Antsy Does Time (2 page)

Across from us in the train was Gunnar Ümlaut—a kid who moved here from Sweden when we were all in elementary school. Gunnar's got long blond hair he makes no excuse for, and a resigned look of Scandinavian despair that melts girls in his path. And if that doesn't work, the slight accent he puts on when he's around girls does the job. Never mind that he's been living in Brooklyn since he was six. Not that I'm jealous or anything—I admire a guy who uses what he's got.

“Hi, Gunnar,” I said. “Where you headed?”

“Where else? The Roadkyll debacle.”

“Excellent,” I said, and filed the word “debacle” in the special place I reserve for words I will never know the meaning of.

So Gunnar's sitting there, all slouched and casual, his arms across seats on either side like maybe there's a couple of invisible girls there. (Don't get me started on invisible. Long story.) Then he takes one look at Howie's book and says, “The dumb guy dies at the end.”

Howie looks up at Gunnar, heaves a heavy sigh that can only come from a lifetime of ruined endings, and closes the book. I snicker, which just irritates Howie even more.

“Thanks, Gunnar.” Howie sneers. “Any more spoilers you care to share with us?”

“Yeah,” says Gunnar. “Rosebud's a sled, the spider dies after the fair, and the Planet of the Apes is actually Earth in the distant future.” He doesn't smile when he says it. Gunnar never smiles. I think girls must like that, too.

By the time we got off at Thirty-fourth Street, the parade crowd had all gravitated to the Empire State Building, hoping to experience the thrill of watching someone they don't know plunge to his death.

“If they don't survive,” said Gunnar, “it's our responsibility to witness it. As Winston Churchill once said,
‘An untimely end witnessed, gives life deeper meaning.'
”

Gunnar always talks like that—all serious, as if even stupidity has a point.

All around us the police are screaming at the crowds, one hand on their batons, saying things like, “Don't make me use this!”

Up above, the Empire State Building was still wearing a coonskin hat, and the three unfortunate balloon handlers were exactly where they were when we left home—still clinging on to their ropes. Ira handed me the camera, which had a 500X zoom, just in case I wanted to examine one of the guy's nose hairs.

It was hard to hold the camera steady when it was zoomed in, but once I did, I could see firefighters and police inside the Empire State Building, trying to reach the men through the windows. They weren't having much luck. Word in the crowd was that a rescue helicopter was on its way.

One guy had managed to tie the rope around his waist and was swinging toward the windows, but the rescuers couldn't get a grip on him. The second guy clung to the rope and also had it hooked around his feet, probably thanking the New York public school system for forcing him to learn how to do this in gym class. The third guy was the worst off. He was dangling from a stick at the end of his rope, holding on with both hands like a flying trapeze once it stops flying.

“Hey, I wanna look, too!”

Howie grabs the camera from me, and that's just fine, because I was starting to get a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. Suddenly I started to wonder what had possessed me to come down here at all.

“How much you wanna bet those guys write a book about this?” says Howie. It seems Howie assumes they're all going to survive.

All the while, Gunnar just stood there quietly, his eyes cast heavenward toward the human drama, with a solemn expression on his face. He caught me watching him.

“For the past few months I've been coming to disasters,” Gunnar tells me.

“Why?”

Gunnar shrugs as if it's nothing, but I can tell there's more to it. “I find them . . . compelling.”

Coming from anyone else, this would be like a serial-killer warning sign, but from Gunnar it didn't seem weird at all, it just seemed like some profound Scandinavian thing—like all those foreign movies where everyone dies, including the director, the cameraman, and half the audience.

Gunnar shakes his head sadly as he watches the souls up above. “So fragile . . .” he says.

“What,” says Howie, “balloons?”

“No, human life, you idiot,” I tell him. For an instant I caught a hint of what actually might have been a smile on Gunnar's face. Maybe because I said what he was thinking.

