I began to think guilty thoughts that maybe Shann had said something to her parents about me. I was confused and frustrated, and I desperately wanted to have an opportunity to speak to Shann.
Robby Brees and I were also drunk. The Scotch whisky made us brave and reckless.
I admitted to Johnny McKeon that we had come up with a plan to kill the Unstoppable Soldiers—a plan involving Robby Brees’s blood and the paintball guns that had been stored inside my garage ever since my brother, Eric, went away to join the Marines and have his testicles blown off.
Robby announced that if he could have one more drink of Scotch whisky he would let me take blood from him.
It was all a very ghastly proposition.
I did not think I could actually do something like stick a needle into Robby Brees’s arm. The thought of inflicting pain on Robby nearly made me cry. With everything that had been going on in my life that past week, and now with Shann treating me like an enemy, I was an emotional disaster.
Shann’s mother, Wendy McKeon, had been a registered nurse before marrying Johnny McKeon and moving to Ealing. She said if she could have one more vodka gimlet, she would draw a few vials of blood from Robby Brees.
I went pale.
Robby went pale.
It was all very ghastly.
The clinic filled with the steaming smell of alcohol breath. There is something about the sterility of clinics that repels everything, as though they are vacuums unto themselves, like the glass globes into which the McKeon scientists trapped all kinds of shit. As soon as the five of us entered the Eden Project clinic, the place absorbed the odors of booze, sweat, cigarettes, and golden retriever.
“I have B.O.,” I said.
Ingrid sighed and curled up on the floor beneath the flat, padded examination table.
“Saint Kazimierz brought a dead girl back to life, and he also made a blind boy see,” I said. I unzipped the top of my jumpsuit and slipped the silver chain over my head. I told Robby he should wear the Saint Kazimierz medal while Wendy McKeon drew blood from him. I put my chain on Robby. He looked scared.
Wendy McKeon told Robby to lie down on the table and strip to his waist. Wendy began opening cupboards and drawers in the clinic, gathering the things she would use to collect blood from Robby Brees.
Robby undid the top of his jumpsuit and slid it down around his hips. He lay there, half naked on the operating table.
“I wonder if those McKeon sickos ever operated on teenagers here,” I said.
Robby said, “Uh.”
I touched the Saint Kazimierz medal and pressed it against Robby’s heart.
Wendy put two wadded balls of gauze into Robby’s palm and told him to squeeze them.
“I bet that’s the first time you ever squeezed someone else’s balls in a doctor’s office,” I joked.
Robby said, “Shut up, Austin.”
“Okay,” I agreed.
Shann was exasperated. She said, “I can’t watch this.”
Shann thud-thudded in her padded scientist socks out into the hallway.
I wanted to follow her, but I was stuck. I could not just leave Robby alone in the clinic. I looked back and forth, from the door to Robby’s pale chest as Wendy McKeon tightened a rubber tube around my best friend’s bicep.
Robby gripped the wads of gauze in his hand. He was scared. I didn’t want to see Robby Brees scared and hurt.
Robby’s skin was the color of the insides of sweet Babcock peaches.
He knew what I was thinking.
Robby Brees whispered, “You should go talk to her, Porcupine.”
Robby Brees always knew what was going on.
I wanted to ask Ingrid what was I going to do, but I did not want Johnny McKeon and Shann’s mom to think I was an insane kid who talked to his non-barking dog and shit like that.
“Uh . . . Um . . . ,” I said.
Wendy McKeon stabbed a thick needle right into the bend of Robby’s arm.
“Gee whiz, babe,” Johnny McKeon said.
Thick maroon blood began filling up the cylinder on the syringe.
Blub-blub! went Robby’s blood.
Robby winced.
I felt my knees buckle.
“Uh. I better step outside,” I said.
WANDA MAE’S PINK BOWLING BALL
SHANN COLLINS HAD gone down to the end of the hallway. She stood outside the doorway to Eden’s bowling alley. Shann faced away from me, but I could tell she was crying.
