When it was my turn to pick up the checks, I crossed the road to 1 Centre Street and entered the lobby, placed my bag on the old plastic container, watched it slide inside the metal detector, and waited to walk through the panels. Someone working the security desk waved me through and there I was, on the seventeenth floor, a serpentine labyrinth of dull, grey corridors leading to depressing offices and cubicles.

If I could find my way to the office where I needed to go, if I didn’t get lost, it was pure mechanical recall. It had been a year now that every other Friday I made my way here, found the door with the narrow window, lowered my face to the opening and announced my reason for wanting to enter the office: I was there to pick up the checks!

Eventually, someone would buzz me in and I would walk into the muted green and grey of that room, let myself be subjected to the logic of bureaucracy, and patiently wait for someone to prepare what I needed, so that I could return to our office triumphant, checks and pay-stubs in hand for all the members of our team. But on this day, a voice on the intercom gave me bad news: the woman in charge of our paychecks had just stepped out. I was welcome to wait.

I stumbled down the hall, passing a constellation of closed doors and muffled human sounds. I stopped by the elevators to take a look outside of the large windows. The long progression of people walking the Brooklyn Bridge mocked me: they had the freedom I lacked, up there on the seventeenth floor, where I was welcome to wait, in the presence of no one and nothing other than three old filing cabinets in the hallway, which like me, were waiting their turn to be discarded. Whoever was in charge of removing them from the building had gone only as far as placing them on top of a metal dolly, letting them languish there by the elevators for who knows how long.

In my boredom, I opened the top drawer of one of the cabinets and found old paper folders carelessly strewn about, victims of the haphazard passage of time. The second drawer was empty. And in the next, almost as if dictated by the rule of thirds, there was an unsealed envelope with a piece of yellow paper sticking out. The letter was sent in 1963 by a Cemetery in Long Island, and had been addressed to a certain ------- ------ of Brooklyn. Inside, I found two receipts for the perpetual care of cemetery plots, ones of ------- ------ and------- ------, husband and wife.

Knowing nothing of them, I wondered about these three people. I imagined the shape of their love, which, I thought, even if disguised under the name of duty, must have taken on the shape of an unbroken, connective thread, like a circle that touched both past and present, and in doing so, kept the self forever tethered to the other.

I knew it then: it would never happen to me.

Those days, I lived alone on the perfumed block. Every store on my street sold perfume and nothing other than perfume. Each night, on my way back home, I walked past colorful, shiny boxes, from the most luxurious and coveted, to the cheapest and most ordinary. They seemed to mock me with the certainty of their pleasure, as if they knew I led an ascetic life and had no skill in joy. And yet, long after the last customer had been dismissed, when the store doors and gates were locked for the night by the clerks, and the only sound on that street came from an occasional car or truck, the cacophony of scents from the stores below would permeate my old wooden floors, rise up to invade my second-floor apartment and keep me up for hours.

In my aloneness, I welcomed it. Warm gourmands, sharp citrus, elegant florals—I loved them all equally, and together most of all. Others might have complained about the smells, or suffered from allergic reactions and migraines, but to me, the scents were a needed escape from the mundaneness of my day to day life. At work, I would dream of their useless luxury, their ephemeral beauty, and the small comfort that would greet me when I returned home.

And while the only thing I could be grateful for in my life was this temporary and accidental tenderness—offered by the inanimate, anonymous bottles waiting to be purchased as gifts for birthdays, engagements and Christmas, and as I had to admit, was most likely exaggerated by my imagination—someone decades ago had taken the effort to make official the love they felt for those closest to them. Ashamed by the immediacy with which such thoughts full of indulgent self-pity entered my mind, I concentrated on the receipts again. I stared at three names: the two in their graves, and the one who had labored for their care, but they said nothing to me. They were empty signifiers that I needed to make real because of my loneliness, because of my street that smelled like vanilla and Sicilian lemons, because of waiting on the seventeenth floor.

When I returned to the office, I hardly spoke to anyone. I handed them their checks—which I had finally received, but with little satisfaction—and sat in front of the computer. I wanted to believe there was a reason why it was me, precisely, who found the envelope and letters. Why had no one else had any curiosity about the filing cabinet, and why, if they had been curious indeed, did they not bother to open its drawers and find what was left there? And if they did find the envelope before me, did they not think it was important? And if they didn’t, what had pushed me to think otherwise?

I settled into searching.

At first glance, the three names were too common. The first two pages of the search engine results provided little information. Every new website led nowhere. Buried somewhere in the third page, however, was a clue in a news article stored in some archive. 1974. A protest against school segregation, and one of our protagonists, the man who purchased the perpetual care, who was identified as a city employee fighting for desegregation, describing the threats and damage caused to his house by those in disagreement. In between the lines, a summary of his life: a Brooklyn home address, his profession, the names of his children and wife, and then, mentions of the Holocaust, comparisons being drawn, a strong resolve. “They were defeated in Germany, and so they will be here,” was his concluding remark.

