We Are the Ants

  “Boyfriend? What are you talking about?”

  “I’ve seen you together at lunch.”

  “Diego?” Marcus flinched when I said the name. “He’s a friend, nothing more.”

  “Was I just someone you banged to get over your dead boyfriend?”

  Marcus had never spoken to me like that before. I honestly didn’t think he cared enough about me to be jealous. “No! Jesus, Marcus.”

  “Then come to my house tonight. My parents are attending a fund raiser and won’t be home until late.” Gone was the swagger he used like a glamour to hide this needy boy who was begging me to come home with him.

  “If I say yes, how long before the next time you humiliate me to amuse your friends?”

  “It won’t be like that.”

  “I want to believe you. . . .”

  “Space Boy, you were my first.” His voice trembled. I hadn’t known, which made it worse.

  I wanted to stay angry, but this Marcus would have invited me to his party. He would have introduced me to his friends. This was the most real he’d ever been, but it wouldn’t last. The moment we walked out of the classroom, his cocksure veneer, the spit and polish, would return. I wasn’t going to spend my last days on Earth as the butt of his jokes. I may not be sure I want to live, but I’m sure I don’t want to live like that.

  “Marcus, I can’t.”

  His armor snapped into place. The vulnerable boy I might have said yes to disappeared, and I’m not sure I’ll ever see him again. “I’m not surprised Jesse hanged himself. I’m just surprised he didn’t do it sooner.” Marcus shoved me against the wall as he stormed out.

  • • •

  I spent my lunch sitting outside the library, trying to comprehend how my life had gotten so fucked up. First my father left, then Jesse. Neither Charlie nor Marcus told me anything I hadn’t already considered.

  It has been 268 days since I got the phone call from Mrs. Franklin telling me Jesse committed suicide. He left no note, gave no explanation, but I still know it was my fault. He killed himself because of me. Because I loved him too much or not enough. I don’t know why; all I know is that it was my fault.

  Charlie’s and Marcus’s words festered in me, and by the time I got to PE, I wanted to hurt someone, anyone. To make them feel how I felt. Narrow rows of lockers separated by benches, fellow students changing into their gym clothes, and the pungent odor of sweat and body spray made my skin itch. I wanted to get dressed for class and get out as quickly as possible.

  I shouldered past a couple of kids, and opened my gym locker. Nickels poured out. There had to be hundreds of dollars worth of them spilling to the floor, and I just stared as they fell.

  Adrian Morse stood a few feet away by the water fountain with Gary Neuman, Chris Weller, and Dean Gold, laughing his ass off. It must have taken them at least an hour to get all those nickels into my locker, all for a moment’s cheap laugh.

  The sound in my ears narrowed until all I could hear was that psychotic cackle. I felt something inside me break in that moment. It wasn’t just what had happened that day; it was as if all the preceding days, all the hate I’d been hoarding and the guilt I’d buried, erupted, breaking my ability to contain them any longer. I ran toward Adrian and launched myself at him, not caring if he beat the crap out of me. I swung wildly, a berserker bloodlust overriding my rational mind. I screamed at him, but can’t remember what I said.

  Adrian tried to protect his face, but my fist connected with something solid, and that only made me fight harder. It seemed like hours but was probably only seconds before he kneed me in the crotch, knocking the breath out of me. I fell to the ground, and he kicked me, but I roared back and tackled him, slamming his back against the lockers, pounding him with my fists. I was beyond pain, beyond all reason. I didn’t care about anything. Not me, not Jesse, not Marcus. The world was ending, and there were no more consequences. I think I was going to kill him.

  Coach Raskin wedged himself between us, yelling at us to break it up, and wrestled me away from Adrian. I struggled to free myself from his powerful grip, but Coach was too strong for me. I shook myself loose and glared at Adrian, sprawled on the locker room floor. Blood ran from his nose, and I smiled. I spit at his feet and left.

