“D“Ya get my kick-butt donation?” Skaterdud asks.
“Huh?” says Gunnar, “Oh, right—a whole year. That was very cool.”
“Liquid nitrogen, man. We’re talking freeze-your-head-till-they-can-cure-you kind of cool, am I not right?”
“No ... I mean yes. Thank you.”
“Hey, ever consider that, man—the deep freeze? Cryonics? I hear they got Walt Disney all frozen underneath the Dumbo ride. The chilliest place on earth, right? Gotta love it!”
“Actually,” I said, “that’s made up.”
“Yeah,” admitted Skaterdud, “but don’t you wish it wasn’t?”
It’s then that I realize that I am the gum-band of sanity between these two jaws of death. On the one hand there’s Gunnar, who has made dying the focus of his life, and on the other hand, there’s Skaterdud, who sees his fatal fortune as a ticket to three carefree decades of living dangerously.
Suddenly I wanted to be anywhere else but in the mouth of madness.
“Listen, Skaterdud, I got somewhere I gotta be,” which was true—and for once I was grateful I was needed to pour water at my dad’s restaurant. “Do you know where we could find car parts so old and cruddy nobody actually wants them?”
Turns out Skaterdud knew the salvage yard well—his dad was the guy who crushed cars.
“Go straight, and turn left at the mufflers,” he told us. “Best be careful. Ain’t no rats don’t got steroid issues around here. We’re talking poodle-sized,
“Rats don’t bother me,” Gunnar said.
I, on the other hand, have no love of furry things with non-furry tails. As I rummaged through the appropriate junk pile, afraid to put my hand in any dark hole, I began to wonder if I’d be more like Gunnar or Skaterdud if I knew the time of my final dismissal. Would all of life’s dark holes seem insignificant?
“You’re right,” Gunnar said out of nowhere. He put down his catalog and reached deep into the pile of junk to dislodge a truck piston. “I’ll go for the gunmetal-gray coffin. It’s classier.”
Maybe it’s just me, but I’d rather be scared of rat holes than not care.
As Gunnar went off in search of boxes we could carry the stuff in, Skaterdud called me aside and waited until Gunnar was too far away to hear.
“Something ain’t wrong about that friend of yours,” said the Dud.
I was a little too tired to decipher dud-ese right now, so I just shrugged.
“No, you gotta listen to me, because I see things.”
That didn’t surprise me entirely. “What kinds of things?”
“Just things. But it’s more the things I
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,
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
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.
WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?
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
