She shrugged. “We just don’t have that much in common anymore.”
I took a deep breath. “If you didn’t want to hang out with me, why did you even come tonight?”
“I told you. I told you up front. I wanted to see the lab. Too bad I didn’t get to see any body parts. But it was worth it to meet Nussbaum.”
“So it wasn’t about me at all?”
“Well, no.”
And she left. I locked the door after her, too embarrassed to look Howe in the face. I knew what I’d see there anyway.
Back in the lab, Grandma Van had done a good job of throwing things away and putting the guys back in their places on the main operating table where I’d first met them. Where I should have left them.
“Come on,” I said to Grandma Van. “We’re leaving.” I stood by the door and waited for her. Then I turned out the lights and shut the heavy door.
Howe stood to meet us in the lobby. “Em’s gone again?” Grandma Van asked, looking around.
I nodded.
“And you’re angry at the guys?”
I nodded again. “They lied to me.” My voice felt thick. “That’s mostly it. They lied. They said they’d tell me where the missing head was. And the whole time, they knew. They knew he was never coming back.”
“You know where he is?” Howe asked.
“Florida. Permanently.”
“Oh.”
“Oh.”
We all three stared at Herophilus for a few minutes.
“So there’s a missing head?” Grandma Van whispered.
“Not now,” whispered Howe. He nudged me a little. “I’m sorry.”
“Me, too.”
4:30 a.m.
I sent them off: Howe to the train, Grandma Van riding her recharged scooter to the Swan Song. Instead of leaving like I said I would, I turned off the lights in the lobby and sat behind the desk, soaking up the bluish glow from the fish tank.
I needed to be alone for this. I couldn’t ask Howe, but I needed to know what that Latin translation was. At the rate I was going, I was sure it meant family traitor. Or monster. That I was born an Igor after all.
I typed FOVEA LATIN into the search bar and opened the first link.
Howe was right. The first definition was not, in fact, eyeballs. It was worse than I thought.
It meant PITFALL.
What.
They’d actually named me Pitfall. On purpose. This wasn’t an accident. Accidents like that happened to other people’s parents, not mine. Wordplay was their thing. Along with dead bodies, I mean. They meant what they said.
And when I was born, they’d actually looked at their brand-new wrinkly baby and said, “Hmm. She’s our little Pitfall.” They’d known what they were doing, and they’d been right on the money. The truth hit me like a heavy sack of Igor’s knuckles.
I was their pitfall.
I was going to ruin them.
If it hadn’t been for me, Inko would never have heard my mom on the phone. I was the reason they were in all this trouble. This was inevitable from the moment I was born. I wasn’t just fighting against time and lovesick Inko Fredrickson and a favor-happy barbershop quartet of heads. I was fighting destiny.
I stared at the word “pitfall” on the screen in front of me, until finally I couldn’t anymore. I turned off the computer and dragged my sad, disgraced kidney-self home to the people I loved and had ruined. As I walked, I realized I didn’t care about lurking danger anymore. Herophilus swished easily in my hand, treading water in the plastic bag I’d put him in, since he was about to be homeless. I decided it was best, even if he had to live in a soup bowl for a little while. But it wasn’t the costume or the fish that made me feel safe. I felt safe because of how pointless I’d become.
An early-morning rat ran across the sidewalk in front of me, pausing for a moment to give me a long, meaningful stare. Pitfall, it said. Pitfall, pitfall, pitfall.
“I’m not getting up,” I said. “I don’t feel good.”
“Where?” my mom asked.
“Everywhere.”
She patted my foot and left my bedroom. When she came back a little bit later, I pulled the covers over my head. I could smell her shampoo, even under the sheets. She told me they’d agreed I could have a sick day if I really felt sick, and did I really, truly feel sick?
Yes, I said.
It was a procedure day, she said, so they’d be operating all morning. They knew it hadn’t been fun so far, but the lab would grow on me. Feel better. More foot patting.
