The Thread

Sometime after midnight, the thread unraveled. From where? Who knows? We only noticed it as it crossed the East River under the arches of the Brooklyn Bridge. We followed it as it wound through Chinatown like crystal vermicelli, glinting below blinking neon into the Lower East Side. There we walked, hand-in-hand, in the middle of the street, picking pickles from barrels and catching dollar bills as they fluttered down from the windows. We jumped, startled, onto the sidewalk as a brewer’s dray rumbled towards us, its hooves scraping on the cobbles. It was there, on Orchard Street, that I told you the story of my ancestor whose wife waited for him by one of these windows on a night like this.
Sausage and sauerkraut smells fill the room. She pushes up the window sash and looks down.
Johann’s shopping for fish. Will he remember to get ginger snaps to crumble on top? She smiles. Of course not. His head’s filled with leather.
Night falls.
He hasn’t returned. No one on Orchard Street has seen him all day. Maria tucks the children into bed. Waits by the window.
“Was there another woman?” you asked.
“No evidence,” I replied.
“A man then?”
“Again, no evidence.”
“But you’d be extra careful in those days.”
“Sure, but still not a scrap of evidence.”
“Maybe he jumped from the ferry into the icy Hudson and froze?”
“It was summer. He could swim.”
“He got into debt and gangsters murdered him?”
“Then you’d expect his body to wash up on the shore of the East River.”
“Forensic science wasn’t invented in those days.”
“True. But there was an official investigation.”
“And it found nothing?”
“Nothing official.”
Then we sat by the Hudson, listening to its murmuring floodtide. The countless masts set sail long ago. So too the ferry boats, mooring posts, oyster beds, and reeds. On our bench, we could make out the New Jersey skyline through the saffron steam.
At dawn, dewdrops swung on the thread, iridescent hues poised on gravity’s edge before each fell in turn, staining the sidewalk in rainbow spots. They say a sweep of the stoop in the morning clears away any remainders of the night.
This time it didn’t.
Three children happened upon the thread in an abandoned lot and played Chinese rope, jumpsies, or elastics (they’ve no interest in nomenclature). The smallest boy tripped on it and scraped his knee. He hopped home to his nervy mother.
She marched down to the lot and tried to cut the thread but couldn’t find it. She asked her husband to get up, to do something, it’s dangerous, another boy might break his neck. Her husband turned up the volume on the television. She called the city authorities and demanded they remove the hazard. They assured her they would send someone out, but no one came.
Maria pushes up the window sash to let the new day in. Only then she realizes that the leather suitcase is missing.
She washes dishes that are already clean and polishes the children’s shoes. Curly-headed and wide-eyed, the youngest chases the neighbor’s cat across the floorboards, ducking under the washing. Round and round he goes until Maria sends him out to play on Orchard Street so she can mop.
Payday. Johann’s still missing.
Maria takes the youngest with her on the ferry to New Jersey. The noisy factory smells of grease. Men pause their machines when a woman and her small boy enter. They shrug and mumble to their shoes. One of them hands her a leather bag that contains Johann’s knives, punches, and hammers.
“No one uses this stuff anymore,” he says.
The bag is heavy. On the return ferry, Maria resists the urge to drop it into the Hudson.
By now, the thread was all over Manhattan, with sightings uptown, in Brooklyn and New Jersey. Scientists sent a team to investigate. An initial trial found the thread’s “tensile strength surpassed that of steel, but it possessed greater elasticity.” They declared these “promising characteristics.”
But the scientists’ funding ran out before they could map its twists and turns through the city. They found no beginning or end. Sometime later, they published a short report. The report—specifically its reference to strength—attracted the attention of the military, who sent an inspector. But, after days of searching, the inspector couldn’t find the thread and labeled the report “most probably a hoax.”
Though it was almost invisible and even the experts had trouble finding it, city officials labeled the thread a “potential liability” and began a risk mitigation campaign. A financial crisis soon drew them away and public attention, briefly piqued, turned to “mass avian mortality events” as migrating birds, disorientated by the city’s glass skyscrapers, crashed into them.
Maria pushes up the window sash and the smells of fish and ginger fill the room.
If only she could hold out her purse and dollar bills flutter in.
The closet is piled high with shoes. She twists the wedding band that placed her in the world.
Her face bleaches with each passing day.
Maria rents a Singer. One dress at a time, she will sew her way out of destitution.
