Last Night

For the real event they’ll be starched versions of themselves, in blue gowns and tasseled mortarboards, but Crisp likes this better: the sea of kids in ripped jeans with rings and tats in full flare; teachers scattered in the back rows of the vast auditorium, casually enjoying the fruits of their labor. A party mood, with mostly just the elders paying attention to his rehearsal of the valedictory, The Speech he practiced at home, over and over, for his mother and grandparents.

Center stage, he finishes: “…and that is why my years at Stuyvesant have been not just formative, but inspiring. Aut viam inveniam aut faciam—I shall either find a way or make one.”

An explosion of applause tells him that he was wrong—people were listening. Adrenaline nearly lifts him off the stage, and there he is, floating over everyone, smiling, laughing, reaching down to feel a thousand fingertips graze the palms of his hands. Feeling like the new balloon at next year’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, representing…what? A brown-skinned, fro-headed hybrid of a young man with high-tops clean and white, the way he likes them, and—here’s the kicker—something to say.

He levitates through the rest of rehearsal and then the 687 other seniors are dismissed until morning, when the official ceremony will take place.

Outside in the buttery June afternoon, Crisp unlocks his bike and flies along Chambers Street and onto the Brooklyn Bridge. Dodging pedestrians with pinball precision, the lightweight bike so attuned to him that it feels like part of his body. Ignoring dirty looks and riding fast, faster across the wingspan suspended between two urban shores. Energized by the fact that a lifetime of New York City public schools is behind him. Wondering how, if, he’ll fit in next year at Princeton. The sharp tip of that thought bursts his bubble and he feels the air begin to seep out of him. Of course, it won’t be easy. He slows along the bridge’s off-ramp, merges into traffic, and comes to a stop at the intersection of Tillary and Adams.

“You.” A short, burly cop standing in front of the corner diner waves him over. “Come here.”

“Me?” Crisp points to himself, his mind whirring.

“You deaf?”

“No, sir.” Crisp pedals onto the sidewalk, comes to a stop near the officer, and hops off his bike. “Did I do something wrong?”

The cop rips a curled printout off his ticketing device and hands it to Crisp with a dead-eyed stare.

“What’s this for?”

“Can’t you read?”

Crisp looks at the ticket and there it is: a hundred-dollar fine and a court summons for riding his bicycle on the sidewalk. He swallows the bitter foretaste of a percolating anger.

“Officer Russo,” getting the name off the lopsided tag beneath the badge, “I rode over because you told me to.”

“It’s against the law to ride your bike on the sidewalk. You oughta know that, kid.”

“But you told me to come over. When I was riding in the street.”

“You saying you didn’t ride on the sidewalk just now?”

“No, but—”

“You think I’m blind?”

“No.”

“Don’t do it again.” Russo begins to move away.

Color flushes out of Crisp’s fingers, he’s gripping his handlebars so hard. He shouts, “Who do you think you are? Franz fucking Kafka?” He inches his bike closer to Russo and jerks it to a stop.

“What’d you call me?”

“Franz Kafka is a who, not a what. Sir. But you wouldn’t know that—fucking idiot.” He’d meant to think that last part, but somehow the words hissed out.

Forehead sweaty, jowls shaking, Russo whips out a set of handcuffs.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!”

“Oh, I am not kidding you, son.” He snaps open one bracelet and latches it to Crisp’s left wrist.

“‘Son’? You think you’re my father now?”

Muttering the standard Miranda warnings, Russo yanks Crisp’s right hand off the handlebar and clinches the second bracelet. The bike crashes to the sidewalk.

“I didn’t do anything wrong!”

“Assaulting an officer. Resisting arrest. And now—” Russo glances at the fallen bike. “—littering.”

“Assault? How?”

“Verbal assault with threat of physical violence.”

“What? This is insane!”

“Trying to mow me down with that bike.”

“I did not!”

“Tell it to the judge.”

The phone won’t ring but Detective Lex Cole stares at it anyway, then hates himself for waiting for Adam’s call and looks away, then turns back to the silent screen clenched in his hand: that cruel rectangular void.

He switches the phone to vibrate, puts it facedown on his desk, and checks the new case log on his monitor—nothing in since he last looked. After an initial flurry of activity at the start of the night shift, it’s as if the whole southern end of Brooklyn went to sleep all at once. Now it’s just him and Toby Rios left in the 6-0 squad room. His colleague must have opened a window because suddenly a brisk salty breeze and the rhythm of nearby waves fill the room.

“Think I’ll step outside a minute,” Lex tells Toby.

When Toby lifts his head from whatever file he’s reading, a sheen of light from the overhead bounces off his pate. “Sure thing.”

As soon as Lex stands, his right calf muscle cramps, followed by a note of craving he immediately silences—that old song of pain wanting relief and the slippery slope of getting it. Out on the surf that afternoon, he felt the vibration of a wave coming up behind him and turned to carve his board into it: flashes of silver light, an exhilarating lift out of time. He rode the swell as it chased him back to shore. As the wave shrank, he felt, irrationally, as if his mastery had subdued it. Right away another one crept up, powerful, ready to teach him a lesson. Turning to meet it, he thought he glimpsed Adam standing on the beach, watching him—handsome Adam, pale with his thatch of black hair, light and dark like a two-tone cat. It wasn’t Adam, though: it was another man who vaguely resembled him. In that single, hapless moment, Lex’s calf seized and he nearly lost his balance. A moment of injury in its full innocence; the treachery always came later.

