Last Night

by Karen Ellis

  Invisible Boy

  22

  Crisp runs until he finds himself on Pioneer Street and keeps running until he turns into Clinton Wharf, where he spots a sign with an arrow pointing to the ferry.

  He runs, and he runs, until he reaches the choppy azulene waters of the Buttermilk Channel. In the near distance one of the city ferries approaches, leaving two strands of froth in its wake. But there’s another boat, some kind of maintenance vessel, preparing to depart right now.

  He accelerates to give himself some lift and jumps from the dock onto the back of the boat. The stern, he thinks, the back is the stern and the front is the bow. Someone must be at the bow now captaining the thing because all of a sudden it jerks away from the dock and slides into the channel. He lands on his feet and falls to his knees and, in a surrender to gravity, buckles forward onto his elbows and lies there, just lies there, as the boat makes waves and distance.

  When he finally lifts his head and looks behind him at a shrinking Red Hook, he knows he’s made it. He rolls onto his back, faces the sky, breathes.

  “You!”

  Crisp jolts up to see a grizzle-faced white man in late middle age wearing a dark blue uniform with a name sewn onto the shoulder: Salvador. He struggles to stand on the swaying boat while Salvador stands firmly and watches.

  “Good morning, sir,” Crisp says.

  “Another one of you damn kids.” Shaking his head, Salvador spits over the side of the vessel into the water. “What, you lose your MetroCard? School doors don’t open for another two hours. Eh, what do I care?” He waves a dismissive hand.

  Crisp improvises, “My teacher wanted me to come in early.”

  “Don’t tell me—Ed Sansone again. Tell him for me, Sal,” he points to his embroidered name, “that he shouldn’t make early appointments with kids from Brooklyn unless he plans to paddle his own damn canoe over here for the pickup.”

  He must be talking about the Harbor School over on Governors Island; Crisp remembers seeing it listed in the public-high-school directory, how they have designated ferries to take the students to and from the mainland.

  Going with it, Crisp promises, “I will.”

  “And while you’re at it, tell the school they need an earlier ferry. Eight thirty don’t cut it—you’re my second stowaway this month.”

  Sal opens a storage trunk bolted to the deck and throws Crisp a faded orange life vest.

  “Thanks.” Crisp snaps on the vest, its musty smell rising like a fog.

  Sal disappears into the cabin.

  Ten minutes later, they dock on Governors Island.

  Crisp returns the life vest to the trunk and jumps onto a utility dock opposite the passenger ferry mooring at Soissons Landing. A feeling of early-morning abandonment permeates the place, a powerful sense of refuge—Dante will never find me here.

  Crisp jogs along the dock, onto the island, and continues up the first path he comes to so that, if Sal happens to be watching, he’ll see a boy hurrying to an early appointment on one of the last days of the school year—only seniors, graduates, are now free of the calendar.

  A pair of cops roll by in a squad car and his first impulse is to hail them, ask for help, explain the situation. But then he pictures Officer Russo’s dead eyes when he handed over that bike ticket. No way.

  He comes to what looks like the back of a low, wide brick building surrounded by a grass-filled moat and remembers: Fort Jay. As he walks around to the main entrance of the old fort, all the research he did for an eighth-grade New York history project (“The Coast Guard and the City It Protects”) comes flooding back.

  Crisp at thirteen still hadn’t hit his first growth spurt but he knew it was coming. His voice had already shifted and puberty was creeping up by way of lip fuzz and incipient acne. He remembers being uncomfortable in his body, almost afraid of what was happening to it, to him, and how when he worked and studied he could forget about all that. He remembers holing up in his room with library books and his laptop, reading every single thing he could find about the coast guard in New York City, and spending an entire night on its residency on Governors Island. He remembers building the poster board vista of Popsicle stick houses and trees of clay, and writing a lengthy history of the island’s occupations over three hundred years. He remembers how reading about Governors Island marked the first time he ran across the name Robert Moses, who wanted to build a bridge between the city and the island. How this was Crisp’s first taste of a man who, he would later learn, used eminent domain to mow down whole tracts of thriving neighborhoods in order to build a network of highways that only deepened the city’s segregation. How this would eventually open his mind to a complex socioeconomic perspective on the city’s evolution, urban planning, race, educational imbalance, and on and on. How he proceeded to read Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities and fell in love with her ideas. How he came to view Moses as someone whose efforts encouraged the separation of races, even going so far as to consider the man a strategist in the demise of his own parents’ relationship and thus a negative force in his, Crisp’s own, childhood. (But there never was a bridge to Governors Island; the War Department objected on the grounds that it would pose a navigational threat to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Take that, Robert Moses.)

