ENCYCLOPEDIA BROWN TRACKS THEM DOWN

or FROM INFINITY TO KATMAI

What happened was one of my neighbors was moving and he knew I was a reader — I had a reputation around the neighborhood, was always carrying a book — and on the day he dipped he left a set of Colliers Encyclopedias for me with my mother.  (I was at school.)  The black and red 1975 edition.  All two dozen volumes present, except for two. 

This was in 1977 or 1978; I was either 8 or 9 and believe me when I tell you that no one could have given me a better gift.  First, I loved reading like other people loved money; nothing to me was more satisfying, more exhilarating, more important, more complete — nothing.  Second — and perhaps more importantly, during my first months as an immigrant, I had evolved this random conviction that if I learned enough about the US, if I became an expert on all things Yankee Doodle, I could make my American life easier.  Nothing I could do about my ridiculous family, but I figured I could do something about my acculturation, if I just read enough American facts. 

Which explains why I battened on to those encyclopedias like all life on the planet depended on it, venerated them like they were the Ark of the fucking Covenant. 

I really believed in reading.    

But here’s where the weirdness began.  Remember the two volumes that I mentioned were missing?   One of them, Volume 8 (Deccan to Electron) happened to be the very one where a young curious Dominican boy could have found an entry for the Dominican Republic.  (Did it ever cross my mind that Volume 13 (Infinity To Katmai) might contain a Junot entry? Maybe once. Or twice.)  

For a normal kid, this might have been a brief blip, nothing more.  No big deal.  But I didn’t get halfway through the first volume (A to Ameland) before becoming weirdly obsessed with the possibility that missing Volume 8 would contain a Dominican Republic entry that —unlike all the other Dominican entries I’d read, and I’d read quite a few in other encyclopedias by then — would explain me, explain what the hell I was, and in the process help me out with the whole surviving America thing. 

Clearly I was going through it in those days.

Had you known me as a kid you wouldn’t need a palantír to know that this was going to turn into a whole damn thing.  Which it did.  For the next year or so I turned into Encyclopedia Brown and searched everywhere for those lost volumes.  Walked to every library I could, including my tíos’ local libraries in East New York and the Bronx.  At least once a month I braved the landfill and asked the workers if anyone had thrown out any encyclopedias.  They looked at me like I was nuts, though the nicer ones would occasionally direct me to the stack of water-crinkled porno magazines they had piled higher than a Syracuse snow-mound in February.

Today I could hop on Ebay and find the missing volumes lickety-split — in fact, I just did — but in and around 1978 neither technology nor luck was on my side. 

I don’t want to pretend that I thought about it all the time.  I wasn’t Ethan Edwards and this wasn’t The Searchers, but it did preoccupy more of my thoughts than it should have.  I even had these occasional fucked-up dreams where I found the missing volumes, but I always woke up before I could read to the desperately-sought entry.

Codex Interruptus.

I often dreamed about finding another The Lord of the Rings novel, or a sequel to Watership Down (“The Return of Fiver!”) — but the mind that could imagine those impossibilities wouldn’t let me read those fucking encyclopedias, not for mercy or prayer. 

2

I knew a kid who wore a Spider-Man onesie every hour of every day for a year, even to school.  I grew up with someone who for the entirety of fifth and sixth grade was completely convinced that he was a ninja, even though he couldn’t throw a shuriken to save his life, wasn’t at all violent. 

Surprise, surprise — a boy who would grow up to be a writer thought a book was going to save him. 

Anyway, it was a year-long fever.

And like most fevers it finally broke. 

Why?  No idea.  No special moment, no epiphanic bolt.  Something in me just shifted, as quiet and unobtrusive as blood in a vein.  I stopped looking, stopping thinking about the missing volumes.  Like my ninja neighbor, who one day without so much as a word put away the sais and the rope chain, and that was it for his shinobi dreams. 

Another friend who knows this story and knew me in those youth years suspects that the whole Encyclopedia Brown phase was my way of mourning the Dominican Republic, of keeping the country I lost as close as I could bear to keep it. 

So what happened? I asked him.  Did I stop mourning Santo Domingo? 

Either that or you realized you were never getting it back.

Fuck me, I told him. 

Fuck me.