good a place as any to begin.
It was a glorious day, made all the more precious because the weather had been so weird that spring.
One day I’d be bundled up in a jacket and scarf, cloth cap on my head, with fingerless gloves to keep the cold from my finger joints while I was out busking, the next I’d be in a Tshirt, breaking into a sweat just thinking about standing out on some street corner to play tunes.
There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, the sun was halfway home from noon to the western horizon, and Jilly and I were just soaking up the rays on the steps of St. Paul’s. I was slouched on the steps, leaning on one elbow, my fiddlecase propped up beside me, wishing I had worn shorts because my jeans felt like leaden weights on my legs. Sitting beside me, perched like a cat about to pounce on something terribly interesting that only it could see, Jilly was her usual scruffy self. There were flecks of paint on her loose cotton pants and her shortsleeved blouse, more under her fingernails, and still more halflost in the tangles of her hair. She turned to look at me, her face miraculously untouched by her morning’s work, and gave me one of her patented smiles.
“Did you ever wonder where he’s from?” Jilly asked.
That was one of her favorite phrases: “Did you ever wonder ... ?” It could take you from considering if and when fish slept, or why people look up when they’re thinking, to more arcane questions about ghosts, little people living behind wallboards, and the like. And she loved guessing about people’s origins. Sometimes when I was busking she’d tag along and sit by the wall at my back, sketching the people who were listening to me play. Invariably, she’d come up behind me and whisper in my ear—usually when I was in the middle of a complicated tune that needed all my attention—something along the lines of, “The guy in the polyester suit? Ten to one he rides a big chopper on the weekends, complete with a jean vest.”
So I was used to it.
Today she wasn’t picking out some nameless stranger from a crowd. Instead her attention was on Paperjack, sitting on the steps far enough below us that he couldn’t hear what we were saying.
Paperjack had the darkest skin I’d ever seen on a man—an amazing ebony that seemed to swallow light. He was in his midsixties, I’d guess, short corkscrew hair all gone grey. The dark suits he wore were threadbare and out of fashion, but always clean. Under his suit jacket he usually wore a white Tshirt that flashed so brightly in the sun it almost hurt your eyes—just like his teeth did when he gave you that lopsided grin of his.
Nobody knew his real name and he never talked. I don’t know if he was mute, or if he just didn’t have anything to say, but the only sounds I ever heard him make were a chuckle or a laugh. People started calling him Paperjack because he worked an origami gig on the streets.
He was a master at folding paper into shapes. He kept a bag of different colored paper by his knee; people would pick their color and then tell him what they wanted, and he’d make it—no cuts, just folding. And he could make anything. From simple flower and animal shapes to things so complex it didn’t seem possible for him to capture their essence in a piece of folded paper. So far as I know, he’d never disappointed a single customer.
I’d seen some of the old men come down from Little Japan to sit and watch him work. They called him
But origami was only the most visible side of his gig. He also told fortunes. He had one of those little folded paper Chinese fortunetelling devices that we all played around with when we were kids. You know the kind: you fold the corners in to the center, turn it over, then fold them in again. When you’re done you can stick your index fingers and thumbs inside the little flaps of the folds and open it up so that it looks like a flower. You move your fingers back and forth, and it looks like the flower’s talking to you.
Paperjack’s fortuneteller was just like that. It had the names of four colors on the outside and eight different numbers inside. First you picked a color—say, red. The fortuneteller would seem to talk soundlessly as his fingers moved back and forth to spell the word, RE-D, opening and closing until there’d be a choice from four of the numbers. Then you picked a number, and he counted it out until the fortuneteller was open with another or the same set of numbers revealed. Under the number you choose at that point was your fortune.
Paperjack didn’t read it out—he just showed it to the person, then stowed the fortuneteller back into the inside pocket of his jacket from which he’d taken it earlier. I’d never had my fortune read by him, but Jilly’d had it done for her a whole bunch of times.
“The fortunes are always different,” she told me once. “I sat behind him while he was doing one for a customer, and I read the fortune over her shoulder. When she’d paid him, I got mine done. I picked the same number she did, but when he opened it, there was a different fortune there.”
“He’s just got more than one of those paper fortunetellers in his pocket,” I said, but she shook her head.
“He never put it away,” she said. “It was the same fortuneteller, the same number, but some time between the woman’s reading and mine, it changed.”
I knew there could be any number of logical explanations for how that could have happened, starting with plain sleight of hand, but I’d long ago given up continuing arguments with ply when it comes to that kind of thing.
Was Paperjack magic? Not in my book, at least not the way Jilly thought he was. But there was a magic about him, the magic that always hangs like an aura about someone who’s as good an artist as Paperjack was. He also made me feel good. Around him, an overcast day didn’t seem half so gloomy, and when the sun shone, it always seemed brighter. He just exuded a glad feeling that you couldn’t help but pick up on. So in that sense, he was magic.
I’d also wondered where he’d come from, how he’d ended up on the street. Street people seemed pretty well evenly divided between those who had no choice but to be there, and those who chose to live there like I do. But even then there’s a difference. I had a little apartment not far from filly’s. I could get a job when I wanted one, usually in the winter when the busking was bad and club gigs were slow.
Not many street people have that choice, but I thought that Paperjack might be one of them.
“He’s such an interesting guy,” filly was saying.
I nodded.
“But I’m worried about him,” she went on.
“How so?”
Jilly’s brow wrinkled with a frown. “He seems to be getting thinner, and he doesn’t get around as easily as he once did. You weren’t here when he showed up today—he walked as though gravity had suddenly doubled its pull on him.”
“Well, he’s an old guy, filly.”
“That’s exactly it. Where does he live? Does he have someone to look out for him?”
That was Jilly for you. She had a heart as big as the city, with room in it for everyone and everything.
She was forever taking in strays, be they dogs, cats, or people.
I’d been one of her strays once, but that was a long time ago.
“Maybe we should ask him,” I said.
“He can’t talk,” she reminded me.
“Maybe he just doesn’t
Jilly shook her head. “I’ve tried a zillion times. He hears what I’m saying, and somehow he manages to answer with a smile or a raised eyebrow or whatever, but he doesn’t talk.” The wrinkles in her brow deepened until I wanted to reach over and smooth them out. “These days,” she added, “he seems haunted to me.”
If someone else had said that, I’d know that they meant Paperjack had something troubling him. With Jilly though, you often had to take that kind of a statement literally.
“Are we talking ghosts now?” I asked.
I tried to keep the skepticism out of my voice, but from the flash of disappointment that touched Jilly’s eyes, I knew I hadn’t done a very good job.
“Oh, Geordie,” she said. “Why can’t you just
Here’s one version of what happened that night, some three years ago now, to which Jilly was referring:
We saw a ghost. He stepped out of the past on a rainy night and stole away the woman I loved. At least that’s the way I remember it. Except for Jilly, no one else does.
Her name was Samantha Rey. She worked at Gypsy Records and had an apartment on Stanton Street, except after that night, when the past came up to steal her away, no one at Gypsy Records remembered her anymore, and the landlady of her Stanton Street apartment had never heard of her. The ghost hadn’t just stolen her, he’d stolen all memory of her existence.
