PEACE BE WITH ME

It was already kind of an odd day before I met her. When I got to the L train I knew it was delayed right when I got to the mouth of the station because there were so many people crowded in there. Some fuzzy voice came on the loudspeaker, but I couldn’t understand the words. The electronic sign promised a train in six minutes, but I had been in New York long enough to know not to count on that.

I decided to walk to work. It was eighteen minutes by train and twenty-five on foot, so it wasn’t a big burden, and I wasn’t in any hurry. Spring was just starting to come into focus. It was one of the first days you could feel the sky’s heat on your shoulders and in little pockets of concrete you could see vegetation coming alive. I didn’t want to be squeezed into that train with that whole impatient crowd, anyway.

On the way, I kept hitting the avenues just wrong. Every time I reached an intersection, the avenue crosslight would be red, and the cars would whir past, so I would cross the street instead. The route to my office was northwest, but due to my bad luck with the lights, I kept heading north, north, north, until I couldn’t go north any more and had to wait for the light and head west. I actually went one block too far north before realizing my mistake.

All of this is to say that I was taking an unusual path when I saw her. She was ruddy, round shouldered, and softened the way butter softens in sun, but nevertheless resembled the same person I had gone to high school with. As I hesitated, trying to figure out whether it was her, her bobbing head turned my direction, and we made eye contact before I could avert my gaze.

Our conversation was enthusiastic, perhaps buoyed by the good weather or the genuine surprise at the sight of each other. We hadn’t been close in high school - I struggled to remember her last name - but I always enjoy reconnecting with someone whom I used to know. Often I find myself sucked into my own journey, and it is reassuring to be reminded that so many others, equal to me, are preoccupied with their own parallel slices of life, just as narrow and just as wide as mine.

On a whim, we grabbed breakfast. I had meant to get food along the way anyway, since I had run out of eggs at my apartment, and where we crossed paths was right outside of an old-school lunch counter. We sort of stumbled and fell into the impromptu breakfast date; that’s not something that I usually do, and I don’t think it was normal for her, either. Between the shouts for pastrami and black coffee, we fed each other nibbles of our decades. It struck me that we had never had this sort of conversation in high school - one-on-one, intimate, extended - but that time and maturity had allowed us to slip into a mutual comfort that proximity had not.

She had been a peculiar kid in high school. She always wore the exact same outfit, which was a red tee-shirt and black jeans. In the winter months the red tee-shirt was covered by a red sweat-shirt. It wasn’t that she was poor - she just liked the simplicity of wearing the same thing every day, I guess. Every year on halloween, she wore a black tee-shirt and red jeans and won the school costume contest to thunderous applause.

So she had been peculiar if not off her rocker, but growing older and roaming wider had apparently flattened her demeanor to normalcy. When I saw her, she had on a blue sweater and gray slacks. I asked her when she got rid of the red shirt, and she told me she couldn’t remember. It had been years ago.

I have a knack at getting to what is eating at people, and it wasn’t long before I squeezed her secret out of her. She herself seemed surprised that she was telling me, but I think that the unique role I occupied in her life as a reliable presence she had known about for years, but for practical purposes a stranger, allowed her to be open with me. Or maybe she just needed to get it off her chest. In any case, she told me what she had been up to when I had run into her.

Her words slowed and her shoulders wilted, as if her whole body was relaxing. While she spoke, she was there. She could see the double-paned windows that frosted with ice in the winter. She could feel the warmth of the evening tea in her cupped hands. She could hear the birds and the creak of the floorboards and the crackle of the fire all at once. Off to her right teetered a stack of board games with specially made pieces and books with family trees in the front cover, many of them older than both of us. In front of her was a puzzle half done and not far off were brownies baking in the oven. Down the hall was a little homemade sauna, a reading room with floor to ceiling windows, a gym just big enough for one, and a place where you could make simple, functional objects with your hands. There was real grass on the lawn, all around, and on some days the dew rose as mist with the sunrise.

It was a place she had been before. A place she missed. I asked her where it was. Sheepishly, she told me.

It was in midtown Manhattan.

And then, even more sheepishly, and with a little bit of shame, she told me she couldn’t find it. She had lost this log cabin.

She wasn’t crazy. I could see it in her eyes that she knew what she was saying didn’t make any sense, and that I probably wouldn’t believe her, and she accepted that. She told me this because it was her truth, not because she expected it to be mine.

She hadn’t been on her way to work after all, as I had assumed. She was walking the blocks of midtown, looking for the log cabin. She came out here every day, without a plan or a pattern, and wandered. When it was close, she could sense it, she thought. Almost like she could smell it or hear it, but as a totally different sense altogether.

There was more. Someone was trying to keep her away from the log cabin. She wasn’t sure what the organization was, exactly, or why, but she knew the man they employed. One day she would see him waiting on a street corner, hands in the pockets of a worn-out, coal-black overcoat, but most days she wouldn’t see him at all. He kept the brim of his hat pulled low, shadowing his face even in the brightest of sunlit days, and out of that shade would twinkle his sharp, beady eyes. At first glance he seemed the type who would struggle to move, but he was fast, faster than you’d believe, and when he got to her, he’d beat her senseless with a billy club. He never spoke, but the message was clear: stop looking for the log cabin.

Looking across my egg sandwich, I could see the lumps on her head from the beatings. I thought to ask her if it might be worth it to report this to the police, but I already knew the answer. They wouldn’t believe her, just as I didn’t.

At this point, I felt impressed at how many little things lined up just right for me to see this person and pull this thread from her - the subway being down, the streetlights being all red, even the fact that I had forgotten to buy eggs the day before. Surely just as many coincidences had occurred in her life. But then again, maybe there were an equal number of events that just stopped us from running into each other the past years. How many times had we passed each other on parallel streets? Or on the same street, with neither of us happening to look up? There were many others from my childhood in the city, I was sure, but I rarely saw them. How many had tales just as extraordinary? I wondered if mine was a life of lucky hits or narrow misses.

Why not find such a place outside of the city, I asked. Surely she could buy a place like that in upstate New York, or the Poconos, or in the upper peninsula of Michigan.

No, she told me, urgency in her voice. It was important that I understood. Those weren’t the one she wanted. The one she wanted was in Manhattan. She knew it, and she had seen it before. It was right around here, and she was sure to find it soon. Okay, I nodded, and took a sip of my coffee. I could understand how all of that in the middle of New York could be alluring. I thought it would be rude to suggest that it might have been razed and turned into an apartment complex. It seemed unlikely to me that a one-story cabin could survive long in one of the most valuable plots of land in the world.

Our conversation continued until I realized with a jolt it was half past ten and I was quite late to work. We parted ways, promising to catch up later but knowing we never would. I walked out of the lunch counter, musing on her tale to distract me from the pit in my stomach that grew as I approached my office. I was glad to have run into her and never intended to see her again.

The L was delayed a lot in the next few weeks, and I started walking to work more and more. At some point I gave up on the subway altogether. Spring was rounding into summer, and I was enjoying the walk more than packing into the hot subway car. It was worth the price of seven minutes.

As I commuted, I revisited the chance encounter and considered whether I might run into her again. Without any thought, I began changing up my path to work day to day. It was an almost perfectly diagonal walk through the grid, so there were many different routes that would take the same amount of time. Mixing it up became sort of a little game, and I enjoyed checking out new streets. I didn’t see the log cabin, but I began noticing things that were usually lost in every day bustle: a man walking his pig on a leash; a woman flat on her back in the middle of the sidewalk, reading two books at once; the friezes of a 18th century church no wider than a townhouse, tucked between two sleek black office buildings. Midtown, for all its exorbitance and grandeur, held a surprising number of modest holdovers from simpler times: a barn retrofitted into a chic modern cafe; a lighthouse squeezed by office buildings; a pocket park cemetery that couldn’t have held more than fifty graves. Maybe a log cabin wasn’t too far fetched after all.

