Нил Шустерман - Antsy Does Time

“That’s not what I mean.”

He looked at me, read what must have been a pretty unpleasant expression on my face, and said, “You’re just like my parents. You have an unhealthy attitude. Did you know that in ancient Egypt the Pharaohs began planning their own tombs when they were still young?”

“Yeah, but you’re Swedish,” I reminded him. “There aren’t any pyramids in Sweden.”

He finished off the second N. “That’s only because Vikings weren’t good with stone.”

I found myself involuntarily looking around for an escape route, and wondered if maybe I was a “not-in-my-airspace” type after all.

Then Gunnar starts launching into all this talk about death throughout history, and how people in Borneo put their departed loved ones in big ceramic pots and keep them in the living room, which is worse than anything I’ve told my sister about our basement. So I’m getting all nauseous and stuff, and his mother calls out, “Dinner’s ready,” and I pray to God she’s not serving out of a Crock-Pot.

“Borrowed time, Antsy,” he said. “I’m living on borrowed time.”

It annoyed me, because he wasn’t living on borrowed time—he was living on his own time, at least for six months, and I could think of better things to do with that time than carving a tombstone.

“Will you just shut up!” I told him.

He looked at me, hurt. “I thought you of all people would understand.”

“Whaddaya mean ‛me of all people’? Do you know something I don’t?”

We both looked away. He said, “When that guy . . . the other day . . . you know . . . when he fell from Roadkyll Raccoon ... everyone else was staring like it was some show, but you and I... we had respect enough to look away. So I thought you’d have respect for me, too.” He glanced at the unfinished gravestone before him. “And respect for this.”

I hadn’t meant to hurt his feelings, but it was hard to respect a homemade gravestone. “I don’t know, Gunnar,” I said. “It’s like you’re getting all Hamlet on me and stuff. I swear, if you start walking around with a skull, and saying ‛to-be-or-not-to-be,’ I’m outta here.”

He looked at me coldly, and said, insulted, “Hamlet was from Denmark, not Sweden.”

I shrugged. “What’s the difference?”

And to that he said, “Get out of my house.”

But since we were in his backyard, and not in his house, I stayed put. He made no move to physically remove me from his presence, so I figured he was bluffing. I looked at that stupid rock that said GUNN in crooked letters. He had already returned to carving. I could hear that his breathing sounded a little bit strained, and wondered whether that was normal, or if the illness was already making it difficult for him to breathe. I had looked up the disease online—Pulmonary Monoxic Systemia had symptoms that could go mostly unnoticed, until the end, when your lips got cyanotic—which means they turn blue, like they do when you’re swimming in a pool someone’s too stinking cheap to heat. Gunnar’s lips weren’t blue, but he was pale, and he did get dizzy and light-headed from time to time. Those were symptoms, too. The more I thought about it, the worse I felt about being so harsh over the tombstone.

Then, on a whim, I reached into my backpack, pulled out a notebook and pen, and began writing something.

“What are you doing?”

“You’ll see.”

When I was done, I tore the page out of the notebook, held it up, and read it aloud. “‘I hereby give one month of my life to Gunnar Ümlaut. Signed, Anthony Bonano.’” I handed it to him. “There. Now you’ve got borrowed time. Seven months instead of six months—so you don’t gotta start digging your own grave for a while.”

Gunnar took it from me, looked it over, and said, “This doesn’t mean anything.”

I expected him to launch into some Shakespearean speech about the woes of mortality, but instead he showed me the paper, pointing to my signature, and said, “It’s not signed by a witness. A legal document must be signed by a witness.”

I waited for him to start laughing, but he didn’t.

“A witness?”

“Yes. It should also be typed, and then signed in blue ink. My father’s a lawyer, so I know about these things.”

I still couldn’t tell whether or not he was kidding. Usually I can read people—but Gunnar, being Swedish and all, is as hard to figure out as IKEA assembly instructions; even if I think I’m reading him right, it’s guaranteed I’ve done something wrong and I’ll have to start over.

Since his expression stayed serious, I thought of something to say that sounded seriously legal. “I’ll take it under advisement.”

He grinned and slapped me hard on the back. “Excellent. So let’s have dinner and watch The Grapes of Wrath.”

Five places were set for dinner—including one for Mr. Ümlaut, who was presumably working late, but would be home “eventually.” Mrs. Ümlaut made hamburgers, although I was expecting something more Scandinavian. I knew about Scandinavian food on account of this Norwegian smorgasbord place my family once accidentally ate at, because it was called DØNNY’S and my parents thought the 0 was an e. Anyway, there was a lot of food at the buffet, including like fourteen thousand kinds of herring—which I wouldn’t touch, but it was satisfying to know there were so many different things I could refuse to eat. I was oddly disappointed that not a single form of herring was on the Ümlauts’ menu.

Sitting at the Ümlauts’ dinner table that night was not the nerve-racking ordeal I had thought it would be. No one talked about Gunnar’s illness, and I didn’t say anything too terribly stupid. I talked about the proper placing of silverware, and the cultural reasons for it—something my father made sure to teach me, since I had to put out place settings at the restaurant. It made me look sophisticated, and balanced out anything subhuman I might have done at the table. I even demonstrated my water-pouring skill, pouring from high above the table, and not spilling a drop. It made Kjersten laugh—and I was pretty certain she was laughing with me instead of at me—although by the time I got home, I wasn’t so sure.

Mr. Ümlaut didn’t make it in time for dinner. Considering how much my own father worked lately, I didn’t think much of it.

Dad came home early from work that night with a massive headache. Nine-thirty—that’s early by restaurant standards. He sat at the dining table with a laptop, crunching numbers, all of which were coming up red.

“You could change your preferences in the program,” I suggested. “You could make all those negative numbers from the restaurant come up green, or at least blue.”

He chuckled at that. “You think we could program my laptop to charm the bank so we don’t have to pay our mortgage?”

“You’d need a sexier laptop,” I told him.

“Story of my life,” he answered.

I thought about talking to him about Gunnar, but his worries tonight outweighed mine. “Don’t work too hard,” I told him—which is what he always said to me. Of course he usually said it when I was lying on the sofa like a slowly rotting vegetable.

Before I went to bed that night, I took a moment to think about the various weirdnesses that had gone on in Gunnar’s backyard that afternoon—particularly the way he acted when I gave him that silly piece of paper. I had written it just to give him a laugh, and maybe get him to shift gears away from dying and stuff. Had he actually taken me seriously?

I opened a blank document on my computer, and typed out a single sentence. Then I pulled up the thesaurus, changed a few key words, found a really official-looking font, put the whole thing in a hairline box, and printed it out: