The Last President: A Novel of Maps, Small Miracles

The city had been taught, for as long as the oldest chimney could remember, to expect its weather, its politics, and its losses in neat, predictable installments. People left their coal for the same family of men who collected it; they listened to three particular speeches on three particular days and called those speeches ＂comforts.＂ It was a place with appointed sorrows and licensed joys, where the calendar itself papered shop doors and municipal ledgers kept a cautious, well--rehearsed order.

Because the city measured certainty in lists and ledgers, anyone who produced a new map, however shabby, was called an eccentric or a prophet. So when a stranger stepped off a coach at the foot of a hill on a night the river smelled faintly of iron, folded his coat tighter, and consulted a battered atlas annotated with arrows to abandoned fountains and a lone X over a patch of Staten Island, people noticed in the way one notices a small, curious thing and files it away.

It is useful, before the reader advances too far, to say plainly what most such maps deny: places hold moods like weather, and the mood of a place can be altered by a single, unremarkable thing-a telegram misdelivered, a voice raised in the wrong kind of laughter, the decision of a child to keep a stray key. Lockwood’s city, though bound in the etiquette of its own rules, was porous in the narrow places. It admitted intrusions: a rumor, a portrait that would not hang straight, a dog that collected keys in its mouth.

The stranger-tall, shoulders like iron hinges-asked for an address no one could find, left a card with an initial and a cipher of curving lines, and walked toward the wrong side of town as if the wrong side had always been his destination. His atlas passed into the pawnbroker’s hands, and each hand that kept it smoothed its edges as if smoothing might coax revelation from what it contained.

At roughly the same hour, in a narrow house overlooking the ferry slip, a boy named Baron Trump wrote letters to the sky. He called himself a traveler because his grandfather, a man of urgency and peculiar follies, had taught him to prefer destinations that unsettled the comfortable. He kept a dog, Bulgar, who understood silences and liked to carry keys. Baron had been reared among maps-drawn, torn, speculative-and had learned to read the spaces between lines.

The atlas’s X did not mark treasure or a burial. It marked a photograph in a shop window: a man wearing the severe expression of those who make laws and the absent tenderness of those who have been loved poorly. The photograph was pulled from the window, purchased, and the day it left the shop a rumor began to tear across town like a flag loosed in a storm. ＂The last president,＂ people whispered, naming something as if naming might secure it.

Rumor is a small animal that prefers alleys. It multiplies on cheap details-an overheard line, a clerk’s imagination, a clock that stops-and stacks trifles into apparent design. Baron watched the pattern unfold over porridge, Bulgar leaving a damp print on the editor’s column. The boy felt the city settle in a new way and decided, simply and without theatricality, that a journey was needed. Some journeys arrive as invitations; this one came as a public puzzle untied in whispers.

So, Baron pinned his grandfather’s compass to his lapel-a compass whose needle quivered when a secret was near-took Bulgar with a key between his teeth and stepped into a fog that winked with the atlas’s promise. It would take more than a stranger’s book and a photograph to change a republic; yet often it takes only an impatient boy, a faithful dog, and a map that insists on being read.