“Naa,” I said to Mom. “It couldn’t be.”
I went to answer it, fully prepared for a blast of flesh-searing fragrance. But it wasn’t Aunt Mona—instead it was two kids—fourth or fifth graders by the look of them, holding out pieces of paper to me.
“Hi, we’re collecting spare time for a kid who’s dying or something—would you like to donate?”
“Let me see that!” I snatched one of the papers from them. It was my own blank contract—second- or third-generation Xerox, by the look of it. Someone had taken one of my official contracts and was turning out counterfeits!
“Where’d you get this? Who said you could do this?”
“Our teacher,” said one kid.
“Our whole class is doing it,” said the other.
“So are you going to donate, or what?”
“Get lost.” I slammed the door in their faces.
So now collecting for Gunnar had become a school fund-raiser. I felt violated. Cheated. Betrayed by the educational system.
I didn’t bother my parents with this—they had enough on their minds, and they’d probably just say “So what?” and they’d be right. It was petty and dumb to think that I owned the whole idea . . . but the thing is, I liked being the Master of Time. Now there were people running around, doing it on their own, without official leadership. They call that anarchy, and it always leads to things like peasants with pitchforks and torches burning things down.
“Think of those little kids as disciples,” Howie said, when I mentioned it to him the next day. “Jesus’ disciples did all the work for him after he wasn’t around no more.”
“Yeah, well, I’m still here—and besides, Jesus knew his disciples.”
“That’s only because the lack of technology in those days forced people to have to know each other. Now, because of computers, we really don’t gotta know anybody, really.”
Then he went on about how today the Sermon on the Mount would be a blog, and the ten plagues on Egypt would be reality TV. None of this addressed the issue, so I told Howie I was leaving, but by all means he should continue the conversation without me.
I think this whole prickly, offended feeling was the first warning. I was sensing things getting out of control—not just out of MY control, but out of control in general. My little idea of giving Gunnar a month to make him feel better was now turning into a monster. And everyone knows what they do to monsters. It’s pitchforks and torches again. That happens, see, because people think the monster’s got no soul.
As it turns out, they’d be right this time. My monster didn’t have a soul . . . and I was about to find that out.
11 It’s Amazing What You Can Get for $49.95
There’s this junkyard off of Flatlands Avenue where they salvage anything they can from junked cars and dump the cars into massive piles before crushing them into metal squares about the size of coffee tables. It’s the kind of place you might invent in a dream, although in a dream, the metal squares would talk to you, on account of they’d be haunted by the people who got murdered and thrown into the trunk before the car got crushed.
Gunnar and I went there looking for rusty engine parts to put in a corner of our dust bowl, to add to the atmosphere of despair.
I did most of the looking, because Gunnar was absorbed in the catalog he was reading. “What do you think of this one?” he said to me while I was looking at a pile of bumpers too modern for our purposes. I didn’t look at the catalog because I didn’t want any part of it.
“Tell you what. Why don’t you make it a surprise?”
“Come on, Antsy, I need your opinion. I like this white one, but it’s a little too girlie. And then this one—I don’t know, the wood looks like my kitchen cabinets. That just feels weird.”
“It all feels weird,” I told him.
“It must be done.”
“So let someone else do it. Why should you care? You’re gonna be inside it, you’re not gonna be looking at it.”
Now he was getting all miffed. “It’s about the image I want people to be left with, why can’t you understand that? It needs to express who I was, and how I want to be remembered. It’s about image—like buying your first car.”
I glanced at the catalog and pointed. “Fine—then go with the gunmetal-gray one,” I said, fairly disgusted. “It looks like a Mercedes.”
He looked at it and nodded. “Maybe I could even put a Mercedes emblem on it. That would be cool.”
The fact that Gunnar could discuss coffins like it was nothing didn’t just freak me out, it made me angry. “Can’t you just pretend like everything’s okay and go about your life, like normal dying people?”
He looked at me like there was something wrong with me instead of him. “Why would I want to do that?”
