by David Arnold
I shift my weight to the other hip. “I once had this cat named Justin.”
“What?”
“For my twelfth birthday, Dad brought home a kitten. It was female, but when Mom asked what we should name her, I was all, Let’s call her Justin! I was twelve, what can I say? Justin it was. When Mom and Dad died, the cat came with me to Uncle Les’s house.”
“Madel—”
“My uncle had one of those animatronic singing fish. You remember those? The kind that turned its head and sang right at you?”
Even Bundle knows better than to interrupt now; he hums under his breath, low and out of tune.
“‘Take Me to the River,’” he says. “Al Green, right?”
“That’s the song. I don’t know who sings it. Other than the fish.”
For a moment the faint hum of the digital recorder is a cricket during silence. And all I can see are the eyes: one pair turned off, one pair on fire.
My God . . .
“Justin the Cat hated that stupid fish. She didn’t trust it, but she was too curious to leave it alone. She used to climb up on the back of the sofa so she could reach it up on the wall. She’d sniff at it, claw at it—I think she wasn’t sure whether to pounce on the fish, run from it, or take a bite out of it. The whole thing just drove Uncle Les nuts. Said if I couldn’t control my own pet, he’d control her for me. What you have to understand—I mean, it’s not like Uncle Les was rotten from the beginning. When Jamma and I first moved in, he was nice, even. Sad but not mean. He was trying, you know. But . . .”
“Madeline, what are we talking about here?”
I take another sip of water, the last gulp in the glass. The cut on my lower lip still stings, not to mention the throbbing pain in my back and hips. “One day I came home from school, and Justin was missing. I scoured the house, turned the whole place upside down. I walked out onto the back deck, past the patio furniture and grill, all the way to the edge of the property, where a shallow creek ran behind our house. I found her like that—sopping wet, moving with the motion of the weak current, no telling how long she’d been there. Her eyes were like a doll’s or . . . a puppet’s. They didn’t look dead. They looked like they’d never been alive in the first place. And then, behind me, from an open window of the house, I heard singing.”
I wipe my eyes, look straight ahead at Bundle, and quietly hum.
(TWO days ago)
MAD
Vic dropped the rifle to the floor.
“I am a Super Racehorse,” he said.
I barely recognized him in Baz’s baseball cap, but then it was hard to see much of anything at the moment. My eye was swollen almost completely shut; it hurt like fire and shards of glass. I sat up in a daze, leaned over, and checked Uncle Les’s pulse.
“He’s alive.”
Vic’s hand was on my shoulder. “You okay?”
Everything was blurred, fuzzy, like I was peering through a moldy shower liner. Behind me, Vic said something about calling the police, and I vaguely registered him leaving the room. I felt the rest of my life would be this way, one nebulous happenstance after another where I would never quite grasp what anyone ever said or did. I watched Uncle Les breathe, up and down, in and out—life required every direction. It needed the push and the pull, the simultaneous extreme opposites. An empty bottle lay at his feet, and just as suddenly as the vagueness was on me, I pulled back the liner and everything came into focus.
I turned, ran stiffly from the room. My left hip, the one that had taken the brunt of Uncle Les’s weight, throbbed from the inside out. I shut the door, looked around for something to barricade it with. An old armoire stood at the end of the hallway. Moving to one side of the armoire, I put my shoulders and back into the pushing, but it barely budged.
Vic came running back. “I called the cops.”
“Help me with this.”
Vic hesitated. “I think we should go.”
“What? No.”
“Mad, I hit him. What if he’s . . . I don’t know. And the cops are gonna ask all sorts of questions.”
I pointed to Jamma’s room, where my grandmother was in bed, admiring her mittens like the whole world wasn’t spinning off its axis. “I’m not leaving her. Now help me.”
