At the street number that I’d written on the card, I found a large, plain single-story building, impressive only for its size. The street was almost clogged with big trucks making deliveries and picking up shipments at an array of businesses. A marshaling yard on the north side of Metropolitan Suits, adjacent to the company’s loading docks, seemed to be the busiest place of all.
The front door brought me into a reception area. To the right, a counter separated the public space from four desks where women sat typing, working adding machines, and answering phones. The center of the room was open, and to the left were eight chairs, all empty, and a coffee table on which glossy magazines were fanned like a hand of cards.
One of the women got up from her desk, a nice older lady with curly gray hair, and came to the counter and smiled and asked if she could help me.
“I need to see Mr. George T. Yoshioka, please. I’m sorry to bother him on the job, I don’t want to get him fired or anything, but it’s very important, it’s an emergency.”
“And your name?” she asked.
“Jonah Ellington Basie Hines—” I checked myself. “Jonah Kirk, ma’am. I’m Mr.
Yoshioka’s neighbor. He’s fifth floor, see, and my mom and me are on the fourth.”
Indicating the chairs around the table of magazines, she said, “Have a seat, Jonah, and I’ll let Mr. Yoshioka know you’re here.”
I was too nervous to sit. I stood in the center of the room, shifting from foot to foot, taking off my gloves and stuffing them in my jacket pockets.
When the lady returned to her desk and picked up the phone, I could hear her voice, soft and low, but I couldn’t make out a word.
The many trucks in the marshaling yard suggested the company must be successful, but you wouldn’t know it from the condition of the reception lounge. Painted concrete floor. Cheap wood paneling. An acoustic-tile ceiling. The chairs looked like army surplus.
At the counter again, the gray-haired lady said, “Mr. Yoshioka will join you in a minute.” She seemed to realize that in my highly agitated state, I couldn’t bear to sit down. Pointing to an inner door directly opposite the outer one, she said, “He’ll be coming through there.”
She didn’t invite me to open that door, but I opened it anyway, without thinking. Beyond lay an immense, well-lighted chamber with a complex truss ceiling, the thick tie beams of which were supported by rows of tall steel poles. A couple of hundred people toiled in what appeared to be long-practiced rhythms. At the nearer end, men worked in pairs at wide tables, with great bolts of material that could be drawn as needed from enormous spools suspended from the beams overhead. They chalked the material to match patterns they placed upon it and then, with large and wickedly sharp shears, cut quickly and precisely to the chalk line. Farther back, still more men sat at smaller tables, operating industrial sewing machines; each was attended by a younger man ever on his feet, supplying his superior with pre-cut pieces of material, lining fabric, and other items just when needed. These younger men were the only employees on the floor who didn’t wear suits and ties, though the older men worked in their shirtsleeves, their suit coats draped on nearby chairs. To a boy’s eye, that farther end of the vast room had a macabre quality, for throughout stood tailors’ dummies, mannequins of various sizes, all of them headless. In the back wall were three widely separated pairs of doors leading to other realms of the Metropolitan maze.
The sewing machines stuttered ceaselessly in their stitching, and the place smelled of wool. Warm air came in through wall vents near the floor, and exhaust fans pulled it toward fewer but larger vents in the exposed ductwork that snaked through the truss system overhead. In the ascending currents, I saw fabric dust rotating as it rose, like galaxies of tiny suns and planets and moons.
Some might say these were tedious jobs involving mind-numbing repetitious motions, but to a boy like me, the great room and all in it were astonishing, wondrous. The men who labored there seemed too engaged in their work to be bored, and the confidence and speed with which they performed their tasks struck me as wizardly.
Mr. Yoshioka appeared in one of the aisles, in his shirtsleeves but pulling on his suit jacket as he approached. He smiled and gave me a half bow and said, “What a pleasant surprise to see you, Jonah Kirk.”
“I’m so sorry to bother you at work, sir, but something really bad has happened, and I don’t know—”
He interrupted me. “Perhaps it would be wise to wait until we can discuss this without raising our voices.”
To the left of the door hung a time clock and next to it a file board with hundreds of slots containing envelope-size cards arranged alphabetically. Mr. Yoshioka took his from near the end of the array, inserted it in the clock, and put it away after it had been stamped with the time.
In the reception lounge, we sat in the two chairs farthest from the four women busy at their desks. We didn’t whisper, but we spoke softly.
“You know when I finally told you everything, how I’d seen Eve Adams dead in a dream, and her name was really Fiona Cassidy?”
Mr. Yoshioka nodded. “This was after you brought me a plate of your mother’s superb chocolate-chip cookies, for which I remain most grateful.”
“I thought you wouldn’t believe me about the dream, but you did. I’ll never forget how you believed me. It was like a huge relief.”
He smiled at me and waited.
With some embarrassment, I said, “Well, I didn’t really tell you everything. I mean, I told you everything about Fiona Cassidy, but she isn’t the only dream.”
“And now you will tell me everything.”
“Yes. I have to. It’s all tied together somehow.”
“Perhaps it is a good sign that you have not brought me cookies this time.”
“Sir?”
“When you bring me cookies and tell me everything, it turns out that the everything was not everything. Perhaps the cookies are your way of apologizing in advance for not telling me everything.”