by David Arnold
Whatever his dreams were, they terrified him; and this terrified me.
He calmed down eventually, and when the snores revived, I leaned in close to Vic’s ear. “Follow me. Bring your bag.”
Vic tucked away his iPod, slipped on his coat, and followed me down the walkway and out the door. If I were honest with myself, I would have to admit I’d missed him. Just a little. The Metpants, the eye drops, the way he looked at everyone the exact same way as if all of humanity was on an even playing field—I mean, yeah. I missed him.
Outside, the night was cold and silent. We made our way across Channel à la Goldfish, our shoes clumping softly against the wood, then under the chain-link fence and across the street. We stopped in front of the graveyard, and I thought about bumps and the thousand red lights and the inevitability of corresponding units.
“We’re going to your grandparents’ old house,” I said.
“Okay.”
“You said they lived around here.” I turned, began walking. “Which gave me an idea.”
Vic jogged to catch up. “What was the idea?”
“You’ll have to wait and see.”
He followed silently, and I don’t know what I was expecting—a question or two, I suppose. At the very least, I figured he’d ask how I knew which direction to go in. But he didn’t say a word, just kept his head down.
I flipped my hair to one side as we walked. I’d actually spent some time on it tonight, which wasn’t something I normally did. The shave, the hat, the length—my hair just didn’t require that much maintenance, which was good because I never felt like the upkeep. But yeah, for some reason, tonight . . . I upkeeped.
I glanced sideways at Vic, wondering if he noticed, but more important, wondering why I cared. I pulled out a cigarette, lit up.
“You shouldn’t smoke, you know,” he said, just like last time by the stream, with Harry Connick Jr., Jr., and the debilitating opera.
Drag.
Blow.
Warm.
“What was that song you had me listen to a couple of days ago?” I asked. “The last time you nagged me about smoking, I mean?”
“‘The Flower Duet.’ It was Dad’s favorite,” he said. “Now it is mine.”
Now it is mine. More than Vic’s favorite song, apparently, he owned it. That fucker belonged to him lock, stock, and barrel.
“My favorite song is called ‘Coming Up Roses,’” I said. “By Elliott Smith. You know it?”
“No.”
Disappointing but not unexpected. Music was more than subjective; it was erratic. It was the ship on the horizon that one sailor saw, the other sailor didn’t.
The Madifesto dictates: smoking in the cold will bring out your inner existentialist.
“It is weird, though,” said Vic.
“What’s that?”
“Both of our songs have a flower in the name.”
We walked through the middle-of-the-night streets of New Milford, the soles of our shoes pat-patting against the pavement, and our breath walked with us, this exhale shooting a bit of soul into the air, that inhale sucking a piece of heart into our throats—exhale, inhale, exhale in the cold night.
“What do you think Baz was dreaming about?” asked Vic, his words cutting through the shivery silence.
“No idea. Not sure I wanna know.”
To our left, the Hackensack River wasn’t visible, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t feel it. Like a distant fire, the river made itself known in the smells, the sounds, the way the air felt like a cloud. And then Vic stopped walking and I stopped walking and we stared at each other and this new quiet joined the old cold, and I had no idea what was going on.
“We’re here,” he whispered.
I dropped my cigarette butt on the pavement, stomped it, looked around. “Oh. Right.”
In front of us was a modest two-story with brown siding and brick trim. The only signs of life were a single lit window and a steady stream of smoke from the chimney. Even in the dark it was obvious the house had been neglected through the years: at each corner the gutters dangled like limp arms, and everything from the giant rotting tree in the front lawn to the crooked porch light confirmed total architectural atrophy.
“You’re probably wondering why I brought you here,” I said.
I waited a beat, but Vic gave no indication that this was true. As far as he let on, I may as well have presented him with nothing more than an old toothbrush, or one of those fake certificates of authenticity guaranteeing the validity of some celebrity’s autograph.
