by David Arnold
Anyway.
Coach Tao is nice. She asks about my back, if I think I’ll be able to get into shape again (“When it comes to swimming,” she says with a wink and a laugh, “you’re never more than a couple Twinkies away from last place”), if I’ll be ready to compete, and I tell her, “Yes, it’s a lot better,” and I tell her, “Yes, Dr. Kirby thinks I should be ready to go soon,” and I tell her all the things I know she wants to hear, all the things everyone in my life wants to hear: I’ll live the life you’ve laid out for me; I’ll follow the trajectory you set from the beginning, I’ll stay inside the robot, be a good boy, do whatever you want; and even though it’s a lie, I can’t not say it.
Because I have socks, and because look: I am not gripping a glockenspiel like it’s the entirety of my fucking existence. And so “Yes, I will be ready,” and “Yes, I feel good,” and “Yes,” and “Yes.”
But no.
* * *
“So what’d you think?” asks Dad. We’re underground again, waiting on the train. No glockenspiel this time.
“It was good,” I say. “Coach Tao was nice. Guys seemed, you know . . .”
“Nice?”
“Yeah.”
Dad clears his throat, and I know what’s coming. “Listen, you didn’t tell that kid . . . what was his name?”
“Paul,” I say.
“You didn’t decline Paul’s invitation because of me, did you? There’s plenty I can do on my own.”
This being my first college recruiting visit, I had no idea part of the experience was going out with the team, which I’m sure means one thing in Milwaukee, and something else in Manhattan. (Or the Bronx, or wherever.) After practice one of the guys had come up and introduced himself as “Paul, my official host,” and apologized for not having time to plan anything, but if I was up for it, the guys would like to take me out.
“I didn’t decline Paul’s invitation because of you, Dad.”
I leave it at that. I could hardly tell him the truth, that I have no intention of attending Manhattan State, that the whole trip is a ruse, that the last thing I want is a bunch of rando college guys to “take me out.”
Dad looks like he’s about to say something when our train rumbles from the depths of the tunnel, whizzes by in a breath of cold wind, and screeches to a halt. We climb aboard, and since it’s later in the day, there are plenty of seats available, and Dad says nothing the whole ride back to SoHo.
From the train stop, we find this little hole-in-the-wall Korean restaurant where Dad orders a beer and beef bulgogi with red lettuce and another word I can’t pronounce.
“What did you get?” I ask, once the waiter is gone.
“Bulgogi. It’s Korean barbecue, very delicious. . . .”
Dad talks about the ins and outs of a proper bulgogi, but his words become air and my thoughts drift through them, back to a yard at night, and a bag of takeout, and a feeling of wanting to turn around, knowing that I should, and knowing now that I was right to want that. But also: this dish of marinated red meat is never something Dad would eat. And maybe most kids don’t pay attention to their parents’ dietary habits, but most kids don’t have a celebrated vegan chef for a dad.
Eventually the waiter sets down our plates with some fanfare, and Dad digs in. “You think you could be happy here?” he asks between bites.
“Yeah,” I say. “Just need time to think, you know?”
Dad nods, sips his beer. “Hey, what do you call a cow with no front legs?”
“What?” I say, but more as a Wait, what are you doing? not as in I don’t know, what do you call a cow with no front legs?
“Lean beef,” he says.
“Dad.”
“What? No good?”
It’s not that Dad is above dad jokes; it’s that he’s above beef jokes. He shrugs, sips his beer again, snags a large piece of meat between two metal chopsticks. “What do you call a cow with no legs at all?”
“Dad. Please.”
“Ground beef.”
Later, as we stand to leave, he points out that I barely ate a thing. I tell him I wasn’t all that hungry. “Nerves,” I say, knowing how he’ll take it, that I’m processing our day with Coach Tao, and all the ways it might further the trajectory of Noah Oakman. We step out into the cold pulsing veins of the city, and it’s true, I am nervous, but not about the ways in which this day might further that trajectory so much as the ways in which tomorrow morning might.
75 → girl, faded
“If I’m going to live in the city, I need practice navigating the subway on my own,” I say, which is not untrue. Dad agrees under the conditions that I text the minute I get there, and that I meet him at the MSU admissions office at no later than one fifteen. (The Back to School Brunch is at a restaurant close to campus, and our tour is scheduled for one thirty.) I agree, and even though I assure him I know exactly where I’m going, he insists on walking me to the stop.
On the way we pass the Korean restaurant from last night. As if that dinner hadn’t been strange enough on its own, later, all tucked away in those boutique bedsheets, I’d had an especially vivid rendering of my recurring dream where the person in the corner finally turned around, only just before I saw his face, the colors in the room went from bright to blinding, like someone turned up a dial.
When I woke up, my retinas were burning.
Dad and I walk down the cement steps, find a map on the wall, and go over the route to the stop nearest the restaurant. Just looking at the map gives me heart palpitations—the letters and colors spidering out into unrestricted chaos. But it does confirm what the map on my phone told me earlier, which is that East Harlem is in between SoHo and the Bronx, leaving me with plenty of time to talk with the Fading Girl and still be at MSU by one fifteen.