Vic took off Baz’s Thunder cap, set it on top of the armoire, and helped me push the thing so it sat squarely in front of my bedroom door. And I don’t know if it was the sight of Jamma right now, or the idea that we’d just called the police on my own uncle, or the fact that things had been so bad for so long, I’d forgotten it was something to call the police about, but at that moment I felt what little food I’d had to eat that day boiling in my stomach.
“I’m gonna be sick.”
I ran into the bathroom, slammed the door behind me, staggered to the toilet, and threw up. After, I stuck my face under the faucet to let the cool water run over my swollen eye. On the corner of the bathroom counter sat a framed photograph, the catalyst of the evening. I turned off the water, picked up the photo, and stared at a shadow.
There were no pictures of my parents in this house. Uncle Les had seen to that. I kept my own box of them hidden in my closet. We’d been a family once, with homemade Halloween costumes and broken vases and pulled teeth and cookies for Santa and time-out corners and movie nights—and now, nothing. Whenever I could, I spent some time with what I had left: photographs. And today, I found this photo. I don’t remember it being taken, which is just the way families operate. You live with these people; they are in your space and you are in theirs, and even if what you’re doing doesn’t require documentation, sometimes documentation happens. And there we were in the photo, all three of us happy together, pleased as pie, just sitting, doing something or nothing, it really didn’t matter.
And I liked it. So I put it in this frame and set it on the bathroom counter. I don’t know what I thought. Maybe that Uncle Les wouldn’t mind. But I knew better. I thought about that day when I came home early and found him drinking orange juice that did not belong to him. I thought about the flirty lilt of my mother’s voice from the bedroom, and I knew—they loved each other. My uncle fell in love with his brother’s wife, and while her death may have been enough to make Uncle Les drink himself into oblivion, to hit this girl in his house who was nothing but a reminder of a love that was not his to claim, to remove all photographic evidence, effectively wiping Mom from his memory—I would not let him wipe her from mine.
I placed the framed photo back on the counter, carefully standing it upright.
In the mirror, I tried to straighten my hair a little. Bruises and scars, and a swollen eye . . .
“I’m a junkyard full of false starts.” I sang the words in a whisper, the way Elliott Smith did, the way a favorite song should be sung. “And I don’t need your permission to bury my love—”
From the other side of the door: a loud crash.
“Vic?” I said loudly.
Nothing.
Breathe. In and out. Breathe.
In my head, I heard Vic’s song, the opera of debilitating beauty, and I heard my song, “Coming Up Roses,” both of them mashed together in the most glorious medley of all time. As I opened the door, time slowed, and I saw everything in vivid detail.
As I opened the door, I regretted not finishing what Vic had started, picking up the rifle and ending my uncle’s life while I still had the chance.
As I opened the door, I saw the old armoire in my head, and I knew where the crashing sound had come from.
As I opened the door, I saw my uncle holding Vic from behind, his muscular arms wrapped around Vic’s neck like a python, choking off any chance of air or escape. They stood in the middle of the newly cleaned living room, and Vic’s face was purple, and on his neck I saw a tiny spot of bright red where the jagged-sharp edges of Uncle Les’s broken bottle met Vic’s skin.
As I opened t
he door, I heard nothing but our two songs floating around the house like flung roses in slow motion.
I heard nothing. . . .
NINE
COCA-COLA
(or, This Is How It Ends)
Interrogation Room #3
Bruno Victor Benucci III & Sergeant S. Mendes
December 19 // 7:46 p.m.
Mendes holds her pen between her thumb and forefinger, her hand resting on the file in front of her. “This afternoon you opened our conversation by discussing all the girls you’d fallen in love with. We’ve talked about art and family, and your own personal struggles.”
. . .
“So?”
“So, what am I missing?”
“What do you mean?”
“Vic, you’ve been telling this story, and I’m happy to listen, but you’re stalling. I wanna know why.”
. . .
“What time is it?” I ask.
“That’s the second time you’ve asked. What difference does it make?”
