Up the drive, through woods, we left the rain shower. The cab pulled up to the indistinct warehouse I had seen on Google Street View — blue aluminum, no windows, no sign of people other than a few cars in the lot. A big Dumpster in the parking lot was filled with construction scrap, but on second look I saw it was full of dead suitcases, ones that had been unzipped or cut open and discarded.
I told the driver to wait.
“Why are we here?” Elizabeth asked, getting out and looking over the top of the car at me. I could hear the rain advancing through the trees and waved her to take my arm and run. We got under the shelter and I said, “I just heard about this place. It’s supposedly where all lost and unclaimed luggage ends up. I thought it would be interesting.”
She wiped the water off her shoulder. “Used to, when the airlines lost your luggage, they found it and delivered to your front door. Now they give you a voucher for the value. Everything is expendable.”
When we stepped through the door and saw the expanse of the place, saw the rows and rows of merchandise, I felt around inside my bag, dug her camera out, the one she used to take pictures of the merchandise in the retail stores in the airports, and gave it to her without a word.
The warehouse was a giant thrift store filled with smells of used clothing, old plastic, warm electronics. I saw no other shoppers. Only a mannequin guarding the entrance dressed completely in scuba gear and holding a spear gun, guarding the wall-to-wall forgotten merchandise, a graveyard of lost things.
“Welcome to Mishandled Luggage!” a man shouted over the full rain on the metal roof. He was behind a sales counter working on the interior of something electronic. His cash register read a green “00000.”
I caught up to Elizabeth at the glass jewelry case. Inside, mannequin hands reached out of the lake of a mirror, plastic fingers garishly adorned with rings — lost wedding bands, cheap green stones, ugly turquoise jewelry, white price tags dangling.
“Look at this, Sandeep!” She took the camera and aimed into the display case, trying to get a picture through the glass. We went to the next case where watches hung from horizontally placed golf clubs, hundreds of watches.
Somehow I knew which direction to walk. Maybe it was the increase of electronic noise from the back, but I saw guitars on the back wall, old ones and shiny new ones, a few without strings. Guitars? Who lost guitars? And each one represented someone’s broken heart, like Elizabeth with her violin or the girl who’d dropped Barbie into the Air of Liability.
There was so much stuff here I didn’t even notice the young woman until she moved, lifted her head to see us. She sat on a stool behind a counter, and her chin dropped to continue reading an old paperback held open on her knees.
On the wall were beat-up trumpets, shiny flutes, and empty instrument cases with plush red-velvet interiors. Beneath the pounding of the rain was my heartbeat because I saw high on the wall a violin in its open case sitting on pegboard hooks. I could see the Master Stefen label liner, the gold script on black cloth, one that I had seen all my life. It is a popular maker of violins, but I felt the remnants of raindrops reach my scalp and tingle. “Elizabeth” was all I could say, but she had seen it.
“That,” she said to the girl reading on the stool. “Get that down.”
That’s it, I thought, that can’t be it. The coolness of the raindrops made me dizzy. This can’t be happening.
The girl pulled an aluminum ladder over, legs clattering. Elizabeth put her hands on her ears to block the racket, and the girl stopped and climbed.
Elizabeth pivoted to me and said, “That is my violin. Sandeep, how did you know?”
For the first time that trip, I noticed her earrings (clip-ons) — were gold frogs sleeping on her ears.
“I don’t know how to tell you,” I said.
The girl took the Master Stefen by the neck, no strings.
“Be careful,” Elizabeth said, “and the case too. It is all delicate.”
The girl put the violin under her arm and grabbed the case.
When a pegboard hook fell, clanging through the ladder, Elizabeth put her hand to her mouth, but the girl made it to the ground and came forth and put the violin on the counter. An orange tag had $800 written on it.
“This is my violin,” Elizabeth said to me. It lay before her, but she seemed unable to reach out to touch it. Her right hand came out slowly and for some reason the violin reminded me — this thing without strings — of something dead in a tiny coffin, the children’s graves I had seen when we played flashlight tag in the cemetery in Florida, and she lifted it.
“Is it okay?” I asked her.
“This is my violin,” she said to the girl.
The girl said, “It’s eight hundred dollars.”
Elizabeth twisted around, eyes wide in disbelief. “I should not have to pay for my own violin!” She looked at me, tears streaking. I couldn’t bear to look at her. “Should I have to pay for my own violin?” she said.
I took my money clip out, hands shaking.
The girl said, “You don’t pay me.”
We had to go to the man up front. He scanned a barcode on a sticker and the register went from 00000 to 00800. Maybe I should have explained that the price was badly wrong, but I was shaking and stunned, only wanted to get out of there.
I gave him the money to get us back out in the world with her violin, which rode in its case on her lap in the cab. Classic music played on the cab’s satellite radio as the driver retraced the path back to the airport, Mozart’s Symphony No. 15. Elizabeth wiped tears away as soon as they came, trying not to sniff, both of us wondering what had just happened.
Her tears cleared up and she asked me, “How did you know it was there?”
“Are you absolutely sure this is yours?”
“Without a doubt. How did you know?”
My hands squeezed my knees, and I said, “Magic.”
“Dammit,” the driver said and touched a finger to the radio to change stations until the screen said “Sports Talk 250” and the music was gone.
My phone vibrated. I pulled it out and saw a new conversation had begun:
Some people call them “miracles.”
I texted:
Thank you for the lost luggage tip. How did you know?
Now Raye?
Somebody out there could obviously sort through data and track a violin down. The explanation would be complicated but it would be a rational one. I kept reminding myself of this. It wasn’t really magic. Nothing was but I had this wonderful feeling of being confused by what I saw.
I quickly turned my phone for Elizabeth to see. “Do you see this conversation?” I said to her.
She cleared her eyes and tilted her head back even though she didn’t have her reading glasses on. “What?”
I looked at the phone and there was nothing but the phone’s menu, the conversation gone.
Everything could be explained, maybe explained with a long-shot scenario, like the fact that all information exists on the web and a hacker could get information and track down a violin. I think we all have this sense that a shadow exists in this other space — each name, place, thought, theorem, video — entire lives could be constructed from the information. I had once noticed how my fingers were more blunt than Elizabeth’s, and the thought crossed my mind to search “Sanghavi Aardarsh’s fingers” to see what my grandfather’s fingers looked like before I realized the absurdity.
The satellite radio on the dash changed from sports talk back to Symphony No. 15 without the driver touching it. Everything was becoming a message to me, or I was going insane.