I felt like shit.
“Please don’t cry, Shann,” I said.
I put my hand on her shoulder and slid it up beneath the soft warm fluffs of her perfect hair. She did not pull away from me. That was progress, I thought.
History is all about progress.
“And please don’t hate Robby. Uh. Or me. I would never lie to you, Shann. I love you too much.” I said, “And, uh, be honest: How many boys do you know who actually have the ability to save the entire world? Robby Brees is like a superhero.”
Shann laughed and cried at the same time.
History does show that Shann Collins was a complex person, capable of doing such things simultaneously.
All my best friends were very complex.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me, Austin?” Shann said.
I nearly gave Shann Collins the automated teenage boy response, which would have been I don’t know. I stopped myself.
“Do you really want to hear about Robby? Because I will tell you everything I know about him, Shann,” I said.
Shann said, “No.”
I said, “I love you, Shann Collins.”
She wiped at her face. It was my fault Shann was crying.
“Tell me the truth. Are you gay, Austin?” Shann Collins said.
“I really don’t think so. Uh. I don’t know, Shann.” I said, “Maybe there is something wrong with me.”
“But I love you, Austin,” Shann said.
“I know that. I’m sorry for hurting you, Shann.” I said, “I can’t even begin to tell you how much I love you.”
Then Shann turned around and put her arms around me. We kissed, more deeply and passionately than we had ever kissed in our lives. I pressed my hips into hers. She did not back away from me at all.
Shann Collins clearly approved of my erection.
She said, “I’m scared, Austin.”
I whispered, “I guess I am, too.”
“Okay.”
“I’m sorry.”
We moved like tangled dancers through the doorway and into the bowling alley.
That was a lot of progress.
The world was turning, and mankind was marching onward, doing the same stupid shit over and over and over.
I unzipped Shann Collins’s jumpsuit and did the same to mine, so I could press my bare chest against her full breasts. My throat tightened. My heart felt like it was squirming up inside my neck, just like a fat walleye forcing its way through a shallow creek during the spring spawn.
Eden 5 needed to spawn.
We went deeper into the bowling alley.
I imagined being inside a cave, fifteen thousand years in the past.
Shann Collins and I threw off all our clothing. Naked, we went down onto the floor together.
“Do you think this is the end of the world, Austin?”
“We’ll be okay. We’ll be okay.”
Shann kissed me. She put her mouth everywhere on my body.
It was electric.
But I could not stop myself from thinking about my brother, Eric, and the two prostitutes named Tiffany and Rhonda. I thought about Saint Kazimierz and his hair shirt, about Krzys Szczerba, and all the Szczerba men after him. I thought about Robby in the clinic.
I thought about naming my balls.
Shann Collins helped me put my penis inside her vagina, and we had sexual intercourse right there on the floor of Eden’s bowling alley, below a pair of shoes and a pink ball that had Wanda Mae embossed in gold on it.
Our sex was noisy and urgent and wet. I rubbed my kneecaps raw, scraping them on the rough carpeting at the shoe-changing station. I pushed Shann along on her butt until her head and mine bumped against the rattling rack of bowling shoes.
I did not care about anything at that exact moment.
No one knew anything about it.
Dr. Grady McKeon would be proud of Shann Collins and me.
We were unstoppable.
At exactly that moment, Louis, the cook from The Pancake House, whose real name was Ah Wong Sing, climbed over the bloody, shitty mess in the front seat of Ollie Jungfrau’s Dodge Caravan minivan. He got out of the van through the shattered window, the same way the Unstoppable Soldier that once had been Travis Pope did.
Ah Wong Sing wanted to help Mrs. Edith Mitchell get out, too.
“Climb over the seat,” he said to her.
Mrs. Edith Mitchell shook her head and said no.
Ah Wong Sing tried all the doors on the Dodge Caravan. He could not open any of them.
“Climb over the front seat,” Ah Wong Sing repeated.