She teaches her daughter. The girl has thick, clumsy fingers. She tells the girl stories as they sew, folk tales in an old language that the girl hardly knows. The only story the daughter remembers is “A Thread Can Save a Life” as Maria tells it again and again.
Working under the lamp, Maria sometimes catches a waft of leather and hears that familiar “tack tack tack.” Johann’s bag sits in the closet under the shoes.
“Are you looking for redemption?” you asked me.
“For Johann?”
“Yes. I sense empathy.”
“I think he had his reasons.”
“Like?”
“One plausible account I read is that—years later— someone heard of a shoemaker in Chicago. He worked on a street corner and was renowned for his miraculous stitching. He could repair any type of shoe or boot. He even made gloves and belts, all to the highest level of craftsmanship.”
“And what happened to this sublime cobbler?”
“He disappeared.”
“Of course. And do you think this shoemaker was Johann?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why are you telling me this story?”
“It’s my connection.”
Earlier that day, before the thread unspooled, we were at the Metropolitan Museum. You stopped to examine an ancient stone tablet, Assyrian or Sumerian. Its carved inscription comprised squares within squares and, in the center, a circular maze. The labyrinth—a symbol that I’d always thought was invented by King Minos in Crete—was clearly more ancient.
I admit that it was I who, like Theseus, unspooled the thread in the first place, though you prompted me. Your eyes were a dark mirror sparkling with mica. Perhaps I was one of those dollar bills rustling above your head. The thread was not an innovative fabric or risk mitigation strategy, yet we descended into the labyrinth.
Later, your shoes at the end of the bed gleamed white, though you warned me not to read too much into things.
“Metaphors are notoriously unstable,” you said. “Those shoes, for example, look comfortable to wear. And they were. But now I’m more comfortable with them off.
“Things begin in the middle,” you continued, “as if you were an extra, picked up by the studio at the last minute, who wandered into my film but instantly became a central character. Your lines, designed to string me along, worked.”
As we slept, the thread unspooled through the city.
“Let’s say your Chicago cobbler was Johann,” you said. “Why?”
“Some things can’t be explained.”
“So that’s it? Don’t you have a theory?”
“I have something.”
“Go on.”
“It’s an image rather than a theory.”
“Let me hear it.”
“Johann’s on a train. Outside, the horizon, punctuated by fences, farms, and grain silos, is flat. The train’s almost full but he walks through the carriages until he finds an empty one. He sits down and exhales slowly. One by one, he unlaces his shoes, pulls the laces through the eyelets, caresses the leather, and places them on the seat beside him. He opens the window and throws the laces out. He removes his socks and flexes his toes in the breeze.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
As things continued to fade, peel, or disappear, the thread remained. It crossed the grid and ran over tenements as if to defy the city’s order, taunting its inhabitants with another tangled city, though few—so very few—acknowledge its existence.
Was it marking a territory or mapping a field? I could find no discernible pattern, nor could I identify a distinct endpoint. It was thin and became further rarefied into a tiny hair of thinness.
“Are there many threads,” you asked, “tangling worlds into a barely discernible ball?”
The thread isn’t a line to follow out of the labyrinth. It isn’t Time but Time’s retreat or suspension when faced with an expertly wrought sentence.
“It’s still there,” I replied, “all over Manhattan, where we left it.”
Maria pushes up the window sash and smells garlic and chili and steaming rice. She looks down the zigzag of fire escape stairs that end at the last pickle barrel on Orchard Street. She rents the spare room to a lodger.
The bare bulbs in Maria’s apartment have grown into glass tulips.
Her daughter works in a New Jersey department store, and her son in a bank in Philadelphia. They realized that questions about fathers are less frequent the farther you get from Orchard Street. By the time the story of the Chicago shoemaker reaches them, it’s up to the part where he’s disappeared.
Maria crumbles ginger snaps on top of the fish she’s cooked for dinner. She still sews, by hand, in meditative waves. Johann’s leather bag still sits below a pile of shoes in the wardrobe. One of the children might want it someday.
“And what about Johann?”
“He disappeared.”
“Is this where I’m supposed to infer something about your genetic makeup?”
“Maybe. But remember, I’m equal parts Johann and Maria.”
You squeezed my hand. It was almost time for my flight.
“Wait,” you said, “I get it. The bag. You inherited Johann’s bag, right?”
“No. It disappeared.”
“How do I know if any of this is true?”
I had to go. The gate was about to close.
“Trust me.”
“I do,” you said, letting go, “I do.”