She had yet to do any of these things.
Bizarrely.
“Marry me,” said Frank.
Someone screamed.
Everyone looked at me.
The scream—which, in my estimation, had been the most sensible thing to happen in the last two or three minutes—had come from my own throat. Or gut. Or mouth. All of them, actually.
I did it again. It seemed the thing to do.
And again.
Yes, screaming at the highest of pitches was very sensible.
No words. Just animal screams as I exited my body.
From above, near the ceiling, I saw Vic run from the kitchen. In the hallway, he overcame his inability to touch his father’s urn by simply picking it up. He felt the weight of the urn in his hands, remarkably heavy. I shouldn’t be surprised, he thought. I am holding the whole of my father, the same bald heart-thinker who taught me to find beauty in asymmetry, led me to the Land of Nothingness, gave me the soaring sopranos. If anything, his ashes should be heavier! Vic stuffed the urn into his backpack, slipped on his boots, threw on his coat, and bolted out the front door. He had to get his dad out of that place, away from all those disturbing ding-dong-how-was-your-ding-dong-days, and the rest of the happy family voices. He needed to find a place where his father, the world’s last and greatest Super Racehorse, might rest in peace.
He knew just the spot.
MAD
Being born on December 31 meant watching everyone in the world celebrate a thing on your birthday that wasn’t you. Mom never saw it that way, though. She called me her New Year’s darling, said I was special, meant for great things. I was a little younger than most in my class—Mom said this gave me an edge. I’d finish school sooner, discover the world first, and maybe find whatever great thing I was meant for.
I lit my cigarette and wished she were here now.
Drag.
Blow.
Calm.
The snow kept falling, the wind from the river kept coming, and I stared at the submarine, pondering the intricacies of my past, but mostly, wondering about my future. Three weeks from now, happy New Year would be my happy birthday, and the freedom of eighteen would be upon me with all the honors and benefits granted therein. One benefit was the legal opportunity to get myself, and Jamma, out from under the iron fist of Uncle Les. Sure, I could sneak off now for days at a time, and he either didn’t notice or didn’t care. But I had to go back. Even though Jamma rarely knew who I was anymore, I always went back. I’d been thinking a lot about love recently, and how it wasn’t contingent on the person receiving it; it was contingent on the person giving it. Whether or not my grandmother recognized me didn’t matter. I loved her too much to leave her stranded with Uncle Les.
Enter the freedom of eighteen, with all those pesky honors and benefits.
The problem was, eighteen or not, I had no idea where we should go or how we should get there. I couldn’t choose a place too far away; the thought of being separated from Baz and Zuz and Coco was almost as difficult as the thought of losing Jamma.
Drag.
Blow.
Calm.
I often considered various situations as if they were sets of a Venn diagram. In this case, it was a supremely shitty Venn diagram where set A = {A Person Who Knows What Needs to Be Done}, and set B = {A Person Who Has No Idea How to Do What Needs to Be Done}, and the intersection = {Mad}.
I stomped out the last of the cigarette, pulled the edges of my knit cap over my ears, and blew warm air into my hands. There was something about sitting by the Ling at nighttime that helped me think, like the very heart and soul of the sub was here to keep me company. The black winter-water rippled as thousands of snowflakes dissolved the second they hit the Hackensack River. And I couldn’t help but wonder if it looked as beautiful in the daytime.
Just as I was about to stand and head back, I heard footsteps behind me.
The navy museum was currently closed, and though I’d never had trouble before, I wasn’t entirely sure my being here after hours was allowed.
There, about twenty yards downriver, someone approached. I stayed low, watched as the figure walked up to the fence that separated land from water, laced one hand through the metal mesh. A second later he looked around, and in the snowy moonlight I saw a familiar, unforgettable face: the kid from Babushka’s and Foodville.
Okay, look. I was no believer in a higher order of the cosmos. There was no evidence in my mind to suggest that fate interceded in our lives like some tragic demigod moving humans like pawns on a chessboard. So possibly it was the magic of the Ling that made me want to talk to this kid, or just the fact that I’d only seen him a total of maybe three times before today, and now three times today alone, or hell, maybe there was a tragic demigod moving me like a pawn, but whatever the case, I found myself approaching him.
The Madifesto dictates: when the order of the cosmos sets the board, position yourself as Queen.
I was feet away now, close enough to see white earbuds coiling up to his ears. He knelt on the ground and pulled something out of his backpack, a pot or a jar of some kind, then leaned over it.
“I hope you were right,” he whispered. “I hope there’s beauty in my asymmetry.”
Okaaaaaaaaay.
“You weren’t a nuisance,” he continued, his words growing louder in the cold, snowy silence. “You were the Northern Dancer, sire of the century, the superest of all racehorses.”
Without a doubt this was one of the more bizarre one-sided conversations I’d ever heard, and that was saying something, considering I lived with Coco.
I watched him pull back a piece of tape and open the lid of the jar. His body deflated, as if everything leading to this point had been full of air, energy, expectation—and now . . . not.
