Before We Go Extinct (8 page)

I'm guessing it's the latter, but what do I know?

It's not like he ever discussed his past.

The stuff he said was either a criticism or a decree. Every time he talked, it sounded like he was hurtling down a slope, a pile of something inevitable crashing down, smashing the listener to smithereens. He'd had so much plastic surgery that his face moved wrong with his voice, making him seem even less real, both ancient and ageless. Like a
being
rather than a person. Like something you couldn't quite put into a category. Feelingless, but alive.

A monster.

Zen, baby
, that's what The King would say to him, in this singsong voice that wasn't his, either.
Find your Zen, Big Daddy.

His dad would yell, spittle flying, and The King would smile his own version of that small, slow smile. The power smile. They would smile at each other, in slow-motion like that, seeing who would win, teeth against teeth. It made me think of the goblin shark, the ugliest shark in the world, the shark that can actually throw its own mouth outward from its body, surprising its prey. The shark whose smile is pretty much always fatal.

Zen, baby
.

The King had his own philosophy. One day, he was going to write it down. It was like Buddhism, basically, he said. But better. Buddhism without the hippie angle, the flowing rivers and things people couldn't relate to anymore, living in New York City. It was about how you could skim along the surface of life or you could really live it, but you could do it without letting other people get to you because you would not attach to other people. Wrap yourself in a veneer that disguised you and confused other people. Save the inner warmth of your true spirit for a chosen two. His Buddhism had sidewalks with rivers running underneath, you just had to believe they were there. Cold, clear rivers that led to the sea.

Daff and I were his two.

Daff and The King were mine.

I can't explain it like he did. It sounded right when he said it. Ideal. Perfect. And most of all, correct. Save your humanity for the humans, he said. Give everyone else an automaton who meets their expectations. Never let anyone down. Remember the river is there, even when you can't see it.

His dad thought he was ridiculous. A
fucking idiot
. And he didn't hesitate to say it.
Hey, have you met my fucking idiot son?
he'd say to his cronies and then he'd laugh, and they'd laugh, because that's what he was like. They'd be uncomfortable because, seriously, who says that about your own kid, in front of your own kid. But they'd laugh because he was a guy whose laugh commanded your own laugh out of you, even when nothing was funny.

Especially when nothing was funny.

I'd say that his dad was the
fucking idiot
but no one asked me and no one would dare say that about that man, even though they all probably privately thought it.

Fucking idiot
, he'd say, and The King would cringe down inside his cool veneer and smile slower and slower and slower, his feet feeling through the ground for that river that wasn't even there.

I run my finger along a vinyl seam on the seat. My nails are too long.

I think about The King's nails, growing, in his marble box.

Was there anything left of his fingers?

He used to get manicures. Mom laughed when I told her, offered to buff my nails, but I said no. Embarrassed that I'd told her. Embarrassed for The King. Embarrassed for how different it all was, a bus and two trains away.

On the first day of school, me all pressed in my new white shirt, blue pants, plaid tie, blazer, feeling like a freak in a costume, the teacher said, “So we have a new kid. This new kid's name is John. John, come on up here and talk a whole bunch of bullshit lies about yourself or even the truth, if you're that way inclined.”

The teachers at the Royal Pricks' Academy always swore. They thought it made them cutting edge. Different. Radical. When
really
, I wanted to tell them, the “Academy” was no different from Red Hook High. The only difference was the way the kids oozed the kind of laconic cool confidence that slid across the floor like oil and kept me slipping, never sure when I was okay, when I was safe to stand. They were all always playing a game, something with complicated rules that no one really understood but also would never admit to not understanding. A game that was more-than-slightly dangerous.

That's when I did my speech about the sharks and how they matter.

When I
cried
.

Fucking idiot
, The King's dad would have said.
Look at you, blubbering up there, you fucking idiot faggot
. (He threw in
faggot
when he was feeling extra cruel.)

