Everything Matters!

by Ron Currie Jr.

  No? Last chance?

  Okay. Quickly, then, before it’s too late:

  Here you are, sixteen again, in Amy’s brother’s bedroom, lying together with her and watching a movie on VHS. It’ll take a moment’s getting used to. Your vision is suddenly undamaged by years of reading in bad light, and your knees and lower back don’t hurt at all. Take a look in the mirror behind the television and see your hair is all there again, every follicle precisely the same, cut in a jet-black flattop that you rarely bother to put up. You may notice, too, that you have no craving whatsoever for a drink. You are relaxed and calm and free suddenly of the frayed, raw sensation that always accompanied your sober hours as an adult, the feeling of having been rubbed all over with fine-grit sandpaper.

  Most important, of course, you are with Amy again, delighted by the warmth of her, by the nearly forgotten scent of the sandalwood oil she favored in high school, by the soft weight of her ass pressed against your thigh.

  You’ll notice too that, as promised, everything is in its right place. Amy’s hair, curly and full of flyaway static, tickling your face and nose. To the left of the TV an embarrassing family heirloom: a blackface bell-hop in red suit and hat, offering up an ashtray with outstretched hands. The ashtray itself crammed with Amy’s Camel Lights and her mother’s lipstick-stained Virginia Slims. A Red Sox calendar, two months behind, hanging on the wall opposite the bed.

  Pay attention, because now is when things could become different. This was the precise moment, the first time around, when you finally screwed up the courage to tell Amy about the Destroyer of Worlds, and as you know things went more or less completely to hell after that. In fact, a direct line could be drawn between this moment and you sitting alone on the summit of Mount Katahdin, waiting to be broiled alive, convinced that even your best, most loving and generous and big-hearted choices had been wrong, wrong, wrong.

  Now all that never was. You are a boy of sixteen again, still too young to have done anything irreparable, anything beyond forgiveness, and Amy’s love for you is intact. It is also delicate and immature, and requires nurturing in order to grow into the sort of love with the strength to endure a lifetime. The first step in that nurturing process is as simple as it is obvious: keep your mouth shut.

  You find this easy enough. Instead of talking, you use your mouth to kiss the back of Amy’s neck. At first she barely responds, absorbed as she is in the movie. You pop the two top buttons of her Levis, tickling the fine blond hairs below her belly button, then heading south, grasping, seeking, and realizing now that you mean business she rolls to face you. You kiss her desperately, and she pulls back and puts a hand to her mouth and gazes at you, questioning. But what she sees in your face must provide a satisfactory answer, because after a moment she folds herself into you again, meets your desperation with her own, and as good as it always was this is somehow better, fuller, so good that for the first time since infancy you are separated, however temporarily, from your awareness of the end of all things. Afterward you lie naked on the carpet, limbs entangled, rug burns stinging with sweat. You light a cigarette from her pack and pass it back and forth. The smoke rises and billows lazily, forming endless fractals in the slanting sunlight.

  When that sunlight is gone completely you kiss Amy goodbye and walk the mile or so to your parents’ home. You let yourself in and find your mother sitting in the dark with her Turbo Chug! cup boring a hole in the dining room table with the implacable slowness of erosion. You turn on every light in the house. You kiss your mother on the cheek and she continues to stare straight ahead. You ask if she would like to play a game of cribbage and she continues to stare straight ahead. You cook a small simple meal of pork chops and baked potatoes and canned green beans, and you fix a plate for yourself and set another in front of her and she continues to stare straight ahead. She takes a drink from the Turbo Chug! cup and sets it down squarely on her pork chop, at which point you suggest to her that maybe she should go to bed, and she lets you lead her to the bathroom, where you make her brush her teeth, and then to the bedroom, where you watch as she turns back the covers and gets in all by herself.

  You cover the plates of food with plastic wrap and stack them in the microwave and wait somewhat anxiously for your father to get home from the warehouse. You’ll be waiting awhile, as his shift doesn’t end until after midnight. When he finally comes in, hair and mustache coated with dust, boots clunking on the kitchen floor, not just alive again but young, so young, you greet him with a hug from which he noticeably recoils. You heat the plates of food and set them back on the dining room table. The two of you sit opposite one another and eat in silence. He keeps a cigarette going in the ashtray and takes a drag after every third or fourth bite. When he’s done eating you wash the plates and forks while he makes himself a cup of instant coffee. The two of you go into the living room and watch the late news without speaking. Once or twice during commercials you catch him looking in your direction, and you don’t need us to explain why: he’s wondering what on earth has gotten into you.

  Two years later, when because of the way that you have altered her timeline Amy leaves for Harvard instead of Stanford, you go with her. You move into a beautiful but outrageously overpriced loft in Union Square, and while Amy starts her freshman year you take an internship at Oxfam’s headquarters across the Charles River in Boston. You’ve been at the job only two weeks when you formulate a framework for solving problems with aid distribution in China, where a flood has devastated the Jiangsu province. You offer this framework unsolicited to your immediate boss, Helen, who is special adviser to Oxfam’s vice president. Two days later you find yourself at Clio, trying to figure out which utensils go with which course while the vice president grills you about your background. The vice president does not have much of a poker face, and his bewilderment grows visibly with each answer you give. Over a dessert of chicory crème caramel he tells you that if Oxfam is successful in negotiating with the other agencies to implement your ideas then you can take the bulk of the credit for saving tens of thousands of Chinese villagers from starvation. He follows this by asking if you’d be interested in taking a paid position, and you tell him yes you would be very interested and thanks very much.

