by David Arnold
* * *
At the bottom of the escalator, people zip up coats, and slip on hats and gloves as they ascend. Vic kneels over his backpack, pulls out his photos and the urn.
“Ready?” he asks.
But there’s a subtext in his tone, in the way he’s standing—upright, feet together, the urn resting waist-high in both hands like he’s about to walk it down the aisle and devote himself to it in sickness and in health.
“You go,” I say, picking up his backpack and slinging it onto one shoulder. “I’ll wait here.”
“You sure?”
I motion over to the gift shop. “Yeah, I preordered one of those Obama Fatheads—gotta see if it’s ready for pickup.” Vic looks at me, and I know he’s smiling. I smile back, hold up my index finger. “Might get a patriotic foam finger while I’m at it.”
We sort of fall into the hug when it comes, and Vic speaks into my shoulder. “I understand why you have to go to Florida. I do. Just promise me, we’ll figure something out, okay?”
“I promise.”
“I’m serious, Mad. I want more than the . . . motherfrakking sunset. I want a plaque on a park bench.”
Under normal circumstances, the length of this hug would be way awkward. But these are not normal circumstances, and instead of pulling away, I pull closer. A big part of me is sad I’ll have to leave Vic, but it’s that very same part that is so happy to have found him. Vic’s theory of simultaneous extreme opposites is starting to remind me of a certain goldfish I know: it just will not quit.
“I want a plaque too,” I say. “And hey—it’s not like I’m leaving this second.”
“I know,” he said, his words warm on my neck. “I may be stuck.”
I smile, and we just stand there hugging, and it is entirely glorious. People are side-eyeing us, but fuck ’em. This isn’t about them, and it’s not even about me, not really—it’s about Vic not wanting to go up those stairs. And I get it. If I’d had a list of places Mom or Dad wanted to be scattered, places that reminded me of the way things used to be, of a love I was born into but somehow lost along the way, I’d prolong things too. In a way, the list resurrected Vic’s father—as long as he had it, he had a piece of his dad. But its completion means acknowledging the end.
“So let’s do this,” I say, pulling out of the hug, looking him straight in the eye. “I’ll tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear. Okay?”
“Okay.”
I still don’t know what the fuck I’m going to do with my life, but I know it’ll turn out okay. Because Jamma and Baz and Zuz and Coco will always be my family, but they are my Alt. My Neu is gloriously asymmetrical.
“Vic.”
“Yes?”
“The biggest thing is letting go.”
VIC
The prospect of standing on an observation deck is quite exciting, a sort of mecca for a quiet observer such as myself.
An observation deck is a very literal place.
. . . up, up, up . . .
As the escalator rises, the temperature drops. Nearing the top, I shift the urn around and flip up my jacket collar, but it does very little to ward off the cold. The biting wind stings my eyes, but no matter how much I want to shield them, I can’t.
Because: this view.
The entire deck is surrounded by tall glass partitions, each one separated by four or five inches. I walk right up to the edge. On the other side, New York City is spread out in all its bustling nighttime glory. Buildings on buildings on buildings, and lights everywhere. Parks and trees, cars and streets, people, people, people, buzzing about.
Thousands of tiny red lights, some dwindling, some just being born: the circle of light-life.
“Victor?”
Mom’s voice is like recognizing a single grain of sand on the beach. I turn and see her standing next to a bench near the escalator. And now she’s right in front of me, and now she’s pulling me into a hug, and now she’s crying. In my hands, the urn feels heavier. Like Dad gained weight.
Mom pulls away a little. “Where have you been, Vic?”
“You first.”
For a minute neither of us speak. Answers are coming, but something about being up here with the whole world spread out before us messes with trivial matters like conversational timelines.
“This is where he brought me,” she says, turning back to the view. “Your father proposed right here. Said he had little money and no ring, but plenty of plans. He always had plans.”
I think about Dad’s plans, how people might see the things he achieved—or didn’t achieve—and assume he failed to see those plans through. But I know better. Because I was one of his plans. And so was Mom. And here we are, together, on top of the world.
Together.
What a word.
“We looked into bringing you up here once,” says Mom. “Show you the place it all started. But it got so expensive. Bruno planned to save it for a special occasion.”
Considering the urn in my hands, the momentous nature of what I’d come up here to do, and the company I was currently keeping, I’d say Dad executed this plan to a T.
I set his urn between my feet, pull the photographs from my pocket, and stare at the first one—at Mom and Dad, my young parents in love, right here where we’re standing, with New York City behind them—and think about everything that’s happened between then and now.
Things are different: the Twin Towers are gone.
Things are the same: the city is alive.
Things are different: I am here.
Things are the same: Mom and Dad are here.
Things are different: Dad’s in a jar.
Things are the same: we are, each of us, hopeless hopers.
All things revolve around simultaneous extreme opposites.
The second photo offers the ultimate origin story. Mom and Dad with their fresh tattoos: one east, one west. I look up at Mom, then down at Dad. Guess the tattoos worked. Even now he’s compassing us in the right direction.