I thought of my perfumed street, of Gabrielle Chanel fucking Nazis and then living to the ripe old age of 87, leaving behind the world’s most famous perfume and a nearly spotless reputation. I thought of François Coty, whose innovations in the selling of perfume were deemed important enough to obscure his antisemitism and disdain for the working class. And didn’t it always come down to that? The absurd luck enjoyed by the worst people, the unfair rolling of the dice, fate’s kindness toward the few. Here was someone who had tried to do what was just, only for his efforts to be forgotten, discovered accidentally by a lowly municipal worker on an ordinary Friday.

Shouldn’t there have been some greater commotion?

Suddenly, I remembered the genealogy archive I had used to find my family’s immigration records, tried my luck with the names of the parents, the son, and the address I found, and soon, there they were before me. Bitola. Immigration records. Certificates of naturalization. Chicago, then New York. Seven children. A tenement at Eldridge Street, then at Forsyth Street. Membership records for synagogues of the Lower East Side. Employment as tailors, shop clerks. Registrations in the army. The move to Brooklyn. Settling in Coney Island. The children’s careers: enviable artistic pursuits, talent, success. Steady jobs, pension plans, white collar. Sometime in-between, the perpetual care and the protest. Whole lives reduced to bureaucratic records.

The evidence of their existence started to spread out in front of me, as specific as it was sparse, so that I could only think of their lives as an amalgamation of facts, not as a narrative.

The years that separated me from all these events, these dates, and these names, weighed on my shoulders and pushed me down on my seat. That immensity of time felt like, all of the sudden, finding myself on a raft boat in the middle of the open ocean. In those depths, away from all land, unreachable to other vessels, the stillness of the water would not be the calming sight observed from the shore, but a promise that the unknown was preparing its revenge.

No, I thought, I can’t continue.

Yet, on the way home that evening, I stopped at the drugstore intent on continuing my investigation. I placed a few boxes of steel wool in my basket and went to pay. The line was long, and I was stuck behind a woman arguing with the cashier: there was something wrong with her coupons. “Come back tomorrow,” the cashier told her. But the woman responded, loudly enough for all of us to hear, that tomorrow she was burying her brother, and she could not deal with this problem then. No one acknowledged this breach in the social contract, we carried on with waiting. I muttered the names I had discovered, counting the years that had separated us, calculating the possibility for me to have walked the same street at the same time as one of them, and so I passed the time, the minutes and seconds, in the imaginary world where ------ and I existed briefly together.

But when my waiting was done, and with it, my imagining, I paid for my stuff and stepped out in the cold air. It was dark already, so I didn’t linger on the street. I passed the perfume stores quickly, barely glancing at the customers still inside, the clerks wrapping boxes in shiny purple and silver plastic. When I entered my apartment, I turned on all the lights. I took the steel wool and unraveled it, then cut it in small pieces that I stuffed in every opening of my hardwood floors. I found some old sealing tape in a drawer and used it to secure the steel wool tightly against the floors. When I was finally done with the holes in the floors, which once I started, seemed to multiply every few minutes, I opened, very methodically, every single window in the apartment. The cold, fresh air filled each room.

Tomorrow, I would go to Eldridge Street. I would walk up and down its length, and then move over to Forsyth, before taking the train down to Mermaid Avenue. I would see where the family had lived and then I would understand everything. So, tonight, I couldn’t let anything get in the way of the sensations I would feel tomorrow, and the air needed to be cleansed: no fragrance could enter the apartment and linger in the air.

I would find something somewhere, I thought. If not at the first location, then at the second. And if not there, the third would have to have something for me. Because if I came home empty handed, it would be up to me to give this story meaning. It would be my duty to struggle and find some significance for these events, which I would have to recover from the ordinary meaning one could ascribe to the discovery of some old receipts in an old envelope inside a filing cabinet destined for the trash, forgotten on the seventeenth floor of the biggest bureaucratic building in the city. I wasn’t up for that task, this much I knew.

In the morning, I put on my nice gloves and hat and called out of work.

When I stepped out of my building, it was so early that the superintendent was still standing by the main door and having his coffee like he did every dawn. I remembered the awkward night a few months earlier, when I had found him drunk in the lobby, his body slumped over a couch in the waiting area. I had helped him to his apartment down in the basement, all while he muttered something about his children. If he had been depressed about his unhappy wife, then I could have helped somewhat. But children? It was out of my element completely.

I must have done something right because he thanked me so profusely the next day, making me so sick with his exaggerated gratitude that only reminded me of his pathetic state the night before, that I took every effort to avoid him in the weeks that followed. And now, there he was, in his old thermal pajamas, the color of boiled cherries, holding a mug of coffee and eager to give me an earnest greeting. I yelled “good morning!” to him first, and before he had the chance to vomit his well-wishes at me, I turned the corner.