  Afterward you stand waiting for a bus in the bracing air of early fall, hands in pockets, smiling sort of dopily as the traffic rolls past, and you are feeling good about your life, because you are about to return to your small beautiful home with the soaring ceilings and stone fireplace and find Amy there in the warm light of the dining room, and because you will pull her away from her books and papers and make love, maybe in bed, more likely on the kitchen counter, and because you will tell her what’s happened and she will smile with pride, and above all because you feel like it matters that thousands of people have been saved from starvation.

  You could not be more correct. It does matter. All of it.

  Occasionally you wake to find Amy thrashing the covers and warding off phantom blows in her sleep. Sometimes she continues to tremble and weep even after you’ve reached your hands out in the dark to calm her fear and rage, and you have to turn on the lights and walk her to the bathroom and show her in the mirror her pale, unmarked skin, the absence of blood. On these mornings you stay awake with her and talk and share cigarettes, the ashtray resting in the comforter-valley between you. Together you watch the day begin slowly outside the windows, and for her the sun coming up is like being rescued.

  You often take breaks during the summer to see Rodney play baseball, because it is important to him, and because what’s important to him matters. Usually you go to a short home series, three games over a weekend, and when he’s not playing or lifting weights or sitting in an ice bath the two of you do the things Rodney enjoys: hot dog lunches, movies, and single-A baseball games. Despite the fact that he already spends 90 percent of his waking moments engaged in baseball in one way or another, for reasons that are mysterious even to us he likes to spend his downtime watching the Kane Coun
ty Cougars, who play out of Geneva. The first time you go with him to a game at Elfstrom Stadium someone recognizes him and the next thing you know even the players are coming out with pens and baseballs, asking for autographs. Rodney handles this attention with the sort of grace and humility that have always put him way over the head of you or anyone else who could smoke him on an IQ test.

  By the time Amy has earned her B.A. you’ve risen to senior agriculture director at Oxfam, and as she begins the law program at Boston University you find yourself very much interested in water. Obsessed with it, in fact: its properties, its functions, how to produce it, and how to get it where people need it to be.

  It’s this last conundrum—how to get water where people need it to be—that is on your mind when you take a trip to South Africa to test a small, manually operated pump you’ve developed that can draw water from as deep as sixty feet and irrigate almost three acres. Most experts believe a pump that doesn’t run on expensive fuel or electricity can’t go any deeper than thirty feet, and when they discover how young you are, they’re even more skeptical. You’ve brought one hundred of these pumps with you to test with maize farmers in the KwaZulu-Natal midlands, hoping to prove the experts wrong. If this thing works—which it will—you’ll be looking at a conservative estimate of half a million poor farmers made suddenly viable by a single piece of equipment that sells for twenty bucks and costs nothing to operate.

  You planned the trip to coincide with Amy’s Christmas break so she could come along, and she is more than eager, accompanying you on the long rough rides overland from Howick to the maize fields. She walks the rows and gets down in the dirt, and after watching you do your routine a few times, she starts helping teach Zulu farmers the fairly simple workings of the pump. You’re happy for her company, as always, but after a week she takes sick and spends the next few days alternately in bed or in the bathroom. At first you stay with her at the hostel, but she eventually insists that she’s fine, you should be out doing the work you came here for, and we have to admit we’re surprised that as well as you know Amy you seem unaware that she wants you out of there not just because she’s concerned about your work, but because she hates to be doted on, especially when she’s sick and craves only darkness, silence, and solitude. Listen: she simply wants you to leave her alone. And so, vaguely hurt, you do, returning to the farms by day, but you are preoccupied with your concern for Amy, her refusal to see a doctor and your fear that she’s contracted something serious. And this distraction causes problems, e.g., one afternoon you’re trying with your very limited Afrikaans to convince a Zulu granny to allow you onto her son’s farmland, and through the entire clumsy negotiation you can think of nothing but Amy lying alone in the darkness of the hostel room, unable to eat now for five days, and the granny hollers and gesticulates wildly and finally chases you back to the Range Rover with a broom.

  By the end of your second week there, however, Amy’s condition improves to the point that she expresses renewed interest in a hiking trip you’d planned to Howick Falls. Ecstatic that she is well again, you immediately schedule a couple of off days, and you hire a Jeep to take you to the falls trailhead, where you disembark.

  The two of you hike the gorge trail, about one leisurely hour down through the forest to the base of the falls, where the Umgeni River plummets three hundred feet to form a wide pool of olive-green water ringed with rocks. Compared with how it will flow in February, at the end of the rainy season, the falls is a trickle right now, but still hitting the pool with enough force to send up a misty miniature rainbow. To either side of the falls the small trees and shrubs are beginning to green up with the return of the rains.

