Kids of Appetite (10 page)

“What's it mean?” asked Coco.

“They're my parents' initials,” I said, my words hanging like smoke in the air. They were clunky words. Awkward. The cold had a way of doing that, of making each word feel hard and heavy. “They had tattoos on their shoulders. Compasses. Dad's pointed east, Mom's west. So they would never lose each other.”

The cold snow fell.

The warm words rose.

My whole life, I'd felt the capacity for bitterness and self-pity. But never more so than on those rare occasions when I wanted to smile
and
frown at the same time, yet was capable of doing neither. I remembered the way my parents were together, like the world was a tree branch, and they shared the same cocoon. Mom should be here now, scattering these ashes with me, not looking for a new cocoon-mate. The letter was written to her, and no matter how much Frank the Boyfriend wanted to be Frank the Husband, he would never be Frank the First Love. Mom was Dad's
due everywhere
. This ought to be her mission.

Suddenly Coco's tiny arms wrapped around my waist in
a tight hug. It lifted the weight a little, made Singapore feel possible, however unlikely.

I turned to Topher. “Could I borrow some tattoo ink? And a pencil?”

Topher nodded, ran back toward the Parlour.

Before I knew what was happening, Mad and Baz and Nzuzi gathered around Coco and me, bracing us against the cold like a waddle of penguins. I wasn't sure how it happened, but I suppose fulfilling the wishes of a romantic dead man speeds up the bonding process a bit. I wasn't complaining.

I'd never been a penguin before.

A minute later Topher returned with more than ink and a pencil. He also handed me a photograph. “We take pictures of most of our work,” he said. “This was long before my time, but those tattoos you described—I had a feeling I'd seen them in our photo album.”

I stared at the photo.

The tattoos were jet-black, pinkish flesh, fresh. Two shoulders, two compasses. Due east, due west. A perfect match.

“You're an early Chapter, right, Topher?” I asked.

Topher's eyes gleamed. “I was messed up, man. These guys took me into their magical frakking greenhouse, let me sleep on the couch, took turns watching over me during withdrawal. Then Baz got me plugged in with the local AA group. They saved my life, man. I'm proud to be part of the book.”

Coco departed our waddle to go hug Topher. I smiled with my heart, held up the old photo of my parents' tattoos. “Can I keep this?”

“All yours, my man.”

I slid the photo into my backpack and pulled out the urn. Strange, how long it had taken me to touch this thing, and now here I was about to dip into it.

I popped open the bottle of navy blue ink. Next, I peeled back the tape on the urn and pulled opened the lid. Inside, I pinched a small amount of Dad's ashes, then sprinkled it into the bottle of paint, closed it up, and shook it in.

I dipped the tip of the pencil into the blue, ashy ink, and turned to the sign.

B. B.
D. J
.

The paint in my hands reminded me of Matisse and his belief that each face had its own rhythm; ergo, I thought about Dad, who taught me about Matisse; and now here I was using a combination of Matisse's medium and Dad's bones.

“Hang me from the Parlour,” I said aloud. Because it felt right. And I painted in the initials using the ashes of the very person who'd carved them in the first place. The very person who taught me to think and smile with my heart.

“Hang me from the Parlour,” I said again.

And again.

And again.

It must've been close to ten o'clock. Snow still fell, but gently, like the flakes were stalling for time, swinging every direction but down. A few steps behind me, Baz presided over what sounded like an epic game of Rock, Paper, Scissors between Coco and Zuz.

Vic led the way back to the greenhouse with utter confidence, verifying his earlier statement that his grandparents used to live in the neighborhood. A minor coincidence, though that wasn't what he called it.

He'd called it a bump.

A couple of blocks away from the orchard, something came over me. I skipped ahead, fell in stride next to Vic.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi.”

“How you doing?”

“Fine.”

“You need a hat.”

“What do you mean?”

“What do you mean
what do I mean?
I mean it's cold and you need a hat.”

Behind us, Coco yelled excitedly, having won a round of Rock, Paper, Scissors.

“Yeah, I left the house in sort of a hurry last night.”

“I have an extra one at the greenhouse, remind me to give it to you.” It was as though my body had had an idea, one it forgot to tell my brain. Ultimately it was the nighttime snow that triggered it—I remembered last night's conversation, also in the snow, the two of us in the shadow of the
Ling
, Vic hunched over his dad's urn while I watched, listened to him whisper what seemed gibberish at the time.

You were the Northern Dancer, sire of the century, the superest of all racehorses
.

There it was.

The idea.

“Vic.”

“What?”

“Do horses ever race in the snow?”

