Kids of Appetite

  Rockefeller Lookout was approximately four hundred feet above sea level. According to the sign, you could see the following:

  The Hudson River (Which, uh, I would hope so. It was right there.)

  New York City (Ergo, Citi Field, home of the New York Mets.)

  Henry Hudson Bridge (Great.)

  Long Island Sound (Terrific.)

  Westchester County, New York (Why not.)

  Posted just below this was another sign urging people to observe park rules. The rules themselves were pretty obvious: do not climb the cliffs, stay on the trails, alcohol is prohibited, and the like. I suppose some kid at some point, after one too many cheap beers, had probably thought rappelling down the cliff would be a rad idea. And I felt sorry for that kid. But I felt sorrier for his parents. Because their house was filled to the brim with green bean casseroles and sideways hugs.

  Together we walked toward the precipice of the Palisades. Nothing but a thin metal rail separated us from the edge of the rocky cliffs below. There were no crowds. Probably because it was still snowing. We stepped up to the fence, stared across the Hudson, and saw all five things from the sign. What the sign hadn’t prepared us for was the sweeping grandeur of the view. In fact, this should have been included:

  6. Sweeping grandeur of the view (Super Racehorse.)

  It was a shame people didn’t come up here during winter; snowy sights were a thousand times better, the giant rocks of the cliff face either wet or white with the stuff. I was just about to pull out the urn when Coco said, “I need to piss like a lover.”

  “You mean like a mother,” said Mad.

  “Why would I need to piss like a mother?”

  “Why would you need to piss like a lover?”

  “I don’t know, Mad, but I’m about to piss my motherfrakking pants, and we’ll find out real quick what it’s like.”

  “Coco, you’ll have to hold it,” said Baz. “There’s nowhere to go.”

  “I can’t hold it,” she whimpered, crossing her legs.

  Baz sighed, pointed toward a bustle of snow-covered bushes. “Go ahead then. We’ll wait.”

  Coco shuffled from one foot to the other. “I need a guard.”

  Nzuzi snapped twice, turned, and walked in the opposite direction. Baz rolled his eyes and started toward the bushes with Coco.

  I rezipped my backpack. “So Mad and I will just wait here, then?”

  But Mad was gone too, smoking next to a nearby park bench. It did not appear as though she was admiring the bench so much as keeping an eye on it. As if it might come to life, shimmy loose its blanket of snow, and trot off down the highway.

  I should probably help her keep an eye on that bench, I thought.

  Making my way over, I heard her say, “Memories are as infinite as the horizon.”

  “Poetic mood?”

  She pointed to a plaque on the bench:

  SYLVIA & MORTIMER ALTNEU

  MEMORIES ARE AS INFINITE AS THE HORIZON

  “What do you think it means?” I asked.

  “Got me,” said Mad. “Altneu. Strange last name.”

  The Land of Nothingness was upon me without warning.

  We were in a car. Ages ago. Dad drove; Mom laughed. Your father is the funniest person I know. There were mountains. And trees that had just turned colors, so it looked like we were driving into a swirling tsunami of burnt orange and yellow. Mom finally stopped laughing and it was quiet, the peculiar kind of quiet where the leftover energy from the laughter hangs in the air. With some laughter, you just have to let the dust settle. From my seat in the back of the car, I saw my parents’ heads. And then Dad’s arm reached across the middle console, his hand resting in Mom’s lap. Till we’re old-new, he said. She responded in a whisper: Old-new.

  Consider this: billions of memories in a brain, each one drowning in a furious river, grasping and gasping for life, a twine of rope, an olive branch. It’s no accident, the memories that last. They are survivors.

  “Old-new,” I said.

  “What?”

  I turned from the bench to Mad. “People always talk about growing old together like it’s the greatest, most romantic thing ever. But how often does it end up that way? People grow in different ways. More often than not, they just grow bitter.”

  I imagined my father’s hand, resting in Mom’s lap. And I knew the older they got, the younger they seemed.

  “I took two years of German,” I said. “Alt means ‘old.’ And neu means ‘new.’ It’s the signature from Dad’s Terminal Note. Till we’re old-new.”