Dad hands me a MetroCard, tells me to be careful, and that’s that. He’s gone.
When my train arrives, I climb on, follow all the rules—no eye contact, head down, you’ve done this a hundred times, you are not Macaulay Culkin in that shitty sequel. At the first stop, I hop off, hustle up the stairs into the light of day, and, like a freaking pro, throw my hand in the air. Being from Chicago I’m not entirely unfamiliar with cabs, but whenever we ventured into the city we usually drove, so this is a first for me. I just stand here, hand in the air with nothing happening, feeling every bit like tiny Macaulay Culkin, imagining the entirety of New York City stopping in its tracks: tires screeching, helicopters hovering, heads popping out of every high-rise window, as somewhere in the heavens God Almighty pulls the needle off the turntable and as one, everyone points and laughs.
Did you see the way the kid tossed his hand in the air? Like he thought that was how you hailed a cab, baaaahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!
A taxi pulls over. I open the back door, fearing some citywide prank, but nothing.
“You getting in, kid?”
Hop in, slam the door like I’ve done it a million times, do it every day in fact, all day in fact, and God, another cab, but I guess this is the price you pay for living so large.
“Kid.”
“What.”
The cab driver rolls his eyes. “Where we going?”
“One forty-nine Concourse Avenue. In East Harlem.”
Baaaahahahaha, the voices ring, the helicopters hover, the tires screech, did you hear the kid say, “In East Harlem”? Oh my God, I can’t with this kid.
When debating how best to get to Haughty Coffee, I’d considered taking the subway for about a second before thinking better of it. The decision had nothing to do with glockenspiels and impromptu poetry slams, and everything to do with weekend schedules, and the knowledge that, in choosing a train with my stop on its route, I would no doubt board the one train that skipped that particular stop every other Sunday between nine and eleven forty-five a.m., or that was under construction, or that had been closed down last month.
I simply didn’t trust my underground navigational skills enough to take the chance. My second thought was that I would Lyft to the coffee shop. Last year my parents set up the app on my phone “in case of emergency,” which was parent code for “in case you even think about drinking and driving,” which okay, smart move, but the app was linked to their bank account, so the minute I used it, they’d know.
So: a taxi, then. And as I’m currently learning, it’s a special kind of wonderment that comes from viewing the city through the window of a cab, sort of the inverted version of the view from a plane: you see the ground where a single structure was planted, rather than the sky where a thousand of them blossomed.
And I like that.
Until . . .
I touch the window, my fingers in focus, the street blurred behind them, and even though it’s alive now . . . “One day, this will all be at the bottom of the ocean.”
Sometimes you don’t realize you’ve said something out loud until the deafening silence that follows.
“The fuck is wrong with you, kid?” The driver eyes me suspiciously in the rearview mirror.
I tell him I’m sorry, and with each passing block, I grow more and more tense, like the pit of my stomach is standing on the edge of a cliff. I pull out my phone, open YouTube, and watch the Fading Girl video on my way to meet the Fading Girl herself, hoping this might calm me, but it only makes things worse. And just then, a text . . .
Alan: Good luck this weekend, yo
Alan: NYC is dope. Have fun!
Me: Thanks, man. So far, so good.
Alan: Play your cards right, you’ll be a Fighting Skunk next year
Me: Gopher. The MSU Fighting Gophers.
Alan: OMG LMAO
Me: I know.
Alan: Like how is a gopher expected to strike fear into the heart of an opponent?
Me: I know.
Alan: Do gophers even fight, WTF? Do they just adorable their enemies to death?
Me: Better than a skunk.
Alan: Puh-leez. Mofos weaponized their own urine, yo. Skunk > gopher all day, errrrrrry day
The cab slows, then stops. “We’re here,” says the driver. I pay in cash, then stand on the curb and text Alan good-bye. I want to include a thank-you for calming me down, but I can’t exactly tell him what it is I’m nervous about, so I leave it at Gotta go. Love! Next, I send Dad the obligatory “here safe” text and try not to feel guilty about that word—here—and how different it looks from what he imagines.
Dad: Great! Have fun. ☺
Deep breath now—push down that guilt, the nerves and fear—and open the door.
* * *
Haughty Coffee is a small space, tables and chairs bumped up next to each other, and if the MacBooks and scowls and mason jars are any indication, I’d say the owners had a pretty accurate approximation of their clientele when they named their establishment.
I unzip my coat so Bowie is visible, order an iced coffee (in a mason jar), choose a seat near the back corner, and wait.
Five minutes pass.
Ten.
Fifteen. And just when I start to worry she won’t show—in she walks. The Fading Girl in the flesh.
Until now, the feeling in my gut has been one of anxious curiosity—what should I ask, what will she say, where might this conversation go?—but no longer. My gut flips, my breath catches, my toes go numb, and I’ve never passed out, but I suddenly understand the feeling that must come just before fainting, the mild panic and loss of control, and none of this happens because I’m nervous—it happens because the Fading Girl isn’t old. Like, at all. It’s not that she looks good for her age; it’s that she’s not even as old as she was at the beginning of the video.