Afterward, I walked alone down the empty echoing hall to the bathroom. I remember feeling really tired, and not only because it took an hour and a half to get to the school and I'd come early, just to make sure. It was a different kind of tired. The kind of tired that you feel in the part of you that's nothing to do with your body, more like the universe had recently become too heavy to move around in. I held my hands under the cold tap and stared at myself, wondering how I came to be here and why, exactly, I was such a loser and what my old friends were doing at Red Hook and why I'd let my mom talk me into this weird alternate universe where I didn't belong.

Who
cries
?

I looked younger in a tie, like a kid playing dress up. I tightened the knot in the mirror so hard that I nearly choked.

Then The King came in. I jumped, not going to lie. He startled me. He let out a short laugh and then he lit a cigarette and drew on it in one long breath, let it out slowly in a twirling shape. He sat down next to me on the floor, the smoke ringing his head. He looked like a cartoon genie emerging from a bottle.

He said, “I think you take that movie a little too seriously, bro. I mean, it was a good film but everything is a lie. Everyone has an agenda. And no one's gonna die.”

Well, eff you, you liar, I think now.

Someone
did
die, after all.

He did.

I swallow hard, carsickness and sadness congealing in my throat like sour milk. Cough into my hand.

Dad talks and talks. His voice isn't boulders, it's just annoying, like sand being flicked repeatedly in your face. He grinds on, grating on my last nerve.

I keep my eyes closed. I do what I've done since I was little and feeling anxious, do what was prescribed by some shrink in a completely nonhelpful “support group for anxious kids.” What I do is I imagine my happy place. Which is underwater. In the sea.

I picture the sharks sliding through the blue depths.

I count the shark species, naming them all in my head.

Slower and slower and fewer and fewer and fewer of them until suddenly it's just entirely blue and I'm asleep and I'm dreaming that I'm underwater and I'm looking and looking and looking and there aren't any sharks and between me and the surface is only blood and I gasp and nearly wake up except suddenly I'm standing on the platform at the Smith-9th station looking down over the whole city, my uniform wearing me, turning me into someone different, someone who matters. A homeless dude laughs at me and throws something, a bottle of piss, which splashes my pants and I want to go home and change but then I'm back at school, at the bathroom sink and The King is there, crouched on the bathroom floor, which I think actually was marble, too (What is with rich people and marble? Don't they get it? That's what they make headstones out of. That's the material of your grave.), going, “Guess you'll be called Sharkboy from now on, which if you think about it, is better than being called Freak. But me, I'm gonna call you Great White. Because you're white, see? And maybe you'll be great. Probably not though. Probably none of us will. But in movies, it's always the charity kid that comes out on top. So that's you. You get to be the underdog. A real-life heeeee-ro. Savin' everyone. Even maybe me.” But because it's a dream, that's where it stops being real and where he turns around. And then I see the hole on his back and blood coming out and suddenly he has gills and he's flopping around on the floor and I can't save him and I can't save him and then I see that we're on the sidewalk and there is a stupid river, after all. I nudge him with my foot so he can flop into it, and even though he can't swim, the current takes him faster and faster and then he's out of sight and I'm crying instead of following. And then I wake up, sweat pouring from my face, and Dad is still
talking
like nothing has happened and I roll down the window and take great greedy gulps of air.

“OH MAN,” says Dad. “WANT ME TO PULL OVER? ARE YOU GONNA PUKE?”

I shake my head no.

I breathe slowly.

