Vessel

V E S S E L

By C.W. Smith

This happened one summer when I was staying in my brother’s East Village apartment.

It's just after noon and he (that's me) ambles east on 8th street, whistle-stepping like Gene Kelly because his first novel has just come out from a major house, and he's come to the city for the first time as someone who belongs to it even if he does not live here. The day before, his publisher gave a party to debut his career. In the halls of the firm, he passed between Nicholas Von Hoffman and Ralph Nader, who were talking earnestly but nodded a greeting as if they knew him. The party was held on a rooftop terrace, and there were flowers and wine; platters of hors d'oeuvres colored and shaped like creatures on a coral reef; cultured editors of both sexes in bow-ties and seersucker, and on a linen-covered table his books stood in staggered pillars like a model of the skyscrapers rising around them on Madison Avenue.

As I say, the next afternoon he is strolling east on 8th street merrily consuming his newly-conquered city, tasting it, taking immense pleasure in the stench and litter, the steamy fetid vapors of dog doo and subway-tunnel breath huffing up through the sidewalk vents, wading through the surf of frank shucks and paper cups, thinking of how a thousand other writers have walked this street, sat on these brownstone stoops and looked about musingly, pensively; he feels like some Balzac recording on his memory all the glorious wonders of the city and its funky, Jack-Kerouac poverty; he notes the Bowery's winos sprawled in doorways like extras in a sepia Depression saga, all no doubt full of the wisdom of the down and out, and he imagines that if he stopped to chat he'd hear pithy dialogue like that spoken by the sages of Cannery Row.

He crosses Broadway; the sidewalks rill with quick-footed pedestrians, and he threads nimbly through them, aping that I-know-right-where-I'm-going gait of the native New Yorker, for, indeed, he does know right where he is going: up -- he is officially an Author now, albeit one day old. The future lies open like welcoming thighs, and the rich sensation of having the self blossom into an inviting vessel of possibility makes him swoony.

He crosses Astor Place and steps into Cooper Square, where a barren wedge of concrete serves as a base for a sculpture -- a black steel cube poised on one sharp corner. A crowd has gathered. A squad car stands at the curb, both front doors cocked open, and two policemen are kneeling beside a man who lies supine on the shimmering concrete. The writer squirms to the front of the crowd; this is real life, and he doesn't want to miss a minute of it.

The man is barefoot, one shin pinned by the shadow of the cube, wearing dark green work pants, no belt, no shirt, his torso rotisseried by a thousand suntans, a grey-black stubble across chin and cheeks, nose like a new potato. His mouth is locked open in an O like someone caught yawning in a candid snapshot.

"Hey, dude's dead," a young man says.

While one cop talks to the radio couched in his palm, the other puts two fingers to the fellow's wrist. When they roll the man over, everyone, even the police, murmur with surprise. Covering his back from rib to rib and nape to waist is a Yankee clipper ship under full sail. It might be the "Cutty Sark" or "The Lightning" or "The Flying Cloud" built by David McKay of Boston. There's a long, sleek, fully detailed hull complete with flying jib, outer jib, inner jib, fore, main and mizzen skysails, royals, topgallants, under and lowertops'ls, crossjack, and skygazer. This remarkable ship ploughs through blue-green swells foaming along the hull as it heads 'round the Cape of the dead man's flank. It was a nice day to have lifted anchor and gotten underway: high on the left shoulder blade, the sun is either setting or rising from behind a bank of pinkish cloud, and golden rays fall full on the ivory canvas billowing in a strong trade wind. A crescent moon hangs dimly under the doghair on the fellow's nape. Standing at the bow of the ship, with one foot hiked up on the bowsprit base, a sailor peers hand to brow toward the horizon where the sea cascades over the ribs to the cement down under. The world is flat, and there's the edge of it. In the waves below the hull, brown moles float like kelp or oil-stained jellyfish. Off the port stern lies a cigarette butt that stuck to his skin when they turned him over, and the policeman gently brushes it away like an art restorer.

They rummage through his pockets, find nothing. He has no name. He lives nowhere. They look up at the crowd. Anybody know him? No one knows him. Of course, he has "an identifying mark," though this canvas is so large and so unusual it's as if the fellow is the mark -- he's the medium, the museum where this drawing can be found. After a minute, an ambulance arrives, loads up, leaves.

The young writer hurries away eager to relieve himself of this large experience. His brother's apartment -- Avenue A, right? Not this block, this one? Near some park -- Thompson, Thommason, ah, yes, Tompkins! Wouldn't it be terrible to lose.... Here's the entrance, this key or that one? Five locks between the street and behind the apartment door. His place is a small territory claimed in a corner of the living room where his rolled sleeping bag rests next to a backpack and toilet kit, a space now invaded by someone else's cats. He gets out his spiral journal, sits on the floor with his back against the couch -- not a comfortable place to work.

But you can imagine how such a sight might inspire a newly minted author. He's stuffed himself full of delicious ironies and incongruities -- how the fellow lay under the Cubist cube, how he lay near Cooper Union, with its famous museum for the decorative arts, for instances -- and, like any decent postmodernist, he relishes the chance to cast light upon, or make light of, all this.

What luck to be granted such an assignment on his first day at sea, so to speak. Nothing to it. Warm ups, associate awhile: vagabond, hobo, bum, tramp, tramp steamer, sailor, pilgrim, gypsy, vagrant, wino, boozer, drunk, dreamer, rover. Drop dead, croak, expire, go to Davy Jones locker. Fact to bear in mind: the human body is 98% water. Where's the harbor that boat was sailing to?

Tap, tap, goes the eraser against his teeth. A coffee-tabled newspaper says according to a recent poll, most Americans are willing to accept a more modest lifestyle over the specter of recession.

Nothing seems to be coming. Maybe tomorrow, he hopes. He hates to think he's struck out first time at bat in the majors.

Tap, tap, goes the eraser.

For twenty years.

The paper upon which the notes were made has long since gone to grey, the lines pale as veins in the temple of an octogenarian. The notes could be the hieroglyphs of an alien tribe, so far as he can understand them now.

From time to time he has gone back to the memory and the notes, searching like a burglar for that rear window left unlatched in careless haste, but the place stayed locked up tight. Once he conjured up a story: the dead man is a Navy gob on weekend liberty in Singapore, and he wanders drunk by happenstance into the parlor of the world's foremost tattoo artist. The artist has been dreaming of the perfect canvas for many years, and his craft and art are at their perfect pitch on this night when both men step unknowingly into this Borgesian intersection.

This rickety invention soon collapsed. Is the problem his lack of compassion? He has felt no real sorrow for the man. Yes, the fellow was born somewhere in particular and must have had a mother, maybe a sister, a brother, even a wife and child, but he was already a corpse when the author encountered him, and the tattoo was so astonishing that it washed away any sense of tragedy the way newspapers use the word.

Nothing in his box of tricks has ever worked. There is no story, yet no subject is more worthy. Each time he has struggled to make sense of this event, he has failed; each effort has left him staring into a chasm between the fellow's frail mortality and the marvel on his back that he took to his grave. Any fiction spun from this seems but a small thin blanket pulled over the corpse, leaving its limbs exposed.