“You’re not supposed to be enjoying it. That’s all I’m trying to say. Enjoy other stuff . . . but don’t enjoy . . . that.”
“Is it wrong to have a healthy attitude about mortality?”
Before I can even deal with the question, I hear from behind me—
“Yo! Dudes!”
I turn to see a familiar face coming out from behind a pile of taillights. It’s Skaterdud. He gives me his official Skaterdud handshake, which I’ve done enough to actually remember this time. He does it with Gunnar, who fakes his way through it convincingly.
“D’ya get my kick-butt donation?” Skaterdud asks.
“Huh?” says Gunnar, “Oh, right—a whole year. That was very cool.”
“Liquid nitrogen, man. We’re talking freeze-your-head-till-they-can-cure-you kind of cool, am I not right?”
“No . . . I mean yes. Thank you.”
“Hey, ever consider that, man—the deep freeze? Cryonics? I hear they got Walt Disney all frozen underneath the Dumbo ride. The chilliest place on earth, right? Gotta love it!”
“Actually,” I said, “that’s made up.”
“Yeah,” admitted Skaterdud, “but don’t you wish it wasn’t?”
It’s then that I realize that I am the gum-band of sanity between these two jaws of death. On the one hand there’s Gunnar, who has made dying the focus of his life, and on the other hand, there’s Skaterdud, who sees his fatal fortune as a ticket to three carefree decades of living dangerously.
Suddenly I wanted to be anywhere else but in the mouth of madness.
“Listen, Skaterdud, I got somewhere I gotta be,” which was true—and for once I was grateful I was needed to pour water at my dad’s restaurant. “Do you know where we could find car parts so old and cruddy nobody actually wants them?”
Turns out Skaterdud knew the salvage yard well—his dad was the guy who crushed cars.
“Go straight, and turn left at the mufflers,” he told us. “Best be careful. Ain’t no rats don’t got steroid issues around here. We’re talking poodle-sized, comprende?”
“Rats don’t bother me,” Gunnar said.
I, on the other hand, have no love of furry things with non-furry tails. As I rummaged through the appropriate junk pile, afraid to put my hand in any dark hole, I began to wonder if I’d be more like Gunnar or Skaterdud if I knew the time of my final dismissal. Would all of life’s dark holes seem insignificant?
“You’re right,” Gunnar said out of nowhere. He put down his catalog and reached deep into the pile of junk to dislodge a truck piston. “I’ll go for the gunmetal-gray coffin. It’s classier.”
Maybe it’s just me, but I’d rather be scared of rat holes than not care.
As Gunnar went off in search of boxes we could carry the stuff in, Skaterdud called me aside and waited until Gunnar was too far away to hear.
“Something ain’t wrong about that friend of yours,” said the Dud.
I was a little too tired to decipher dud-ese right now, so I just shrugged.
“No, you gotta listen to me, because I see things.”
That didn’t surprise me entirely. “What kinds of things?”
“Just things. But it’s more the things I
don’t see that’s got my neck hairs going porcupine on me.” Then he looked off after Gunnar again, shaking his head. “Something ain’t wrong about him at all—and if you ask me, he’s got iceberg written all over him.”
We rode home from the junkyard in a public bus, carrying heavy boxes of car parts that greased up the clothes of anyone who passed. We didn’t say much, mostly because I was thinking about what Skaterdud had said. Talking to the Dud was enough to challenge anyone’s sanity, but if you take the time to decode him, there’s something there. The more I thought about it, the more I got the porcupine feeling he was talking about—because I realized he was right. It had to do with Gunnar’s emotional state. It had to do with grief. All this time I was explaining away Gunnar’s behavior, as if it was all somehow normal under the circumstances, because, face it, I’ve never been around someone who’s got an expiration date before. There was no way for me to really gauge what was standard strangeness, and what was not.
But even I had heard about the five stages of grief.
They’re kind of obvious when you think about them. The first stage is denial. It’s that moment you look into the goldfish bowl that you haven’t cleaned for months and notice that Mr. Moby has officially left the building. You say to yourself, No, it’s not true! Mr. Moby isn’t floating belly-up—he’s just doing a trick.
