“I think I’m going to stay here a little while longer,” I tell her. It’s not like there’s anywhere else I have to be.
“Cool,” she says. “I’d leave you the blanket, but, you know, you’re invisible.”
“Thanks for that reminder. I’d almost forgotten.”
The smile on her face is still a little sleepy, even under so much daylight.
“I am kissing you goodbye,” she says into her phone mike.
“I am happily receiving your kiss goodbye,” I tell her. This is the best we can do in public. People in New York are forgiving of conversations with the air, but they tend to get worried when you start kissing it.
I watch her go. As I do, I realize we’ve managed to stave off the loneliness for almost an hour.
But I only realize that because I feel its return.
* * *
I sit on the grass, but I don’t really feel the grass. I sit in the park, but the park doesn’t recognize that I’m there. Children play around me. Lovers have no sense that I’m close. A cloud passes over the sun, but it has no idea that I feel the shadow it leaves.
I used to do this a lot, especially in the summer.
It feels different now.
Ivan, my favorite dog walker, comes into view. He is leashless, dogless. Instead, Karen the nanny is by his side. She has been unmoored from children for the day. It is just the two of them, and they would seem like just about any other young couple, only I can’t take away what I already know about them, can’t help but picture the dogs and kids that aren’t there.
I shiver, even though the sun has returned. The woman sitting alone on the blanket next to me has started to itch her face. I notice it out of the corner of my eye. Politeness decrees that I look the other way, but there’s something about her that makes me look more. The itching has turned to scratching. She is starting to claw at her face, her fingernails drawing blood. I want someone else to notice. I am invisible; I can’t help.
I hear a scream. I assume someone has seen what this woman is doing. But it’s coming from the other side of me. I turn and see a man has set his blanket on fire. “I’m so cold!” he is shouting as his wife pulls their child from the blanket. She keeps screaming.
People are starting to look over. People are wondering what’s going on.
A man runs over to help. He looks like an off-duty cop or fireman. He stomps on the blanket . . . even as the father reaches again for his matches and starts to set his own clothing on fire. The cop yells at him to stop—but no words come out of his mouth. He is shocked by this. He goes to scream again. But nothing comes out. The mother is wrestling the matches away from her husband. The woman on the other side of me has blood running in trails down her face, and she is about to go for her eyes. People are starting to run away. They saw the fire and are running away. But one girl—she can’t be older than me—goes to run and she can’t move her legs. I see her trying. But her legs won’t work. She’s lost control of them.
I feel faint. The shivers are rocking my body. I can’t explain it—I feel weak. And at the same time, I feel like I am responsible. I feel that something coming from me is becoming this.
It is the child who tips me off. The boy who was saved from the burning blanket. As people run and scream and try to help, he is looking at a fixed spot. He is looking at someone who is there to him but isn’t there to me. And that’s how I know my grandfather is here.
Someone has wrestled the woman to the ground before she can scratch out her eyes. But she is putting up a mighty fight, screaming that they must come out, that her face must come off. The girl who can’t run is crying; the man who can’t speak is stuck still.
Ivan is running over to help. As he does, a woman he passes drops to the ground and starts eating the dirt.
“RUN!” I shout. I don’t know what else to do. “RUN! RUN!” I scream it over and over again—this voice that isn’t attached to any body. I make it over to Ivan and push him away, push him back to Karen. “GO!” I tell him. “GET OUT OF HERE!” He does.
My grandfather can hear me now. My grandfather knows I am here. But of course he’s known that all along. My curse has tipped him off.
He can’t see me. I can’t see him. But here we are.
The woman drawing blood. The man who feels he’s so cold that he’s setting himself on fire. The man who can’t speak. The girl who can’t move. The woman eating dirt. How can he be doing all of these curses at once?
I feel it draining from me. The energy. It’s not that the curse is lessening—I am no more visible than I’ve ever been. But he’s feeding off of me. I know this. And because of that, I know that I’m the one who has to run.
I am careful not to bump into anyone. I am careful not to leave any kind of trail. I don’t want him to know which way I’ve gone. Although, if I’m right about him sensing me, then he will certainly know I’ve left—and where I’m going.
I can’t go back home. I don’t want to draw him there. And I can’t go to Millie’s, for the same reason. So I plunge north, deeper into the park, as far away from anyone else as I can go. I push through the Ramble, skirting past any people I encounter. I allow myself to be a purely invisible boy once more. I untie myself from the city and become its watchful ghost. I glide through and hold on to the illusion that nothing I do can touch anyone. I am a cause with no effects. I am footsteps without a sound. I am nothing but air—noticeable in motion, but gone even as it arrives.
The screams follow me through the air.
Chapter 24
I’VE NEVER THOUGHT TO care about tea one way or another, but sitting in the hexatorium while Millie pours me the zillionth cup I’ve had since I met her, I decide I hate it. I hate everything about this place. This bunker of secrets that has proven utterly useless. Like the tea, it’s meant for sitting and steeping, but with neglect inevitably comes bitterness.
I haven’t put milk or sugar in my cup. Nonetheless, I stir my ridiculously tiny spoon in the amber liquid, letting the silver scrape against porcelain, the rasping noise echoing my irritation.
I’m ready to share all of my discontents with her, lest I suffer alone, but I wait for my moment.
Millie clasps her delicate, wrinkled hands in front of her chest.
“Let’s begin.” She smiles and I grimace, but she ignores my sour look. “Tell me the code of the spellseeker.”