  • • •

  Mom didn’t talk to me until we were in the car. She’d come straight from work, still in her uniform, her apron stained with ketchup and potato soup. After I buckled my seat belt, I examined my bloody, bruised knuckles. My hand hurt when I flexed it, but it was a good hurt. An anchor.

  Because Adrian had started it with the nickels, Principal DeShields opted for a month of Saturday detentions rather than suspension. I would have preferred the suspension.

  “Do you want to tell me what’s gotten into you, Henry Jerome Denton?”

  “That asshole had it coming.”

  Mom slapped me across the face. My cheek stung, and I touched my jaw while she glowered at me. “You sound like your father.” She cranked up the radio and peeled out of the parking lot, headed for home. My mom had never hit me before, but I think I deserved it.

  “It’s true, you know.”

  “What is?”

  I turned down the music. “That Adrian deserved it.”

  “That doesn’t excuse fighting.”

  “I know.”

  Mom sighed, shook her head. “It’s been rough for you, Henry, I know, but you can’t do this. You’re flunking three classes, getting into fights. I hardly see you because you’re always locked in your room.”

  I wanted to tell her she’d know what was going on with me if she ever bothered to ask, but she was so concerned with Charlie and Nana, or too tired from working to bother with me. Aliens abduct me, and she pretends I’m sleepwalking. My boyfriend killed himself, and we don’t even talk about it. Like my father, Jesse’s name just disappeared from her vocabulary. I would have told her anything, everything, if she had asked, but I knew she wouldn’t.

  “If the world were going to end, but you could stop it, would you?”

  Mom drove for a while without answering. I thought she hadn’t heard me, and I leaned my head against the window. Finally she said, “Some days I think I would. Other days, probably not.”

  “What about today?”

  Mom’s shoulders bowed downward. “What do you think, Henry?”

  Nanobots

  They’re hailed as a marvelous breakthrough in modern medi­cine. Their inventors, two scientists from South Africa, are awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for their work. The tiny robots are too small to see with the naked eye, but are capable of cooperating to eradicate any disease and to repair any damage done to the human body. The Fixers, as they’re called, usher in what many refer to as the Golden Age of Humanity.

  Despite warnings from paranoid extremist groups, governments around the world approve Fixers for widespread use. Billionaire philanthropists donate their entire fortunes to fund efforts that bring Fixers to impoverished nations, making certain that every human on the planet in need is able to receive treatment.

  Within one year, cancer becomes little more than a ­nuisance—­curable with one treatment and no side effects.

  Within two years, HIV, cerebral palsy, Huntington’s disease, blindness, polio, and male pattern baldness are eradicated. They become footnotes in history.

  Genetic defects are repaired in utero.

  Two years, nine months, seven days, and two hours after Fixers are approved for public use, the world experiences its first full day without a single death. It is the day humanity becomes God.

  It begins on 26 January 2016 at 7:35 a.m. EST at a Starbucks in Augusta, Georgia. Donald Catt, already irritated over having to wait in line, completely loses his cool when the barista doesn’t know how to make his drink the way he likes it. Despite the barista’s attempts to calm him, Donald refuses to leave until he gets what he wants, prepared exactly the way he wants it.

  The store manager eventually calls the police. Donald Ca
tt resists, and the officers have no choice but to Taser him. The electrical shock causes a Fixer, deployed to repair Donald’s erectile dysfunction, to malfunction. It scrambles the Fixer’s software and initiates self-replication.

  Fixers were designed to replicate under strictly regulated conditions, but the damaged Fixer replicates uncontrollably, at an exponential rate, using whatever materials are at hand. That includes still-twitching, undercaffeinated Donald Catt.

  Attempts to quarantine Georgia are unsuccessful, and the new Fixers, whose sole function is to replicate, consume the entire planet in three days, leaving behind nothing but an ocean of gray goo.

  20 October 2015

  My situation at school deteriorated. Marcus and Adrian glued my locker shut and wrote Space Boy gargles alien balls on the door in permanent marker, and I couldn’t walk the halls without being stalked by whispers and cruel laughter. I tried to ignore them, but that only made them meaner. In PE, Adrian’s been keeping his distance, but I’ve noticed the murderous glares he shoots me across the gym. I started something I’m certain he’s determined to finish.

