Slob (6 page)

The walls had been repainted. Of course.

The store was empty except for a balding blond man, very spiffily dressed in a gray suit. He looked a little bored. His hands were in his pockets, and he was staring at a row of shoes with strange, squared-off toes, as though he was trying to decide if he liked them or not, without really seeming to care much either way. He turned away from the square-toed shoes and scratched the back of his neck. The scratching turned into picking at something, maybe a pimple or a scab.

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of someone staring at me through the window of the magazine and smoke shop next door. The graying hair was slicked back and oiled with pomade, and I could see the flash of gold around his neck. Mr. Boscana. I shouldn’t have been surprised to see him. He’d been sitting at that same stool behind the counter for as long as I could remember. Still, the sight of that familiar face jolted me. I could read a quick series of emotions playing with his features—shock, pity. He collected himself and rearranged his mouth into a wide, warm smile, his white teeth flashing even behind the smudged window. He rose from his stool by the cash register.

In a minute he was standing outside his store, his necklace and teeth flashing in the sun. “Owen! Owen,
mi hombrecito
!”

I’m a coward. You know that about me already. For the second time in a single day, I chickened out. This time was worse than the time with Mason. This time I heard the hurt in Mr. Boscana’s voice, calling after me as I rushed away down the street: “Owen!! Hang on a minute!”

The liveliness of Broadway now felt like some menacing barricade. I couldn’t maneuver through the crowds. People seemed to be deliberately squeezing together too tightly, just to keep a fat kid from passing them. Finally I shoved my way between a couple. My body touched theirs. People don’t often make physical contact in New York City, even though we are all pressed together so tightly. It almost always produces a strong reaction.

“Watch where you’re going!” the man said.

“Big oaf!” the woman muttered.

Big oaf. Big oaf.
The sound of that played back in my head as I ran across the wide street and east, away from Broadway and the crowds. Big oafs were frightening. Big oafs were the mean, sweating guys dressed in Speedos tossing other big oafs into the air inside pro-wrestling cages. Why wasn’t I that sort of oaf? Why wasn’t I that sort of fat?

All of a sudden I didn’t care about the demolition site anymore. I didn’t care about the forty-decibel amplifier.

I didn’t even care about Nemesis anymore.

The only thing I cared about at that moment was that I was starving. It was a sudden burning, aching hunger that left me dizzy. The empty space in my gut where the three Oreo cookies should have been had doubled, tripled, despite everything that I had eaten back home. I dug through my pockets, but all I found were two dimes. Not enough for anything. I counted the blocks that I’d have to walk to get back home: eleven. Too far.

But Nima’s momo cart was only three and a half blocks away.

I crossed over to Columbus Avenue and then walked a few blocks downtown to the Museum of Natural History. There were three or four people in line at Nima’s cart, which stood to the left of the wide steps that led up to the museum entrance. Hanging by a cord around the front of the cart were brightly colored flags, and printed on the red awning were the words NIMA’S AUTHENTIC HANDMADE MOMOS. Nima was behind his cart, as small as a kid and so skinny. I could see his hands furiously working away at forming his dumplings and dropping them in the huge steamer pot. My stomach responded to the sight by cramping with hunger. I walked faster.

“Owen!” Nima spotted me even as he toiled away. He smiled, then looked confused, although his hands never stopped working. “Why you not in school?”

The other people in line looked at me too.

“I got out early,” I told him. Not a lie really. My eyes anxiously flitted to the dumplings that he had just pulled out of the steamer with a spider spatula. Nima noticed—he noticed everything—and he plunked a half dozen of the dumplings on a paper plate, squeezed out some dipping sauce from a squeeze bottle into a little paper cup and handed them to me. This produced some grumbling from the line of people, and one of them actually walked away.

“No worry, no worry,” Nima assured the rest of the people in line, smiling in his good-natured way. “I work fast. Not wait long time.” His small hands worked even faster. At any other time I would have felt very guilty. But today I didn’t care. I sat on the steps of the museum and devoured the dumplings in minutes. I was still hungry afterward, but I felt better.