I turned quickly, quietly, suddenly feeling I shouldn’t be here. And then . . .
“Hey.”
Dead in my tracks.
I turned back around. “Hey.”
The kid stood clumsily from the snow. “What are you doing here?”
It struck me as an odd first question. What are you doing here? presupposed that the person asking it knew the you to begin with. As opposed to Who are you?
“I like to come here at night,” I said. Because that wasn’t creepy at all.
He let out an “Oh,” as if it really wasn’t, then bent down, put the lid back on the jar, and stuffed it into his bag.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, shivering.
The kid pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his mouth. “I can’t go home right now,” he said.
Me either. I nodded, brushed my hair out of my face, and thought about what he’d said when he didn’t know I was listening. I hope there’s beauty in my asymmetry. Maybe that was it: a slight asymmetry, along with a complete frozenness of features. It wasn’t ugly, or even unpleasant. Far from it, actually. His face was just wholly unique. And I couldn’t help being a little curious.
I pulled out my pack of cigarettes, offered one to him, but he declined. I lit up.
Drag.
Blow.
Warm.
“I mean—I don’t know where to go,” he said. “But I can’t go home.”
“Okay.”
“It’s a long story.”
“I have one of those too.”
Drag.
Blow.
Warm.
I watched my smoke in the cold night air. “I may know a place, though.”
* * *
I should really be dead.
The sentence basically lived on the tip of my tongue. Especially around strangers, which made sense, considering a person isn’t invested in a stranger the way they are, say, in a family member or a close friend. Maybe that’s why so many people ended up leaving their spouses for complete strangers they met
online. It cost almost nothing to tell a stranger almost everything.
“So how about this,” I said, turning down Mercer. “I’m not going to ask you your name, and I’m not going to ask you why you can’t go home tonight. I’m not even going to ask you what’s in that jar.”
“Okay.”
“But I am going to ask you about Northern Dancer, and supreme racehorse and all that.”
“Super,” he said.
“Great.”
“Wait, what?”
“What, what?”
“No, I didn’t mean”—he shook his head, pulled out his handkerchief again, and wiped his mouth—“I meant, it’s not supreme racehorse. It’s Super Racehorse.”
“Okay then.”
“My dad used to call himself an equestrian sport enthusiast. Basically, he was obsessed with horse racing. He didn’t even bet on them, just loved the sport. At one point he got really interested in the actual horses and their lineage and stuff. Like, he could tell you all the fastest horses and who their sires and dams were.”
“Sires and dams?”
“Fathers and mothers. He took me to this farm once, like an hour away. What they do is they take horses that are too old to race, or injured, and they put them on this farm in hopes that they can, you know, produce an even better racehorse. Or—some places, um, harvest the sire’s goods, and then, um, inject them into the . . . dam.”
“Gross.”
He nodded, shifted his backpack as we walked. “Dad would fix a leaky faucet, or win a board game, or get a Jeopardy! question right, and then call himself a Super Racehorse. Anyway, to answer your question, Northern Dancer sired some of the most successful racehorses ever.”
As we turned right on State Street, passing the police station on our left, I noted the use of past tense when he referred to his dad. I said nothing, though. I didn’t much feel like talking about my past tenses either.
“So how about this,” he said. “I’m not going to ask you your name, and I’m not going to ask you what you were doing alone by the river at night. I’m not even going to ask you about the other kids I always see you with. But I am going to ask you about your sire and dam.”
“I don’t have any,” I said.
“I meant your parents.”
“I know what you meant.”
So much for not discussing past tenses.
“So the other kids you’re always with . . .”
“You mean the ones you weren’t going to ask about?” I smiled sideways at him. “It’s fine, man. They’re basically family. We’re undesirables, so we desire each other.” We were only two or three minutes away now—it would’ve been easy to leave it at that. But I didn’t. I blew into my hands to warm them up, then said, “All right, you told a story about your dad, I’ll tell one about my mom. She used to have this framed poster full of pithy inspirational sayings, which she’d ordered off some equally pithy website and hung in our hallway. She made it, like, her personal manifesto. Start doing things you love. All emotions are beautiful. When you eat, appreciate every last bite. That kind of shit. I used to come home from school and find Mom standing in the hallway by herself, reading the thing out loud.” We crossed over Banta, one more block to Salem. “So I started reciting them too. Got to where I’d memorized them, so I could lie in bed at night and stare up at the ceiling and just go with it, you know? I figured if Mom believed in her manifesto that much, there must be something to it. Then one day, we’re all in a car on our way to the mall when a drunk driver hits us head on, killing both my parents. I should really be dead.” There it was—the line, in all its glory, officially packed up and moved out. “But I only got this.” I raised my hat above my ear, pointed to the scar on the side of my head. I kept that whole side shaved for just such occasions, to show I wasn’t hiding it or ashamed of it, wasn’t afraid of who I was or where I came from. My scar was a battle wound, my very life proof of the victory. “Anyway. Mom’s manifesto was total bullshit.”