It was my last year in New York, though I didn’t know it at the time. I’m glad I noticed the things I did.

One night I had to stay at work until the late evening, I think about nine o’clock, and when I left I could still feel the stress in my body like a hive of bees beneath my skin. I decided to wander a little farther around midtown to calm myself down and delay my arrival at home, when I’d need to work more. This wasn’t unusual for me. I was working long hours at that time, trying to secure my place in the world. I didn’t have time for a girlfriend, or for friends, or for myself really, so the walk to and from the office became my escape.

I was meandering, poking my head down one street after another, when I heard footsteps behind me. I was able to turn fast enough to see the grotesque scowl of the thickset man raising the billy club before it descended on me. He knocked me to the ground and rained blows until I stopped moving. Then he left me on the cold concrete. When I moved again, I took the train straight home and laid my throbbing head in ice.

Rather than deter me, I woke the next morning more determined than ever to locate the log cabin. Before, it had been a passing daydream on my walk to work. Now that I was certain of its existence, I was driven to find it.

I devised a strategy that would lead me to the log cabin quicker than my high school acquaintance: I would ask people where it was. Surely, I figured, one of these people walking these streets would have seen it.

No dice. Their responses mimicked mine when I first heard of this extraordinary place. They would suggest I look outside of the city, or would shrug and wish me well. Some would laugh, thinking I was joking. Thank you, I would mutter, and keep walking. As summer wore on, it did in an odd way feel like I was getting closer, but at the same time the noise and the crowds and the muck only increased. Of course, every once in a while, the man with the billy club would appear on my shoulder and beat me senseless. Midtown never seemed so putrid and claustrophobic as those moments when he towered over me, hammering his baton like hard hail. I eventually realized that as menacing as he was, he did not have the rage of someone on an individual hunt - instead, I saw behind his eyes the dispassionate, bored determination of a man paid to do a job. My acquaintance had been right: he was employed by some larger entity. Who’s paying you, I would yell, but to no avail. I never did succeed in getting him to speak.

It did not seem to matter whether I searched during the day or after dark. Everyone was too caught up in their own commute to notice me. I found I preferred to search during the night, when the streets were naked and empty but for fluttering trash. The man with the billy club could see me from farther away at night, without as much hustle and bustle, but I could see him from farther away as well. What’s more is I liked the stillness. It made me feel untethered.

It may seem crazy that I didn’t give up, but in truth the possibility never crossed my mind. What you need to understand was that I really was working a lot of hours then, and this endeavor, even if it was somewhat of a dangerous, fantastical obsession, was a real breath of fresh air from the doldrums of the office. I needed a refuge: I was in the awkward spot of making too much money to leave the city but not enough to build a log cabin within it. Maybe it was the fact that it was so divorced from my daily reality that made the escape so complete.

The more I asked strangers about the log cabin, the more I began to recognize patterns in their answers. This pattern was especially prominent in people who would proactively approach me and offer to help. They’d try to persuade me to stop searching by assuring me that the place didn’t exist, but they always got the words just wrong enough to do the opposite. You’ll never find it, they’d say, and if I squinted my eyes I could see the apprehension behind their faces as they realized they had given away the game and if I squinted my ears I could hear that what they really meant was please, please, stop looking, because you’re getting close.

Other strangers would suggest that I map out all of Manhattan and highlight the streets as I walked down them, to make sure that I got every one. I would nod and assure them this was a good idea, but at the end of the day I never had any sort of organized way of looking. Once or twice, I did exactly as they said, but I would always end up balling up the map and returning to aimless wandering. This action, every time, made me doubt myself. Was the fact that I refused to make use of the grid system a product of the fact that I didn’t really believe in the existence of the log cabin, that I accepted that it was just a fantasy? I pushed away this thought. I’m not just wandering, I told myself. I’m following feelings and intuitions, and, like my acquaintance, I have a sixth sense that tickles stronger when I’m getting closer.

Speaking of her - I never did see her out there while I was looking, despite the fact that I was sure that we were walking the same area. She’s found it, I thought on some days. She’s given up, I thought on others. I don’t know which thought was more comforting.

This summer was also the one where they introduced a bunch of changes to Manhattan. I wasn’t sure if these were led by some change in the law, or if they just happened to spring up as fads. Either way, I didn’t ever see street racing before that year. I mean the type with modified engines, the ones where they zip by with such gusto that you have to always be on the alert to jump out of the way so as not to get killed. That was also around the time that carrier pigeons came roaring back - maybe they were legalized, or maybe they became more economical than the UPS, or maybe they just came into style - so the whole summer you’d never know when the sky would be choked by a cloud of the gray birds. I can’t say how many times I leaped sideways to avoid droppings, but I know it wasn’t as many as the number of times I was hit. That summer, too, was when bands popped up on every corner. I could hardly walk for the ground shaking with music, and often it was too loud for me to ask a passerby if they had seen the log cabin. At times I loved the music and at others I thought it worse than getting flattened by a racecar.

When I was in my office, I was sheltered from this disturbance by the padded walls of the buildings. Yet the sterile, tense pressure of that space, like the inside of a submarine, was worse. During those hours, I’d peer out of the window and mentally trace routes to search.

By the time the city was showing signs of Autumn, my memory of the log cabin was coming back. I could remember snapshots, though I wasn’t sure from where. Maybe from a childhood field trip into the city. Or maybe my parents had taken me when I was young. Maybe, even, I had walked past when I first moved to New York, when the city layout was still a senseless mess in my head, and had promptly forgotten it.

Whichever way it was, my hands regained the feelings they had then - palms on the hot ceramic of a mug; fingertips along the grain of wood to be worked; nails scratching behind the ears of a panting dog. The smells came back too, wood smoke and chopped thyme and peppermint and pine needles.

Now I recalled the expression on my acquaintance’s face, recognizing it as the guilt of making her need mine and the shame at the hours wasted on this ludicrous pursuit. I had walked every street south of Central Park, I was sure I had, and I was getting clubbed every week, but I kept going back. Nothing could stop me from wandering dizzily around Manhattan in the few minutes I could spare from work.

This might sound crazy, but the moments when I was getting beaten to a pulp were the moments I felt most alive. In them, I was forced to reckon with the nonsense I was choosing to engage in, and what I found was that when nothing made sense, when the twinkling eyes of the mean man stared blankly and I squirmed fruitlessly and the blows of the truncheon rained without end, those were the only times when things made sense. Those were the times when cause connected with effect. A lot of people think that work makes sense, but in those days I was clicking plastic keys and watching lines jump up and down and the people around me jump up and down along with them, and what’s more is they expected me too to jump in time. So in those tortured instants trapped between weapon and concrete, when I could think of nothing but the present, those were the times when it felt like things might just be okay and the world had some logic after all, even if the only logic was a man with a billy club punishing someone looking for something that he shouldn't.

One day, a stranger looked at me askance and asked why I was trying to find the log cabin. This question, in all those months, had never been asked of me. I was wide-eyed. Wasn’t it obvious? No, she said. Why do you need that sort of place? I opened my mouth, but couldn’t explain it to her. I just gave a little awkward laugh and walked away.

It was then that I wondered whether I would rather never had heard of this place. Then I wouldn’t have to spend all this time and effort, and I could just relax. I decided just the opposite - this promise of the impossible is what kept me going. Each time I was hit around the head, my desire only grew. So I wasn’t jealous of someone like that stranger, who would never again contemplate the log cabin.

Soon after, a funny thing happened.

I found it.

I wish it had been on some sort of unique day, or that I had found it due to a special tactic that I devised, but in the end it was an evening no different than any other. With enough time, just as I had thought I might, I stumbled upon my holy grail.

The entrance to the property was barely a crack, a sliver so small that you had to turn your body sideways, and colored such that at most angles it was invisible. I had walked by it a dozen times. No wonder it had taken me so long to find it.