  Fort Jay’s front gates haven’t been opened yet for the day, but Crisp discovers enough give in the chain padlocking them together that he’s able to slip through.

  Two-story barracks fronted by Greek Revival pillars encircle a modest central yard. On the narrow verandas of the buildings are pairs of old white rocking chairs. Crisp settles himself into one of them to wait out the morning until ferry service back to the city starts up later. Then he’ll catch a subway home, explain everything to his family, return Princeton’s call, take what comes.

  He holds Dante’s phone in his hands and stares at the lock screen. He recalls the hack a friend once showed him for getting past a smartphone’s pass code (that friend now on his way to study robotics at MIT), closes his eyes, and tries to summon the steps. After several attempts at the complex series of swipes, pauses, and taps, the lock screen vanishes and he finds himself looking at a photo of a woman—the hairdresser who slapped Dante earlier this morning—and a preteen girl wearing matching silver dresses. Crisp is so excited that he actually leaps out of the chair, sending the rocker into a violent backswing.

  He starts to call his mother for help but decides, No, she’ll freak out and ask too many questions and the answers will only make it worse. For all her fierce competence—this mother who can handle anything—he’s come to understand that she raised him on a fuel of hypervigilance that can turn toxic on a dime. It will be better to tell her everything, truthfully, in person, when she can see with her own eyes that he’s really okay. He opens a text and types a simple message: This is Crisp borrowing someone’s phone. Home later. I love you. As far as she knows, he’s still with his friends, and that’s better for now.

  Next, he opens the Uber app. A royal crest for Dante’s icon. His handle: King of Kings. The gun dealer’s last ride was two days ago, to an address in Sunset Park. And the ride before that was the one with Mo Crespo’s face but not his name.

  He recognizes the face instantly: an older version of the man in an old family photo holding baby Crisp in his arms—round and dark with a memorable half smile. There it is again, that almost smile on the mature face of a man with close-cropped hair slightly silver at the temples and the chin dimple he passed down to his son. A face that should have been accompanied by the name Mo Crespo but instead is called, here, Wilson Ramsey.

  The name rings a bell, a whole orchestra of bells, but Crisp doesn’t know why.

  He copies the phone number into a text message that he sends to himself. Then he opens a search window on Dante’s phone and types w i l s o before the battery dies and the phone powers off.

  His mind whirs around the spiky stalk of Wilson Ramsey Mo Crespo Wilson Ramsey Mo Crespo, a dervish of possi
bility until suddenly the name lands with a jolt.

  Wilson Ramsey is the graphic novelist whose series Crisp devoured when he was eight, nine, ten years old—The Life of a Boy, about an albino kid with invisibility powers. And then, when the character was twelve, the books stopped coming and Crisp moved on to other authors, other stories, other interests beyond cartoons.

  The chance that his father could be the Wilson Ramsey rips at his inner lining, at his sense of the person he always thought he was, or wasn’t. He imagined him many ways, but never like this. He learned early that his mother didn’t like to talk about her ex-husband. Babu sometimes would, mostly describing him in innocuous terms like “not handsome but not not handsome,” “not serious but not so funny,” “not so good but not so bad.” She never told Crisp anything he could get a handle on. But Dedu—Dedu was worse, trying to turn Crisp’s questions away from the father he never knew, offering Russian proverbs to create the idea that if Mo would ever return to him it would happen passively, by accident. “A lucky man can stumble upon a treasure, while an unlucky one can’t even find a mushroom.” Meaning, if Crisp is lucky, if he really wants to know his father, the man will someday turn up. “If you were born lucky, even your rooster will lay eggs.” And then there was the one that turned the good luck dictum on its head: “Bad luck is fertile.”