Gradually, the lunch rush dwindled and then stopped altogether. Nima came over and sat beside me on the steps. He pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, shook one out, and lit it. I probably shouldn’t mention that he smokes because it gives a bad impression of him, but he’s trying to quit and anyway, it’s his business.

“So crazy at lunchtime!” he said after blowing out some smoke and glancing at me with his bright, dark eyes. “I need two more hands, I’m thinking. But I can’t afford to pay two more hands. So here’s my plan: I make momos with my feet. I have nice, long toes. Wiggly nice. I keep them clean. Not even hairy. Smooth as Pema’s cheek. The cheek up top, I mean. What do you think?” He kept a perfectly serious face. It took me months before I could tell when he was joking. When I first met him, I just thought he was a little insane.

“I think the Board of Health would take away your cart,” I said dryly.

I was in no mood for jokes.

Nima took another drag from his cigarette and shook his head solemnly.

“Probably right, probably right.”

We were quiet for a while, but he kept stealing glances over at me. It made me feel a little squirmy. There’s a lot Nima doesn’t know about me, and in quiet moments I feel like he’s trying to figure me out.

“I was heading down to a demolition site,” I told him, just to end the quiet moment. “A big one. Lots of great junk there. I’m looking for one more thing in order to get Nemesis working the way I need her to.”

“Jeremy is going to help you?” he asked.

“She’s in school,” I said, then remembered I had said that school got out early, sort of. He didn’t let on that he’d caught me at my lie. He just nodded thoughtfully and took another drag from his cigarette. By the way, I have never seen Nima eat. I know he must, but I’ve never seen it. The only thing I know for sure about his eating habits is that he doesn’t eat shrimp. He told me that once. “Too many shrimp have to die in order to fill just one belly.” That’s true, of course. But he doesn’t know what he’s missing.

A customer came up to his cart, so he darted away for a few moments. While he was gone, I watched a woman place a rubber mat down on the sidewalk in front of the museum. On the mat she placed a portable CD player. She was wearing a long dress with every conceivable color swirling though it. Looped around her neck was a long yellow scarf. She pressed a button on the CD player and some fast, whiny music started to blare. Spreading her arms wide, she began to spin in a circle, the way little kids do sometimes. It looked totally ridiculous. She was clearly a nut job. Still, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. The colors on her dress melted together as she spun, faster and faster. The air around her seemed to change, as though her edges were bleeding into their molecules. If she spins much faster, I thought, she’ll break apart and disappear.

“She come here every day and dance like that,” Nima said as he sat back down beside me.

“I thought she was just a crazy person,” I said.

“Oh, yes, she very crazy person.” He smiled as though he approved. “But she always look happy. So . . . what more she need?”

I shrugged. “I guess nothing, if she’s happy.”

“Oh no, no.” Nima laughed. “Not
she.
” He nodded toward the woman, who was now beginning to slow down. “I mean Nemesis. What more she need in order to work better?”

“A certain kind of amplifier. I have a receiver, but I have to boost the signal to make sure it comes in strong enough. What I’m trying to do is very complicated. No one has ever done it before. At least, they didn’t
know
they were doing it, so it amounts to the same thing.” I felt a rush of excitement as I spoke about Nemesis. I had only ever spoken about her like this to Jeremy.

“I don’t understand,” Nima said, tapping out another cigarette from his pack. “How the other people not know what they do when they build something like a Nemesis?”

“Because they
didn’t
build it. It was something that happened accidentally.”

Nima took a drag on his cigarette and nodded. Most people would have pried at that point, but not Nima. He understood about people’s secrets.

But today, for some reason, I wanted to tell him. Not everything. Not yet. Just a little bit.

“That’s how I first got the idea for Nemesis, actually. There’s this show on TV called
Skeptical Minds,
where scientists investigate supernatural stuff, like ghost sightings and UFOs. Nine times out of ten they prove that the story was all nonsense. Well, I had the show on, but I wasn’t paying that much attention when all of a sudden something caught my eye. One of the places where ghosts had been spotted was The Black Baron Pub.”

“This the same pub right next to our apartment building?”

“The very same. It turns out the guy who owns the pub had a wireless surveillance camera in there that kept capturing these weird, fuzzy images of people milling around while the place was closed on Sunday. But there was no sign of break-ins, and nothing was ever missing. He said that when he bought the place three years ago, he had heard some stories about the building being haunted, but he thought it was a lot of nonsense. Now he was beginning to think it was true. So these scientists tested his story right on TV. They checked his surveillance camera and receiver to make sure it wasn’t rigged, and they hid in a backroom on a Sunday night, watching. They didn’t see a thing. But when they checked the surveillance camera recording in the morning, there were those fuzzy-looking people, milling around. You couldn’t make out faces or clothes or anything, but they were definitely people. You could only see them for a few minutes, and when they were gone, the place looked completely empty again. It totally stumped the scientists. It almost stumped me too. I mean, it really seemed like this guy had ghosts in his pub.”

“Ah.” Nima nodded. I waited for him to scoff at the notion. Or at least make a joke. He didn’t. He just listened, looking down at the spot between his black sneakers, frowning in concentration.

“You don’t really believe in ghosts, do you?” I asked him.

“Oh, sure, sure. Unhappy spirit. Tibetans call such kind of thing Hungry Ghost. It is very unfortunate to be a Hungry Ghost.”

Once in a while it was disappointing to hear Nima’s beliefs.

“Of course the guy didn’t
actually
have ghosts in his pub,” I said. “There are no such things as ghosts. When people die, they are just gone.”

Nima looked at me but said nothing. No, not looked at me. He watched me. His cigarette drooped between his narrow, brown fingers, forgotten for a few moments. He was thinking, not about the TV show, I was pretty sure, but about me. It made me uncomfortable, and he seemed to realize it suddenly. He took a puff on his cigarette and nodded, his eyes averted. I went on.

“Like I said, I was stumped at first. But they replayed those surveillance recordings several times as they were interviewing the pub owner, and that was when I noticed something strange. In the recordings, you could see out one of the windows to the opposite side of the street, where Fuji Towers is. You know how there is that twenty-four-hour supermarket on the ground floor of Fuji Towers? The one with the giant tomato sign?”

“Sure, sure.”

“Well, when you saw the ghost figures in the surveillance recording, the supermarket wasn’t there. All you could see was scaffolding and the outline of the giant tomato-shaped sign. The supermarket was being built. But when the ghost figures went away and it was just a dark, empty pub again, you could see the supermarket in the background, totally built and lit up, with people coming in and out.”

Nima shook his head. “Something wrong with the videotapes?”

“There were no tapes. They were digital recordings. The scientists checked out all the equipment, and there were no problems.”

“So, how can be?” Nima asked.

“That’s what I wondered. I asked Mom about when the supermarket was built, and she said it had been built two years ago. So, here’s where things get real interesting. Have you ever taken a really good look at Fuji Towers? Have you ever looked at its roof?”

“It a funny shape,” Nima said, making a scooping motion with his hand.

“Exactly. It’s shaped like a giant parabolic dish, like a satellite dish. And it’s steel, which makes it a perfect reflector of radio waves. It’s like an accidental radio telescope. And it’s facing The Black Baron Pub. What if, I wondered, the radio waves from The Black Baron Pub’s surveillance camera hit the Fuji Tower’s roof, were reflected off into space, where a star reflected them right back, and the camera’s receiver captured them again? Since those images might have originally been caught on the surveillance camera when the pub was open, you
would
see people walking around. That made perfect sense. And because the reflected signal is weak, the people would look all fuzzy and you’d only be able to see them for a few minutes at a time. That also made perfect sense. What didn’t make perfect sense was this: in order for a radio wave to come back to earth two years after it’s been sent off into space, it has to bounce off a star that’s only one light-year away. But the closest known star system, Alpha Centauri, is about four light years away. So I started doing research, and I found something interesting. Some astronomers believe that there is this red dwarf star which rotates around our sun. They call it Nemesis, and they believe it’s only about one light-year away from earth. That’s incredibly close. No one knows where this star is located exactly, but I have a hunch that the roof of Fuji Towers is pointed directly at it, and The Black Baron Pub directly faces the roof of Fuji Towers. That’s why those images from the past came through on the surveillance camera.” I paused. Here was the beauty part.