But Mrs. Edith Mitchell would not move.
Ah Wong Sing said he would get somebody to help. He ran off, across the Kelsey Creek Bridge toward Amelia Jenks Bloomer Park, which was the opposite direction from where he had seen the Unstoppable Soldier going.
Ah Wong Sing was smart.
Mrs. Edith Mitchell waited in the crumpled Dodge Caravan minivan.
It was not a good idea.
At exactly that moment, Robby Brees was lying back, dizzy. Robby stared up at the soft fluorescent lights inside the clinic while Wendy McKeon smoothed a plastic bandage across the small dark hole she had left in Robby’s arm.
“Just lie there for a few minutes,” Wendy McKeon told him.
Then Wendy McKeon put the three large syringes she had filled with Robby Brees’s blood inside a small steel clinical refrigerator.
Johnny McKeon was asleep on a wheeled doctor’s chair with the back of his head propped against the wall.
In the bowling alley, Shann Collins and I hurried to put our clothes on. We were both sticky and smeared all over with semen and saliva. I wanted to take a shower.
Neither of us said a word.
I was more confused than ever.
I felt terrible for all the things I had selfishly done to Shann and Robby. I shut my eyes and asked Saint Kazimierz to help me.
Outside, I heard Wendy McKeon calling for us in the hallway.
I stuttered guiltily, offering something shitty about bowling a few frames when I saw Robby Brees, Ingrid, and Shann’s parents looking for us in the hallway.
I do not lie, and now I was a liar, too.
Shann and I were mortified with embarrassment.
Robby’s mouth tightened in a disappointed frown. He looked drained and tired.
Robby knew what we did. He could tell.
Robby Brees always knew everything about me.
Robby Brees slipped my silver chain over his head and handed the medallion with Saint Kazimierz back to me.
Robby said, “Thanks for this, Austin. You probably need it more than me now.”
A cigarette was what I needed, but I did not have the guts to say anything to Robby Brees.
I looked at Ingrid and said, “What am I going to do, Ingrid?”
Ingrid yawned, which is what Ingrid always does when she is confused.
I was confused, too.
Johnny McKeon said, “Dang. A dog who understands English. Ain’t that a kick?”
RULES ARE RULES, BUT THE BRAIN ROOM IS NOT PARTICULARLY BRAINY
JOHNNY MCKEON DID not have to try very hard to convince me and Robby that we should wait until daylight before going back to my house for the paintball guns.
Robby Brees and I were going to use my paintball guns and Robby’s blood to kill the Unstoppable Soldiers and save the world.
Nobody wants to go out in the dark with Unstoppable Soldiers on the loose, even if you happen to be hanging around with their God, who is armed with a paintball gun, or shit like that.
I hoped the God of Unstoppable Soldiers was not too upset with me for sneaking away while his blood was being drained so I could have sexual intercourse with Shann Collins on the floor of a bowling alley.
Unlike my great-grandfather, Andrzej Szczerba, I was not testing myself or trying to prove anything.
That was what I told myself, at least.
I was probably wrong.
I mumbled something about wanting to take a shower. I stunk.
Wendy McKeon said that if we had to stay in Eden for a while, we would have to make some kind of rules about when boys could shower and when girls could shower.
It was a ridiculous thing to make a rule about. Wendy McKeon may just as well have made a rule about the rotational speed of the earth.
History shows that as long as there have been human beings on this planet, once you put two of them together, rulemaking will start up before you know it.
“I sometimes take showers with Ingrid,” I confessed.
Ingrid yawned.
We made this stupid rule and this stupid rule.
Boys are not allowed to love each other.
Then we painted a bison on the wall.
I wanted to take a shower. I was sticky and scratchy between my legs. I felt like the abrasive acrylic carpet fibers from the bowling alley were boring into my balls. I had B.O., and I needed to pee really bad.