“So, I got to thinking about that third clue,” I said. “Bury me in the smoking bricks of our first kiss. When we were all at Napoleon’s, you said your parents got together when they were young, right? ‘Silly young,’ you said. Well, if they had their first kiss in high school, it’s not like they would have had their own place or anything, which means there’s a decent chance it went down at a parents’ house. And what kind of bricks smoke?”
I pointed to the roof, at the crumbling chimney with the tiny billows of smoke.
“It could have happened at school,” said Vic. “Or at . . . camp, or something.”
“Maybe. Or maybe it happened here. Maybe it happened up there, on that roof.”
I had a plan, see, wherein I would explain the details of my rationale to Vic, and those bright eyes of his would grow brighter still, and he would thank me profusely for my brilliant deduction, and I would graciously bow my head and tip my knit cap.
“How did you know where they lived?” asked Vic.
I saw another question behind his eyes: Where have you been?
“I did some research,” I said.
“So, like, Google, or what?”
I didn’t answer.
Vic turned toward the house. “Who lives here now?”
“Some old lady. She can’t hear a thing.”
“Did Google tell you that?”
I sighed, wishing we could go back in time a few minutes so I could start this whole explanation over. “I pretended to sell magazines.”
“You what?”
“I knocked on her door, pretended I was selling magazines. I rang the bell a dozen times, she never heard. Practically knocked the door down before she answered. I’m not worried so much about getting caught. The real question is how we get up th—”
Vic stepped onto the lawn.
“Vic, wait a sec.”
But he didn’t. Instead he marched lightly through the snow toward the enormous tree, its rotted branches drooping under the weight of a pitiless winter; he tightened the straps of his backpack as if approaching the face of an enormous cliff, with every intention of climbing it, mastering it, owning it. In a surprisingly agile move, I watched Vic hop in the air, do a chin-up on the lowest branch, and swing himself onto the limb like a skinny-nimble superhero. I stared at the lit window—willing the old lady to be as deaf as she was earlier today—then ran through the snow to the base of the tree trunk. Already four or five branches up, Vic climbed and climbed, and all I could think was, Don’t let him fall, don’t let him fall, don’t let him fall.
“Vic!” I shout-whispered. “Be really careful, okay?”
I took one more glance at the lit window, pulled my coat tight around my waist, and swung myself up each branch with relative ease. Above me, Vic had reached the topmost limb, and was now eagerly eyeing the edge of the roof a good three feet away.
And then—like that—he jumped, clearing the gap fairly easily, landing on the roof with a dull thud. I breathed into my hands to warm them, pulled myself up and up until it was my turn to jump. As it turned out, watching someone leap a three-foot gap at that height was far easier than leaping it yourself. From here, three feet felt a lot more like thirty.
“You don’t have to do it,” whispered Vic from the other side. “Actual
ly. Please don’t.”
I breathed in quickly, held a soulful breath—and jumped.
VIC
In no time at all, we found a loose brick in the chimney. Then another. And another. Mad pulled them out, and with each one my breath caught a little in my chest. Behind the bricks was a solid square foot of space, like a miniature cave.
And in the cave was a box.
The box sat there like it belonged, like it had been among bricks for so long that it thought it was a brick. I pulled it from the chimney, tried not to think about whatever dreams my parents had had the last time they’d touched it.
Bury me in the smoking bricks of our first kiss.
Suddenly the box looked a lot more like a coffin.
I took off my backpack and sat on the roof, carefully placing the tin box next to me. Mad sat on the other side.
It was a very small box. Ergo, she sat like this:
With extreme up-closeness.
Knees tucked under her chin.
Punk cut tilted toward me. (I wanted to put my hand on the shaved side of her head and rub her scalp. Big-time. I do not know why.)
On the other side of her head, her yellow hair tumbled in waves. It looked different—not better or worse, necessarily. But a little more . . . aware of itself or something. It crashed like a waterfall down her shins, splashing a foot shy of her painted Nikes. I wanted to wash myself in that hair. That hair could make me clean.
