Invisible Boy (4 page)

The Catalog was on the thirteenth floor, straight across from the
Granta
Bitches, with the even-nastier
Review
behind door number three at the end of the hall. We were a triad of money pits loosely conjoined, no doubt the aftermath
of some literary-cocktail-napkin Venn diagram. It always felt like that old joke about academia, the one about how the infighting
is so vicious because the stakes are so low.

Pagan was already back in editorial by the time I walked into the front office. She was the assistant photo editor and had
gotten me a gig taking phone orders, part-time.

I’d been staff writer at a weekly paper in Syracuse for three years, but that counted for exactly dick in Manhattan, a revelation
that gave me more compassion for Upstate New York than I’d ever had while living there with Dean.

I parked my take-out coffee next to a vacant computer terminal and sat down, back to the window. We had a cinder-brick air
shaft view: the quality of light made it seem like the asshole of February, year-round.

Yong Sun was running the credit-card batch while Yumiko and Karen typed away with phones to their ears.

I booted up my PC and took a sip of coffee, waiting for the third line to ring. The cool part of the job was talking to customers.
We had a direct hookup with Baker & Taylor’s warehouses in New Jersey and Illinois—wholesalers with instant access to virtually
any book in print.

People called from Tucson, Fargo, Bakersfield, Anchorage. They faxed orders from Buenos Aires and Paris and Guam. They sought
lost favorite volumes to share with their children. They yearned for obscure absurdist novels, slender poetry collections,
meaty anthologies. They thirsted for noir and space opera and Zane Grey, Aeschylus and

Kipling and
Hollywood Babylon
. They wanted to tie knots and grow roses and build wooden dinghies, to mend fences and marriages and classic muscle cars.

The phone rang at last. I punched the blinking button for line

three and picked up. “Good morning, this is the Catalog, how may I help you?”

At the end of my shift a few hours later, I found Pagan lying sideways on the front-office carpet. She was surrounded by leaning
towers of paper trays, her head and arms shoved into the guts of our Xerox machine.

“Fucking jammed again,” she said, pushing herself back out. “Not like it matters, since we’re out of fucking toner.”

The only indication that it was probably ninety degrees and muggy out on West Fifty-seventh by now was the dark tan of Pague’s
legs, unbroken from her flip-flops to the hem of her raggedy shorts.

You want people to wear stockings and shit, you’ve gotta pay
way
more than six bucks an hour.

Pagan slotted all the trays back into the machine and tried to push its door closed, but the catch was blown so it took two
slams with the side of her fist to make it stay shut.

“Espece de merde,”
she muttered.
“Ma che cazzo fai.”

I leaned against the edge of the reception desk. “So get Tracy to make the
Granta
Bitches let us use theirs.”

“She’s stuck in Geoffrey’s office with Betty, going over edits for the Fall Bulletin.”

“O joy, O rapture.”

Betty was the ex-wife of Julian, the owner, and had retained enough post-divorce cred to march down from the
Review
and slap us around whenever she felt like it. On bad days that was pretty much hourly.

A door crashed open against Sheetrock, down the short hallway toward Editorial.

I could hear Betty doing her usual screech-ranting-banshee number: all “congenital
idiocy
” and “how-
dare
-you-fuck-with-me-like-this,” and
blah blah
psycho-bipolar-hosebeast
blah
.

Pague and I flinched at the noise of a sudden crack-splash explosion:
Crockery v. Wall.

“Fucking Betty,” said my sister. “She made me bring her that coffee. In
my
mug from home.”

“Bitch throws like a champ, though. Especially considering she’s missing an arm.”

“Don’t be evil,” said Pagan.

“Compared to
Betty
?”

“You want to be like her when you grow up?”

She narrowed her eyes at me, hands on her hips. No one can shame me like Pagan. Especially when she’s right.

“No,” I said. “Of course not.”

“Go tell the
Granta
Bitches I need to make copies. I don’t want to extend Betty’s psychotic break du jour.”

I checked my watch. “Can’t. Late for the cemetery.”

“Chickenshit.”

“What if I interrupt some
Granta
-Bitch Kill-Toddlers-for-Satan fest?” I asked. “They’ll go for my throat like a pack of Dobermans.”

She rolled her eyes. “I can’t believe I’m related to you.”

“Them’s the breaks. Gotta run.”

I
’d never thought of Jamaica as an actual place.

It had always been more transition than geography. Three stops out of Penn Station and you alighted briefly at this celestial
concrete expanse carpeted all Jackson Pollock with discarded Kool butts and soda-can tabs and matte-black ovals of chewing
gum—a stretch of nowhere to be raced across when exchanging your sleek city train for the big-shouldered cars of the Oyster
Bay Line.

I had nothing against Queens, per se, it was just that if you were raised in the milieu I had been, you were reminded of the
borough beneath this platform maybe once a year, if that often.

It might happen on your way to the airport, or when a member of your party dismissively remarked upon the “bridge-and-tunnel
crowd” still pressed up hopeful against the velvet ropes while a nightclub’s bouncer ushered all of
you
inside that particular season’s haute meat-market Nirvana (and please understand that such inclusion had always made me feel
slightly ashamed and unworthy—whether I’d been granted entrée to Studio or Regine’s aged fifteen, Area or Pyramid at twenty—since
I can’t dance for shit and besides which never had the price of so much as a draft domestic beer in my pocket, even if I was
on somebody’s guest list and didn’t have to pay the cover).

With all of the above in mind on this particular September afternoon, I ventured down Jamaica Station’s cast-iron staircases
to street level for the very first time.

I consulted my rough sketch of map every few blocks, walking on through a crowded terra incognita of bodegas and boombox stores,
newsstands and fruit vendors, feeling very much like the only white chick for miles.

