Antsy Does Time

It turns out that Aunt Mona was considering moving her entire company to New York, so she was going to be here for a while. She could, of course, afford one of those fancy New York hotels, where the maids clean between your toes and stuff, but there’s this rule about family. It’s kind of like the Ten Commandments, and the Miranda rights they read you when you get arrested: Thou shalt stay with thy relatives upon every visit, and anything you say can and will be used against you for the rest of your life.

So Mom’s Lemon Pledging all the dining-room furniture until the wood shines like new, and she says to me, “You gotta be on your best behavior when Aunt Mona comes.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I tell her, having heard it all before.

“You gotta treat her with respect, whether you like it or not.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“And you gotta wear that shirt she gave you.”

“In your dreams.”

Mom laughed. “If that shirt’s in my dreams, they’d be nightmares.”

I had to laugh, too. The fact that Mom agreed with me that the pink-and-orange “designer” shirt was the worst piece of clothing yet devised by man somehow made it okay to wear it. Like now it was an inside joke, instead of just an ugly shirt.

I picked up one of her rags and polished the high part of the china cabinet that she had trouble reaching. She smiled at me, kinda glad, I guess, that I did it before she asked.

“So, do I gotta wear the shirt in public?”

“No,” she says. “Maybe,” she adds. “Probably,” she concludes.

I don’t argue, because what’s the use? When it comes to Aunt Mona, the odds of walking away a winner are worse than at the Anawana Tribal Casino. Anyway, I suppose wearing the shirt was better than Mom and Christina’s fate. They’d have to wear one of Aunt Mona’s perfumes.

Right around then the doorbell rang, and Mom looked up at me with wide eyes and froze. I know what she was thinking. Aunt Mona never showed up when scheduled. She would come early, she would come late, she would come on a different day altogether. But a whole week early?

“Naa,” I said to Mom. “It couldn’t be.”

I went to answer it, fully prepared for a blast of flesh-searing fragrance. But it wasn’t Aunt Mona—instead it was two kids—fourth or fifth graders by the look of them, holding out pieces of paper to me.

“Hi, we’re collecting spare time for a kid who’s dying or something—would you like to donate?”

“Let me see that!” I snatched one of the papers from them. It was my own blank contract—second- or third- generation Xerox, by the look of it. Someone had taken one of my official contracts and was turning out counterfeits!

“Where’d you get this? Who said you could do this?”

“Our teacher,” said one kid.

“Our whole class is doing it,” said the other.

“So are you going to donate, or what?”

“Get lost.” I slammed the door in their faces.

So now collecting for Gunnar had become a school fund-raiser. I felt violated. Cheated. Betrayed by the educational system.

I didn’t bother my parents with this—they had enough on their minds, and they’d probably just say “So what?” and they’d be right. It was petty and dumb to think that I owned the whole idea ... but the thing is, I liked being the Master of Time. Now there were people running around, doing it on their own, without official leadership. They call that anarchy, and it always leads to things like peasants with pitchforks and torches burning things down.

“Think of those little kids as disciples,” Howie said, when I mentioned it to him the next day. “Jesus’ disciples did all the work for him after he wasn’t around no more.”

“Yeah, well, I’m still here—and besides, Jesus knew his disciples.”

“That’s only because the lack of technology in those days forced people to have to know each other. Now, because of computers, we really don’t gotta know anybody, really.”

Then he went on about how today the Sermon on the Mount would be a blog, and the ten plagues on Egypt would be reality TV. None of this addressed the issue, so I told Howie I was leaving, but by all means he should continue the conversation without me.

I think this whole prickly, offended feeling was the first warning. I was sensing things getting out of control —not just out of MY control, but out of control in general. My little idea of giving Gunnar a month to make him feel better was now turning into a monster. And everyone knows what they do to monsters. It’s pitchforks and torches again. That happens, see, because people think the monster’s got no soul.

As it turns out, they’d be right this time. My monster didn’t have a soul... and I was about to find that out.

11 It’s Amazing What You Can Get for $49.95

There’s this junkyard off of Flatlands Avenue where they salvage anything they can from junked cars and dump the cars into massive piles before crushing them into metal squares about the size of coffee tables. It’s the kind of place you might invent in a dream, although in a dream, the metal squares would talk to you, on account of they’d be haunted by the people who got murdered and thrown into the trunk before the car got crushed.

Gunnar and I went there looking for rusty engine parts to put in a corner of our dust bowl, to add to the atmosphere of despair.

I did most of the looking, because Gunnar was absorbed in the catalog he was reading. “What do you think of this one?” he said to me while I was looking at a pile of bumpers too modern for our purposes. I didn’t look at the catalog because I didn’t want any part of it.

“Tell you what. Why don’t you make it a surprise?”

“Come on, Antsy, I need your opinion. I like this white one, but it’s a little too girlie. And then this one—I don’t know, the wood looks like my kitchen cabinets. That just feels weird.”

“It all feels weird,” I told him.

“It must be done.”

“So let someone else do it. Why should you care? You’re gonna be inside it, you’re not gonna be looking at it.”

Now he was getting all miffed. “It’s about the image I want people to be left with, why can’t you understand that? It needs to express who I was, and how I want to be remembered. It’s about image—like buying your first car.”

I glanced at the catalog and pointed. “Fine—then go with the gunmetal-gray one,” I said, fairly disgusted. “It looks like a Mercedes.”

He looked at it and nodded. “Maybe I could even put a Mercedes emblem on it. That would be cool.”

The fact that Gunnar could discuss coffins like it was nothing didn’t just freak me out, it made me angry. “Can’t you just pretend like everything’s okay and go about your life, like normal dying people?”

He looked at me like there was something wrong with me instead of him. “Why would I want to do that?”

“You’re not supposed to be enjoying it. That’s all I’m trying to say. Enjoy other stuff... but don’t enjoy... that.”

“Is it wrong to have a healthy attitude about mortality?”

Before I can even deal with the question, I hear from behind me—

“Yo! Dudes!”

I turn to see a familiar face coming out from behind a pile of taillights. It’s Skaterdud. He gives me his official Skaterdud handshake, which I’ve done enough to actually remember this time. He does it with Gunnar, who fakes his way through it convincingly.