“Where did you get that?” Mom takes the photo in one hand, covers her mouth with the other.
I don’t answer. She knows where it came from. The third photo I keep down by my side. That one’s just for me. Maybe one day it will be my origin story. Maybe I’ll have a kid with Mad, and they’ll find that photo of their mom with no one else in it, and they’ll see the same kind of east-to-west type love I see in my young parents.
Mom wipes her eyes, hands the photo back to me, and looks out at the view. “After you left, I was a wreck. Called the police, of course. It took me a while, but eventually, I realized something.”
“What?”
“I know you. I knew you’d open the urn, find the list. I just knew. So I went to the Parlour, but by the time I got there, you’d already come and gone. I waited on our bench off the Palisades Parkway for a while, but there was no telling if you’d already been there or not. That’s when I realized the only sure chance I had of catching you was skipping ahead. I got here four days ago. Found a cheap hotel nearby. Well. Cheap by city standards.”
“You’ve been coming up here every day?”
Mom nods. “I pack lunch and dinner. Then I sit right there on that bench and wait until they kick me out at midnight.”
I try not to think of how much money Mom has wasted.
A lot. It’s a lot.
“You’re everything, Vic. If you don’t want me to marry Frank, I won’t.”
Her words take shape, float up into the ether, and I try to think with my heart. “I want you to be happy.” It only gets me halfway there. “I just don’t want to forget about Dad.”
. . .
“We won’t,” she says. “I promise.”
I stick the photos back into my pocket, pull out my cell phone.
“Expecting a call?” as
ks Mom.
“I was supposed to call Frank, let him know you’re okay. But I don’t have his number.”
“Ah. Well, there’s no reception up here anyway.”
She’s right. My phone has zero bars. Somewhere in my Land of Nothingness, I hear pieces of a conversation from earlier today.
“Leave a voice mail?”
“Tried. Her in-box is full.”
At the time, this exchange between Sergeant Mendes and Detective Ronald hit me heavy and hard. Not that her voice mail was full, but that the call went to voice mail in the first place.
“My first day up here,” says Mom, “I realized how isolated I was. If they found you, I’d have no way of knowing. So every night, as soon as I got off the elevator and had cell service, I called Sergeant Mendes to see if there were any updates.”
Every night for the last four nights she checks in by phone. Always just after midnight.
I stick my phone back into my pocket. “What about Frank?”
“What about him?” asks Mom. Her tone suggests she’s as surprised as I am by the question.
. . .
“He’s worried sick, Mom.”
“I called him,” she says. “Twice. Let him know I was okay. But all I could think was, he was the reason you left.”
I pull back the edge of my KOA wristband, stare at my tiny paths going nowhere. The saddest of talismans, a different kind of tattoo. The soft fabric falls back in place, and I know—I’m done with that now. The tiny paths will fade, and there will be no more to come. Mad did more than sew together some metaphorical patch. It wasn’t that she fixed me so much as she helped me fix myself.
She led me to Singapore.
“Mom, I think you should give Frank another shot.”
She smiles sideways; I love it when she smiles sideways. “You think?”
“On one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“He has to read the collected works of Dostoyevsky before picking up another Churchill biography.”
She laughs like a little bird, and I wonder if maybe I was part of a miraculous gaggle all along. “The man loves his Winston Churchill, doesn’t he?”
“Yeah, what is that?”
Mom slips her hand in mine, nudges the urn with her toe. “Shall we?”
I kneel down, open the lid, and stick my hand inside. It’s not nearly as full as it was a week ago, but I guess that’s the point. I stand up with a fistful of ashes, the gap between the glass partitions just wide enough to wiggle my hand through.
Mom puts one hand on my shoulder.
I have Dad in my hand.
It is very complicated. But not bad. This is our family, the place our red lights have clustered and lingered.
“You okay?” asks Mom.
I nod, still holding the ashes safely in my closed fist. “I usually say something. Before I scatter him.”
We stare into the ether of the New York City winter.
. . .
. . .
Mom says, “Memories are as infinite as the horizon.”
It’s strange and wonderful knowing we’ve been in the same places, learned the same lines, seen the same sights. All because of Dad’s blueprint. Mom and Dad had gathered their love like kindling, burned it together. And now that love is being scattered all over the place.
My fist is my focus, the KOA wristband blurred in front, the city skyline blurred behind it.
“Till we’re old-new,” I say.
Mom cries through her smile. “Till we’re old-new.”
Now the city comes into focus, a view better than any Matisse, better even than “The Flower Duet.” The view isn’t art at all. It’s not a product of the rhythm or asymmetry. It’s the opposite of the Ling. I can’t say where this view came from or how it got here. It just is. And I am in it. And I don’t want to be anywhere else. And I don’t want to be anyone other than Victor Benucci, son of Bruno and Doris Benucci, sire and dam of the century, the superest of all racehorses. And maybe for the first time ever, I stop seeing the colors that are here, and focus on the ones that aren’t.
And in the night sky, the soaring sopranos fly out over the city, guarding it with song, catching the souls of those rare, lovely heart-thinkers.
