The Salvage

Benjamin Lichtenstein had read in the paper that the neon was finally getting a home, that the whole saved hoard of it was going into the old bowling stadium downtown where people could walk among it, and so at seventy-nine he drove himself across town on a bright cold afternoon to the warehouse where a man he had never met had kept the dead signs of Reno alive for thirty years. He had spent his working life as an accountant, a man who counted what a thing was worth and wrote the number down, and he had come, he told himself, only to see the arithmetic of it, how much of a vanished city one stubborn person could carry off and store against the day the city wanted it back. That was what he told himself in the car. It was not the true reason and he half knew it.

The warehouse was cold and high and full of giants. They lay on their backs and leaned against the walls, the enormous letters, taller than a man, the cowboys and the covered wagons and the great looping script, all of it gone dark, the glass tubing traced across the steel like the veins of something that had been alive. He knew them. He was old enough to know every one. There were the letters off Harold’s Club and the Nevada Club, both of them knocked flat in ninety-nine, the year they cleared that block of Virginia to build something that in turn had already come and gone. There was one of the Mapes cowboys, the hotel his neighbors had been proud of, the finest in the state once, dropped into its own dust in two thousand while the town watched from the far bank of the river. A man had gone out with a truck and a checkbook and no help from anybody and saved these, one demolition at a time, for no better reason than that he could not stand to see them go in the landfill, and now the town had decided it wanted them after all, and there was going to be a museum.

A young woman with a clipboard was walking the aisles, tagging pieces for the move, and she smiled at him and let him wander, and after a while she came and stood near him where he had stopped in front of the Nevada Club letters and she said it got people that way, the size of them, that everyone remembered them small and lit and high up in the dark and forgot they were this big.

“My family was in dry goods,” Benjamin said, which was not what he had meant to say. “Up on Sierra Street. My great-grandfather. Then my mother ran it through the Depression. We never had a sign like these. A painted board over the door. That was all a store like ours ran to.”

The young woman nodded, kind and a little uncertain, the way the young were with the old when the old began to reach back past anything the young could stand in.

What he had not said, what he had driven across town holding and still could not quite get his mouth around, was the other building. In nineteen twenty-one his grandfather Aaron had sat on the committee that raised the money for the temple on West Street, the first synagogue in the whole state of Nevada, a plain brick house of worship between Fourth and Fifth where three generations of them had been named and married and mourned. Benjamin had been a young man of twenty-five, newly an accountant, the winter they condemned it, and he had stood on the sidewalk in the cold of nineteen seventy-one and watched them take it down, the walls his grandfather had paid for coming apart under a machine, and it had been the first time in his life he understood that a thing could be sacred and be rubble in the same week. The congregation had built again, out on Manzanita Lane, and dedicated the new building two years later, and life had gone on, as it does. And the lot on West Street where the temple had stood, the ground itself, had become in time a parking garage for the Eldorado, six flat concrete decks of cars, and there was not a plaque or a stone or a scrap of anything to say what had stood there, and there never would be, because a temple did not leave a sign a collector could carry off in a truck. It left nothing. It became a place to put cars.

That was the thing he had come to feel and could not say to a girl with a clipboard. The casinos that had risen over his grandfather’s temple were themselves coming down now, one after another, the Mapes and Harold’s and the Nevada Club, and the town wept over their neon and built it a museum, saved the very bones of the places that had done the paving. He did not begrudge it. He had loved those signs too, as a boy, coming downtown on a summer night with the whole street burning red and gold overhead. He only stood among the saved giants and understood that a city keeps what it can lift, what it can hang on a wall and light up and feel good remembering, and lets the rest go quietly under the asphalt, and that the difference between the two was not holiness and was not worth. It was only whether the thing had been beautiful in a way the city could afford to miss.

The young woman was waiting to see if he wanted to say more, her pen resting on the clipboard, and Benjamin looked from her to the great dark letters lying patient in the cold, and he opened his mouth to tell her about West Street, about the brick and the committee and his grandfather and the parking garage, all of it, so that at least one more person in the world would carry it. And then he saw that she was young, and that the light was going, and that she had a whole warehouse still to tag before dark, and that it was a long story and not one that ended anywhere she could use. So he closed his mouth again and only shook his head, and thanked her, and turned to go back out to his car, carrying it a while longer himself, the way he had carried it for more than fifty years, the one building in Reno that no one would ever save because no one but him remembered it was gone.

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