Eyes literally sparkling in the moonlight, eyes so gray, they redefined the word.
“I’m not going to make out with you or anything,” said Mad.
I am an Aspiring Car Rental Entrepreneur.
“What?” I said.
“You’re looking at me like you think I might make out with you. I’m not going to.”
I swallowed hard, focused on my bisyllable answer. “Okay.”
“I mean . . . I didn’t know if maybe that’s what you were waiting for.”
“It wasn’t.”
Mad nodded. “Some guys think I’m like that.”
“I didn’t think you were like that.”
“Well, you don’t really know me.”
Even though the phrase cut like a knife, I found myself entirely content. Mad’s speech was so intentional, I could almost hear the functionality of it, her lips and tongue and teeth operating as one. She spoke so quietly, all these little sentences just for me. The eyes, the sentences, the hair—these pieces that composed the single unit called Mad were astounding. They walked inside my brain, pulled up comfy chairs, and made themselves at home.
“Mad, I know you well enough to know you wouldn’t make out with anyone on impulse.”
She smiled, and I felt warm all over.
I looked down at the box and felt cold all over.
The human body is a mysterious machine, capable of feeling an extraordinary amount of emotions—often opposing—at the same time. Like coincidences, it’s not as improbable as it seems. As complex beings, it stands to reason that the mathematical probability of a single unit experiencing multiple stuffs would be quite high.
Dad used to talk this shit all the time.
He called it simultaneous extreme opposites.
. . .
. . .
Mad glanced at the tin box between us, did this sort of tossy-twirl thing with her hair where it shot around to one side and landed on her back, then sang, “I’m a junkyard full of false starts; and I don’t need your permission to bury my love under this bare lightbulb.”
“What’s that from?” I asked.
. . .
“My favorite song. ‘Coming Up Roses,’” said Mad. She sang a few more lines, which only increased my general non-brain, non-heart-thinking way of thinking.
I was such a mess.
“I like it,” I said.
She looked up at the moon and sang in a small melty voice. And as she did, I was transported to another world where kids were nice and no one ever pointed and we all just danced and stayed up late telling stories and drank hot chocolate with marshmallows and lived in greenhouses with unique friends.
“While the moon does its division,” sang Mad, “you’re buried below. And you’re coming up roses everywhere you go.”
She lowered her hand, rested it on top of the tin box between us.
“Who sings that again?” I asked, staring at her hand, trying to build up the courage to reach out and grab it.
“Elliott Smith,” she said.
Do it, Benucci. Be the racehorse. In a rare wave of courage, I reached out toward the box—just as Mad moved her hand.
Such was the way of the world.
She shifted, her shoes scraping the shingles of the roof as she slid toward the chimney, then turned and leaned her back up against it and tucked her knees under her chin again. I watched all her pieces move as one, thinking some machines were just more mysterious than others.
“So,” said the most mysterious machine. “How do you sleep with your eyes open?”
I looked at the box. It sort of tipped the timing of everything, like a third party was up on this roof with us. Our conversation was sporadic, even for me. Talking, then thinking, then no talking, then singing.
I met Mad’s eye. “Are we asking all the questions now?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, we’ve been doing that thing where we say we won’t ask this and we won’t ask that, but . . .”
“Right.”
“Right. So. Are we asking all those questions now?”
“Sure. Let’s.”
I nodded. “Fine. I’ll trade you.”
“You’ll what?”
“I’ll trade you. Questions. But we each have to agree on them before giving our answers.”
“Okay,” she said. “What’s your question for me?”
Mad’s eyes were a strange sort of smile. She knew what I wanted to ask, that I wanted to know where she’d been, why she’d left. And I think she would have told me too. But I had this feeling like even though she would have told me where she’d been, she really didn’t want to. And I never wanted to be that to Mad. I never wanted to be the one to make her go against her wants.