I stopped there, though that was hardly the end. I didn’t tell him about my Madifesto, the antithesis of Mom’s pithy poster, a banner I marched under proudly, one that called for independence, self-sufficiency, and the incessant pursuit of survival.
Stranger or no, those things were for me.
Between Banta and Salem, I veered into a little alleyway known throughout town as the Chute. Famous for drug busts and muggings, the Chute was a narrow stretch that connected Main and State Street, so named because of its lack of any windows whatsoever. It was as if the architects had simply forgotten to draw them into the plans. There were a few doors—exits for shops to dump trash and whatnot—but they were all locked from the inside. With no windows, and such little street visibility, it had become a veritable breeding ground for all sorts of criminals.
I walked up to one of the locked doors. “We’re here.”
VIC
“What. Here?”
The Stoic Beauty pulled a key from her back pocket. “Please,” she said. “I wouldn’t wish an overnight in the Chute on my worst enemy. No, you’re just inside.”
It was dark out, the only light coming from a distant streetlamp reflected off the snow. I reached for my pocket to use the flashlight on my phone before remembering I had left it at home. As she fumbled with the lock, I pretended to watch the fumbling.
What I actually watched:
Her yellow hair dripping out from under her hat like a leaky sun.
Her pale cheeks, red from the cold.
The outline of her shoulders under her coat.
The outline of her waist under her coat.
The outline of her ass under her coat.
Her legs.
Her inked-up Nikes.
I was a mess.
“It’s not the Hilton,” she said, opening the door and flipping on a light. “But it’s warmer than crashing down by the river if that sweetens the deal at all, which, you know, it should.”
I took in the stench of the room as we stepped inside. It was no big mystery why the place smelled the way it did, thick and substantial and rotten. Six swine carcasses dangled from the ceiling like used piñatas. On the floor, little pools of watery blood gathered in tiny red reservoirs. It was all quite good and gross. I pulled the collar of my shirt up over my nose.
“This has to be against some sort of FDA regulation or something.”
“Oh, it is,” said the Stoic Beauty, slipping the key back into her pocket. “It gets cleaned up before inspections, then falls back into . . . well, what you see here. But again. No hypothermia. So, you know. Win.”
In addition to dead hanging pigs, the room had an industrial oven, a dishwasher, and a large desk with papers and work orders strewn across it.
“All right then,” she said, turning for the door. “We’ll be back in the morning.”
“We?”
“Don’t worry. Norm doesn’t usually show up for work till midmorning.”
Suddenly things made sense. “This is the back of Babushka’s.”
The Stoic Beauty nodded. “Sleep tight.”
“Wait a second.”
I had serious questions. Big burning-a-hole-in-my-brain type questions. I started with the one that seemed most important.
“What’s your name?”
. . .
“That’s against the rules,” she said.
“What rules? There were no rules.”
“The rules of questioning. The rules we set forth during our prior conversation.”
I couldn’t tell if she was half joking or what. If yes, it was about the cutest thing I’d ever seen. If not—shit, it was cute anyway.
“I’m Madeline. I go by Mad.”
She pulled a pack of cigarettes from her back pocket and lit up.
“I’m Vic,” I said. That’s good. Keep that going. “People
call me Vic, I mean.” Okay, that’s enough. “Which is to say, my name is Victor.” You’re done. “But, um. No one calls me Victor, really.” Abort! Abort! “Yeah, just Vic is good.”
I was quickly becoming an absolute ace at face-palming myself. But then, miracle of miracles: Mad smiled a little.
And I died a little.
And she left.
* * *
The slaughtered pigs of the alleged KGB let loose an army of stink.
I left on my coat and boots, tucked my backpack under the metal desk, and slid in after it. In the world of backroom butcher shops, the corner farthest removed from dripping swine carcasses was prime real estate. More cramped than cozy, I pulled four things from my bag:
My Visine, which I applied and replaced.
My earbuds, which I inserted.
My iPod, which I turned on, turned up, and flipped to “The Flower Duet.”
My dad. In an urn.
I kicked myself for leaving my phone at home, though I’m not sure who I would call, or for what reason exactly. There was a measure of comfort in knowing you were only a phone call away, exponentially true given my current locale. But I’d left in a hurry—according to the clock on my iPod, less than an hour ago if that was even possible—with only one idea in mind: get Dad out of that house. This turned into quite the Shakespearean notion of me tossing his remains into the Hackensack River, where he would rest with the Ling forever and ever, sparing him whatever catastrophic events were sure to occur during the coming months (and years?) within the tragic remnants of the Benucci residence. But then, on the banks of the river, the soaring sopranos in my head, I opened the urn. And I saw things I had not expected to see.
Consider this: among the billions of people on Earth, there is one you care about, live with, and love; that one person dies and is burned into billions of microscopic pieces; those billions of pieces are placed in one receptacle. Billions to one, one to billions, billions to one. Sometimes I think love really is bound by numbers.