  Is this the day he’ll be lucky, or unlucky, or both?

  Tired, hungry, confused, Crisp stands and, the rocking chair swaying ghostlike in his wake, leaves the confines of Fort Jay.

  In the quiet distance, a golf cart sprouting rakes and shovels rolls along a path like a piece on a board game, then disappears around a bend. Crisp turns in the opposite direction and after a few minutes wanders into Nolan Park. The collection of abandoned yellow houses encircling an old-fashioned green is densely peaceful at this hour of the morning.

  Abundant trees shade the raw glare of a new sun as he walks across the dappled lawn. The houses, though worn at the paint, are evocative of a pretty way of life that Crisp has never known: a classic American village of front-porch neighbors, shared lemonade, a gazebo band on summer evenings. The way life used to be here, back when people lived on the island, before it was turned into a warm-weather playground for a restless city. He lies down on the grass to continue his wait.

  He closes his eyes and tries not to think about his father. Instead, he time-travels back to the eighteen hundreds and pictures himself in a different life, his imagination first dressing himself in a hatted, booted uniform, an officer returning home, where a wife in an arsenic-green floor-length dress has dinner waiting on a polished table…until that image breaks apart. No. He wouldn’t have been the master in this scenario; he would have been the slave. The picture inverts and the officer’s skin lightens while Crisp fades into the background, servile against the wall, clothed in sagging burlap, awaiting orders.

  Opening his eyes, it hits him how exposed he is, lying here in the open. That he might not be as safe as he thinks he is or wants to be. That he should find somewhere to wait out of sight.

  He crosses the lawn and at the closest yellow house he jiggles the front doorknob, but it doesn’t budge. All the wavy-glassed windows are also sealed, either locked or painted shut. It’s the same at the second, third, fourth house he tries: front and back doors secured, windows immovable.

  On the porch of the fifth house, he notices that one of the windows is cracked open. He slips both hands into the gap and is about to push up on the lower sash when he thinks he hears something—a surprise, as these houses have been unoccupied for years. He pulls out his hands and listens.

  Footsteps, definitely footsteps, the old wood floor moaning with complaint.

  He sprints across the porch, but a voice stops him.

  “Are you early?” A woman, sleepy, unconcerned.

  He turns and sees her in the doorway: mid-twenties, bed-tousled short brown hair, pajama pants falling below the hem of a paint-splattered bathrobe, bare feet.

  “I thought you said eleven,” she mumbles. “Come on in.” Leaving the door wide open, she turns down a hallway and disappears.

  Crisp steps into a spacious foyer, with a room opening to either side and a staircase rising straight ahead. The beautiful, balanced symmetry calms him. He takes a deep breath. Everything about the house looks worn down and half collapsed, the floors broom clean but the ceilings cobwebbed at the corners, marginally occupied yet unlived in. Who is she, if no one lives here? And why is she wearing pajamas?

  At the smell of toast, his stomach bucks. He follows the delicious trail into a make-do cooking arrangement sprung from the relics of a nineteen fifties kitchen. Cracked, speckled Formica counters. Rounded oven with crusted racks just visible through a porthole-size glass. Fridge with lever handle. A buzz of confused electrical charge in the air.

  Crisp asks, “Who are you?”

  Her shoulder blades draw together. Turning to him, she says, “Laura,” her tone now pitched with incredulity. Backing against the edge of the counter, as if realizing she’s made a mistake, she asks, “Didn’t the Arts Center send you?”

  “What?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Crisp.”

  “I thought you were…were the artist the Center assigned to work on the walls—Gary. Maybe you should—”

  “It’s okay.” Crisp takes a step backward to reassure her that he means no harm. The irony of her having thought he was an artist hits him hard, as if there could be one iota of artistic talent in him. But what if Wilson Ramsey actually is his father and passed down some long-dormant genetic gift? “I’m an aspiring artist,” he lies, hoping to put the woman at ease. Then, compounding the invention, he adds, “A graphic novelist.”

