The Nine Lives of Alexander Baddenfield

by John Bemelmans Marciano

  “They put the bull back in his pen,” Winterbottom said.

  “I had a dream while I was dead, Winterbottom,” Alexander said. “The bull came back for me, and I was so startled that I had a heart attack, and then I came back to life again just in time to be trampled by him. It was horrible.”

  Winterbottom and Don Bravo looked at each other.

  “That was no sueño, señorito.”

  “What does that mean, sueño?” Alexander asked. “It was a dream—tell me it was a dream, Winterbottom.”

  Winterbottom grimly shook his head no, and explained precisely what had happened, in more excruciating detail than Alexander could bear. The boy cut him off.

  “How many is that?”

  “How many is what?”

  “Lives, Winterbottom—lives!”

  Winterbottom cleared his throat. “Seven.”

  “Seven?” Alexander said, his eyes going round as baseballs. “Seven? Are you sure? That would mean that I only have . . .” He counted seven, eight, nine on his fingers. “I only have three lives left!”

  “Actually, Alexander,” Winterbottom said, and bit his lower lip, “that would mean that you only have two lives left.”

  “Two?” Alexander’s face drooped. “What do you mean, two? You said I was on my seventh life!”

  “No, Alexander, I am sorry. I meant to say you have seven lives gone. You are on your eighth life.”

  “You must be wrong. You must have miscounted!”

  And so Winterbottom recounted the lives of Alexander Baddenfield, or rather his deaths. By the time he was done, Alexander realized it was true. He had only one extra life left.

  Alexander felt a chill, his heart began to race, and he felt an emotion he had very little experience with: fear. And a worse one: uncertainty. How could he live with the uncertainty? Having two lives wasn’t much better than having one, now that he knew how deaths could come in bunches. Alexander couldn’t risk putting it off. He needed eight new lives right away.

  “We have to go to Dr. Kranstenenif’s,” Alexander said to Winterbottom.

  Winterbottom shuddered. “The thought of going back into that strange greenhouse with the frightening menagerie of mixed-up animals gives me the willies.”

  Winterbottom expected Alexander to make fun of his being nervous (or at least his using the word “willies”), but instead he said, “That's a good point, Winterbottom. I’ve lost more than half of my lives to animals, and who knows how dangerous those mutant beasts must be.”

  “And I was so nervous to have to assist him,” Winterbottom added. “My hands kept slipping off the tools.”

  “My god!” Alexander said. “It was madness that I had the operation up there.”

  “I tried telling you.”

  “We need to have the operation in New York, in a real hospital, with nurses and gurneys and stuff.”

  “Hallelujah,” Winterbottom said, thrilled Alexander was on his side for once, and immediately began making arrangements to have Kranstenenif flown in to meet them at Baddenfield Castle.

  Getting on the plane to fly back home himself, Alexander put on his seat belt as soon as he sat down, and asked the flight attendant to repeat the safety instructions three times. Every tiny knock of turbulence made his heart skip a beat. In the car, Alexander climbed into his old booster seat in the back and kept telling Sam the driver to slow down. “Are you a maniac? Why are you in such a hurry?”

  “No hurry, boss kid. This is how I always—”

  “Don’t talk when you’re driving!” Alexander said.

  Winterbottom at first took pleasure in watching Alexander frightened into carefulness. But as the boy nervously fidgeted in the booster seat he was much too big for, Winterbottom couldn’t help but have the sinking feeling that something had gone horribly wrong.

  By the time Dr. Torvic Kranstenenif entered Baddenfield Castle, a mere twenty-four hours after Alexander himself had gotten there, the boy had gone half crazy with hand-wringing and nerves. Only with the buzz of the intercom and the sound of the drawbridge lowering did he relax, his savior having finally arrived. Or had he?

  Removed from his arctic lair, Kranstenenif seemed less than before. No longer dressed like a vagabond madman, the scientist wore an old coat and tie that were both too short, and his dandruff-speckled hair lay flat and greasy against his scalp, the tracks of his comb still visible. Rather than dangerous and deranged, Kranstenenif looked shabby. In one hand he carried a black instrument case and in the other a pet carrier, which housed a spotted kitten who was meowing with wide-open mouth and watery blue eyes.