  You find a large rock with a more or less flat top and take your lunch out of a small backpack: smoked fish, chicken pie, lots of bottled water, malva pudding for Amy’s still-queasy stomach. You spread a towel on the rock and set out the food and eat in silence, watching two figures climb slowly up the rock face to the left of the falls. The figures are far enough up the face that you can’t tell if they’re men or women. What you can see for certain is that they’re free climbing, no ropes. This realization gives you a bit of a jolt, and you look at Amy, about to ask her to confirm what you’re seeing, when you catch her rubbing at her belly and grimacing, the half-eaten cup of pudding resting on the rock in front of her.

  “Hey,” you say, putting down your piece of chicken pie. “You okay?”

  “Fine,” Amy says, though it’s clear she’s anything but.

  “Okay, this is going to stop. You’re seeing a doctor.”

  She leans over the side of the rock and spits, breathing hard with her eyes closed tight. “Junior, not right now.”

  “No more discussion,” you say. “When we get back to town you’re going to the clinic.”

  “I don’t need to go to the clinic,” Amy says. The nausea abates a bit, and she sits back up and leans forward with her head in her hand. “There’s nothing wrong with me.”

  “How can you sit there like you are and say there’s nothing wrong?”

  She lifts her head and looks at you. “You’re going to make me say it, aren’t you?”

  “Say what?”

  “I wanted to wait until we got home. I didn’t want you to be distracted. Although now you’re distracted anyway, so I guess I might as well spill.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  She manages to smile at you, not unkindly. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?” she says. “For such a smart guy, sometimes you can be pretty dumb.” You raise your eyebrows, impatient, expectant, and she takes a breath and says, “I’m pregnant, kid.”

  Anyone else would have seen this coming, but you are the very picture of surprise. You could not be more shocked if Amy suddenly sloughed off her human disguise and revealed herself to be a six-limbed insec toid extraterrestrial. And it’s not as though you’re dealing with only the usual misgivings and fear one experiences upon discovering he’s about to become a father for the first time. Because there is, of course, the Destroyer of Worlds to consider. You thought you were finished with It, but in reality It was just offstage, waiting for this moment to make a surprise reappearance, like the evil matriarch on a soap opera who keeps dying and coming back under ever more improbable circumstances. Now suddenly It wants to shake you down again, threaten your unborn child and leave you doubting all that you’ve built up in your new life.

  People say it all the time: “I could never bring a child into this world.” From your perspective, of course, they know not in the least of what they speak. Compared to the stark terror you’re suddenly experiencing, generic concerns about war, environmental degradation, and the decline of empire would be positively welcome.

  Naturally we understand how you feel, but you must be careful how much of this you allow to show on your face. Amy is watching you closely, and we recommend that you gather your wits and give her a response, immediately and in the affirmative.

  “That’s amazing,” you say, not at all convincingly.

  “Wow. Weak,” Amy says, and you should not allow this sarcasm to blind you to her hurt.

  When you return to town you’ve recovered enough from your shock to check out of the hostel you’ve been staying in and rent the best room you can find. You lead Amy up the stairs and invite her to shower with you. She declines, citing her upset stomach, but you should know the real reason is she wants nothing to do with you after your tepid response to her announcement. You go into the bathroom alone, turn the shower on and let it run a few minutes while you undress. You pass your hand through the stream to make sure the temperature’s good and then you get in. You soap and rinse. There are terrycloth robes in the bathroom closet, embroidered with the first letter of the hotel’s name, and you put one on. You find Amy already in bed, turned on her side with her back to you. You get in and try to put your hand on her waist, but she pushes it off and flips you a backwards bird.

  It is important that you say something,
not just for the future of your relationship with Amy, but because common decency dictates it. You’re not the only one with mixed feelings here. Amy is lying close enough to touch you but feeling very much alone, frightened suddenly by the child growing in her belly, and angered by your reaction to it.

  “I guess we should probably start discussing names,” you say. Not perfect, but it’s a start. “Because you know, if history is any indication it’ll probably take a while for us to reach an agreement.”

  After a long pause, Amy responds without turning around. “We don’t know what it is yet.”

  “Simple,” you say. “Two lists. Boy names, girl names. If and when we decide to discover our fate, we chuck one list and revise the other.”

  Another long pause, but this time she rolls onto her back. She still refuses to look at you. “Do you think we ought to try to make this kid legitimate?” she asks the air above the bed.

  “Probably.” You venture to gently tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, and she allows you to do so.

  Suddenly she laughs, but it sounds more like a sigh. “I’m sorry,” she says, patting her still-flat belly. “This thing is making me crazy. No joke. It’s true, what they say. I am cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, right at the moment.”

  “Well I think you get a free pass on that, considering.”

  Finally she turns to you and puts her head on your shoulder. “Yeah, huh. We’ll see if you’re singing the same tune a few months from now, buster.”

  You lie together like this for hours, and though it doesn’t take long for her breathing to become slow and regular, for you sleep does not come quite so easily. You stare at the ceiling until the day ends and the room grows dim, and then you stare into the darkness.