Once you were in you were in. The parcel of land opened in front of you like Central Park.

It was exactly as my acquaintance had described, and a little different than what I had been picturing. The night was clear and cool enough to be crisp, and the warmth of the light within burned at the cabin’s windows.

I tensed, suddenly aware that the man with the billy club must be around, but he didn’t materialize. Without hesitation, I approached the cabin. My boots tread on real grass underfoot. The way the doorway to the building was constructed made it obvious that it was open to the public.
That first night, when it was finally time to leave the log cabin, I was trembling with fear that I would never find it again. I took careful note of the street numbers and walked to the end of the block, then back, before I left.

When I returned the next evening, I almost cried with relief at the sight of it. There it was! I had nearly convinced myself that the first encounter had been a mirage. That second night was even better than the first, because I could plan all the nights afterwards.

In the following days I explored every inch of the cabin. On the edges of the property, walls of thick trees prevented most all the sound from penetrating the cabin, and the street outside was skinny enough to prevent drag racing, so I never had to worry about taking a wrong step and getting killed. The plot of land that the little building occupied looked small enough up front, but out back it spread its fingers between all the buildings to penetrate the teardrop center of the block, and the vegetation was dense enough to make you almost forget you were in the city.

Other folks visited the cabin, but it never got too crowded. It usually makes me a bit uncomfortable to be interacting with strangers in an unstructured way like that - cooking at the same kitchen, tending to the same fire, grabbing from the same pile of crossword puzzles - but we were so self assured in our individual actions that we paid each other no mind. In that way we coexisted, aware of the presence of the other but with no need for mutual acknowledgement. The knowledge that we were there for the cabin but not each other served as a buffer thick enough to insulate us.

My favorite activity at the cabin was gardening. I had never gardened before, but one afternoon, on a whim, I took soil and clippers from the shed and tried my hand at it. I ended up growing lots of things, tomatoes and cucumbers and bell peppers and pumpkins. They were right there in front of the log cabin, in full view of any passersby, but in all my time they never got trampled or stolen. I never had been a fan of vegetables, but when they were grown fresh by my own two hands, they tasted better than anything I had ever eaten.

The next summer I took up woodworking. At first, the furniture I made was shoddy, but eventually I learned enough to replace all the furniture in my apartment. I took up knitting, too, and made a blizzard of hats and stockings. Still, most of my memories of the log cabin are sitting on an armchair with my feet up, doing nothing in particular, letting my thoughts meander and my fingers alight on what they might, whether it be a newspaper, book, puzzle, or sketchpad.

So passed my time in New York City. The cabin was everything you’re hoping it was. It was wonderful. I could go on about the afternoons I spent within its walls, but that’s a story for another time. This account is about the hope that searching for the cabin gave me, or rather the hope that my faith in the cabin gave me. After all, during the time I spent searching, it didn’t matter whether I would find it or not.

I don’t live in New York City anymore. I haven’t been back to the log cabin in years, and I’m not sure if it still exists. My guess is that it does, but it might be just a bit harder to find, given how much the city has grown.

I never told that acquaintance from high school where it was, or that I had found it. I supposed that she had given up, since I never saw her looking again, and I never saw her at the cabin. I don’t have her contact information, but I’m sure I could track it down if I put some effort into it. I couldn't say why I didn’t tell her. It just never happened. Maybe it’s for the same reason that I stay my hand’s urge to write out the cross-streets of the log cabin. It just doesn’t seem right. To me, it seems that the log cabin should only be found by those who are mad enough to run closer, not farther away, when they are beaten over the head by a man with a billy club. I think that’s the price of admission. That’s what makes the peppermint hot-chocolate sweet. That’s what makes the fire warm. That’s what dews the grass in the morning and that’s what burns it clean with the sun. That’s why the cabin is special. You have to find it for yourself.

John Randolph is a technologist and writer based in New York City. You can join his mailing list here and find more of his work at johngrandolph.com.