  . . .

  . . .

  “So, what do you think it means?” asked Mad.

  I looked at my worn-out boots, crusted with dirty salt and snow, and thought about Dad’s old New Balance sneakers. “Mom and Dad were here. This is where they found that motto, I bet. Probably stood in this exact spot.”

  Mad took a final pull from her cigarette before stomping it out on the ground. “The inevitability of corresponding units.”

  “I mean—it’s not the middle of nowhere. It’s an official stop, or lookout, or whatever. But still. It feels like quite a bump.”

  “We can’t wait around all day!” yelled Coco behind us, apparently done relieving herself in the bushes. Baz and Nzuzi stood next to her at the cliff’s edge, and miracle of miracles, Mad took my hand just as she’d done at the Parlour. As she led the way to the precipice, I felt her up-closeness, thus proving my prior sentiment: some beauties require tragedies.

  At the edge, Baz scooped Coco into his arms, and Nzuzi stared across the Hudson. It felt nice not being alone in such heavy things. Nice being with people who knew what mattered: this infinite horizon where time was nothing, where I was at once old and new.

  “‘The heavens declare the glory of God . . .’” said Baz, “‘and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.’ This will definitely go in the book.”

  White snow fell like a polka-dot panorama against the gray sky. We soaked in the silence and beauty of things until, eventually, Mad leaned over and asked if I was ready. And for some reason—I really couldn’t say why—I thought of the USS Ling. Floating in impotency. And that rock I’d kicked, the one that had hit the deck gun, then plunked into the dark water of the Hackensack River. It was still there. It would always be there.

  I thought of all my momentous multitudes. My many I ams.

  “I am,” I said.

  I unzipped my bag, pulled out the urn—wind whipped around, tossing tiny snowflakes into a sort of tornado, swirling around us, up and up and up into the ether.

  “We’re too far away,” I said.

  The edge of the cliff was at least ten feet away, much too far to chuck a fistful of ashes and expect them to clear the brink. The rocks were roped off with clear signs posted every twenty feet or so: DO NOT GO BEYOND BARRICADE. One of the signs had been vandalized in pastel colors, so it now read: DO NOT GO BEYOND BARRICADE.

  “Guess we should go beyond barricade,” said Mad with a grin. Whenever I saw her do this, I felt like a pilgrim glimpsing the aurora borealis.

  Nzuzi snapped his finger in agreement, the sound echoing off the surrounding cliffs, and Baz rolled his eyes, and all of it made me want to smile. If I’d had a Northern Light, I would have too.

  Mad chanted, “Go-be-yond. Bar-ri-cade. Go-be-yond. Bar-ri-cade.”

  “Fine.” Baz sighed. “We’ll all go.”

  On the other side, a flat rock, massive and snow-covered, jutted out into emptiness. From there, it was a steep drop to the water, four hundred feet down.

  Baz said, “Everyone, be careful.”

  “Ouch,” said Coco. “You’re squeezing too hard.”

  Baz was imagining green bean casseroles too, I think.

  I held the heavy urn in both hands, and noticed the flat rock under our feet had be
en defaced. It must have been recent; the snow had been cleared off. It wasn’t usual graffiti fare, like a skull or a slur; it was a rainbow-colored heart to match Mad’s coat.

  To match Mad’s everything, really.

  Suddenly my foot slipped on the ice, and I saw my own death in the water below. Mad grabbed my shoulder and helped me regain my balance while I tried to play it cool. I nodded at her, bent down, pulled out a fistful of Dad.

  . . .

  “Toss me off the Palisades,” I said.

  “Toss me off the Palisades,” said Mad.

  “Toss me off the Palisades,” said Coco.

  “Toss me off the Palisades,” said Baz.

  Nzuzi snapped once.

  I pulled my hand back and tossed the ashes . . . directly into the wind. Fusing with the tiny tornado, the ashes of Bruno Victor Benucci Jr. came flying back into our faces where three curses, two snaps, and Baz’s silence fused into one glorious choir of profanity.

  “Did any of him make it?” asked Baz, shifting Coco to his other arm.

  We each tried to shake Dad from our coats and faces.

  “I don’t think so.”

  Mad picked up a nearby rock the size of a grapefruit, and spit on it so the snow melted a little. “Here,” she said. “Put some on this.”

  “Some what?” I asked.

  “Some of your dad.”

  I sprinkled a pinch of the ashes on the mushy spot, part melty snow, part melty Mad. She scooped up another fistful of snow, and covered the rest of the rock in it, packing it tight.

  Hey, Dad. You okay in there?

  Yeah, V. Freezing my balls off, but good.

  I heaved Dad right off the cliff, down four hundred feet, and into the Hudson, where he would lie forever. Dormant. Like the rock under the Ling. Like me. Like all of us, really.

  Coco dusted off her mittens. “Who’s hungry?”

  MAD

  By the time we returned to Greenhouse Eleven, it was late afternoon. Baz had the evening shift at Cinema 5, which put him home close to midnight. Having had nothing to eat since our mediocre muffins from Rainbow Café we ravaged the rest of our weekly haul from Babushka’s. It was mostly cold cuts and cheeses, which we kept latched in an old file cabinet behind the greenhouse, a sort of makeshift refrigerator during the colder months.

  I decided tomorrow would be the day: Operation Check on Jamma. Since Vic’s arrival, I’d effectively ignored all the pertinent sections of my Madifesto in this regard, the ones extolling loyalty, family, and remembering one’s roots. I would stay tonight while Baz was gone, get a good night’s sleep, then disappear tomorrow.

  Baz headed off to work, and not for the first time, I was tempted to tell him everything—Jamma, Uncle Les, all of it. But after examining every possible outcome of that conversation, I couldn’t think of one that didn’t end in confrontation; and if Uncle Les had been drinking (which, these days, was a pretty safe bet), I couldn’t think of one that didn’t end with Baz getting punched, or worse, Baz doing the punching. I’d yet to see him resort to violence, but everyone had a limit. Leave it to Uncle Les to find Baz’s. So I said nothing as he left the greenhouse.

  The rest of us ate cold cuts while Zuz spun the same Journey record over and over again, and we all discussed the remaining places on Vic’s father’s list.

  “Okay,” said Coco, staring at the Terminal Note, willing it to reveal its innermost secrets. “So, we still have to find the ‘smoking bricks of our first kiss,’ which, WTF, Bruno? Great clue, dude.” Coco had taken to referring to Vic’s father on a first-name basis. “Also, a ‘wishing well,’ and the top of some stupid rock.” She looked at Vic, who was currently on the couch, applying eye drops. “Spoils? Any ideas?”

  Vic shook his head, and Coco speculated, and Zuz danced, and on and on it went, like the broken record it was.

  Like the broken record we were.

  Very little was done that evening, and we all ended up going to bed early with that specific feeling of having accomplished next to nothing. In and of itself, it was no big deal. Countless nights our collective head hit the pillow without having done much of anything at all, which was fine because there was nothing to do anyway.

  The Madifesto dictates: when nothing is required, doing nothing is something; when something is required, doing nothing is nothing.

  We lay in the dark, listening to the hum of the space heater, tossing in a rotten sort of laziness. The thing is, something was required of me. And I’d let it go far too long.

  “Mad?” said Coco.

  “What?”

  “Can you tell a story?”

  “I’m really not in the mood, Coke.”

  I focused on the sound of Zuz’s snores, closed my own eyes, and tried to channel whatever peace he’d found. From here, I could see Vic, earbuds in, and I wondered if he was listening to that same opera from before, the one he shared with me on Channel à la Goldfish.

  Coco cleared her throat.

  I opened my eyes. “What, Coco?”

  “Nothing. Shit.”

  I rolled onto my back, pulled my sleeping bag up over my head, and there in the darkness of my supreme, extreme consciousness, I saw Jamma lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, a Coca-Cola on the nightstand. I really shouldn’t have waited this long—

  Coco cleared her throat again.

  “Oh my God, what, Coco?”

  “I can’t go to sleep without a story. Or at least . . . a declaration of some kind.”

  “You want a declaration, huh?”