Everyone else wanted to go to sleep. It was very awkward and nerve-wracking for me, talking about going to bed. I wanted Shann and Robby to sleep in the same room with me. I wanted to hold them both and tell them how sorry I was.
I knew that would not happen. You know, rules, and shit like that.
It was on our way through the hallway of Eden’s dorms that we discovered the Brain Room.
Here is how we discovered it: The door had a brass plaque with etched banker-font letters that said this:
BRAIN ROOM
Robby, Shann, and I did not notice it before when we were running crazy through the sleeping compartments, jumping on beds and not making rules, and shit like that.
“What the heck?” Johnny McKeon said.
“Maybe it’s some kind of command post,” Wendy, Johnny’s wife, offered.
“Uh,” I said. “After watching and listening to Dr. Grady McKeon for about three and a half hours tonight, I would not be surprised if the room on the other side of this door was filled with actual brains.”
“Or sperm,” Robby added.
“Uh,” I said.
I turned red.
Shann was absolutely silent.
Nobody wanted to hear about sperm at that exact moment.
But Robby was actually closer to winning the guess-what-is-inside-the-Brain-Room game.
It turned out there was quite a bit of sperm inside the Brain Room.
Robby Brees, the God of all Unstoppable Soldiers, pushed his way between Johnny McKeon and me. Robby turned the knob on the door.
We went inside Dr. Grady McKeon’s Brain Room.
To be more precise, we went into the receptionist’s office of the Brain Room.
Dr. Grady McKeon kept a secretary. History will verify that his secretary was highly involved in Dr. Grady McKeon’s mission to breed. Dr. Grady McKeon attempted to breed with his secretary on top of her desk, on the floor of the reception area, on the pool table in Eden’s Tally-Ho!, and even on the stainless steel tray caddy in the cafeteria.
Dr. Grady McKeon’s sperm was not very lively. Dr. Grady McKeon’s sperm was not
unstoppable. In fact, Dr. Grady McKeon’s sperm never got started.
Dr. Grady McKeon’s secretary’s name was Wanda Mae Rutkowski.
She had a nameplate on her desk that said so.
Moments earlier, Shann Collins and I had sexual intercourse below Wanda Mae Rutkowski’s pink bowling ball and tricolor bowling shoes. Wanda Mae Rutkowski had feet like Godzilla. While my penis was inside Shann Collin’s vagina, I noticed that Wanda Mae Rutkowski’s shoes were women’s size 11.
It is my job to notice accurate details, no matter what is going on.
Wanda Mae Rutkowski’s desk was frozen in time.
“Hey! Gum!” I said.
Wanda Mae Rutkowski left an opened, pale green rectangular package of Wrigley’s Doublemint gum on her desk. There were three sticks left inside the pack. I took one and began chewing it. The texture at first was cardboard-like and somewhat disappointing, but there was still a remarkable double-mintiness locked within the sugary gum.
“Unstoppable Chewing Gum,” I said.
Robby said, “Um.”
I prayed to Saint Kazimierz that he would see to it my balls would not dissolve.
Wanda Mae Rutkowski also had a pack of cigarettes called Virginia Slims. I wanted to smoke one of them. There were two cigarette butts in an ashtray that came from Clement’s Motor Inn in Cedar Rapids. Wanda Mae Rutkowski had cotton candy lipstick. It made me horny thinking about Wanda Mae’s lips. My penis was a real dynamo. I finally settled on names for my balls.
My balls deserved names.
The Virginia Slims cigarettes were menthol, and very thin. They looked like candy.
Wanda Mae Rutkowski obviously enjoyed minty pleasures.
A rotary-dial phone sat on her desk, too. Like the others we had seen in Eden, it had a row of clear plastic buttons across its base.
NEVER LOOK FOR ICE CREAM IN A SPERM FREEZER
“WELL, I’LL BE a monkey’s uncle,” Johnny McKeon said.
I never knew what that meant, but in Dr. Grady McKeon’s case, it would have to mean that someone’s sperm got inside a monkey.