  “Ferry service doesn’t even start until ten,” she realizes suddenly.

  “I got a ride from Sal.”

  “Oh,” she says. “Sal,” she says. “I’m confused, but…”

  She puts two slices of buttered toast on the table and gestures for him to have one. The warmth and richness and perfect crunch of it unfurls on his tongue. He talks about his crazy night, leaving out the worst parts, and bacon sizzles, and the room fills with Laura’s careful listening.

  “Coffee?” she asks.

  “Milk, no coffee.” His stomach is too acid as it is. “If that’s okay.”

  Smiling, she pours him a glass of cold milk.

  Once they’ve eaten, she leans over the table and says, “Listen, Crisp, I’m okay with you hanging here until the ferries start running. But my supervisor’s going to have a kitten if she finds out I hosted someone, because one of the rules is ‘No hosting.’ So would you help me out and do some work on the walls? Since you’re here? So if she finds out and asks I can tell her it was an honest mistake on my part—I thought you were the Friday artist and you were early. Okay?”

  “Sure.”

  She leads him to a slender pantry off the kitchen, deep with shelved art supplies. Someone has drawn an intricate pattern on the heavily dusted countertop.

  “We’re trying not to touch that,” Laura tells him. “You know how they henna your hands when you get married and the test of an auspicious match is how little housework you’re made to do after the wedding—the longer the henna pattern lasts, the more hopeful your future?”

  He resists the urge to dissect the clusters of generalities in her statement, or question, or whatever it is—the gross inaccuracies inevitable when you romanticize something you barely understand—and chooses instead to accept it at its root intention of cultural inclusiveness. (Not that he’s an expert in Hindu ritual; he isn’t. But he’d have to be blind not to notice the glaring faults in her example.) He tells her, “Yes.”

  “We’re thinking of it like Sanskrit,” she elaborates. Jumping now from Ancient Indian body art to liturgical language. “It lasts as long as it lasts, and then it’s gone, but in the meantime we don’t mess with it.”

  “Who is ‘we’?”

  “The summer artists. It�
�s a weeklong residency rotation. We overlap on Mondays. Plus a different day artist comes in every morning, so there are usually two of us here except at night.”

  “Cool.”

  “You can paint the walls before you start,” she tells him. “If you don’t like the base color that’s there now, which is white.”

  “White’s fine,” he says. “Did you know that there are over four hundred shades of white?” Sensing she’d be interested in a detail like that.

  “Actually, I did know that.”

  He scans the mysterious array of choices and, overwhelmed and uncertain, selects two paint markers: a black and a red.

  “A minimalist,” Laura observes. “Well, if you need anything else, you know where it is. Come on.”

  She leads him into the front room, on the left of the house, presumably once a place for receiving guests—a drawing room—empty save for a ladder folded against a wall. Another artist has already filled out the back wall with vivid bursts of color that suggest but don’t fulfill (and there, Crisp assumes, is the concept) a floral motif.

  “Start wherever you want,” she tells him. “I’m going to get dressed, then I’ll be on the back porch working on my installation.”

  With Laura gone, Crisp stands alone in the room and stares at the bland white wall. A bacon-y burp leaves a trace of bile on his tongue. He uncaps the black paint marker and approaches the wall. He has no idea where, or how, to begin.

  He tells himself: Start anywhere. Start at right here. Start at maybe.

  Finally he drags the ladder over and climbs it. In the wall’s topmost left corner he spells out in crudely drawn balloon lettering The Life of a Man.

  That is where he’ll begin: with black outlines so thin you’d have to squint to read them from below. He climbs back down, returns the ladder to the opposite wall, crouches in the bottom left corner of the wall he’s working on, and imagines his maybe father Wilson-Ramsey’s mind-set from the beginning of a story Crisp has never understood: the place on the wall and in the personal narrative where a person can’t get any lower.