postcards to the dead or prayers on their behalf. I went there because I wanted to see what No. 1 would look like when I was gone. When it was gone. Would it look like a valley, a crater, a canyon? A grave? A "footprint"? Would it look like something was missing, and would that something belong to the past or the future? Would it look like something had been taken away, I mean, or would it be just another slot in the grid waiting to be filled? A few twisted I-beams littered the hole like bits of yarn and the pipes poking from concrete boulders the size of city buses looked like fossils embedded in shale, but not even the flags and photographs and souvenir sellers and people posing for cameras—mouths set in grim lines but eyes twinkling with the carefree glee of holiday-makers—could give the scene anything like real sentiment. The buildings were gone, the bodies too, and it was just another construction site spewing noise and dust and smoke that settled in lasagna layers around the U.S. Steel Building, the Bankers Trust building, the World Financial Center, and I didn't realize I'd abandoned the hole in the ground for the latter's trio of geometric copper cupolas—dome, ziggurat, true pyramid—until a flash of light closer to street level caught my eye. All I could make out was a blurrily colored but extremely shiny ball further down Church where it turns into Trinity Place. Not a ball really, but a blob, big, twenty, twenty-five, maybe thirty feet around, and as I watched the blob lobbed high into the air like something animated—like a cartoon—then slowly slowly slowly floated back to earth. Even the memory of it's enough to send a shiver of excitement down my spine. My mouth goes dry now as it went dry then, the sweat thickened on my skin, and I was all like Shit.
  By then the construction crews had started to notice too, and one by one the earth movers pulled up short in ear-splitting hydraulic squeals. Cautiously, keeping one eye on the machines and people zigzagging their way through the crowded avenue, I started walking downtown, and as I got closer to the bouncing blob I noticed something dangling beneath the shiny mass each time it arced into the air, something smaller and less colorful than the blob itself, and even as the jackhammers ceased their labor like foraging birds looking up from the ground I realized that the blob wasn't a single unit but a knot of hundreds, thousands probably, of brightly colored balloons, the kind they make from that metallic foily stuff, but it wasn't until the last operator had switched off the last chugging engine and the street was as silent as a held breath that I allowed myself to accept what I already knew: that the thing dangling from the bunch of balloons was human. Two humans actually. Two teenaged boys laughing and whooping as they leapt high into the air and were carried forward by a breeze as thin as the strings that tethered them to their balloons. Mira, mira, they shouted, shirtless and skinny, their legs poking from pushed-up warm-up pants. A scapula of red white and blue beads in the shape of the Puerto Rican flag hung around the thin neck of one of the boys, from the shoeless foot of the other dangled a sock, gray and torn and ready to abandon him, and that sock, I remember, and that flag, leant a shape to the boys' pleasure, a palpable sense of effort and purpose so necessary that I pressed myself flat on the ground as they approached me and held my breath as they bounced over me with the slow easy effort of trampoliners on the moon.
  They bounced over me; bounced past. The crowd had turned from Ground Zero to the street by then, and even though it was the middle of the day I still found myself imagining thousands of flashes as thousands of cameras snapped thousands and thousands of pictures, although in truth no other light was needed than that which shown off the watchers' beaming faces, no record than the one etched into our eyes. What I mean is, anything could have shattered the boys' illusion of flight. A gust of wind could have blown them into the side of a building or a cop could have grabbed them as they came close to the earth—they could've just let go—but for as long as they held on we did too. We joined them in the conspiracy of belief, felt their freedom as if we clutched one of their strings in our own hands, and even the memory of it tugs at us, tangles us in its web, balloons and audience merge together and what bounces up the ruined avenue is imagination in its purest kinetic form. This is the key to the city. This is its secret. Though its roadways crumble and its buildings collapse the real monument lives on inside us. It lacks name and shape but not purpose. As insistent as a heartbeat it says only, Forward. Forward.