The MTA misplaced and located. {Photograph} by Sophie Haigney.
I used to be pondering, just lately, of a scene from the animated film Rudolph the Pink-Nosed Reindeer. The island of misplaced toys, I remembered, was a spot within the North Pole the place the stuffed bears and Scorching Wheels automobiles and waddling wind-up penguins that disappear from youngsters’s lives ended up. They lived fortunately in their very own colony, tinged solely barely with the unhappy shadow of their severance from their human caretakers. I went to search for this scene, and it turned out I had misremembered it and had been doing so for years. There isn’t any island of misplaced toys. Within the film it’s the island of misfit toys—all of the extra poignant, for the toys are usually not misplaced however deserted, as a result of they don’t fairly belong. Kids don’t need them and they also discover each other. Finally this odd forged of characters comes collectively to show Rudolph a lesson about the great thing about being a misfit; as everyone knows, that individual story ends fortunately ever after. But when the misfits have discovered each other, the place do the misplaced toys go?
That query form of solutions itself: they’re misplaced. They’re unaccounted for. There are some attainable explanations. Maybe that treasured stuffed lion, worn across the ears, was forgotten on the crimson banquette at an Italian restaurant the place the kid was drawing in crayon on a paper tablecloth. Maybe it fell between the seats of a Land Rover, or worse, into the bottomless netherland of “underneath the mattress.” However even when these eventualities are believable or true, they is likely to be unverifiable, and so some issues merely appear to be erased from earth. I lose issues on a regular basis—bank cards, keys, jackets, sun shades, books, a necklace, two necklaces—truly, three necklaces, all of them items from individuals who beloved me. Generally I joke that I apply nonattachment, the Buddhist factor, although the actual rationalization is that I’m clumsy and careless. I do marvel the place it’s that my issues have gone. I’ve at all times been bothered by this, a lot in order that it appears I invented and sustained a perception in a fictional Arctic island populated by reindeer the place misplaced issues would possibly at some point be restored.
I went just a few weeks in the past to the bowels of Penn Station. Squeezed beneath the A/C platform, behind a door embellished with colourful sketches of tennis rackets, cameras, basketballs, guitars, purses, gentle bulbs—all method of cartoon odds and ends—is the MTA’s central misplaced and located. Usually, one sidles as much as a glass window manned by an attendant and requests an merchandise. If the merchandise is there, you obtain it and depart. Accompanied by Ron Younger, who runs the New York Metropolis Transit misplaced and located and has been with the MTA for seventeen years, I used to be in a position to go behind the door. This space is the form of purgatory the place each single merchandise that has been recovered from a New York Metropolis bus or subway is awaiting its attainable return. On common, 5 to 6 hundred objects are available every week.
Within the entrance workplace, at desks with plastic dividers between them, 4 women and men had been working in a means that I can solely describe as methodical with out even understanding the strategy. A person on the first desk was counting greenback payments. The girl behind him had units of keys on her desk to be slipped into plastic sleeves together with figuring out info. (Normally with keys there may be none.) Another person was typing into a large spreadsheet.
Right here is how the method often works: somebody forgets one thing on a bus or a prepare. Mostly, it’s a pockets or a mobile phone. It might be glasses, a guide, a pair of footwear, X-rays, skis, a hat, a backpack, a banjo. This stuff are then discovered, often by somebody on the cleansing crew or a bus driver or a fellow passenger; they’re catalogued on-site and packed into large burlap sacks, that are delivered weekly to the central misplaced and located. Upon arrival, the contents of every bag are reassessed (at all times by two folks, Younger tells me, so there can by no means be any questions of impropriety, of misplaced issues gone doubly lacking). The objects are then damaged down by class internally: Money/Containing Money, Wallets & IDs, Cell Telephones, Massive Gadgets, and Miscellaneous. The entrance workplace—the women and men bent over the desks—make each try to seek out and phone the proprietor of the merchandise. With a pockets, that’s typically comparatively simple. With sun shades, almost unattainable. However each merchandise is saved away, for various lengths of time based mostly on the article’s perceived worth. (Some issues get three months; others, three years.) If nobody claims them—and most objects do go unclaimed—they’re then donated, auctioned off, or trashed. A special division takes care of that.