I wanted her wants intact.
“Other than the Hinton Vortex,” I said, “why do you like The Outsiders so much?”
Her eyes changed into a different smile. They said thank you.
“Do you agree to your question?”
She nodded. “I do. And you’ll tell me how you sleep with your eyes open?”
“I will,” I said. “But you first.”
Mad spent the next ten minutes talking about The Outsiders. No theories or analytics. Just pure, unadulterated fangirling. In the moonlight, I stared at her lips as they moved in succinct elegance, praising story and character and setting. Apparently, the best characters in The Outsiders valued loyalty above all. And I remembered what Coco said, that if Mad’s “thing” was leaving, her other thing was coming back. I thought maybe loyalty, for Mad, was in the coming back. She recited her favorite quotes, and one of them was something about being so real that you scared people. Mad said she wanted to be that kind of real. I thought I understood. In our many conversations about art, Dad always challenged me to look past “the pretty,” as he called it. He taught me that what really mattered wasn’t beauty, but what drove that beauty, the stuff that bubbled just below the surface. Don’t look at the colors that are there, V, he used to say, pointing to various prints in my Matisse book. Look at the colors that aren’t. Dad called this “the simmering underneath,” said you could find it in books and music and art and just about everything. Listening to Mad describe the scary realness of the characters in her book, I thought she probably understood the simmering underneath.
As she continued, hair splashing, lips crashing, he
art singing, she spoke of the joys of fiction, and about sinking into fiction, and I imagined sinking with her. I wanted to be part of all things if they were her things.
I wanted to go to Singapore and take her with me.
. . .
And I wanted her lips.
. . .
Just to taste them. To put my own lips on top of them, all around them. I wanted to put my tongue in there too. I wanted to feel her wet mouth and the sharp edges of her teeth. I’d never kissed anyone before. Kissing was hard for leaky-mug-dry-eye type reasons. And sympathy-smile type reasons. Also, kids-on-the-bridge type reasons. But man. I wanted to. With Mad, I really did.
“Okay, your turn,” she said. “How do you sleep with your eyes open?”
I pulled out my handkerchief and wiped my leaky mug.
Across the street, an old pickup was parked in someone’s driveway. The streetlight next to it shone down on the truck. It looked isolated, like it was alone on a stage. Barely within the circle of light, a garden gnome stood in the grass. Alone in the dark.
“‘Expression, for me, does not reside in passions glowing in a human face or manifested by violent movement.’”
. . .
“That’s a quote?” asked Mad.
“Henri Matisse.”
Mad nodded, like this was perfectly reasonable, like of course this Matisse quote explained how I slept with my eyes open. It didn’t, but for some reason, whenever I thought of my having Moebius, I thought of this quote. It just made me love Matisse all the more. Really what it did was solidify my belief that we—you know, me and Matisse—would have been close friends.
“I have Moebius syndrome.”
And I plunged into these words I’d read, words I’d heard, words I’d thought . . . but words I’d never spoken. Mad sat, her chin on her knees, her back to the bricks, listening intently.
“It’s a neurological disorder that causes facial paralysis,” I said. “Something like two to twenty per one million are born with it, so . . . lucky me. But lots of people with Moebius have it way worse. Some can’t move their mouths at all. Some have other problems with their hands or arms or feet. I am lucky. In some ways.” I held up Dad’s monogrammed handkerchief. “Swallowing is difficult. I can’t smile. I can’t move my eyes sideways. I only cry on rare occasions. I can’t blink, which causes severe dry eye, hence the Visine. I had speech therapy when I was younger, which helped a lot. Before that, people had a hard time understanding me. I can’t curl my lips around the rim of a cup, so I had to train myself to drink without spilling. And to answer your question, I can’t close my eyes when I sleep. Not all the way, anyway. There are different surgeries I could have, but . . . I don’t know. I’ve never known any different.”