by Andrew Smith
“What do you think that shit in the ball was?” Robby said.
“I don’t know. You read the nameplate on it. It said Contained Plague.”
“Nothing good is ever called Plague,” Robby said.
“Maybe it was just some glow-in-the-dark experimental stuff,” I said.
“I’ve done an experiment. We made a battery out of a lemon. Remember that?” Robby asked.
“Yes. It was a good experiment,” I agreed. I nodded like a scientist would. “We knew what was supposed to happen before we even started it. And it worked.”
“But I don’t think things called Plague are the subject of the kinds of experiments we do in the lab at Curtis Crane,” Robby said.
That’s what it was—what Robby and I had done up there on the roof at Grasshopper Jungle—I thought.
An experiment.
It is perfectly normal for boys to experiment. I read it somewhere that was definitely not in a book at Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy. Or if it was in a book, it would certainly no longer be part of Curtis Crane Lutheran Academy’s library collection. Not after the shit I did in eighth grade.
Maybe I heard some psychologist who specialized in Teen Sexuality say shit about things like Boys experimenting on one of those afternoon talk shows that are only on television for the fulfillment of depressed and lonely women.
Depressed and lonely women need to know about Teen Sexuality and how it’s normal for boys to experiment. Normal. That’s what the psychologist would say. The psychologist also would have been a slim woman with nicely trimmed hair, a sincere and calming smile, and modest jewelry.
That was bullshit.
History shows that real experiments, like the one we did with the lemon, always involve some reasonable expectation ahead of time about the outcome. About how things will work out.
Robby slid the pack of cigarettes into the back pocket on his sagging jeans and we gathered up our flamingo, wine, grimacing lemur, and skateboards. We made our way down the ladder and onto the dumpster we’d rolled across Grasshopper Jungle.
“Don’t say anything to Shann,” I cautioned.
I didn’t need to tell Robby that. It was just one of those things boys do sometimes to confirm that there are secrets that shall be protected.
Robby said, “You mean about what we saw in her stepdad’s office, or what we did up on the roof?”
I said, “Shit.”
I imagined I had two arguing and confused heads sprouting up from my shoulders.
I felt sadness for that other boy inside the jar in Johnny McKeon’s office.
HELL BREAKS LOOSE
SHANN WAS SLEEPING soundly in the backseat of Robby’s Ford Explorer when we came back to the car. She stretched out comfortably, with her head lying on some crumpled socks and a pair of Robby’s boxers that had fire trucks and Dalmatians on them.
Watching Shann sleep made me horny.
I was all messed up.
I thought I probably needed to talk to someone about how sexually confused I felt. I couldn’t talk to Robby about it, not after what we did on the roof. I thought, but only for half a second, about talking to Pastor Roland Duff. But I already felt guilty as it was.
I thought I could talk to my father.
It scared me to think about doing that, but my father would know what to tell me. He could help me sort things out. I just needed to work up the courage to start the conversation. Then everything would fall into place.
Everything always falls into place that way.
“Shann?” I whispered.
I ran my hand up her leg to wake her.
Shann opened her eyes slowly. She smiled at me.
I felt guilty and sad.
“Did you and Robby already go?” she asked.
I said yes, but didn’t tell her we’d been gone for over an hour. It was nearly 2:00 a.m.
Robby opened the Explorer’s rear gate and deposited our flamingo, the grimacing lemur head, skateboards, and wine bottles.
He already held an unlit cigarette in his mouth when he got behind the wheel.
Robby passed the pack to me and started the engine. We lit both our cigarettes on the same orange coiled moon burning at the end of the car’s lighter. Our faces were so close our cheeks touched. I looked Robby straight in the eye as we leaned in to get the cigarettes going. It was awkward. I felt sad for Robby.
I turned around and reached back between the seats. I held Shann’s hand.
Behind her, I saw a glowing blue ball floating down the steps in back of the vacant podiatrist’s office. Grant and the Hoover Boys were coming out from the mall.
I glanced at Robby.
I was certain he saw the same thing in the rearview mirror. We both knew better than to say anything and have Shann turn around. She would only start asking questions. Maybe she’d want to confront those punks.
In a lot of ways, Shann was tougher than Robby and me.
Maybe the boys were already drunk. I can’t be certain of it. But something happened to cause Tyler to let go of the glass globe. I watched the circle of blue light drop like a falling moon.
Robby coughed.
Back in Grasshopper Jungle, blue light splattered everywhere.
“I’m ready to go home,” I said.
“Um. Yeah,” Robby agreed.
Robby’s hands gripped the wheel, but his eyes were pinned to the rearview mirror.
Grant and his friends were the first victims of Contained MI Plague Strain 412E.