He looked at me for the first time since the Parlour. And I couldn't tell for certain, but it sure felt like he was smiling.

And then we raced. And it was super.

* * *

We waited on the old stone wall for the others, the fig tree like an awning over our heads, its branches glistening with ice. Across the street, the orchard awaited our arrival. Weird how just this morning Vic and I sat on the bridge over Channel à la Goldfish and talked while staring at this stone wall—like our current selves were mirroring our former ones.

“Why did you call it a bump?” I asked, still trying to catch my breath in the thin air.

“Why did I call what a what?”

“This afternoon. When you told me how you used to sit here and look at the orchard. You said your grandparents lived around here. You called it a bump.”

Vic looked a little left of the orchard, at the neighboring graveyard. “It's a weird word, don't you think?”

“Bump?”

“No.
Lived.
My grandparents
lived
around here.
Lived
—the literal past tense of life. Also known as death.”

I understood the urge to brood, maybe better than anyone. And even though another person's brooding is never quite as appealing as your own, I knew better than to respond.

“The word just makes sense, I guess,” said Vic.

“Lived?”

“No.
Bump
.”

“In what way?” I asked.

“So like—imagine each person is a unit, and each unit makes so many decisions in a day, and each decision takes each unit in so many directions, it seems kind of silly to think we'd never run into one another, you know? Especially considering units tend to cluster and linger.”

“We cluster and linger, do we?”

His eyes turned from the graveyard to me, and there it was again—the suggestion of a smile. “Yes. It's called home.” He reached up and brushed my eyelids closed. “Consider this. You're flying in the sky, not in a plane, but with your arms and hands. Like a miraculous bird. You're thousands of feet above the earth, drifting through the night. And far below, you see thousands of tiny red lights on the ground. The red lights are in constant motion, blinking, shuffling between buildings and trees and houses. Old ones disappear, new ones are born. Over time, you notice the lights bump into one another occasionally. Are you surprised?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“I call it the inevitability of corresponding units.”

I opened my eyes. “So, we're the red lights.”

He nodded, turned back to the graveyard. “People talk about coincidence like it's some big thing. But it's not. We bump into one another all the time. Mostly I think people are just too blind to notice.”

It was a nice thought—or reminder, really, that whatever shitty situation I'd been dealt wasn't my fault. It was, in fact, nothing more than a sequence of unfortunate bumps.

“Wait here,” said Vic. He plopped down off the wall, unzipped his bag, and pulled out his dad's urn.

“Where are you going?”

“I'll be right back.”

Funny how many times I'd seen the graveyard, yet had never quite built up the courage to venture over. Vic navigated his way through tombstones and trees, a cautious but easy gait as if he knew exactly where he was going but wasn't quite sure he wanted to go there. The streetlight shone just bright enough for me to see him stoop in front of a large tombstone, set the urn in the grass in front of him, and
begin speaking. I couldn't hear of course, but it suddenly hit me what was happening.

After a few minutes, he made his way back across the street, tucked the urn in his bag, and sat back on the stone wall.

“Your grandparents?” I asked.

He nodded. “They died in the same month, of the same thing. My dad buried his father, then came back two weeks later and buried his mother.”

“Shit, Vic.”

“I try to think of Dad from far away, as a unit, as a disappearing red light. But it's like you said about the dying stars—sometimes I still see Dad even though he's gone.”

“I thought you said that was bullshit.”

“Oh, it's bullshit. But I mean—the theory holds up. Anyway, Dad's gone. But I still smell his aftershave. I still hear him clear his throat. Little things that made him my dad, and not just
a
dad, you know?” Vic's eyes had not left the graveyard. “I wonder if that's how he felt about his parents. And I wonder if I'll have kids who'll feel that way about me. I hope so. Our past tenses last way longer than our present ones.”

Before I could respond, Baz and Zuz and Coco rounded the corner, effectively dissolving the conversation. Eager to get out of the cold, we all hurried under (or in Baz's case, over) the fence, and were halfway across Channel à la Goldfish when a silhouette froze us in our tracks.

I'd only seen Gunther Maywood once, as he rarely emerged from his house; I'd completely forgotten how tall the old man was. He stood on the opposite end of the bridge, blocking our way across, and in the dark I could barely make him out, so when he spoke, the voice seemed to come from the cold itself.

“What was our deal, Mr. Kabongo?”

I saw Baz's breath, felt him carefully calculating his surroundings, his words. “Groceries in exchange for the greenhouse.”

Gunther Maywood raised his right hand. “I found eye drops. In the gift shop bathroom. Was the gift shop bathroom part of our deal?”

