Public book. The ink is still wet. Shape the next line.
Everything You Ever Lost Is in Room Nine
Under the Wash and Go Laundromat on Delancey Street, past the machine that eats quarters and the vending machine that has had the same bag of pretzels stuck in it since nineteen ninety eight, there is a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. There are no employees. There is only a staircase, and at the bottom of the staircase there is a room with a brass number on it, and the number is nine, and inside Room Nine is everything you have ever lost.
Every single sock. Obviously. There is a mountain of them, a real mountain, with weather, and a small village of socks living on top who have elected a mayor, a grey wool one named Gerald. But also every umbrella you left on a bus. Every pen you lent to somebody who said "ill give it right back." Your first tooth. Your car keys from that Tuesday. And on a shelf in the back, in a little jar with a label, the temper your dad lost at the Thanksgiving of two thousand eleven, still steaming.
The person in charge of the room is a very old woman who wears mittens.Her name was Bettany Plum, and she was either seventy or four hundred, nobody has the courage to ask. Her cardigan is made entirely of lost mittens and she keeps everything organized with a filing system so complicated that even the filing system has a filing system. Lost dogs go in the garden. Lost time goes in the clock room, which is very loud. Lost causes go in the basement, where they hold meetings every Thursday and never agree on anything.
Yusuf found the door completely by accident while looking for his left earbud, which, it turns out, is in Room Nine, sitting on a velvet pillow next to about four million other left earbuds, all of them playing the same half of the same song. Bettany Plum looked at him over her glasses and said, "Youre the first living person down here in sixty years. Please dont touch the regrets, theyre sticky."
Of course the first thing Yusuf did was touch the regrets. They were in a big glass bowl like candy at a bank, and they were sticky, and the moment his finger touched one he heard, very clearly, his own voice at fourteen saying "no thanks Im not hungry" to the last slice of his tía's flan in the year of the great flan shortage. He had to sit down on a pile of lost sunglasses.
Bettany Plum handed him a tissue that someone had lost at a movie theater during the end of Titanic. "Everyone does that," she said. "Thats why I keep them in a bowl. Humans cant resist a bowl." Then she told him the real problem, the reason the lights were flickering and the sock mountain had started to rumble. Room Nine was full. Completely full. And when the place where lost things go runs out of space, she said, lost things start going back.
It started small. On Monday a man in Ohio opened his front door and four hundred umbrellas fell on him, every umbrella he had ever left anywhere, including one from a wedding in nineteen ninety three that still had rice in it. On Tuesday every person in Portugal found their car keys at the same time and the sound of everyone saying "there they are" was picked up by a weather satellite.
By Wednesday it was getting weird. A grandmother in Toledo got back her maiden name. A guitar player in Memphis got back his virginity and was very upset about it. And all over the world, at exactly noon, people started finding their lost tempers in their coat pockets, which, as you can imagine, did not go well at the license office.
Elena was the one who got back something nobody else did. She was in her kitchen making tea when a small paper boat sailed out of the faucet, very calm, like it had been there the whole time. She knew it immediately. She had made it when she was six and put it in the river behind her grandmother's house and watched it go around the bend and she cried for a whole afternoon because she thought it was gone forever. Oh là là, she said, quietly, to the boat.
Inside the boat, folded small, was a note in handwriting she didnt recognize. It said: We kept it safe for you. Please come down before the socks revolt. Signed, Bettany Plum, Head of Lost and Found, Room Nine, under the laundromat, bring snacks.
Daniel didnt lose things, Daniel lost dreams, every morning, the second his feet touched the floor. So when Room Nine started giving things back, he woke up on Thursday and all of them were sitting on the end of his bed. Every dream he had ever forgotten. The one where he could fly but only over parking lots. The one with the whale who worked at the bank. The one where his father was young and laughing and they were fishing on a lake made of soup.
They were small and glowing and a little embarrassed, like cats who have been out all night. The whale one sneezed. Daniel looked at them for a long time and then he did the only reasonable thing a dreamer can do when all his dreams come home at once. He put on his shoes, picked them up in a laundry basket, and went looking for the laundromat.
The Wash and Go Laundromat on Delancey Street is run by a man named Teodoro who has been there thirty one years and has never once, in all that time, found the other sock. He has a sign on the wall that says SOCKS ARE NOT OUR RESPONSIBILITY, and under it someone has written in pen "then whose??" and he has never erased it because honestly he wonders too. When Daniel came in at seven in the morning with a laundry basket full of glowing dreams, Teodoro didnt even look up from his newspaper. "Machine nine," he said. "The dryer at the end. It doesnt work, you just go in." Daniel asked how many people had gone in. Teodoro turned a page. "Today? You and a lady with a paper boat. And a guy with one earbud who keeps coming back up to get snacks." Somewhere under the floor something rumbled, like a very large stomach, or a mountain clearing its throat.
Going down through the dryer is like going down a slide made of warm towels that just came out. It smells like Sunday afternoon when you were small and someone was folding clothes and singing badly in the next room. Amara went down right after Daniel, because she had lost something too and she wasnt telling anybody what. She landed in the basement, which was a mistake, because it was Thursday, and on Thursdays the lost causes have their meeting. There were about two hundred of them in folding chairs. World peace was there, very tired. A diet from January was there eating a donut. The homework of every student who ever said the dog ate it was there, chewed, still bitter about it. They all turned to look at her. "Ay, perdón," Amara said, "wrong floor." A small lost cause in the front row raised its hand and asked if she was here to save them. She said no, mija, but she would bring them coffee, and the whole room started crying because nobody had ever offered them coffee before.
Up on the sock mountain the weather was getting bad, a cold fog of lint coming down the slopes, and Mayor Gerald called an emergency meeting on the summit. Gerald is a grey wool sock with a darn on his heel from the war against the moths, and he is very proud of it. "Brothers and sisters," he said, and the mountain went quiet, which for socks is a very soft sound. "They are sending us back. To people who already bought new pairs. Who use our partners to clean the windows." A little pink baby sock started crying. "We will not be the odd ones in a drawer again," Gerald shouted, and three hundred thousand socks began rolling toward the stairs, slowly, because socks are not fast, but with a lot of feeling. Bettany Plum heard the rumble from her office, put down her tea, and said one word. "Caramba." She learned it from a lost Spanish dictionary.
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