And then they were gone.
I fell asleep thinking, This is it, this is the end of everything.
I woke up feeling even worse. Like I was made of sludge. But after an hour of watching the spiders fight the wind outside my window, I couldn’t take it anymore. I needed to know what was going on.
I got out of bed and pulled on some jeans and a soft old T-shirt.
Daytime looked weird on the city now, too bright and peppy. Even the sidewalk was too shiny. It made my eyes itch. In the ten minutes it took to get to the lab, I started thinking maybe I was allergic to day. So I didn’t notice that the door was locked until I pulled on it.
I pulled harder, in case it was stuck or something, but no. Locked. Absolutely locked. That was it. First sign of the apocalypse or whatever.
My parents were probably already in jail.
Wondering, no doubt, how Inko Fredrickson found out about the missing head, unless he’d told them, in which case they were probably thinking horrible, dark things about their daughter, Pitfall.
They’d be sitting behind bars, shaking their heads. “Should’ve named her Nobel Prize or Lotto Winner or New Car, or even Extra Piece of Cake.”
“Nah,” the other one would say. “No escaping destiny.”
There was a sticker on the glass of the door, announcing 20 percent off reading glasses. Old-person graffiti left over from the crowd last night. I scratched at it with my thumb. If my parents were in jail, the lab was mine, I figured, at least until I had to sell the whole thing to pay their legal fees. Or until Inko Fredrickson cremated it. I yanked on the door a few times, knowing it wouldn’t open, but I wanted to get in badly now. Somehow, being inside would mean there was something I could do.
I had a sudden thought—the back door. We hadn’t really made it a patio like Lake wanted, but some of the old men and a few women went out there to smoke their pipes and cigars. I’d been so angry at the end of the night, I’d forgotten to lock it back up.
And now I wasn’t quite angry. I didn’t know what to call what I was.
I walked around the block to the alley, knowing that this route meant I was going to have to see the guys again, and debating whether I would talk to them. Probably so. I’d ask if the police had been there. Ask if my parents were surprised or just saw it coming. Except the last thing I wanted to do was make the guys think I forgave them, because I didn’t. Maybe I’d wait and see how bad they felt about it. I tried the door, and it swung open easily. Of course. I mean, of course I left it unlocked. The lab I was trying to protect. Maybe subconsciously I knew it was pointless.
I stepped in, noticing that something felt different. No streamers, of course. No gauze curtains. No stars. But it wasn’t that.
I took another step.
And realized what my parents had been doing that morning.
Of course.
It wasn’t like this was just where heads hung out.
They were there for a reason.
Andy opened his eye. Just the one.
The other eye was covered by a strip of gauze that draped casually across his face, like he was a tree and someone had TP’d him. But he wasn’t a tree and it wasn’t toilet paper. The gauze came from inside his head, which had been cut open. A flap of skin covered the opening, but incompletely, almost carelessly.
It was horrible.
“Fovea!” Andy said. “Thank goodness! Listen. We’re all very sorry about last night.”
�
��I…” There wasn’t enough oxygen. I tried to catch my breath, but I couldn’t seem to do it. “I…I can see your brain.”
“Yes, but listen: we didn’t mean to upset you.”
“Your brain.”
“Yes, yes, we knew this was coming, but you can’t make a good recording if you’re worried about your brain dribbling all over the place. Or other…problems. Since we knew Dean’s voice was going to be on that TV show, we didn’t think it was going to make much of a difference when we told you.”
“Stop! Stop it!” It was impossible to look at him and hear him at the same time. “Does it seriously not hurt?”
“What?”
“THE GIANT HOLE IN YOUR HEAD.”
“That?” He looked toward the flap. “No, no. It’s a little chilly, I guess. But it’s what we signed up for. No surprises here.”
The other two guys started to stir. “Oh,” Andy said quickly, “maybe a couple of surprises.”
