Antsy Does Time (15 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.

At first I just chuckled. Everything's a website now. It was the next line that really got me.

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.

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.

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.

 
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.

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.

I truly hoped his illness was fake. I'd be relieved if it was—and yet at the same time, the thought was already making me mad. See, I had wasted all that time collecting months for him, thinking I was doing something noble—something that might make his limited time a little brighter—and he accepted those months without the slightest hint of the lie. If this was a con, then everyone had been taken in—there was even that stupid time thermometer by the main office. Sure, I'd be thrilled to know he wasn't dying—but I couldn't deny the dark river of anger running beneath it. Just the right conditions for a sinkhole.

12
Repossession Is Nine-tenths of the Law, The Other Tenth Is Not My Problem

Mr. Ümlaut was home that night. I had hoped he wouldn't be, because his presence added an even greater air of tension. His Lexus was in the driveway, but not for much longer, because it was being hooked up to a tow truck.

Good,
I thought.
If his car is in the shop, maybe he won't go running off to that casino as much.

He stood there in an undershirt, in spite of the cold, watching his car as it was raised. His hands were in his pockets, and his shoulders slumped.

“Hi,” I said awkwardly. “I need to talk to Gunnar.”

“Yeah, yeah—he's inside.”

He didn't look at me when he spoke, or take his hands out of his pockets, and I got the feeling that if I had asked to see Attila the Hun, his response would have been, “Yeah, yeah—he's inside.”

The front door was open a crack. I pushed it all the way open and stepped inside. Gunnar and Kjersten were in the living room—Gunnar was listening to an iPod so loudly I could hear the song all the way across the room. Kjersten sat on the sofa—but not in the way you usually sit on a sofa—she was sitting stiff and straight, like it was a hard chair. All at once I recognized this scene. This was the aftermath of a family fight. Mrs. Ümlaut was nowhere to be seen, but I suspected she was either upstairs in a room with the door locked, or in the basement violently doing laundry, or somewhere else where she could be alone with whatever emotions had gotten stirred. I wondered if this had anything to do with the car breaking down.

Kjersten noticed me first, but she didn't smile and say hello. In fact, she didn't seem happy to see me at all. Under the circumstances, I wasn't entirely thrilled to see her either, but I told myself not to judge things until I had all the facts.

“Hi,” I said, trying to sound as casual as humanly possible, “what's up?”

“Antsy, this isn't a good time.”

Well, call me callous, but I had a mission today and would not be put off by a family squabble. “Yeah, but I need to talk to your brother,” I told her.

“Please, Antsy—just come back later, okay?”

“This can't wait.”

Kjersten gave a resigned sigh, then threw a sofa pillow at Gunnar, getting his attention. He saw me and took off his earphones.

“Good, you're just in time to witness this pivotal moment of our family's history,” said Gunnar, seeming resigned, disgusted, amused, and angry all at the same time—a combination of emotions I usually associate with Old Man Crawley. “Have a seat, and enjoy the show,” he said. “You want me to get you some popcorn?”