  “Boy, am I glad you called, Baddenfield!” Kranstenenif said, shaking the boy’s hand like he was hammering a nail. “I tell you, I thought I was going to make a fortune with the whole novavivum-transplant thing. Do you have any idea what you can charge for giving people eight extra lives? Anything you want!” He fell down into an armchair and kicked his legs out in front of him. “But wouldn’t you know it? The next three people I tried the surgery on all died right there on the operating table. For good.”

  Alexander’s head dropped an inch, and his jaw two inches lower than that.

  “I tell you, it’s a good thing you wrote me that insurance policy; otherwise me and my rabbitortoise would be homeless on an ice floe somewhere.” Kranstenenif shook his head while picking something out of his ear. He looked at whatever it was and wiped it on the armrest.

  “So why did the operation work on me?” Alexander said.

  “Beats the heck out of me.” The scientist shrugged. “Maybe it only works on certain people. Or maybe it was sheer dumb luck. We’ll only know if we keep trying!” Kranstenenif opened up his black case and pulled out a stainless-steel surgical saw. He began picking at its teeth.

  “Did you ever try the operation on yourself?” Winterbottom asked.

  “I may be a mad scientist, but I’m not crazy,” Kranstenenif said, and let out a Ha! “A surgery has to work a few times—in a row—before I’ll be going under the knife, thank you very much.”

  Face turning green, Alexander stammered, “I . . . uhm, I . . .” He looked helplessly at Winterbottom. “I think maybe this is a mistake. I’m not really up for the surgery again.”

  “What? After I came all this way?” Kranstenenif slumped into his seat like a deflating balloon. Then he perked back up. “I have other ideas, you know. I can make you into a minotaur!”

  “A minotaur?”

  “Yeah. You’d have the upper body of a bull. Wouldn’t that be cool?”

  “The upper body?” Alexander said. “What about my head?”

  Kranstenenif shrugged. “I’ll make you a centaur, then. Half man, half horse. Or whatever animal you want on the bottom.”

  “Look, Doctor,” Winterbottom said, getting up, but Kranstenenif cut him off.

  “Wait, wait—you’re gonna love this one. Are you ready?” Kranstenenif held his thumbs and index fingers at right angles, framing the picture. “I’m going to give you a camel’s hump. Think about it: You’ll be able to go an entire month without drinking anything!”

  It took all the might of Winterbottom and Sam the driver, but they threw Kranstenenif out of the castle, babbling and furious. On Canal Street, no one noticed.

  With his newfound fear of dying and no backup lives on the way, Alexander tried returning to the Winterbottom way of doing things. Crossing the street, Alexander looked left, then right, then back left again. But before he could step off the curb, he lost his nerve. What if while he had been looking back left, something happened to the right? It needed to be left, then right, then back left again, then back right again. But now he had the same problem. Any number of terrifying vehicles could have come tearing out of nowhere back on the left in the meantime. It was a vicious cycle that never ended.

  The outside world contained all kinds of dan
gers that not even Winterbottom had noticed before, Alexander realized. “Do you see that cloud, Winterbottom? That hideous, threatening cloud?”

  Winterbottom looked up. A single cottony cloud hung in the sky, the remnant of a morning storm. He thought it looked like a whale, or perhaps an avocado. “That seems like a perfectly lovely cloud, Alexander.”

  “Lovely? Sure, if it doesn’t strike you down with lightning. It’s a menace to have those things hanging over us. The government should start a missile program to shoot them all down.” Alexander stopped to think for a moment. “Of course, then there’d be too much sun. That’s the real danger. Global warming, skin cancer, the rising seas.” Alexander threw up his hands. “The whole sky is just a catastrophe waiting to happen!”

  “But remember how you loved it, when you flew with your Icarus wings up above the clouds, up nearly to the sun? And then how you saved yourself, and landed so perfectly? I must say, I was glad you didn’t listen to me that day,” Winterbottom said. “It was magical.”

