The End of FUN (40 page)

The next day another wave of the Avis Mortem hit: I stepped outside to find a dozen little birds flopping around in the gravel. They were having some kind of seizure. I tried to grab one, but it flopped out of my hands.

“Homie
™
!”

“I need help. Directions. Like how to save a dying bird.”

A couple of the birds had stopped flopping around. They were just lying there in the drive. I touched one with the toe of my shoe. It didn't move.

“Hurry up!”

“But how do I save them?”

“Yes! Can't you see? I need, like, instructions or something!”

“Yes!”

“No! That's not what I need. They're all
dying
!”

Homie
™
hung in the air.

“A
patch
?”

It was too late. They were done flopping around now—all but one. And then it, too, died. I went inside the house. What was the point? The birds were dying, Shiloh was pissed, Katie was gone, there wasn't any treasure, and I was so deep into
FAIL
it'd be like a million years before I was able earn my way out, let alone pay back my dad or Evie. Let alone give Oso the money to get Los Ojos de Dios off his back.

The world is just full of so much suck and so much fail. It's everywhere. We're just
swimming
in it. The biggest suck that ever sucked. So what's it all about? Why are we here? Just to screw up, suck on some fail, grow old, and die? Some people, their whole
life
is just one big fail, so sucky it's disturbing to your very soul—I've seen the video to prove it—and then it's over. How can life be worth anything, how can there be any God or any good, if there's so much suck?

What's the point? You live, you screw up, you fail, the suck comes rolling in. You YAY! some stupid shit, you have some fun, you feel better. For a second. Something happens. You fail. The suck comes back. You YAY! some stupid shit. And the whole stupid, boring suckcycle repeats itself again, a wheel rolling down the most sucky road. And then you die. And is that all there is?

When I went back outside, the flies had gathered in buzzing swarms over the dead birds. Flies are smart like that. They figure it out pretty quick. I looked at the little yellow corpses. I looked at the flies. I looked at the land spreading out to the horizon. One by one I picked up the birds, grabbing them by their tiny claws, and tossed them into the brush.

The part that sucked continued to suck, which is part of what made it suck so much. (YAY! again for Dyson.) Days went by—weeks, even—and I sat on my butt, playing stupid games, watching stupid videos, eating my way through all the food in the house until there was nothing left but the cans I'd dug up. The first one I opened was vegetable soup. It smelled OK. I ate it cold. For dinner I had three-bean salad. For breakfast the next morning I opened a third, unidentified can with just a scrap of label clinging to it. It was some kind of strange beef stew—or so I thought. A couple bites into it, though, I read the warning printed on the remainder of the label:
DO NOT FEED FROM CAN. DOG MAY CUT OR INJURE ITSELF.

Thpth
.
Thpppt
.
Thpppppppt
. (The sound of me spitting it out.)

I continued to neglect to feed the Animals of Wonder & Light
®
, and they began to bray and falter, and then over the course of a morning I got to watch almost the entire menagerie die off, one by one, in alphabetical order: the Armadillodile
™
, Bearboon
™
, Buffaloon
™
, Camelroo
™
, Hawkalope
™
, Owligator
™
, Rhinostrich
™
—all of them looking at me one last time with those big anime eyes. The last to go was the Mighty Amphibious Shaarkvark
™
. It struggled mightily for an hour, living off the fly-ridden corpses of its fellows, but then it, too, succumbed.

I didn't feel anything. Nothing.

If anything, the feeling of nothing was even worse than feeling the suck—just this empty hole inside of me.

“Yeah, I don't really feel so—I don't feel so
anything
.”

“Yay.”

Homie
™
showed me a video of skateboarders jumping off a high ramp into a lake. I didn't feel anything.

“Yay.”

Homie
™
showed me a picture of a ghost in a creepy old house in New England. I didn't feel anything.

“Yay.”

Whatever Homie
™
offered, I didn't feel anything—and then it asked me if I wanted to feel disturbed. And I said, “Yay.” I wish I wouldn't have. I wish I would've had the self-control to say no to that one. I won't say what it was, I'll just say I wish I could unsee it. I wish I could
unfeel
it.

I found myself later sitting at the kitchen table with my grandfather's .410. The final shell was loaded, the last of his ashes, and a little sucky voice was speaking to me from inside my head.
What would happen if you pointed it at your face and just pulled the trigger?

I told the voice to shut up, but it wouldn't.

What would happen?

Nothing would happen. I'd just burn my face with ashes or whatever.

You never know for sure until you try….

Shut up.

A horn sounded. Like, an actual horn.

I went out to find a big white truck idling in the drive. The window slid down and a flappy old arm waved me over. Anne Chicarelli. She had on those giant sunglasses that old people wear and was smoking a cigarette.

“Tell me, Adam. Have you seen it yet?”

“
Aaron
. Seen what?”

“
It
. The holy light all around. It's everywhere, you know.”

And I almost laughed at her. It just seemed so ridiculous for people to go around talking about holy light when there was so much suckitude everywhere. I almost laughed, but instead I said, “Not really, no.”

Anne took a drag of her cigarette and looked at me. “The time has come. We knew it would be soon. They say Georgia is on her last breaths now, plucking at her bedsheets and babbling on about her grade school days.”

And it took me a moment to figure out what the hell she was talking about. At first I thought it was like,
The time has come for you to see the holy light
, and then I thought she was talking about the state of Georgia—but then I realized no, she was talking about her
sister
, Georgia. The one in Arizona who had cancer, now floccillating around on her deathbed. More evidence of suck.

“If I leave now, I can be there by tomorrow morning. Can you still watch my horses for me, Adam?”

Right, the horses.

She gave me instructions for feeding them and filling their water trough, and then she said, “Remember, it's OK to ride Abel. But Cain's a little jumpy. I shouldn't be gone more than a week, and I'll tell you the same thing I told your grandpa: help yourself to anything in the house. There are Pecan Sandies in the cupboard, and I've got satellite. Water the houseplants if they look like they need it.”

In the end, I guess that's what saved me from my suck of fail. If nothing else, I had to take care of the horses, and I couldn't take care of the horses with a burned-off face. So that evening I went over to Anne's place, fed the horses, and topped off their water. When I returned to the house, the gun was still there on the porch. The stupid gun. My grandfather's ashes.
Never point it at a human being
, he'd said. I thought about what Anne had said. The holy light. I thought about the holes I'd been digging—they were pretty holey, weren't they? And that made me laugh—just a little—
nothing's holy but this hole I got here
.

I took the .410 and aimed it at the sky.

Squeezed the trigger. Fired off that last round.

BLAM!

A cloud of ashes floated in the darkness.

Then nothing.

I dreamed that night of horses and an endless field of waving grass, and woke the next morning with a splitting headache. I didn't know what to do about the headache, but as for the horses I thought maybe I'd let them out of their corral to graze a little bit—just, you know, to give them a treat. Or better yet, why not bring the grass to them?

In my grandpa's basement I found an old gas weedwacker. It was old and hard to start—and probably nothing like holding a brand-new Craftsman
®
30cc 4-Cylinder Straight Shaft WeedWacker
™
with comfort strap (YAY!)—but at least it worked. For a while, at least.

Starting from the porch, I worked my way out in an ever-widening radius, sweeping the spinning line over cheatgrass and rabbit brush, watching the brittle stalks disintegrate into dust—pebbles and seeds zinging up at my arms and face. It was actually almost kind of fun. I ran that wacker until it was
smoking
. Just before it died on me, an object whipped up out of the brush and thumped me on the shin. I retrieved it from the lower branches of a sagebrush, where it had been snagged. A ring. Katie's birthday present. I put it in my pocket.