He bends to push a hand into his boot and massage the muscle. Slides his phone into the back pocket of his jeans and heads for the stairwell down to the first floor.

Out on West Eighth Street in the moonlit darkness he listens to the roar of the ocean. Coney Island is uncharacteristically quiet, the Wonder Wheel at rest, Luna Park’s dazzle switched off. The solitude grips and terrifies him. He reaches for his phone and almost calls Adam, but resists the urge. Let Adam be the one to break the silence.

Toby clips past, jangling a set of keys to one of the precinct cars. “Caught one. I told Minnick you’re out here if someone else comes in.”

“Thanks,” Lex says. Whatever lands next will be his. After that, new cases will have to wait in line for whoever gets back first.

Just as he’s about to head inside, his phone vibrates and he stops breathing. The screen comes alive in his hand, but not with Adam’s name.

A text from his brother, David:

David’s been angling since late winter for that meeting with the New York State attorney general, wanting to discuss a judgeship that’s about to open. Justice David Cole. Smiling, Lex taps out his response.

Second time this month. David should consider finding either a new babysitter or a second wife. But in truth, Lex enjoys his rare one-on-one time with his nine-year-old nephew. Once Ethan is old enough to get himself back and forth to school and spend a few hours alone in the apartment, there won’t be any more calls for standby parenting on David’s custody days. Lex doesn’t look forward to the moment he’ll stop being the cool cop uncle and become just another asshole authority figure.

On his way through the lobby he nods at Minnick, the front-desk officer, mealy in his uniform, with a fringe of thinning hair poking out from beneath his cap. Minnick nods back in acknowledgment of the detective’s return.

A small woman clutching her purse to her side blasts through the precinct entrance and announces to Minnick, “My son is missing!” Her shoulder-length brown hair is frizzed from the moist night air, defying an apparent effort to straighten it. Lex pauses in the stairwell door. This is unusual, someone coming on foot to report a missing person; typically they panic and pick up the phone.

He turns and watches Minnick suck in his cheeks as he faces the monitor on his desk and clicks through to open a new case report. The officer asks, “How old is your son?”

“Nineteen.”

“Oh. Okay.” Minnick clicks through to a different page, presumably having opened a report for a missing minor, based on the mother’s relative youth and her level of agitation. As he takes down the basics, Lex backtracks to the front desk; the case is just going to find its way upstairs to him anyway. Glad for something to think about not-Adam, he takes the printout that Minnick hands him.

“I’m Detective Lex Cole.” He gives the mother his card. “How can I help?”

Her forehead ruts. “My son never came home tonight. He was arrested yesterday and then—”

He glances at the report—her name is Katya Spielman—and interrupts, “Mrs. Spielman, let’s go talk somewhere quieter.”

“It’s quiet right here.” Impatience spikes her tone. “And it isn’t Mrs. I’m divorced.”

“My mistake.” He says it gently, in the hope of knitting a strand of calm into her worry. He leads her to one of the first-floor interrogation rooms, windowless gray walls that might have been white once, the metal table etched with someone’s initials.

She looks at his card, then at him. “Your full name is Alexei.”

“Yes, but everyone calls me Lex.” He sits, and gestures toward the opposite chair. “You were starting to tell me that your son,” he looks at the report, “Titus—”

“He also doesn’t use his given name. He goes by Crisp.”

“Crisp. That’s unique, but then so is Titus.”

“I’m so worried.”

“You were saying that Crisp was arrested yesterday, meaning Wednesday, right? Technically today’s already Friday. Just to be clear.”

“Yes, Wednesday. On his way home from school.”

Lex listens carefully, taking notes as she unspools the story: her son’s ticket for riding his bicycle on the sidewalk, followed by a “wrongful arrest” for assaulting an officer, “which he would never, ever do.” He spent a night in the Brooklyn House of Detention before finally appearing on the arraignment roster at around noon. She explains, “When he got home this afternoon—no, that would be yesterday afternoon now, Thursday—he wasn’t good. He looked exhausted, obviously, but it was more than jail. It was missing his graduation yesterday morning—speaking at his graduation—the honor of being valedictorian gone because some cop was trying to meet his quota. The principal himself tried pulling strings, but it was too late.”

“If the arrest was wrongful,” Lex assures her, “the charge will be thrown out.”

“It was wrongful. But then…” She lowers her face into her hands to stifle a groan of frustration. “I never should have told him that the Princeton dean’s office left a message. That was a mistake.”

“It upset him?”

“They gave him a full scholarship—everything, even housing. He must be worried they found out about the arrest, but who knows why they called? He said he’d return the call later, but I pressed the issue, and then he stormed out—and that was that.”

“He’s nineteen.”

“Yes.”

“An adult.”

“Only technically.”

“Yeah, I get that, I do. But usually we give it a little time when it’s an adult, especially when it’s an older teenager.”

“This is a good boy. An unusual boy.”

“You said you’re divorced—could he have spent the night with his father?”

“My ex-husband isn’t in the picture, not since Crisp was a baby.”

“Does he have a girlfriend? Buddies he stays over with sometimes?”

“No girlfriend, no friends close enough to stay over. He’s more of an…an…intellectual