  “Magical?” Alexander said. “It was suicidal!”

  Then there were the dogs. All over New York City, canines. It was worse than the African bush! Alexander had to shy away from them on every block.

  “Why are you so afraid, Alexander?” Winterbottom said, and even knelt down to pet one of the mongrels.

  “You’re the one who taught me to steer clear of these things, Winterbottom.”

  “But I meant pit bulls, Alexander. Not poodles.”

  “Poodles were bred to be vicious.”

  All Alexander’s fears were realized when, walking down Canal Street a few blocks from the castle, a particularly fierce and deceptively small Maltese terrier broke free of its leash and made straight for Alexander. In terror, Alexander fled the other way, only to find himself face-to-face with an obviously rabid, madly barking pug. Trapped between the two yelping dogs, the boy looked for an escape route.

  He found himself standing in front of an all-new luxury hotel, with clear glass windows overlooking the sidewalk and a cascading waterfall inside. It looked like paradise, but that glass door! Alexander saw the germs of a thousand hands writhing all over it. He decided to make a break for the street instead, but got caught in the endless left-right-left-right-lefting. Finally, with the two mutts closing in, Alexander had to just go for it.

  He had been so preoccupied with looking back and forth for cars that he never saw the bright orange-colored barriers, or the flags, or the enormous WARNING! sign that was right in front of him. As he ran, the ground gave way beneath him, everything went black, and Alexander felt the cold shock of water.

  The boy had fallen into an open manhole. He thought he’d landed in the sewer, but it was a drainage canal for storm water. The underground tunnel was still filled from the morning showers, with water rushing fast and whisking Alexander along with it. The boy thought he heard something. His name?

  “Alexander! Alexander!” Winterbottom knelt at the opening, calling and calling to nothing but the echo of his own voice and the cool air rising off the water below. Alexander was gone, vanished into the depths of what had to be the sewer, and no doubt getting carried off to some waste management facility. The boy would die a most horrible death—and likely his last!

  Winterbottom whipped out his cell phone and hit the tracking app. It showed Alexander moving west under Canal Street. Winterbottom began to run. “Ooph, excuse me! Ooph, pardon me!” he kept saying, bumping into people. The sidewalk was jammed! The pulsing white dot that was Alexander kept getting farther and farther away. Winterbottom looked for a cab. Canal Street was filled with them—all occupied, stopped bumper-to-bumper, and honking their horns. But then Winterbottom spotted his salvation: a Mr. Rickshaw pedicab coming his way up the bike lane.

  Meanwhile, Alexander was experiencing something he hadn’t felt since he realized he only had two lives left: fun. It was like he was on the greatest waterslide in the world! “Ya-hoooo!” he yelled as he hurtled along the underground river.

  In the back of the Mr. Rickshaw, Winterbottom chewed his nails. They started gaining on Alexander, but then stopped. Red light. “Go!” Winterbottom yelled to the driver, whose name was Wayne. “The traffic isn’t moving—you can sneak right through!”

  “No way, dude,” Wayne said. “A pedicab has to follow the same laws as a car. I could lose my pedi-hack license!”

  Winterbottom reached into his pocket, pulled out a handful of fifty-dollar bills, and shoved them into Wayne’s shirt pocket. “Can you follow some different laws, please?”

  Wayne’s eyes went wide, and he began to weave in and out of traffic and pick up so much speed that Winterbottom got knocked from one side of the pedicab to the other. They began closing in on the Alexander dot, but were almost to the end of Canal Street. Straight ahead was the Hudson River.

  Alexander was still laughing and splashing and sliding when he spotted a bright light up ahead. It started as a tiny pinprick of sun, but got wider fast. With a whoosh Alexander was whisked out of the underground canal and rode a waterfall down into the Hudson River.

  I want to do that again! Alexander thought as he plunged into the water. Then he remembered that he didn’t know how to swim.

  Deep in the river, Alexander held his breath and tried to get back to the surface, but once he did, he couldn’t stay afloat. He waved with his arms and kicked with his legs, but it was no use. He knew drowning would be a lousy way to die. Had that been life three or four when he had almost drowned? He couldn’t quite recall. After breathing in a few more gulps of seawater, he couldn’t recall anything at all.

