For twenty-six years, Elias Marsh had worked in the lost and found office of the city's transit system, a windowless room beneath a downtown station where the city's forgetfulness came to rest.
Every morning the night crews delivered their gray canvas sacks, and every morning Elias emptied them onto a steel table: gloves without partners, phones that had died in the middle of a call, a violin, once a birthday cake still in its box.
But mostly there were umbrellas.
The city lost, by his careful estimate, around four thousand a year, and on the morning after a storm they arrived in such numbers that the sacks looked like bundles of folded black wings.
Officially, each item received a number, a date, a line on a form and a place on a shelf, and after ninety days, if nobody had claimed it, it was sold at auction or given to charity.
Elias followed the procedure faithfully, but at some point in his second decade he had begun, without ever quite deciding to, to keep a second record.
In a series of green notebooks that lived in his locker, he wrote down not what each object was but what it suggested.
A child's umbrella printed with frogs, abandoned on the first morning of the school year, suggested a boy who had been too nervous to remember anything.
A large, expensive one with a carved handle, left behind on a Friday evening, suggested a man who had just had good news and walked out into the rain without noticing.
Elias knew perfectly well that he was inventing these people, and also, after so many years, that he was rarely entirely wrong.
His supervisor, a brisk young woman who had been brought in to modernize the department, treated him with the polite patience people reserve for antique furniture.
It was she who told him, one wet afternoon in March, that the office would close at the end of June.
In the future, lost items would be photographed, entered in a database and sent to a warehouse near the airport.
His position, she said gently, would not be continued, although there would be a generous payment.
Elias thanked her, because that was what one did, and went back to his table.
In the weeks that followed he worked with a strange, quiet urgency, as if the notebooks had to be finished before the room that had produced them disappeared.
He was halfway through copying out the umbrellas of 2009 in a neater hand when the visitor arrived.
She was perhaps eighty, small and upright, and she laid on the counter a folded card whose ink had faded to the color of weak tea.
“In 1961 I left my father's umbrella on a train,” she said.
“I was nine, and I was quite certain he would never forgive me.”
When she and her father came to ask for it the next day, a clerk had not only found it but had tied this card to its handle.
Elias unfolded it with great care.
In small, slanting letters someone had written: “Yellow, with a duck's head handle, found on the Tuesday evening train; belongs, I suspect, to a girl who is braver than she feels today.”
Elias recognized the habit at once, because it was his own.
The woman, it turned out, had spent her working life as a curator at the city's history museum, and had kept the card for more than sixty years because, as she put it, it was the first time a stranger had seen her clearly.
She had read in the newspaper that the office was closing and wondered whether anyone there still wrote things down.
After a long moment, Elias went to his locker and came back with the green notebooks.
She read for nearly an hour without speaking, turning the pages as if they might break.
When she finally looked up, she asked whether it had ever occurred to him that what he had made was not a record but a collection.
The exhibition opened the next spring in a small gallery at the museum.
It was called The Museum of Lost Umbrellas: forty unclaimed umbrellas from the office's final months, each beside a page from the notebooks, and the faded card from 1961 in a glass case by the door.
Visitors lingered longest, the guards reported, not over the umbrellas but over the stories, and many left notes in a book by the exit about things they had lost and, now and then, things they had found.
Elias works there three days a week now, as what the museum describes as a consultant.
He still keeps a notebook, although for the first time he has started to write in it about himself.