She figured it out, I think, how to age in reverse, how to go from being the darkened millpond back to the bright young waterfall.
It’s like she found the remote for the movie of her life and pushed rewind.
The Fading Girl looks around, sees my T-shirt, walks right up to my table, and sits down. She doesn’t say anything, just stares at me through slightly glared eyes like I’m a faraway sign she’s trying to read.
I’m all, “Um, hi.”
Still nothing, still reading me. I’m about to ask if she’d like a coffee when she sets a gloved hand on the table between us and points at me. “I want to know who you are. And I want to know why you came here.”
If I wasn’t freaking before, I am now. “Those . . . aren’t easy questions to answer.”
She leans back, crosses her arms. “I have all the time in the world.”
“I’m sorry, but . . . how did you—” Grow young again? Age backward? I am entirely unequipped to finish this sentence. “How did you do it?”
“Do what?”
Shit. She’s going to make me ask it. “I watched you age. Like, a million times, I watched you, but here you are all of twenty-five years old, if that.”
“I knew it.” She shakes her head. “I knew you were a creeper.”
“I’m not a creeper.”
“You watched my mom’s video a million times, and you’re telling me that’s not creepy?”
Slowly, it comes together: the grainy scanned-in Polaroids, the distinctive seventies flare . . . “She was your mom.”
“Look, I don’t really like going”—she moves her arms in a circular motion—“out. Like this. So I’m going to ask you some questions, and if you’re not straight with me, I’m going to scream.”
“You’re going to scream.”
“You should know I can scream really loud.”
“Okay.”
“What’s your name?”
“Noah Oakman.”
“How old are you, Noah Oakman?”
“Sixteen.”
“Where are you from, Noah Oakman?”
“You can just call me—”
“Where are you from, Noah Oakman?”
“Chicago area.”
“Where specifically?”
“Iverton.”
This answer seems to give her pause, but she keeps going. “Wren Phoenix.”
It doesn’t sound like a question. It doesn’t really sound like anything at all, so I say nothing.
“Wren Phoenix,” she says again.
“I don’t know what you’re saying.”
“Wren. Phoenix. That name mean anything to you?”
“I didn’t even know it was a name.”
“Straight answers, Noah Oakman.”
“No, the name means nothing to me.”
This disappoints her, which actually gives me a little satisfaction. So far she’s owned this very bizarre conversation, and whatever dissatisfaction she might feel at the moment pales in comparison to my confusion.
“Wren Phoenix,” I say. “Was . . . that your mom?”
There’s that glare again, and just when I’m afraid she might actually scream, she says, “I’ll be right back.” She walks to the register, orders something, and waits by the bar while I try to loosen up. When she comes back, she says, “So what’s a sixteen-year-old from Iverton, Illinois, doing in Manhattan by himself?”
“I didn’t come by myself.”
“Explain.”
“My dad came too. I’m visiting Manhattan State.”
She puts her nose down by the rim of the mug, makes an audible sniffing sound, and it begins to dawn on me why this girl maybe doesn’t “like going out.”
“I’m Ava,” she says, then moves her eyes from her latte to me and offers a gloved hand.
I shake it, try not to stare, but the resemblance is uncanny even for a mother-daughter. I only saw photographs of the Fading Girl—Wren Phoenix, I guess—but the way Ava looks at you like she’s looking inside you is exactly the same as her mom. “So,” I say, “if that’s your mother in the video—�
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“Why am I here instead of her?” asks Ava.
“Yeah.”
“I keep tabs on the comments section.”
I nod like this makes total sense. “Okay.”
“Don’t say ‘okay,’ like that. You don’t have to pretend like it’s normal. She’s gone. That’s why I check the video comments.”
“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that. When did she die?”
Ava raises her mug over her head, looks under the bottom like she’s trying to find something. “You’re not a very good listener, are you, Noah Oakman?”
“What are you doing?”
She lowers the mug, goes back to glaring at me. “It is important to me that I know where things come from. This mug, as expected, is from China. Not that it matters, but now we know.”
“Okay.”
“I never said Mom died, I said she was gone. Which is why I check that comments section, in case someone knows where she went. I hacked her emails and Facebook account, too. And quit saying ‘okay,’ like the things I do are normal, it’s insulting.”
Unhinged, that’s the word. Ava Phoenix is unhinged.
“So your mom . . . ?”
“Disappeared. Two years ago.”
I don’t know what I was expecting, but not this. “I don’t know what to say,” which is exactly the truth. “Did you, like—”
“Call the cops? Uh, yeah. She’s an official ‘missing person,’ or whatever.” Ava sips her latte, and then asks, “Would you like to hear a very sad story, Noah Oakman?” I say, “Yes,” but as the daughter of the Fading Girl unfolds her mother’s story, I wish I hadn’t.