Denial is kinda stupid, but it’s understandable. The way I see it, human brains are just slow when it comes to digesting really big, really bad hunks of news. Then, once the brain realizes there’s no hurling up this double whopper, it goes to stage two. Anger.
Anger I can understand.
How DARE the universe be so cruel, and take the life of a helpless goldfish!
Then you go kick the wall, or beat up your brother, or do whatever you do when you get mad and you got no one in particular to blame.
Once you calm down, you reach stage three. Bargaining.
Maybe if I act real good, put some ice on my brother’s eye, clean the fishbowl and fill it with Evian water, heaven will smile on me, and Mr. Moby will revive.
Ain’t gonna happen.
When you realize that nothing’s going to bring your goldfish back, you’re in stage four: sadness. You eat some ice cream, put on your comfort movie. Everybody’s got a comfort movie. It’s the one you always play when you feel like the world is about to end. Mine is Buffet of the Living Dead. Not the remake, the original. It reminds me of a kinder, simpler time, when you could tell the humans from the zombies, and only the really stupid teenagers got their brains eaten.
Once the credits roll, and you’ve completed stage four, you’re ready for stage five. Acceptance. It begins with a flush, sending Mr. Moby the way of all goldfish, and ends with you asking your parents for a hamster.
So I’m sitting there on the bus holding car parts while Gunnar’s browsing through his catalog again, and I suddenly realize exactly what Skaterdud meant.
Gunnar never faced stages one through four.
He went straight to acceptance. This crisis, which would have thrown most people’s worlds into a tailspin, instead left Gunnar in a perfect glide. There was something fundamentally wrong about things being so “right” with Gunnar. So maybe, as Skaterdud suggested, Pulmonary Monoxic Systemia was just the tip of this iceberg.
Gunnar and I invited our whole English class to our dust bowl for dinner a few nights later, promising “authentic dust-bowl cuisine.” Since everyone knew my dad had a restaurant, more than a dozen people actually showed—including our teacher, so we were able to present our report right there. We served everyone a single pea on dusty china, to emphasize what it meant to be hungry in 1939. Our classmates thought we were jerks, but Mrs. Casey appreciated the irony. People kept asking what the faint chemical smell was, and I kept looking to the sky, praying for rain, probably looking like one of Steinbeck’s characters—although I wasn’t interested in making the corn grow, I just wanted the herbicide to wash away. Gunnar gave the verbal presentation, and I handed Mrs. Casey the written contrast between the book and the movie. She said we did a credible job, which, I guess is better than incredible, because we got an A. I wonder what she would have said if she saw Gunnar’s unfinished gravestone, which I forced him to cover with a potato sack before anyone showed up. When she gave back the written report, it came with a contract for two months, signed, witnessed, and stapled to the back of the report.
I went to my computer that night to escape thinking too much, or at least to force myself to think about things that didn’t matter. See, when you’re on the computer, you get really good at what they call multitasking, and usually the tasks you have to multi are so pointless you can have endless hours without a single useful thought. It’s great.
So I’m chatting online with half a dozen people, trying to maintain all these conversations while simultaneously trying to read all these e-mails filled with OMGs and LOLs that aren’t even F, while attempting to delete the obvious spam, like all those people in Zimbabwe who have like fourteen million dollars to give me, and the e-mails offering pills “guaranteed” to enlarge your muscles and other things.
Anyway, there I am, sorting online crud, when I notice something I rarely give any attention to: the ad banner at the bottom of the screen. Usually those ad banners are bad animations that say things like SHOOT THE PIG AND QUALIFY FOR OUR MORTGAGE. I’ve never lowered myself to shooting the pig. But right now the only thing on that banner was a single question, in bright red.
WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?
