Нил Шустерман - Antsy Does Time

I pulled up the rear, shouting and whooping as the landscape of Prospect Park shot beneath me. This kidnapping was a winner! The zip line did exactly what it was supposed to do—it filled our senses and souls with excitement. It reminded us what it meant to be alive. For twenty shining seconds there was nothing but me, the wind, and the fifty feet between me and the ground. The engineering guy was wrong. It felt too short!

By the time I arrived, Crawley had already recovered some of his usual demeanor.

“So, whaddaya think?” I asked.

“I’m only mildly impressed.” From him, this was a five-star review.

“It was . . . exhilarating,” Lexie said. I could tell she hadn’t cared for it. When you’re flying down a zip line, I suppose sight is a sense worth having.

The students lowered us from the platform, working hard on the pulleys like medieval sailors, and as we descended, Crawley said to me, “As usual, you’re missing the obvious.”

“Excuse me?”

“With regard to your not-quite-dying friend—you’re missing the obvious.”

I crossed my arms. “So tell us. We await your brilliance, O Ancient One.”

For once he ignored my sarcasm. “It’s not that he wants to die—it’s that he needs to be sick. The sooner you find out why he needs to be sick, the sooner you can solve this mystery and return to your mediocre existence.”

I didn’t respond, because as much as I hated to admit it, I knew he was right.

“Now,” he said, “take me back to the other tree, so we can do that again.”

Crawley contacted the parks department shortly after the kidnapping and offered to build a zip line tourist attraction in Prospect Park. He got the blessing of the city, and wouldn’t you know it, the zip line was already in place. Any minute he’ll be making a hefty profit from it.

“The difference between you and me,” he once told me, “is that when I look at the world, I see opportunity. When you look at the world, you’re just trying to find a place to urinate.”

***

When I got home that afternoon, I decided to play Sherlock Holmes and figure out why Gunnar needed to be sick. I did some in-depth research on Pulmonary Monoxic Systemia.

Although the disease is almost always fatal within a year of diagnosis, huge strides were being made in research recently, and there were early reports that test patients were living longer, healthier lives. The leading research and all the hopeful results were coming from Columbia University Medical Center, right in Manhattan.

I thought about Dr. G. The thing with the Dr. G website is that you can throw out the same basic symptoms, and each time it would diagnose you with something else. I wonder how many diagnoses Gunnar had gotten before he convinced himself that this is what he had.

And wasn’t it convenient that all the hope for Gunnar’s illness lay right here in New York?

Before I could think about it much further, I got a call from my father. He needed me to work at the restaurant. The Crawley kidnapping had exhausted me, and it was the last thing I wanted to do today.

“There are laws against child labor,” I told him.

“Aren’t you always telling us you’re not a child?”

“What about my homework? Is your restaurant more important than my education?”

“It’s our restaurant, not just mine—and didn’t Christmas vacation start today?”

I knew he had me.

I showed up at seven and did my job, but the whole situation with Gunnar never left my mind entirely. Sure, it was vacation, but there was a big fat Gunnar-themed rally waiting for me when vacation was over. I was irritable, but maintained an air of professionalism for most of the evening. Things would have been fine if it hadn’t been for the single certified idiot at table number nine.

He arrived at around seven-thirty with a scowling wife, and two kids who wouldn’t stop fighting. From the moment he sits down, this guy starts complaining. His fork has spots on it; the wine isn’t cold enough. The appetizer came out too late and the main course came out too early. He demands to see the manager, and my father comes over. I’m standing there, refilling water glasses, after having been chewed out by the guy for not having refilled them the instant he took a sip. For him I don’t bother with skillful pouring.

“How can you call this a restaurant?” the guy complains while his kids kick each other under the table. “The service is lousy, the food came out cold, and there’s a horrible stench in the air.”

Well, first of all, the service was perfect, because my mother was his waitress, and she is the queen of quality control. Secondly, I know the food was hot, because I served it myself, and nearly burned my hands on the plate. And third, the horrible stench was coming from his son.

But my dad—he gets all apologetic, offering free dessert, and discounts off the guy’s next visit, and such. That just makes me angry. See, my dad used to work in a big corporation, full of guys like this, so he had developed an idiot-resistant personality. I, on the other hand, had not. All I had going for me at the moment was a big pitcher of ice water.

This is why I could never get a job as a busboy in a restaurant my family didn’t own ... because, for the first time in my water-pouring history, I missed the glass. In fact, all the water in the pitcher missed the glass, and found the top of the guy’s head instead.

After I was done pouring the pitcher of ice water on him, he finally fell silent, and stared at me in total shock. And I said, “I’m sorry—did you want bottled water instead?”

To my amazement, the rest of the restaurant started applauding. Someone even snapped a picture. I was ready to take a bow, but my father grabbed my arm. He grabbed it hard, and when I looked at him, the expression in his eyes was not one of gratitude. “Wait for me in the kitchen,” he growled. Very rarely did my father speak in growls. When he was mad he usually yelled, and that was okay. Speaking in growls was not. I hurried off to the kitchen, sat on a stool, and waited, feeling more like a little kid than I had in years.

Christina came up to me. I don’t know if she saw what happened, but I’m sure she guessed the gist. “I made a swan for you,” she said, and handed me a folded napkin.

“Thanks,” I said. “Got any Himalayan mantras I can recite for the occasion?”

“I’m beyond that now,” she told me. “I’m into chakra points.” She massaged some spots on my back that failed to relax me, then went to fold more napkins.

Dad did not come back to talk to me at all that night. He just let me stew on the stool. Mom would occasionally pass by to pick up orders and would scowl, shake her head, or wag her finger. Then eventually she gave me a plate of food. That’s how I knew Dad was truly, truly angry. If Mom felt sorry enough for me to feed me, it meant I was in a world of trouble.

Eventually Mom just sent me home, because she couldn’t stand to see me sitting there so miserably on that stool.

Before my parents got home that night, I got a call from Old Man Crawley, who must have had spies in the restaurant again.

“Did you actually pour a pitcher of water over a man’s head?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” I replied. I was too exhausted to make excuses.

“And did it feel good to do so?”

“Yes, sir, it did. He was an idiot.”

“Was this a premeditated attack on your part?”

“Uh ... no, sir. It was kind of... spontaneous.”

He paused for a long time. “I see,” he finally said. “You’ll be hearing from me.” And he hung up. He didn’t even bother to torment me with how much I had disappointed him—that’s how bad this was. I couldn’t help but feel that “you’ll be hearing from me” were among the worst possible words to hear at the end of a conversation with Crawley. It was even worse than “you’ll be hearing from my attorney.”