  Diego is still a mystery, but I enjoy spending time with him. He listens when I need to vent, talks when I don’t want to, and knows more about literature than anyone I’ve ever met. The only thing about him that unnerves me is the dark look that falls over him when I tell him about something that Marcus said or that Jay Oh and Adrian have done. It’s like a completely different person replaces the smiling Diego I’ve come to know. And then, quicker than a summer storm, it disappears, leaving me to wonder if I imagined his reaction.

  Nothing will make me change my mind about the button, but I’m trying my best to maintain the status quo for the days that remain. I figure if I keep my head down, maybe I can serve out the balance of my life sentence in relative peace. Wake up, go to school, go home. Repeat until the world ends.

  • • •

  The house was quiet when I got home from school—Mom wasn’t screaming at anyone, and Charlie wasn’t being Charlie. It was nice. Living in a house with my mother, brother, and Nana means that someone is usually shouting or dashing from one room to the next as if everything is of monumental importance. I wish they understood how little their actions matter. With the end of the world looming, I can finally see the pointlessness of everything. How the whole of human civilization is nothing more than a mosquito’s annoying buzz to the universe.

  My stomach rumbled, so I figured I’d make a snack and watch TV while there was no one around to bother me. The fridge was pretty barren, so I settled for peanut butter and jelly. The bread had some mold on it, but I cut it off, too hungry to care.

  A sonogram with HAWTHORNE, ZOOEY printed across the bottom clung to the refrigerator door—held in place by a magnet from our favorite Chinese takeout joint. The picture looked like a miniature monochrome galaxy, teeming with stars and worlds and boundless potential. I took the sonogram to the kitchen table and tried to determine which part of the amorphous blob was my future niece or nephew. It was a game: find the fetus. Was it too early to know the sex? Probably. Not that it mattered. It wasn’t even a baby yet. It was just a little parasite, and it would never be anything else.

  A shadow fell across the table, startling me. Nana hovered to my left, staring at the picture over my shoulder. “Jesus, Nana, you scared the crap out of me.”

  Nana’s flaccid, wrinkled cheeks pulled back into an impish grin. “Mission accomplished.” She eased into the seat next to mine and snatched the sonogram, turning it this way and that, examining it from every angle. “What the devil am I looking at?”

  “Charlie and Zooey’s kid. I think.”

  “Are you certain? It looks like an ink blot test.” Nana covered her right eye. “I see Jonah and the whale.”

  “I won’t tell Zooey you called her a whale.”

  Nana snorted. “I wonder if they’ve thought about names.”

  “Probably not. I call it the little parasite.”

  “I like that,” Nana said. “That little parasite is lucky. Its life is just beginning, while mine is nearly over.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “You’ll understand when you’re my age, Henry. You spend your life hoarding memories against the day when you’ll lack the energy to go out and make new ones, because that’s the comfort of old age. The ability to look back on your life and know that you left your mark on the world. But I’m losing my memories. It’s like someone’s broken into my piggy bank and is robbing me one penny at a time. It’s happening so slowly, I can hardly tell what’s missing.”

  I tried to think of the right thing to say, but sometimes the right thing to say is nothing.

  “I look at people and I don’t know them. Yesterday, I spent twenty minutes trying to figure out who the grumpy woman sitting beside me was before I realized it was your mother.” I laughed, and Nana offered me a feeble smile in return. “I’ve led a rich life, Henry, but I’m terrified of dying a pauper.”

  While there are some memories I wish I could dispose of, sometimes my memories are the only things that keep me sane. There are times when I walk along the beach and smell the hot tar and sand, and I think of all the summer days Jesse and I spent lying in the sun, making our plans to rule the world. Then there are times when I see something funny on TV or hear a great song, and I pick up my phone to text Jesse before I remember he’s dead, and the wound tears open, bloody and raw all over again. A person can become a part of you as real as your arm or leg, and even though Jesse is dead, I still feel the weight of that phantom limb. I have a thousand amazing memories of Jesse, but his suicide is leaking into those recollections, poisoning our past. I can hardly remember him without hating him for taking his life and leaving me alone in mine.