Younger took me again to the world the place the big objects are saved. Strollers, tennis luggage, a snowboard, a guitar in a case, a walker, a wheelchair, a Peppa Pig backpack, a Google fitness center bag. I wandered round for some time, taking notes, trying on the stuff. It was nothing particular, actually: not fairly a junkyard really feel, extra just like the storage closet behind a highschool fitness center. There have been curiosities which Younger and others identified: old-school prosthetic legs, jumbled in a bin; a scale for weighing medicine; a classic ammunition case; a bag filled with previous dentures. (Comparable dentures had apparently just lately been reclaimed.) After which umbrella after umbrella after umbrella.
On the finish of Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping, the narrator, Ruth, and her aunt Sylvie burn down their home—disordered, decaying, packed to the brim with relics and junk—fairly than depart their possessions behind. Robinson writes:
For even issues misplaced in a home abide, like forgotten sorrows and incipient desires, and plenty of family issues are of purely sentimental worth, just like the dim coil of thick hair, saved from my grandmother’s girlhood, which was stored in a hatbox on high of the wardrobe, together with my mom’s grey purse. Within the equal gentle of disinterested scrutiny such issues are usually not themselves. They’re remodeled into pure object, and are horrible, and have to be burned.
This picture at all times returns to me—the close to violence Ruth experiences when this stuff lose their high quality of reminiscence and turn out to be “pure object.” I had a sense, within the fluorescence of this basement, that we had been within the land of pure object right here.
We handed by means of the world dedicated to smaller electronics. Hundreds of cell telephones had been saved in old-school submitting cupboards, grouped by the date of retrieval. Some had been stored in a type of cage, packaged collectively in plastic in order that they shaped a brick-like stack, iPhone on high of iPhone on high of iPhone. Ringtones and alarms had been periodically going off, little chimes and blaring tones, some endlessly ringing like an out-of-whack ice cream truck. Younger mentioned he typically marveled at their battery life, the way in which these telephones might keep alive for months and months after they’d been discovered, since nobody was utilizing them day-to-day. Paradoxically, locked cell telephones are one of many hardest objects to hint—“black iPhone” is completely ineffective as an identifier, Younger advised me, even when somebody does take the difficulty to name and request theirs again. these stacks of telephones—most certainly lengthy since changed by folks like me who can’t final greater than a day or two with out one—and listening to them ringing out in a form of half life, it was arduous to not really feel slightly dispirited. The island of misplaced toys was extra dejected than I’d imagined, the losses extra remaining or interchangeable; in any case, we change our issues on a regular basis, with out pondering a lot of the previous ones. Most misplaced issues merely don’t get discovered.
There are upbeat narratives that come out of the misplaced and located, although, the sort that always make for native information tales. Somebody left their marriage ceremony costume on a prepare, and a lady within the entrance workplace thought to hint it to the dry cleaner whose tags had been nonetheless on it. An urn of pet ashes, just lately, was traced to a cemetery in Wisconsin, and ultimately made its means again to the grateful house owners. As we walked again towards the entrance, I used to be launched to Veronica Santana, who’d just lately made the native information as a result of she had helped hint a naval aviation ID card of a World Struggle II veteran again to his daughter, months after it had been left on the prepare. (The daughter had been bringing it to a particular displaying of High Gun: Maverick for veterans.) After which after all there are wallets, driver’s licenses, backpacks, which are consistently and quietly being returned to their house owners—a headache or a serious disaster resolved for somebody someplace.
Ron Younger advised me that in additional than ten years, they’ve by no means misplaced an merchandise within the system after it’s been turned in, at the same time as they’re storing ten thousand or extra objects at a time. That is form of exceptional if you consider it, this huge bureaucratic system of monitoring lostness, and all these workouts in preserving and care. There’s something spiritual about all of this, one thing Christian, I actually imply, despite the fact that it’s most likely, definitely blasphemous to consider worldly possessions like that. However I’m imagining little resurrection tales, simply as I imagined my island of misplaced issues—these objects restored to a type of life when reunited with their house owners. On this gentle of disinterested scrutiny, the bag of classic golf golf equipment will be nothing however a set of golf equipment, inexperienced bag, not the latest mannequin; their story has come to a type of finish. However truly maybe it has been redirected right here: of their path from consumption to cataloguing to storage, these golf equipment tackle a brand new and poignant set of prospects. Return, renewal—unlikely however attainable. What higher destiny for something, or for anybody for that matter, than to be as soon as misplaced after which discovered once more?
Sophie Haigney is the online editor of The Paris Overview.