There's applause all around us, and when I look up, I can see the swinging man has finally been caught by a cop, and he's hauled through the window. The helicopter has arrived with a guy tethered to a rope like an action hero, to go after the trapeze dangler. The crowd watches in a silence you rarely hear in a city. It takes a few hair-raising minutes, but the guy is rescued and hauled away by the helicopter. Now only one dangler remains. This is the guy who seemed calmest of all; the guy who had it all under control. The guy who suddenly slips, and plunges.

A singular gasp from the audience.

“No way!” says Ira, his eye glued to his camera.

The guy falls. He falls forever. He doesn't even spin his arms—it's like he's already accepted his fate. And suddenly I find I can't watch it. I snap my eyes away, looking anywhere else. My shoes, other people's shoes, the manhole cover beneath me.

I never heard him hit. I'm thankful that I didn't. Yeah, it was my idea to come here, but when it comes right down to it, I know there are some things you just shouldn't watch. That's when I saw Gunnar—for all his talk about witnessing disaster, he was looking away, too. Not just looking away, but grimacing and covering his eyes.

The gasps from the crowd have turned to groans of self-loathing as people suddenly realize this wasn't about entertainment. Even Howie and Ira are looking kind of ill.

“Let's get out of here before the subway gets packed,” I tell them, trying to sound less choked up than I really am—but if I'm a little queasy, it's nothing compared to Gunnar. He was so pale I thought he might pass out. He even stumbles a little bit. I grab his arm to keep him steady. “Hey . . . Hey, you okay?”

“Yeah,” he says. “I'm fine. It's nothing. Just a part of the illness.”

I looked at him, not quite sure I heard him right. “Illness?”

“Yes. Pulmonary Monoxic Systemia.” And then he says, “I only have six months to live.”

2
Heaven, Hockey, and the Ice Water of Despair

The idea of dying never appealed to me much. Even when I was a kid, watching the
Adventures of Roadkyll Raccoon and Darren Headlightz
, I always found it suspicious the way Roadkyll got flattened at the end of each cartoon and yet was back for more in the next episode. It didn't mesh with any reality I knew. According to the way I was raised, there are really just a few possibilities of what happens to you in the hereafter.

Option one: It turns out you're less of a miserable person than you thought you were, and you go to heaven.

Option two: You're not quite the wonderful person you thought you were, and you go to the other place that people these days spell with double hockey sticks, which, by the way, doesn't make much sense, because that's the only sport they can't play down there unless they're skating on boiling water instead of ice, but it ain't gonna happen, because all the walk-on-water types'll be up in heaven.

I did a report on heaven for Sunday school once, so I know all about it. In heaven, you're with your dead relatives, it's always sunny, and everyone's got nice views—no one's looking at a disgusting landfill or anything. I gotta tell you, though, if I gotta spend eternity with all my relatives, everybody hugging and walking with God and stuff, I'll go crazy. It sounds like my cousin Gina's wedding before people got drunk. I hope God don't mind me saying so, but it all sounds very hockey-stickish to me.

As for the place down under, the girl who did her report on it got all her information from horror movies, so, aside from really good special effects, her version is highly suspect. Supposedly there are like nine levels, and each one is worse than the last. Imagine a barbecue where
you're
sizzling on the grill—but it's not accidental like my dad last summer. And the thing about it is, you cook like one of them Costco roasts that's somehow thicker than an entire cow, so no matter how long you sit there, you're still rare in the middle for all eternity.

My mother, who I'm sure gives advice to God since she gives it to everyone else, says the fire talk is just to scare people. In reality, it's cold and lonely. Eternal boredom—which sounds right, because that's worse than the roasting version. At least when you're burning, you've got something to occupy your mind.

There is a third option, called Purgatory, which is a kinder, gentler version of the place down under. Purgatory is God's version of a time-out—temporary flames of woe. I find this idea most appealing, although to be honest, it all bugs me a little. I mean, God loves us and is supposed to be the perfect parent, right? So what if a parent came up to their kid and said, “I love you, but I'm going to have to punish you by roasting you over flames of woe, and it's really going to hurt.” Social Services would not look kindly upon this, and we could all end up in foster care.

