Antsy Does Time (5 page)

“Will you just shut up!” I told him.

He looked at me, hurt. “I thought you of all people would understand.”

“Whaddaya mean ‘me of all people'? Do you know something I don't?”

We both looked away. He said, “When that guy . . . the other day . . . you know . . . when he fell from Roadkyll Raccoon . . . everyone else was staring like it was some show, but you and I . . . we had respect enough to look away. So I thought you'd have respect for me, too.” He glanced at the unfinished gravestone before him. “And respect for this.”

I hadn't meant to hurt his feelings, but it was hard to respect a homemade gravestone. “I don't know, Gunnar,” I said. “It's like you're getting all Hamlet on me and stuff. I swear, if you start walking around with a skull, and saying ‘to-be-or-not-to-be, ' I'm outta here.”

He looked at me coldly, and said, insulted, “Hamlet was from Denmark, not Sweden.”

I shrugged. “What's the difference?”

And to that he said, “Get out of my house.”

But since we were in his backyard, and not in his house, I stayed put. He made no move to physically remove me from his presence, so I figured he was bluffing. I looked at that stupid rock that said GUNN in crooked letters. He had already returned to carving. I could hear that his breathing sounded a little bit strained, and wondered whether that was normal, or if the illness was already making it difficult for him to breathe. I had looked up the disease online—Pulmonary Monoxic Systemia had symptoms that could go mostly unnoticed, until the end, when your lips got cyanotic—which means they turn blue, like they do when you're swimming in a pool someone's too stinking cheap to heat. Gunnar's lips weren't blue, but he was pale, and he did get dizzy and light-headed from time to time. Those were symptoms, too. The more I thought I about it, the worse I felt about being so harsh over the tombstone.

Then, on a whim, I reached into my backpack, pulled out a notebook and pen, and began writing something.

“What are you doing?”

“You'll see.”

When I was done, I tore the page out of the notebook, held it up, and read it aloud. “‘I hereby give one month of my life to Gunnar Ümlaut. Signed, Anthony Bonano.'” I handed it to him. “There. Now you've got borrowed time. Seven months instead of six months—so you don't gotta start digging your own grave for a while.”

Gunnar took it from me, looked it over, and said, “This doesn't mean anything.”

I expected him to launch into some Shakespearean speech about the woes of mortality, but instead he showed me the paper, pointing to my signature, and said, “It's not signed by a witness. A legal document must be signed by a witness.”

I waited for him to start laughing, but he didn't.

“A witness?”

“Yes. It should also be typed, and then signed in blue ink. My father's a lawyer, so I know about these things.”

I still couldn't tell whether or not he was kidding. Usually I can read people—but Gunnar, being Swedish and all, is as hard to figure out as IKEA assembly instructions; even if I think I'm reading him right, it's guaranteed I've done something wrong and I'll have to start over.

Since his expression stayed serious, I thought of something to say that sounded seriously legal. “I'll take it under advisement.”

He grinned and slapped me hard on the back. “Excellent. So let's have dinner and watch
The Grapes of Wrath
.”

 
 
Five places were set for dinner—including one for Mr. Ümlaut, who was presumably working late, but would be home “eventually.” Mrs. Ümlaut made hamburgers, although I was expecting something more Scandinavian. I knew about Scandinavian food on account of this Norwegian smorgasbord place my family once accidentally ate at, because it was called DØNNY'S and my parents thought the
ø
was an
e
. Anyway, there was a lot of food at the buffet, including like fourteen thousand kinds of herring—which I wouldn't touch, but it was satisfying to know there were so many different things I could refuse to eat. I was oddly disappointed that not a single form of herring was on the Ümlauts' menu.

Sitting at the Ümlauts' dinner table that night was not the nerve-racking ordeal I had thought it would be. No one talked about Gunnar's illness, and I didn't say anything too terribly stupid. I talked about the proper placing of silverware, and the cultural reasons for it—something my father made sure to teach me, since I had to put out place settings at the restaurant. It made me look sophisticated, and balanced out anything subhuman I might have done at the table. I even demonstrated my water-pouring skill, pouring from high above the table, and not spilling a drop. It made Kjersten laugh—and I was pretty certain she was laughing
with
me instead of
at
me—although by the time I got home, I wasn't so sure.

Mr. Ümlaut didn't make it in time for dinner. Considering how much my own father worked lately, I didn't think much of it.

 
 
Dad came home early from work that night with a massive headache. Nine-thirty—that's early by restaurant standards. He sat at the dining table with a laptop, crunching numbers, all of which were coming up red.

“You could change your preferences in the program,” I suggested. “You could make all those negative numbers from the restaurant come up green, or at least blue.”

He chuckled at that. “You think we could program my laptop to charm the bank so we don't have to pay our mortgage?”

“You'd need a sexier laptop,” I told him.

“Story of my life,” he answered.

I thought about talking to him about Gunnar, but his worries tonight outweighed mine. “Don't work too hard,” I told him—which is what he always said to me. Of course he usually said it when I was lying on the sofa like a slowly rotting vegetable.

Before I went to bed that night, I took a moment to think about the various weirdnesses that had gone on in Gunnar's backyard that afternoon—particularly the way he acted when I gave him that silly piece of paper. I had written it just to give him a laugh, and maybe get him to shift gears away from dying and stuff. Had he actually taken me seriously?

I opened a blank document on my computer, and typed out a single sentence. Then I pulled up the thesaurus, changed a few key words, found a really official-looking font, put the whole thing in a hairline box, and printed it out:

 
 
I have to confess, I almost didn't sign it. I almost crumpled the thing and tossed it into the trash, because it was giving me the creeps. I'm not a particularly superstitious guy . . . but I do have moments. We all do. Like, when you're walking on the street, and you start thinking about that old step-on-a-crack rhyme. Don't you—at least for a few steps—avoid the cracks? It's not like you really think you're gonna break your mother's back, right? But you avoid the cracks anyway. And when somebody sneezes, and you say “God bless you,” you're not saying it to chase away evil spirits—which is why people used to say it in the old days—but you don't feel right if you don't say it.