“Fovea!” Lake exclaimed. Someone had made an attempt at sewing him back up, so there were stitches crisscrossing his head, Frankenstein-style. “¡Qué bueno verte!”
“What?” I asked.
“He speaks Spanish now,” McMullen said, sounding amused.
“¡Es verdad!” Lake added.
“Well, I don’t speak Spanish,” I told Lake. “Just English and one semester of French. So my French is mostly limited to stuff about pastries.”
“Ayyy, dulces,” he said with a big smile on his face. “Me hacen falta los dulces.”
“No, he can only speak Spanish,” McMullen explained. At least the old grouch seemed whole-ish. Completely sewn up, and by somebody who actually knew how to sew, it looked like.
“Are you all right?” I asked him.
He didn’t answer, just looked off into the distance past me.
“McMullen?”
“Oh, me?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I have a slight change in my eyesight.”
“What kind of change?”
“I don’t have any of it anymore.”
“You’re blind?”
“Yep.”
“My parents will fix it. They’ll fix it.” My parents. I’d completely forgotten to ask about them. “Where are my parents? Were the police here?” I felt the panic rise up in me. How quickly could I get them back to the lab? Was it already too late? I’d go to the police station or the courthouse or whatever. I’d beg whoever was there to let my parents get out of jail so they could fix the damage to my talking head friends.
I suddenly understood why they’d lied to me. Why we had to get the recording done so quickly. They were out of time in the realest way.
“No—” I was lost.
“It’s okay, Fovea,” McMullen said gently. “You must’ve known this was going to happen.”
“No,” I said again. “No, I thought—I thought you were I don’t know, like holograms….”
“¡Ja! Soy yo, la princesa Leia.”
“Holograms?” asked Andy.
“Holograms, they’re made with these metal plates, that’s how you bounce the lasers, but the thing is”—I was talking too fast, but I couldn’t stop—“if you break the metal plate in half, both halves of the plate still show the whole image, and you can keep breaking it down, break it into a million million pieces, and the images, they’ll all still be whole, and I thought, I thought, you’d be fine, that you’d stay in a refrigerator maybe, but you’d be fine. You’d still be whole.”
Looking at them now, I felt myself break into pieces. I wasn’t a hologram either.
“This is probably our last run, kiddo,” Andy said.
“Ay, algo me pica.”
“What if I put you back in the freezer? Refreeze you?” I was desperate.
“Está allí abajo de la oreja izquierda…”
“I don’t want to get refrozen, Fovea,” said McMullen. “Damned goose pimples. If there had been any ladies in there, I would’ve been flat-out embarrassed. Actually, there might have been ladies. It can be hard to tell.”
Andy added, “This is all okay with us.”
Not for me it wasn’t.
Lake was wiggling his ears. I didn’t know why, though, I didn’t have any idea why he was wiggling his ears, and I wanted to know, and there was nothing I could do about his wiggling ears.
“It’s all right,” Andy said again, for the millionth time. “This is what happens.”
“No. It is not what happens,” I finally said. “NO. I spent all this time, years and years and years worrying about Grandma Van, and suddenly she’s just fine and apparently she’s not going toes up anytime soon, and I let down my guard, and then you, you, you don’t even have any toes.”
“Well,” he said gently. “Somewhere. I have them, out there somewhere.”
I had to do something. I was trying so hard to think of something I could do that I thought I might pull all my muscles. And then something broke, and in that space, I thought of it. The thing I could do. I ran to my desk out front, grabbed the drive Dirk had given us last night, and ran back. I messed with the sound system on the lab computer until I got it on, plugged in the drive, and pumped up the volume. It echoed, bouncing off the clean white walls and the shiny metal tables and the thin cold air. The room was so empty. Just me and three brokedown heads. And the sound of their barbershop quartet.