  “If it’s not too much trouble.”

  Vic pulled out one earbud. Zuz snapped once, sat up in his sleeping bag. Guess we were all present and accounted for.

  “Fine,” I said. “How about this . . . And Madeline drop-kicked the little girl who kept everyone awake, and there was much rejoicing. Better?”

  Coco didn’t say anything at first, but in the veiled moonlight of the greenhouse I thought I could make out a determined frown. “I’ve been working on one,” she said.

  “One what?”

  “A declaration.” Coco cleared her throat again and spoke with the tone of someone who believed the whole world was listening. “And when the kids needed someone most, someone to love and trust, they found one another, and they called themselves the Kids of Appetite, and they lived and they laughed and they saw that it was good.”

  In the wake of Coco’s declaration, there was a long silence, though I had no idea how long, because there was just no way to calculate something like that.

  “What do you guys think?” asked Coco. “I know Vic is just a Chapter and all, but—I dunno, after today, it feels like we’re a real gang, you know? Like the greasers, right, Mad? From The Outsiders? Figured we should have a name.”

  Zuz snapped once.

  “The Kids of Appetite,” continued Coco. “Get it? Cause we’re always hungry, and always at Babushka’s or Napoleon’s or White Manna, and our shenanigans at Foodville with the ice cream. Plus, you know, hunger for life and whatnot. So, double meaning. Kids of Appetite.”

  I sat up, slid out of my sleeping bag. “We get it, Coco. It’s fucking guileless.”

  Coco’s red curls whipped around in the semidarkness. “What the frak does guileless mean?”

  “Guys,” said Vic.

  An irrational anger boiled from my stomach to my throat to my face and forehead, and now my hair was on fire. And how strange, to possess all my faculties at such a time, to understand that what I was pissed about, I wasn’t really pissed about. I wasn’t mad at Coco, not really. So who was I mad at? “It means it’s not nearly as clever as you think it is.”

  Coco’s tiny figure sat fully upright now, her bottom half still in the sleeping bag like a partially stuffed pepper. “You’re just mad you didn’t think of it first. For once, I made a declaration. A guilefull declar
ation.”

  Zuz snapped twice.

  I put on my shoes, stood, and started toward the coat rack by the door. “I am so sick of this place.”

  “Well, good,” said Coco, “because it’s sick of you. So sick, it’s gonna vomit you right up.”

  At the other end of the greenhouse, Vic was propped up on one elbow, his earbuds in hand. I slipped on my coat and hat, and only then did I realize that at some point, I’d picked up The Outsiders. The book wasn’t really a book at all—it was a limb, an appendage. I walked out, slammed the door behind me, and started down the frozen path. My head flooded with images of Jamma laying like a sloth in her own filth, or worse, bruised, or worse . . .

  Approaching Channel à la Goldfish, I heard the shrill voice of Coco. “And we lived and we laughed, Mad!” She must have stuck her head out the door, her voice echoing throughout the orchard; I said a silent prayer that Gunther didn’t have a window open. “And we saw that it was good!” she yelled. “We saw that it was really frakking good!”

  In the stream, Harry Connick Jr., Jr., swam idly toward me as I crossed the bridge. His bulging eyes seemed to say, Who are you, Madeline Falco?

  “Give it up, Junior.”

  But I knew he wouldn’t. That fish would not quit.

  FIVE

  INWARD TRANSFORMATIONS

  (or, The Magnificent Enigma of Simultaneous Extreme Opposites)

  Interrogation Room #3

  Bruno Victor Benucci III & Sergeant S. Mendes

  December 19 // 5:34 p.m.

  “Mind if I see your dad’s list?” asks Mendes. I slide my backpack out from under my seat, pull out Dad’s Terminal Note, and hand it across the table.

  There’s a knock on the door, and Detective Ron pops his head inside.

  “News?” asks Mendes, slipping Dad’s note into her file.

  “You’re not going to like it,” says the detective.

  “Oh my God, Ron, I swear, one more preface out of you, and—”

  “She’s not home. She’s not at work. Every call goes to voice mail, which, as I mentioned before, is full.”