The day had grown hot: air rank with diesel fumes and curry, melting asphalt and the chicken-soup funk of humanity, not to
mention the occasional sweet-sour belt of Dumpster leakage wafting out from restaurant alleyways.

I trudged onward, the sidewalk crowds thinning, the stores fewer and farther between, until I finally turned into a cratered
dead-end block in the shadow of some elevated subway tracks. A wall of vines ran down one side of this lane, the occasional
snatch of ornate rusted fence peeking out from beneath the leaves.

I spotted a gate sagging open next to a small Romanesque building of golden stone. Its low roof-pitch was more suggestive
of synagogue than chapel, and its rose windows were shattered.

I looked across maybe a quarter-acre of cleared lawn inside the gate. There were crooked gravestones poking forth from the
hacked weed stubble and a dozen brush-filled black garbage bags lined up at the head of a trail leading into the lot’s still-riotous
green interior.

I followed the narrow path into a jungle of nettles and vines, towering three times my height in some places.

“Cate?” I called. “It’s Madeline….”

I heard soft laughter ahead.

“Cate?”

I found her around the first bend of trail through the brush, with a gaggle of chattering teenaged kids bearing hedge clippers
and

machetes.

My newfound cousin swiped an arm across her forehead, then spotted me and waved.

“This is Madeline,” she said, rattling off the names of her crew.

It was cooler in the shade, but my face had started pouring sweat now that I’d stopped moving. I took a bandanna out of my
pocket and folded it narrow to tie around my forehead, Deadhead style.

“There’s a big jug of ice water in the chapel,” Cate said. “Let’s grab some before I put you to work.”

I blinked when we came back out into the glare, following her past an enclosed rectangle of headstones, its shin-high rails
held aloft by a squat granite obelisk at each corner.

“Was everything
that
overgrown when you started?” I asked, looking back at the cool wall of green behind us.

“Solid vegetable matter,” she said. “It’s taken us the whole summer to get this much cleared. The final burial was in nineteen
fifty-four—I suspect that’s the last time anyone tried weeding.”

At the chapel door Cate fished a big wad of keys from her pocket and started sorting through them.

I looked above the iron fence as an elevated train screeched by along its Great-Wall course of tired concrete.

Kate fitted a key into the padlock, popping it open with a rough twist.

“It must have been beautiful. The whole city,” I said, “before there
was
any city.”

“You’d have been able to see all the way down to the water from here. The old villagers picked a magnificent place in which
to honor their dead.”

Impossible to picture: no buildings or asphalt, just foot trails winding through beach plum and shadbush beneath Long Island’s
great green canopy, connecting sparkling ponds and white beaches, cornfields and oyster beds, wildflower meadows and beaver
dams.

We entered the shade inside the chapel, our steps echoing back from its stone walls and floor. Cate poured out two Dixie cups
of cold water and handed one to me.

“We just found a headstone the kids are excited about,” said Cate. “One of the slave graves.”

I told her I’d like to see it too, and we put our cups in a trash bag and headed back outside.

Cate started walking toward the thicker growth and I followed, Indian file, behind her.

Stones peeked out of thinner brush near the trail, markers for loads of people to whom Cate and I were related: Townsends
and Ludlams, Seamans and Underhills.

Beyond that were old New York names I knew only from street signs and arboretums: Lefferts, Wyckoffs, Boerums.

I paused next at the grave of one Elias Baylis:

For his love of liberty he fell a victim to British cruelty and tho’ blind was imprisoned in New York in Sep. 1776 and was
released only in time to breathe his last in the arms of his daughter while crossing the Brooklyn ferry. During his confinement
he was accustomed to sing the 142
^nd
Psalm.

Near that was a smaller, cruder stone, on which was written,
Our Babie
. The two words were so uneven and faint that I pictured a young father incising each letter with his own tools, unable to
afford the local gravesmith.

Cate was a few yards ahead. I caught up and we stepped over a pile of vines and a tree’s knuckled roots.

She pointed to a white marble headstone centered in the dell beyond, its surface jaded with moss:

Jane Lyons, a colored woman, who upwards of 65 years was a faithful and devoted domestic in the family of James Hariman, Sr.
of this village, died Dec. 19, 1858. Age 75 years

I touched the numerals commemorating her year of death.

“When was slavery abolished in New York, anyway?” I asked.

“Eighteen twenty-seven,” answered Cate.

“So they owned her first, and then she stayed on.”

“Where else could she have gone?”

I knew better than to think all slave-holding guilt fell on my southern brethren—that
our
racial history was a sweet Underground-

Railroad rosebed of “Kumbaya” singalongs with Harriet Tubman waving the conductor’s baton—but I hadn’t realized it was a mere
three decades before Lincoln that Abolition prevailed in my home state.

“At least they had the decency to record her name,” I said. “The ones in our cemetery just have blank leaves of slate shoved
into the grass—head and foot. Like all that mattered was making sure you didn’t dig up a slave by accident.”

It made me want to walk up to random black people on the street and apologize.

“Let me get to work,” I said.

Cate led me back up the trail and gave me clippers and a machete.

“There are definitely a few homeless people camping at night in the densest parts,” she said, handing me a pair of work gloves,
“so look out for that. We try to leave their stuff where we find it.”

“Okay.”

We started hacking away in separate directions. The dense air around me was soon astringent with the green perfume of sliced
grass and the sharp tang of nettle sap.

By the time I’d filled two bags I’d cut into a private lane of tunnel, with no line of sight back to Cate.

My bandanna felt hot and wet against my forehead. I shook off Cate’s heavy gloves so I could flip it over to the dry side,
then leaned down to pick up a bent tin can and several brown shards of beer bottle with my bare hands.