So here I am, looking at this very legal-looking piece of paper, and wondering what it means to sign away one month of my life. And then I think, if this was an actual contract—if it was true and somewhere in the Great Beyond a tally of days
was
being kept—would I still do it, and give Gunnar an extra month?

Sure I would.

I knew that without even having to think about it.

So I bit back the creepy step-on-a-crack feeling, got a blue pen, and signed my name. Then, during my first class the next morning, I got Ira to sign as witness.

And that's when things began to get weird.

4
Photo Ops, Flulike Symptoms, and Trident Exchange in the Hallway of Life

There are very few things I've done in my life that I would consider truly inspired. Like the time I e-mailed everyone at school to tell Howie his pants were on backward. After dozens of people pulled him aside to tell him, he finally gave in to peer pressure, went into the bathroom, and turned his pants around, so they really
were
on backward.

That was inspired.

Giving Gunnar a month of my life—that was inspired, too. The problem with inspiration, though, is that it's kind of like the flu—once one person gets it, it spreads and spreads until pretty soon everyone's all congested and hawking up big wads of inspiration. It happens whether you want it to or not, and there's no vaccination.

I tracked Gunnar down in the hallway between third and fourth periods that day, and presented him with his extra month, officially signed and witnessed.

He read it over, and looked at me with the kind of gaze you don't want a guy giving you in a public hallway.

“Antsy,” Gunnar said, “there are no words to express how this makes me feel.”

Which was good, because words might have made me awkwardly emotional, and that would attract Dewey Lopez, the school photographer—who was famous for exposing emotions whenever possible. Such as the time he caught star football jock Woody Wilson bawling his eyes out in the locker room after losing the first game that season. In reality, Woody was crying because had just punched his locker and broken three knuckles, but nobody remembers that part—they just remember the picture—so he got stuck with the nickname “Wailing Woody,” which will probably stick to him like a kick-me sign for the rest of his life.

So here we are, Gunnar and me, standing there all ripe for a humiliating Kodak moment, and Gunnar finds the words I had wished he wouldn't: “As Lewis once said to Clark,
‘He who would give his life for a friend is more valuable than the Louisiana Purchase, entire.'
” And now all I can think about is what if he hugs me—and what if Dewey gets a picture, and I'm known as “Embraceable Antsy” for all eternity?

But instead Gunnar looks at the paper again and says, “Of course you didn't specify which month you're giving me.”

“Huh?”

“Well, each month has a different value, doesn't it? September has thirty days, October has thirty-one, and let's not even mention February!”

I have to admit, I was a little stunned by this, but that's okay, since stunned is an emotion I can handle. It is, in fact, an acceptable state for me. I was willing to go with Gunnar's practical approach—after all, he was the one who was dying, and I wasn't going to question how he dealt with it. I did some quick counting on my fingers. “You got six months left, right? A seventh month would put you into May. So I'm giving you May.”

“Excellent!” Gunnar slaps me on the back. “My birthday's in May!”

That's when Mary Ellen McCaw descends out of nowhere, grabs the paper away from Gunnar, and says, “What's this?”

Just so you know, Mary Ellen McCaw is the under-eighteen gossip queen of Brooklyn. She's constantly sniffing out juicy dirt, and since her nose is roughly the size of Rhode Island, she's better than a bloodhound when it comes to sniffing. I'm sure she knew about Gunnar's illness; in fact, she was probably responsible for broadcasting the information across New York, and maybe parts of New Jersey.

“Give it back!” I demanded, but she just holds the thing out of reach, and reads it. Then she looks at me like I've just arrived from a previously unknown planet.

“You're giving him a month of your life?”

“Yeah. So what?”

“Giving Gunnar a new lease on life? Antsy, that's so sweet!”

This leaves me furtherly stunned, because no one has ever called me sweet—especially not Mary Ellen McCaw, who never had a nice word to say about anybody. I figure at first that maybe she means it as an insult, but the look on her face is sincere.

“What a nice thought!” she says.

I shrug. “It's just a piece of paper.”

But who was I kidding? This thing was already much more than a stupid piece of paper. Mary Ellen turns from me to Gunnar, and bats her eyes at him. “Can I donate a month of my life, too?”

I look at her, wondering if she's kidding, but clearly she's not.

Gunnar, all flattered, gives her an aw-shucks look and says, “Sure, if you really want to.”

“Good, then it's settled,” says Mary Ellen. “Antsy, you write up the contract, okay?”

I don't say anything just yet, as I'm still set on stun.

“Remember to specify the month,” says Gunnar.

“And,” adds Mary Ellen, “make sure it says that the month comes from the end of my life, not the middle somewhere.”

“How could it come from the middle?” I dare to ask.

“I don't know—temporary coma, maybe? The point is, even a symbolic gesture should be clear of loopholes, right?”

Who was I to argue with logic like that?

 
 
“So what's it like at the Ümlauts'?”

Howie and Ira were all over me in the lunchroom that day, as if going over to the Ümlauts' was like setting foot in a haunted house.

“Was there medical stuff everywhere?” Howie asked. “My uncle had to build a room addition just for his iron lung—the thing's as big as a car.”

“I didn't see anything like that,” I told them. “It's not that kind of illness.”

“It must have been weird, though,” Ira said. I considered telling them about Gunnar's do-it-yourself tombstone, but decided not to turn something so personal into gossip.