Нил Шустерман - Antsy Does Time

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.

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.

“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, comprende?”

“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 don’t see that’s got my neck hairs going porcupine on me.” Then he looked off after Gunnar again, shaking his head. “Something ain’t wrong about him at all—and if you ask me, he’s got iceberg written all over him.”

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, No, it’s not true! Mr. Moby isn’t floating belly-up—he’s just doing a trick.

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.

How DARE the universe be so cruel, and take the life of a helpless goldfish!

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.

Maybe if I act real good, put some ice on my brother’s eye, clean the fishbowl and fill it with Evian water, heaven will smile on me, and Mr. Moby will revive.

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 Buffet of the Living Dead. Not the remake, the original. It reminds me of a kinder, simpler time, when you could tell the humans from the zombies, and only the really stupid teenagers got their brains eaten.