I figure Hell and Purgatory are like those parental threats—you know, like, “Tease your sister one more time, and I swear I'll kill you,” or “Commit one more mortal sin, and so help me, I will roast you over eternal flames, young man.”

Call me weird, but I find that comforting. It means that God really does love us, He's just ticked off.

Still, none of that was comforting when it came to Gunnar Ümlaut. The thought of someone I know dying, who wasn't old and dying already, really bothered me. It made me wish I knew Gunnar better, but then if I did, I'd be really sad now, so why would I want that, and should I feel guilty for not wanting it? The whole thing reeked of me having to feel guilty for something, and I hate that feeling.

 
 
Nobody talked much on the return trip from the Roadkyll Raccoon incident. Between what we witnessed and what Gunnar had told me, there just wasn't much anyone wanted to say. We talked about the football games we were missing, and school stuff, but mostly we looked at subway advertisements and out the windows so we wouldn't have to look at one another. I wondered if Howie and Ira had heard what Gunnar had told me, but didn't want to ask.

“See ya,” was all anyone said when we got off the train. Howie, Ira, and Gunnar all went off to their Thanksgiving meals, and I went home to find a note from my parents, with exclamation points and underlines, telling me to be at the restaurant
ON TIME!!!

My dad runs a French/Italian fusion restaurant called
Paris, Capisce?
He didn't always do this. He used to have an office job with a plastics company, but he lost it because of me. That's okay, though, because he got the restaurant because of me as well. It's a long story from the weird world of Old Man Crawley. If you've heard of him, and who hasn't, you'll know it's a story best kept at ten-foot-pole distance. Anyway, it all worked out in the end, because running a restaurant is what my dad always dreamed of doing.

We all quickly found out, however, that when you have a restaurant, you don't run it, it runs you. We all got sucked in. Mom fills in when there aren't enough waitresses, I'm constantly on call to bus tables, and my little sister Christina folds napkins into animal shapes. Only my older brother Frankie gets out of it, on account of he's in college, and when he's home, he thinks he's too good to work in a restaurant.

My particular skill is the pouring of water.

Don't laugh—it's a real skill. I can pour from any height and never miss the glass. People applaud.

Thanksgiving, we all knew, was going to be the big test. Not just of the restaurant, but of our family. See, Thanksgiving has always been big with us, on account of we got this massive extended family of aunts, uncles, cousins, and people I barely know who have various body parts resembling mine. That's what family is. But these days more and more people eat out on Thanksgiving, so Dad decided to offer a special Thanksgiving meal at
Paris, Capisce?
instead of the usual big family meal at our house. That got the relatives all bent out of shape. We told them we're doing Thanksgiving at home one day late, but they flatly refused to postpone the holiday. Now we're family outcasts, at least until Christmas, when everyone will, in theory, kiss and make up. Dad knows better than to keep the restaurant open on Christmas, because Mom told him if he does, he'd better set up a cot in the back room, because that's where he'll be sleeping for a while. Mom says things like this very directly, because my father is not good with subtle hints.

As for Thanksgiving, Mom was very direct with the rest of us as well. “None of youse are allowed to eat any turkey this Thursday, got it? As far as you're concerned, Thanksgiving is on Friday.”

“Do turkey hot dogs count?” I asked, because no direct order from my mother was complete unless I found a way around it. Not that I had plans to eat turkey hot dogs, but it's the principle of the thing. Mom's response was a look that probably wilted the lettuce in the refrigerator.

Part of her laying down of the law was that we weren't allowed to have a turkeyless Thanksgiving at friends' houses either—because if we did, our own family Thanksgiving would feel like an afterthought. I didn't think I'd really mind, but right now I didn't want to be alone with my thoughts. I was still feeling funny about the dead raccoon wrangler, and Gunnar's terminal confession, but it was still a while until Mom and Dad wanted me at the restaurant.