Catching their ashes.
. . .
. . .
I let go of Dad.
For my mother, my father, my sister
PROLOGUE
Dr. James L. Conroy does not approve of prologues (Conroy, v–vii). I imagine, should his eyes ever land on these pages, he will find a great many of my methods to be lackluster, and very possibly substandard. I am okay with this. His pages contain almost no luster at all. (More on this in a moment.) Notwithstanding the aforementioned, Dr. James L. Conroy does believe that good stories take time (Conroy, 18–154). I find this very encouraging. If the value of one’s story is found in the amount of time one spends working on it, this will be a very good story.
For it has taken a very long time.
Truth be told, it’s been a struggle. There are many things happening, many reasons not to write this book. My work in the church and at the local shelter takes up much of my time. My brother and I are seeing a therapist, which has been vital in helping us process our past, present, and future. When it comes to writing, I find myself repeating those four dangerous words: I’ll do it later. And then—last night I had a conversation with my brother. This has become a habit of ours: we spend hours under a tiny tree behind our apartment in the Windy Palms apartment complex, talking long into the night. Until recently there were four of us who participated in these late-night chats, but one of our number moved, and the other was adopted by a close friend. (Good-byes are often bittersweet, I know, but these were more sweet than bitter.) So my brother and I usually devote a few minutes of our discussion to the past before moving on to the future. I find a great deal of luster in these conversations. They are, in fact, far above standard.
Last night my brother said, “You have spoken for long enough, Baz. It is time to write.” (Since attending community college, he has grown somewhat big for his britches if you ask me. But okay, he was not wrong.)
So here I am. Writing.
Our mother used to say we were all part of the same story, and while we could not choose the setting or plot, we could choose what kind of character we wanted to be. (Dr. James L. Conroy says nothing of the sort, though I admit I have yet to finish his book, Writers Who Write Right Write Right Now. I do wonder if Dr. James L. Conroy had followed his own advice and gone with a shorter title [Conroy, 178–186], then perhaps the book itself would be less of a bore. I doubt it. It really is a heaping pile of excrement.) It is all, of course, one big metaphor, comparing life to a story, but it was the way we lived, Mother and I. Even today, I find enormous comfort in it.
So—my story has many Chapters. I had planned to write them sequentially, giving an account of my life, and the life of my family, from the time I was born to the time I sat down in this moderately comfortable chair in this moderately comfortable apartment in the Windy Palms apartment complex. But I recently listened to something, and am now convinced that my story should be told using a “nonlinear narrative” (Conroy, 402–403, then again at 411–414, and also at 1, I suppose). I could—and will—tell the stories of my mother, the films of my father, the cries of my sister, the words of my brother. I will write of war and ruin, of a very long walk through hard lands, of a trip across an ocean, of finding family and losing it, of an orchard, a butcher shop, a restaurant, a tattoo parlor. I will write things that seem impossible; I will write places that seem improbable. I will write of death, whose presence makes itself known to all; of life, who got there first; of disappointments; of broken promises; of bad choices, some made by me, some made for me; of my many families, and how each of them, for better or worse, shaped me.
<
br /> But first, I will begin (that is, Chapter One will begin) with two interviews, which were recorded one year ago this month. I recently acquired these interviews during my research, and upon hearing the audio knew exactly how to begin this nonlinear narrative of mine. It would begin not with plot or setting but with the most important aspect of story: character (Conroy, 209–222). And while it may not be the best story, I do hope it is a good one. I am optimistic. For it took a very long time.
It begins with my friends.
Baz Kabongo
Tampa, Florida
December 2
AUTHOR’S NOTE
While Vic is entirely fictional, Moebius syndrome is not. It is a rare congenital neurological disorder primarily manifesting itself in facial paralysis. Most individuals with Moebius cannot smile or frown, and many have respiratory problems, sleep disorders, difficulty swallowing, strabismus, speech and dental complications, clubfeet, and visual or hearing impairments. These conditions often lead to a variety of other issues, including prejudice and discrimination. Many teens with Moebius are ostracized and bullied by their peers, which can cause depression and low self-esteem; it is not uncommon for people with Moebius to be treated as though they lack intelligence.
I believe people with facial differences need to let others know we are just like everyone else. . . . I learned when I am stared at, instead of crawling under a rock, which I always felt like, that just opening my mouth and talking breaks the tension.
The above quote was pulled (with permission) from one of many e-mails with Leslie Dhaseleer. I had the pleasure of hearing Leslie’s story, and the story of Roland Bienvenu, Daphne Honma, and Sheyenne Owens, each of whom have Moebius syndrome, and each of whom had a profound impact on the arc of Vic’s character development. I owe them a tremendous amount of gratitude for sharing their stories, for patiently answering my many probing questions, and for reading various drafts of this manuscript along the way. Thanks, too, to Vicki McCarrell at the Moebius Syndrome Foundation, and to the Many Faces of Moebius Syndrome Facebook page, who, when I asked for help, eagerly gave it. Each of you showed me how to smile with my heart, and for that I am eternally grateful.