The subway car was nearly empty and reeked of musk and smoke. It felt good to have a goal for the day. I looked forward to returning home in the evening, my feet aching from the day’s walk. Even if my mission was as undefined as the vague imperative to face the past, I was determined to carry it out. But doubt negged at me: What was I expecting to find on my journey? And if I found something, whatever that was, what would I do with that knowledge? Who would I tell?

Eldridge and Forsyth provided few answers.

Busy sidewalks, groups of people going their own way, no neighbors to ask any questions, renovated buildings flanking those left in disrepair, sterile storefronts, an attack of white tile and pale mint walls. A feeling overwhelmed me: could anyone, at any time, have made a life here? And was I projecting the disappointments of my own life to the lives of strangers who had once walked these streets? The anxiety I had begun to feel when I had stepped out of the station—and which increased with every new building I decided could not have housed this family, after all, because it was missing something—followed me all the way to Coney Island.

Mermaid Avenue is a long street. Every block contains the same combination of businesses: a deli advertising their sandwiches, a small market with crates of fruit outside, an empty restaurant, a bank, a dentist’s office. In the two or three floors above these storefronts, lives unfolded unbeknownst to one other. How could I think I’d ever know anything about them, when I couldn’t uncover even the most basic clue about ------ in the neighborhoods where they lived for so many years.

It began to feel hopeless.

In my search the previous day, I had come across a long interview with one of the couple’s children. “Our family was very normal,” he had said, “we did what was expected of us: hard and honest work every day, and dinner at home each evening.” Then, he added: “But there was always music. My mother sang constantly, while ironing or cooking, and my father played all sorts of melodies on our piano or his harmonica. And us kids, too, would hum and practice instruments, so there was always some kind of sound at home. Often, it would be the combination of multiple people singing, an unplanned and directionless chorus, where you could never make out what was being sung or by whom.”

Maybe that was it, I thought. Maybe I was fascinated by how simply and seriously these strangers had made beauty into a way of life, how they had resisted the tyranny of the formula. It seemed that, underneath the veneer of the conventional conveyed by the documents I had found in the archives, there was something undefinable about this family, something that endured even the scrutiny of time and the demands of the story.

I was getting tired.

I entered the first bakery I noticed on that block, its windows crowded with loaves of bread, rows of Italian cookies, and the morning’s stale bagels. I needed something to eat, ordered a sandwich at the counter, and paced back and forth while waiting for the food to be ready. The interior smelled of yeast, sugar, warm cinnamon, orange and chocolate. I thought of the perfume stores on my street and wondered if perfumers came to nondescript bakeries like this one, in order to scope out inviting aromas before replicating them for mass consumption.

On one of the bakery’s walls, there were photographs from key moments in the story of the business. In one of them, two men stood smiling, their arms crossed. Under the photo, a caption identified them as the original owner of the bakery, and his employee ------ , one of the sons of the family I had been looking for all day. He had worked there, and so, they had lived nearby, this much was certain. Was this the permission I needed to speculate, freely, about their lives?

The woman at the counter wore topaz earrings, they sparkled in whatever afternoon sun managed to penetrate the crammed windows. I wondered if I should ask her something about the photograph, and if so, what could I ask to make my mission clear? The man in front of me was laughing with her as she handed him some change. “Every morning I say ‘praise him’!” he told her, “I woke up alive!” Her earrings sparkled, and as she smiled, I became afraid of what I would say.

I was up next. I couldn’t help it: I told them everything.

I told them about the seventeenth floor, told them about the abandoned filing cabinets, the abandoned envelopes, the perpetual care, my empty apartment, the long hours of searching, the archives filled with indecipherable cursive, the Lower East Side, the synagogues, the music, the singing, the protest, and my reasons, which I still didn’t understand, but I was trying to discover, there, in that bakery, where a photograph of one of the ------ couple’s sons was hanging, taunting me with its proximity to the truth, the kernel of the story, and the immensity of its simultaneous distance from the past, which held the only solution to this mess.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but the only response I received was the man’s dismissive “perpetual care?”, which he spoke after a long pause. “That’s just how those cemeteries make their money. You ever see a poor funeral director?” he said with a conviction you could only find in the peripheries of this borough, adding, “Me, I told my family to cremate me when I die, and just sprinkle my ashes over the Atlantic over there, let me float back home, that’s what I said.”

They both waited for me to answer, to explain myself, or at least ask them a simpler question, but I was embarrassed, spent and silent. I placed some bills in the tip jar, closed the door behind me, and walked to the boardwalk. I climbed the stairs and faced the ocean, couldn’t help imagining the man from the bakery, whose essence would one day get lost in the waves. And what more could we want? It was a nice afternoon. Soon, the golden hour would give a sweeter smell to the salty sea air. I took a seat on one of the few empty benches on the boardwalk. A dedication plaque on it read: In the Memory of ------ , who loved to sit by the water. Predictable. Despite my dissatisfaction, the story wanted to come full circle, and so it did.