  The Ninth Life

  of

  ALEXANDER BADDENFIELD

  No amount of fifty-dollar bills could help Winterbottom cross the West Side Highway. Traffic was streaming fast in both directions, and he had to wait at a red light for what seemed like forever. Was it broken?

  Looking down at his phone, he saw that the dot that was Alexander had stopped moving, right at the edge of the Hudson. Oh, why had he never taught Alexander how to swim!

  Finally the light turned green, the cars on the highway stopped, and Winterbottom sprinted through the crosswalk into the river park to the railing, where he immediately saw Alexander floating.

  Winterbottom dove over the side and quickly had the boy in a lifeguard carry, Alexander’s head up under the crook of his arm, as he swam to the marina. Had Winterbottom gotten to him in time? He wasn’t breathing, but maybe if Winterbottom got him back to the dock and gave him CPR, he could revive Alexander before he wasted another life and—

  “Is that you, Winterbottom?” Alexander said, lifting his head. Then he coughed out a gallon of seawater.

  The final life of Alexander Baddenfield started differently from all the others. Alexander felt no exhilarating jolt, no thrill at his very aliveness. Instead, he felt queasy. Back home, he examined himself in the mirror. His skin looked pale, almost green, and black circles ringed his eyes.

  “What if I’ve contracted some horrible disease and I don’t even know it?” he said. “What if my last life just started and I’m already dying?”

  “But Alexander, you are brand-new!” Winterbottom said.

  “Except I just took a ride in a sewer! Think of the billions of germs that must have been in there. I could have typhoid fever or some sort of Chinese spider monkey disease.”

  “But it wasn’t a sewer; it was a storm drain,” Winterbottom said. “That was all fresh water.”

  “Well, what about the Hudson River then? Can you think of anything more polluted than a river running between Manhattan and New Jersey?”

  The only sensible thing, Alexander decided, was never to leave Baddenfield Castle again. It was too risky to even step out onto the sidewalk.

  “You had the right idea all along, Winterbottom, keeping me locked up in here.”

  “But it was too much, Alexander,
” Winterbottom said. “You can’t become like me. For a Baddenfield to be cautious upsets the natural order of things.”

  As ever, Alexander refused to listen, and shrank further and further behind the moated walls of Baddenfield Castle. He ordered every window boarded up to keep out the dangerous sun, and still he put on sunblock. No outside air was allowed to enter the building, so fresh oxygen had to be pumped in. Alexander refused all nuts, all dairy, and everything else on Winterbottom’s old dietary restrictions list, and then refused some more. He stopped eating anything anyone anywhere had ever been allergic to. The more Alexander read on the Internet, the more he discovered that the problem was food itself. Any food can kill you. So Alexander just stopped eating altogether.

  The boy spent more and more time in the Hall of Baddenfields, mulling over what had happened to his ancestors, and himself.

  “When you’re down to your last life and you’re wishing you had this one back, just remember who told you so,” Alexander repeated to Winterbottom. “That’s what you said, and I do remember. Oh, do I remember.” He shook his head and turned away from the portraits. “You were right, Winterbottom. So, so right.”

  No one had ever been so sorry to be proved correct. In fact, Winterbottom couldn’t bear to hear the boy repeat it. “Please, Alexander, just leave this room of lives and deaths and go outside and play like a twelve-year-old is supposed to!”

  Alexander looked at Winterbottom as if he were crazy and snorted.

  “What is the point of living this last life if you have no fun?” Winterbottom said. “You are no worse off than you were before you started all this. You were born with one life and one life is what you have now, the same as I have, the same as everyone has!”

  “It’s totally different. Your glass is still full. Mine is eight-ninths empty.” Alexander shook his head. “You’ve got no idea what it’s like to have had so many lives.”

  While Alexander spoke, Winterbottom had an epiphany. He became excited, and realized that he had hit upon the answer. Not just to Alexander’s plight, but to that of all the Baddenfields who had come before him. All he had to do was explain it to him, and the boy would be convinced.