I take out my phone and I text The King.
Dude
, I type.
I am so freaking sorry. I love you. I hope you found the river. Don't let anyone piss on your pants.
Then I delete it without sending it because even though he's dead, I don't want him to read that and I don't know why I don't and I don't know what I'm sorry for and the things that I don't know that I should are so big they are crushing me into the seat like too much gravity and for a minute I let myself sink, finless, drowning and …

“THE BOOG IS GOIG SO WELL! YOU HAB DO READ ID!” Dad suddenly shouts, snorting loudly to clear his nose. “IT HAS TIME TRAVEL. YOU CAN BE MY BETA READER! THAT'S THE GUY WHO READS IT FIRST. I'M IN ONE OF THOSE READING GROUPS ON THE INTERNET BUT I DON'T LET THEM SEE IT IN CASE THEY STEAL MY IDEA. MAYBE YOU CAN MAKE SOME NOTES FOR ME, LIKE ABOUT WHAT YOU KIDS SAY NOW, LIKE … NOOB.” I stare at him in the mirror and shake my head at him but he isn't looking, he's watching the road. I like looking at his face when he isn't looking back. I feel like he's a mystery and if I solve him then I'll understand me. The mystery is how much of a buffoon he is, how round-edged and slow-witted. His face is mine, but older and softer. His beard and eyebrows are threaded with gray. The skin flakes around his nose. He rolls down the window and pays the woman in a booth. We're here. The ferry.

“Hey,” he says out the window. “We make it?”

She nods, bored. “Lane thirty-two,” she says flatly, like she's actually putting effort into layering each single syllable with ennui.

“Have a
great
day,” Dad says, oblivious, turning his eyes to me in the mirror. “I know the kids say ‘noob,' the kids at the beach say it all the time. You're going to have the best summer of your whole life. You love the ocean, right? Well, this island is … It's amazing. You'll die. I mean—” He hesitates. “Not, like,
die
. Bad choice of words, eh. God, I'm sorry, kid. That must have been…” He does look sorry, his eyes crinkling up until his face looks as puckered and weathered as a piece of fruit that's been left in the bowl for months too long. “I'm really sorry,” he says again. I nod, to let him off the hook.

He looks a little too relieved.

“Anyway, maybe you can have some adventures for me to write about,” he says. Then he laughs too hard—he's been eating potato chips like a starving man—and oily crumbs glisten around his mouth and are stuck between his teeth, like some kind of chip apocalypse.

“Chip?” he asks.

My stomach contracts. I shake my head no.

TIME TRAVEL
, I type on my phone.

The phone accepts it.

The phone accepts everything.

Swoop, swoop.

 

15

Somehow when something happens and you can't photograph it and send it somewhere, anywhere, it's the worst kind of loneliness.

I slap my phone against my leg, like that will revive the dead battery for long enough that I can take a picture. I want to show someone (Daff). I want to say,
Look at this.
I want someone (Daff) to say,
Wow.

Because, seriously, this
place
. This is not what I was expecting. Not even a bit.

Mrs. S. would die. It puts the Keys to shame. It's freaking breathtaking.

“You can plug it in when we get to the cabin,” says Dad. “The car charger thing is broken but I've hooked up batteries to solar panels up there and you can plug in anything. We're completely off the grid.”

I give him a look that he misses entirely. I'm lucky my dad is not a genius. It's kind of like being parented by a cartoon. Everything about him is two-dimensional. There, but not there.

“Cool, eh?” he says. He gestures with his arm, a sweeping circle, like Mrs. S. waving down passersby to look at her display of fresh cod.

Yeah, I nod. I don't know who I'd want to see this more: Mrs. S.? Or Daff. (Daff, Daff, always Daff.)

It looks like a scene from a jigsaw puzzle or a postcard of somewhere that no longer exists, as though it really is TIME TRAVEL. The ferry weaves through islands that are dark-green-thick with forests, like cakes with too much icing, top-heavy. So many trees. The islands should sink into the sea from the weight of all that forest. I've never seen trees like this.

Or islands.

I've got to be honest. I didn't know places like this existed. You hear about deforestation and the raping of the rain forest and clear-cutting and how everything is wrecked, so I guess I just went ahead and believed it was too late. I guess I thought everything had been cut down and destroyed. Everything like this, that is.

When you live in a city, it can be hard to even know that other realities are out there.

Reality that's like this.

Nature in abundance.

I feel stupid even thinking that, but …

I reach for my phone to type
nature in abundance
before I remember that it's dead. And so is he.