  I honestly don’t know whether it would be better to forget or be able to remember, but it physically hurts being forced to watch Nana diminish. Charlie and Zooey’s baby will never know the terror of creating memories only to lose them, but Nana knows all too well.

  “I love you, Nana.”

  • • •

  I was sitting in the living room, flipping through the channels, unable to find anything worth watching, when Charlie and Zooey came home. I didn’t want to be in the same room with Charlie, but I wasn’t about to leave and let him think he’d beaten me. He mumbled about needing to take a shower before stomping toward the bathroom.

  Zooey looked cute in a pair of little jean shorts and blousy white top. I’ve never been able to figure out what magic my brother cast to make someone like her stay with him. To want to have a kid with him. When they first began dating, I assumed she must have been blind, but she wasn’t. She actually and improbably seemed to like Charlie. Love him, even.

  “Whatcha watching?” Zooey asked. She flopped down onto the couch with a thick book and a legal pad.

  I’d stopped on the Bunker live feeds, but no one was doing anything interesting. You could watch for hours and never see any good action. It was a miracle the producers were able to cobble together enough entertaining footage for three weekly shows. “Nothing.”

  I tossed the remote to Zooey and started to stand, but she said, “Don’t leave on my account. I have so much studying to do.”

  “What class?”

  She rolled her eyes and glanced at her book. “Just a stupid history survey.”

  “Sounds like a blast.”

  “I hate it. Not history—history’s pretty cool—just the way they cram two thousand years of human civilization into a five-month class.” Zooey shook her head. “Seriously, it’s like history for dummies. No, strike that. It’s like white male history for dummies. The professor totally ignores every major contribution by anyone who wasn’t a white dude.”

  She talked about history the way I felt about science. Science is all around us. We are science. It governs our bodies, how we interact with the world and universe. But most people are too stupid to realize it. They think science is optional. Like if they refuse to believe in gra
vity, they can simply ignore it.

  “Is that what you want to do?” I asked. “Be a historian, I mean.”

  “No,” she said. “I think I want to be a psychologist.” Zooey flashed me a wry smile. “To be honest, I’m not even a hundred percent certain about that.”

  “You’ve definitely got the patience for it. You’d have to, dating my brother and all.”

  “Who knows? Maybe I’ll major in history, too, and become a historical psychologist.”

  “Is that even a thing?”

  Zooey shrugged. “Got me.”

  Talking to her was easy. Even when she was watching the TV with one eye, I felt like she was really listening to me. Like she actually cared. “If you knew the world was ending, and you had the chance to stop it, would you?”

  “Of course.” Zooey rubbed her belly. She wasn’t even showing yet, not that I could see. “Why do you ask?”

  “Oh,” I said. “It’s for a school project.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  I shook my head. “Not really. Like I said: it’s just a school thing.”

  Zooey turned toward me, giving me her undivided attention. “Not the question—the fact that you’d even need to ask.”

  “You don’t think there are some pretty compelling ­reasons for wiping the earth clean and starting over?”

  “No,” she said, “but clearly, you do.”

  I didn’t get the opportunity to respond because Charlie returned, his shirt sticking to his still damp body. He flopped down between me and Zooey and grabbed the remote, which was my cue to leave. Though she didn’t say anything, I felt Zooey’s eyes on my back as I left the room.

  • • •

  I was surprised when Diego texted me later that evening to meet him outside in twenty minutes. He refused to tell me where we were going, but Charlie and Zooey had ordered pizza and traded her history homework for baby name books, so I was especially grateful for the opportunity to escape.

  Diego grinned when I hopped into the car, and didn’t even wait for me to buckle my seat belt before throwing Please Start into drive and lurching toward our destination, which didn’t take long to deduce.