“It was not,” said Baz.

Gunther tossed the eye drops to Baz. “I'm a patient man, Mr. Kabongo. But if I discover you, or your friends, trespassing again, I will call the police. Do I make myself clear?”

“You do,” said Baz.

The silhouette slowly stepped to one side of the bridge. We hustled across, didn't say another word until we were safely inside Greenhouse Eleven. I tried to catch Vic's eye—knowing he must have left his eye drops in the bathroom this afternoon when he changed his pants—but he wouldn't look up.

“Don't sweat it, Vic,” said Coco, tucking herself into her sleeping bag. “Heck, lots of people use eye drops. Might not even be yours.”

Baz set the Visine on the card table, offered Vic a small smile, and assured us there was no need to worry about Gunther, that we wouldn't have to live in the greenhouse much longer. In the meantime we would just need to be extra careful when using the gift shop bathroom, be sure to take a lookout. Baz often referred to the future in vague and passing expressions, and I could hardly fault him for it. None of us knew what would happen, least of all me. In light of my previous conversation with Vic: it hardly mattered
where
we all clustered and lingered, so long as we clustered and lingered together.

Within minutes we were tucked inside our sleeping bags by the space heater. I lay on my back and stared up at the plastic ceiling and the fuzzy stars on the other side.

“Mad?” said Coco. I only remembered how truly young she was when she spoke in the dark.

“Yes?”

“I need a story.”

Zuz snapped once.

I looked over to the couch where Vic lay on his back. He had his earbuds in, his eyes wide open.

“Okay,” I said. “Which one?”

“Fro-Yo, please.”

I stayed on my side, cleared my throat, and watched Vic as I spoke. “Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Frozen Yogurt. Her friends called her Fro-Yo for short.” Coco giggled. She always giggled at this one. “Fro-Yo lived in a magical land called the Eleventh Aisle, where there were no houses or streets, only freezers and shelves and sweet things that melted. But Fro-Yo was lonely. She had no friends, and nobody anywhere—not in the freezers or on the shelves—ever wanted to play with her. Poor Fro-Yo.”

“Poor Fro-Yo,” said Coco.

Vic pulled out a single earbud.

“One day,” I continued, “a little girl named Coconut—who lived in a far-off land called Greenhouse Eleven—happened upon the Eleventh Aisle. Coconut pulled Fro-Yo off the shelf, out of the cold, misty freezer, and said, ‘Yo, Fro-Yo! Hello! I will be your friend and love you forever. Would you like that? I'm from Queens, so tell the truth.'”

Coco giggled again.

“Well, poor Fro-Yo, who had been feeling very low-low, said, ‘I would like that, and that's the truth, but alas, my
parents—Ben and Jerry—are very strict and will only let me be friends with people who are from the Eleventh Aisle.' This was odd, because Ben and Jerry were pretty progressive parents in some ways, but that's a different story for a different bedtime.”

This time Baz chuckled.

I went on. “‘Yes, I suppose we are very different, aren't we?' said young Coconut. ‘Though doesn't it seem odd?' Poor Fro-Yo tilted her head. ‘Doesn't what seem odd?' she responded. ‘Well,' said Coconut, pointing her finger to the window, and the world beyond the Eleventh Aisle. ‘Do you see that sunset?' Fro-Yo took a look out the window and said, ‘Why, yes, I do see that sunset.' Coconut tapped her chin, and said, ‘It seems odd that the sunset
you
see from the Eleventh Aisle and the one
I
see from Greenhouse Eleven is the exact same one. Maybe the two worlds we live in aren't so different. We see the same sunset.'”

Vic turned on his side, and we stared at each other in the dark.

“‘Why, yes,' said Fro-Yo, ‘we do see the same sunset, don't we?' And together, they walked hand in hand out of the Eleventh Aisle.”

“Where did they go?” asked Coco. “Here? Did Coconut bring Fro-Yo back here?”

“No,” I said. “They walked into that sunset, because it was something no one had ever done or heard about, or seen at all anywhere ever. And they lived drippily ever after. The end.”

Coco let out a long, contented sigh. “That was your best yet, Mad.”

It was quiet and dark and, before long, Coco snored soundly in her sleeping bag beside me.

Sometimes a thing should be strange, but it's not. I couldn't explain it, but Vic and I stared at each other for a long time that night. We never said anything, never smiled, and he never blinked. I imagined what he might say, what he wanted to say, and I wondered if he was thinking the same thing about me.

What is that story really about?
Vic never asked.

You know what it's about
, I never answered.

I fell asleep, looking at his eyes. And it should have been strange, but it wasn't.