I think I must have seen this one before but it was all subliminal and stuff, because there are many times I’m sitting at this computer asking myself that same question. Meanwhile, all the chats are demanding responses. Ira’s is on top. At first he was trying to convince me about how old movies are better than new ones. He’s gotten snooty all of a sudden that way, and anytime you’re over his house, he forces you to watch classic movies like Casablanca and Alien. After chatting for like half an hour, he’s gotten tired of movie talk, and now he’s just telling dead-puppy jokes. This is where things go with Ira, no matter how snooty he pretends to be. I ignore it, and keep my eyes on the ad. Now the answer dances across the banner to join the question.
WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU? ASK DR. GIGABYTE!
At first I just chuckled. Everything’s a website now. It was the next line that really got me.
WITH DR. G, DIAGNOSIS IS FREE!
I sat there staring and blinking, and shaking my head. Gunnar’s doctor was also a “Dr. G.” I figured it was just a coincidence. It had to be. I mean, one out of every twenty-six doctors would be Dr. G, right? Well, not exactly, but you know what I mean.
A scoop of ice cream, some root beer, and a dead puppy, Ira’s instant message says. He’s waiting for my LOL, but right now I’ve got bigger puppies to fry.
RU still there?
BRB, I type.
I keep wanting to ignore the Dr. G thing, but I can’t. It’s stuck in my head now.
Maybe it’s legitimate, I tried to tell myself. Maybe it’s just a real, live doctor who does online consultations.
What did one dead puppy say to the other dead puppy?
I don’t care, I answered. GTG. TTYL, I told him, and then I added, IGSINTDRN. I closed the IM window, taking a little pleasure in the fact that Ira would spend hours trying to figure out what that meant.
I watched a string of other ad banners. Singing chickens, man-eating french fries, aliens in drag. I have no idea what they were all advertising, and I really don’t want to know. Then the ad for Dr. G came back. WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU? I clicked on the ad.
It took me to a very professional-looking page that asked me to enter my symptoms. Did I have symptoms? Well, I was overdue for new shoes, and the ones I had were too small, so my toes have been hurting. I entered Toes hurt. Then it asked me about twenty other questions, all of which I answered as honestly as I could.
Are your toes discolored?
No.
Do you liv
e in a cold climate?
Yes.
Are your ankles swollen?
No.
Have you been bitten by a rodent?
Not to my knowledge.
When all the questions had been answered, the website made me wait for about a minute, my anticipation building in spite of myself, and then it gave me a bright blinking diagnosis.
You may be suffering from rheumatic gout
complicated by lead poisoning.
To avoid amputation or death, seek a full diagnosis,
available here for $49.95.
All major credit cards accepted.
When I clicked no thanks it took me to a screen that offered pills to relieve my symptoms, which also had the favorable side effect of enlarging muscles and other things.
I tried it three more times. My growling stomach was intestinal gangrene. The crick in my neck was spinal meningitis. The tan line from my watch was acquired melanin deficiency. All could be further diagnosed for $49.95, and all could be treated with the same pills.
I did a lot of pacing that evening. So much that Christina, buried in her homework, actually noticed.
“What’s up with you?” she asked as I paced past her room.
I considered telling her, but instead I just asked, “Have you ever heard of Dr. Gigabyte?”
“Yeah,” she said. “It told me my zit was late-stage leprosy.”
And, grasping at my last straw of reason, I asked, “What if it is?”
“Please, God, let it be true,” Christina said. “Because a leper colony would be better than this.” Then she turned her attention back to her math book.
There are no words to describe the muddy mix of things you feel the moment you realize your friend probably isn’t dying, but instead is conning you. It means that no matter how much you thought you knew him, you don’t know him at all.
I still had no proof, only suspicion—after all, Gunnar really could have a different Dr. G—but I had a gut feeling that was impossible to ignore. The more I thought about it, the more certain I was. If Gunnar wasn’t dying, it would go a long way to explaining his family’s behavior. The way they never talked about it, as if . . . well, as if it wasn’t actually happening. And what about Kjersten? Was Kjersten in on this? Could she be? I suppose I could wrap my mind around Gunnar pretending to be sick—but I couldn’t believe Kjersten would be in on it, too. It made me realize I didn’t know, or understand, her all that well either.