Nussbaum had done a good job. It had the feel of an actual concert, of something happening live. Not the kind of concert from the night before, with the old people hollering and singing along. But you could hear the mistakes sometimes and the laughing and the way they knew when they were nailing it. You could tell how much fun it was. The recording ended, voices fading away, laughing about some joke that McMullen had told.
I was surprised how soon it was over.
“Just the two of us now?” McMullen asked.
I nodded, but then remembered he couldn’t see me, and said yes, but fast, so that nothing else could come out of me.
“Hey. Hey, kiddo. This was never going to last.” He smiled so big that his eyes, his sightless old eyes, wrinkled in the corners. “It’s not about us surviving death, Fovea. Nobody survives death. We’re the pins, and death, he’s the ball, and there aren’t any gutters. Just a fast roll and a slow roll. We can’t stop the ball. The four of us, we each had something extra burning inside us that slowed it down, something we wanted so bad it kept us going a little longer than it should have.”
“Like what,” I struggled to say.
“Well, Lake, he wanted to be a star, wanted to be as big as his feelings. Andy wanted to drop into the music one more time. Dean had an incredible voice, better than all of us, but he didn’t care about the singing. He wanted to be in a convertible with the sun on his face and a beautiful woman in the driver’s seat. He wanted to drive off into the sunset.”
“What about—” My breath caught again. This was all crap, it was all wrong. “What about Whitney? She wasn’t just somebody in the car. She’s a person. How is that supposed to make her feel?”
“I don’t figure he tried to die on her. But when he was done, he was done, and she’s just gotta forgive him for that. He already had one foot out of the door, you know. And one foot somewhere else entirely. San Diego, I think he said.”
I wasn’t glad that my parents had blinded McMullen with brain surgery, but I was glad he couldn’t see me. I didn’t like the way my face felt to me. “Are you scared?” I finally said. “I would be so scared.”
“Nah,” he said.
“How can you say that?” I wanted to shake him into being afraid. Just so he wouldn’t go.
“I’ve played a lot of lanes in my life—”
“Stop bringing it back to bowling! This is serious!”
“Bowling is serious, girl. But listen, I mean it. I’ve been scared so much in my life: scared that I would land a gutter ball or lose a big game or jinx it somehow and let my buddies down. And I’m only just realizing what a damn waste that was. I
shoulda just let fly, you know what I mean?”
I pushed my hands against my eyes, still glad he couldn’t see me.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen exactly,” he continued. “Maybe all of my personal electricity will fly out into the universe and go make stars. Maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow as a baby snail. Maybe I’ll be on a cloud with a percussive instrument of some sort. Maybe I’ll just be like a breath somebody’s letting go of. Hell if I know, kid. But I’ll tell you what: it’s nice to feel warm again.”
I just wanted to keep him talking. If I could just keep him talking. “How do you even keep points in bowling?”
“Fovea, you don’t care about bowling.”
“Sure I do.” I wasn’t even convincing myself.
“Here’s what I’m going to tell you from bowling: You don’t have to know how to write down the score. You need to know how to go for it. Do you know what I’m saying?”
“Don’t overthink it?”
“I’m saying you need to let that ball fly, girl. Life isn’t going to wait around for you. You wait to roll your ball, and the game will assume you’re not playing anymore, and those pins are going to reset around you, every time.”
“But I can’t, I can’t bowl, I don’t know how to bowl.”
“Well, it’s a good thing I’m not really talking about bowling, then.”
“You aren’t?”
“What’s the thing you really want to ask me?”
My ribs felt so tight. Like my lungs weren’t strong enough to make them move. “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“What burned in you so bad?”
He closed his blind eyes for a minute. “I wanted to make my son proud of me. All the time I spent at the lanes, and what did I leave him? A few ugly old trophies. I made him bowl with me, even though he didn’t want to. I didn’t listen to him until the 1997 Championship Game when he started throwing balls so hard they smashed right through the backboards.”
“Bobby-Duran? Bobby-Duran was your son?”
The Mortification of Fovea Munson Page 17