Before I can come up with anything, Mendes stands, walks around behind me, leans down into my ear, and whispers, “Victor, I wanna know what you know. Why keep protecting Kabongo? You say you were in the house when it happened—okay, fine, I believe you. No more bullshit. Tell me what you saw.”
. . .
“Do you know what the literal translation of Fauve is, Miss Mendes?”
“Wild beast.”
She says it like it’s nothing, like she was just waiting for me to ask.
“I get it,” she says, her voice urgent, her whispers tickling my ear. “The simmering underneath. I do. But, Vic—you’re not Matisse. This isn’t abstract art, and you’re not a Fauve. You can’t make this pretty, no matter how much gray you throw on it. You know what I think? I think you’re a kid who saw something that scared the shit out of you.”
I go to my Land of Nothingness. There, few words are spoken, and all beauty is abstract. There, questions are traded and wounds healed. There, moms don’t change and dads don’t die.
“Victor. Why did Baz Kabongo kill Mad’s uncle?”
I go to my Land of Nothingness, where sopranos fly.
“He didn’t, Miss Mendes.”
(TWO days ago)
VIC
This is how it ends. There is nothing left to consider. My red light is fading, almost gone. I am separated by oceans, far removed from the magic of the bell tower, where I defied mathematics and everything by kissing the loveliest girl I’d known. I am alone inside a reverse cocoon. So many deaths eluded by inches: that slip on the snowy rock up on Rockefeller Lookout, a mighty plummet off the Palisades; the near miss with the produce truck; my many multitudes boiled down to one, as I become the rock soaring through the air, clanking off the deck gun, plopping into the dark water of the Hackensack River. I will sink to the bottom and exist forever without anyone knowing about me.
. . .
Mad stood frozen in the bathroom doorway. She stared at me. Time was no longer a thing, nor sound, nor slow, nor fast—only separation. The Self-Portrait Man held me from behind, digging the tool of separation into the skin of my throat, slowly carving a new tiny path, a path going somewhere dark, pulling me down . . .
And like that . . . sound returned.
Two snaps.
MAD
Zuz came out of nowhere.
The first punch landed squarely on Uncle Lester’s left cheek, knocking him back a couple of feet. The shard of bottle fell from his hands; Vic, now released from my uncle’s grip, fell to one side. Palm open, Zuz whipped Uncle Lester across the face once, twice, three times. Uncle Les hit back, landed a blow on Zuz’s mouth, but it didn’t seem to faze him.
I found feeling in my feet again, ran over to Vic, and helped him up. What was left of the bottle I kicked across the room, where it landed next to my jacket on the floor, and even in the madness of everything, I found this incredibly odd.
Why is my jacket on the floor?
Above it, on the wall, there was the gun rack: three rifles, the fourth still on the floor of my room. Next to it, where Uncle Lester’s prized antlers had been mounted on a plaque, there was now only its empty outline on the wall, a light spot where years of sun and dust and grime had been unable to penetrate.
The ivory antlers were gone.
I turned back to the fight, saw Uncle Lester take one last drunken swing, missing by a wide margin. Zuz did not punch back. He’d won and they both knew it. In one last forceful motion, he pushed Uncle Lester into the shadow of the hallway, and I waited for the sound of my uncle’s body hitting the ground, but it never came. Instead a different sound—crushing and crackling and ill. And out of the shadows, Uncle Les stumbled forward, his eyes turned off, not the eyes of a dying or dead thing, but the eyes of a thing that had never been alive to begin with, the eyes of a puppet, a doll. I’d seen the look before, though I couldn’t say where.
And I saw those ivory antlers emerge from his mouth as if he were throwing them up, their sharp ends impaling his skull from back to front like a toothpick through a ripe grape. The toothpick moved now, ever so gently, as blood gushed like a broken fire hydrant; and, sliding backward by inches, the antlers exited the way they came, eventually disappearing altogether, the sickest of ingestions.
I saw Uncle Les fall to the ground. Those antlers he so loved, and the hours spent admiring them on the wall, never once suspecting they would be his final undoing.
I saw my grandmother standing in her slippers, blood spatter across her face and nightgown. She held the glimmering red antlers in front of her, and her eyes connected with mine, and I’d never seen that kind of fire. They were ancient and primal, those of a den mother protecting her young. They were lucid. For a moment her entire body shook from top to bottom, the way an animal dries itself off when it’s wet. And then her eyes glazed, and she looked down at the mittens on her hands as if they’d acted of their own accord. “I’m still thirsty, though,” said Jamma quietly, continuing some imaginary conversation. She dropped the antlers to the floor, turned, and walked into the kitchen.
“So very thirsty.”
TEN
AND DONE SO MIGHTILY
(or, Those Tenacious Molecules of Chance)
Interrogation Room #2
Madeline Falco & Detective H. Bundle
December 19 // 8:11 p.m.
When the dust from the atomic cloud clears, the room is eerily silent.
“I don’t believe you,” says Bundle.
“Believe what you want.”
“Mad, come on. You’re telling me—you’re saying it was your grandmother. Your eighty-something-year-old grandmother.”
“She’s strong as an ox, dude.”
The door flies open, and a woman walks right up to me, completely ignoring Bundle. “Madeline, I’m Sergeant Mendes. I need you to tell me your grandmother’s name.”
Vic stands behind her; I smile at him and he inside-smiles back, and I’m breathing steadily for the first time in hours, and God, I’ve missed him.
“Her name, please,” says Sergeant Mendes.
“You took her to the hospital and you don’t know her name?”
“I didn’t take her personally. What’s her name?”
“Olivia.”
“Olivia what?”
“Chambers.”
Bundle sighs, puts his hands behind his head. “Sarah, please. This is asinine.”
Mendes leans over the digital recorder, says, “Interview between Madeline Falco and Detective Bundle terminated at”—she checks her watch—“eight thirteen p.m.” She pushes stop, looks at Bundle. “I don’t think it is, Herman.”
Vic and I sit silently in the room while Sergeant Mendes and Detective Bundle step into the hallway. Bundle doesn’t pull the door closed on his way out, so we hear pretty much everything. M
endes sends Ron (a detective, apparently) to call Lieutenant Bell first, then Bergen Regional Medical Center, and inform them the police are on their way to pick up Olivia Chambers. She then mobilizes a slew of Hackensack’s finest to check the back room at Babushka’s, Napoleon’s Pub—any place Nzuzi Kabongo might be hiding—sending extra officers to the orchard, last greenhouse on the right, with instructions to get whatever DNA and prints they can off any and all vinyl records, specifically by the band Journey.
“I knew we moved too quickly with this,” she says. “I told Lieutenant Bell, but—shit. I should have pushed harder.”
“Sarah, DNA does not lie. Now this story they’re telling, it’s not—”
Mendes reappears in the room, apparently uninterested in Bundle’s opinion; Bundle follows closely behind, and there’s something in the contrasting looks on their faces, their differences in body language—hers with a sense of urgency; his with a sense of, well, dinner—that is the perfect illustration of the two. Mendes is in charge, and everyone in the room knows it.
“I need to speak to Nzuzi pronto,” she says. “Do you know where he is?”
The Madifesto dictates: when parsing words, avoid the spirit of the question, and answer only what is asked.
“No,” I say.
Vic looks at me, says nothing.
“Sarah, let’s talk facts,” says Bundle, raising his right thumb. “The baseball cap. Kabongo’s DNA was in the cap, the cap was found at the scene.”
“Oh,” says Vic.
The word sort of seeps out of him, but I hear the revelation behind it. I feel the same revelation, having wondered what caused the police to land on Baz in the first place. Surely it’s not just the hat.
“What, oh?” asks Bundle.
Vic says, “I wore his hat that night.”
Bundle crosses his arms. “Let’s say that’s true. The DNA on the antlers is rock solid. Kabongo held that thing in his hands. We know this. It is a scientific fact.”