Nobody knew anything about it.
Travis Pope and his wife, Eileen, had been hired by the association management of the Ealing Mall to clean the common areas every week. They drove through the lot Saturday mornings before sunrise, rarely doing anything about the debris that accumulated in the back alley of a soon-to-be abandoned mall.
That Saturday, Travis and Eileen stopped in Grasshopper Jungle and picked up large chunks of broken glass from the alley. Travis Pope tossed the shards into the dumpster somebody had pushed against the rear wall of The Pancake House. Travis cursed the winos and delinquent kids in the town for getting drunk and fucking in public.
Travis and Eileen Pope were the fifth and sixth victims of Contained MI Plague Strain 412E.
Nobody knew anything about it.
And later that morning, an old man Robby Brees and I called Hungry Jack, who was missing his front teeth and had served in the United States Army in Vietnam, climbed into the dumpster we rolled across Grasshopper Jungle. The dumpster had pieces of Johnny McKeon’s sick broken universe inside it.
Hungry Jack became the seventh victim of Contained MI Plague Strain 412E.
All hell had broken loose. It splattered across the piss-soaked pavement of Grasshopper Jungle.
Nobody knew anything about it.
HISTORY IS FULL OF SHIT
EVERY DAY I wrote in my books.
I drew pictures, too.
That night, I drew a plastic flamingo with a spike coming out of its ass, a grimacing lemur, bottles of wine, and a picture of me with my shorts pulled down around my knees. In my drawing, I was in the backseat of Robby’s Ford Explorer, lying on Shann Collins and some socks and a pair of my best friend’s boxers that were printed with red fire trucks and spotted Dalmatian dogs.
I drew a two-headed baby boy trapped inside a pickle jar.
That night, I sat at my desk until the sky outside began to get light.
I took off my shoes and socks, and my Orwells T-shirt, too. I always write more accurate accounts of history when wearing as little as possible.
It’s difficult to avoid the truth when you’re undressed.
My armpits reeked. I had serious B.O.
That was also true.
Ingrid, my golden retriever, was in my bedroom. She liked to lie down beneath my desk so I could keep my bare feet in her fur. Ingrid, although she could shit better than any dog I knew—a real dynamo—never barked. When she was a puppy, she had a tumor on her neck. It made it so she couldn’t bark
, which helped me sneak into the house past curfew countless times.
Our house got robbed twice, too.
“You’re a good dog, Ingrid,” I said. I wriggled my toes in her fur.
I wrote.
Even when I tried to tell everything that happened, I knew my accounts were ultimately nothing more than an abbreviation. It’s not that I neglected to write details—I told the truth about Shann’s room, the staircase leading down to nothing, what the main ingredients of a Stanpreme pizza are. I wrote what it felt like to have my bare penis pressing upward against the cool skin of Shann Collins’s thigh.
That was also true.
I told about Robby kissing me. I described it in detail, down to the taste and feel of his tongue. I kept accurate count of the cigarettes we smoked, and described the things trapped inside the jars we found locked up in Johnny McKeon’s office.
But no historian could ever put everything that happened in a book.
The book would be as big as the universe, and it would take multiple countless lifetimes to read.
History necessarily had to be an abbreviation.
Even those first men—obsessed with recording their history—who painted on cave walls in Lascaux and Altamira, only put the important details down.
We killed this big hairy thing and that big hairy thing. And that was our day. You know what I mean.
My name is an abbreviation.
Three grandfathers back, a man named Krzys Szczerba came to the United States from Poland.
People in America did not know what to do with all those consonants and shit in Krzys Szczerba’s name. They decided to swap some out for vowels, and to take others away from Krzys Szczerba, so my three-grandfathers-back grandfather became Christopher Szerba.
I imagined. Sometimes I drew this picture: An official stone building, a repository for all the consonants and shit taken from refugees’ names when they arrived on the doorstep of the United States of America. It is piled high everywhere with the letters we don’t find useful: Cs and Zs in great heaping mounds that looked so much like the black-and-white photographs of luggage or shoes from World War 2.
Krzys Szczerba.
History, and the United States of America, can call him Chris.
History is full of shit like that.
Krzys Szczerba came to America when he was seventeen years old.
In 1905, being seventeen years old made you a man. In 1969, when Hungry Jack fought in Vietnam, seventeen years old was a man. Now, I wasn’t so sure. My brother, Eric, who was somewhere in Afghanistan, was twenty-two.
Krzys Szczerba came across the Atlantic with his father. They planned on working and earning enough money so Krzys’s mother, brother, and two sisters could come to the United States, too. People who did that were called Bread Polacks. They came here to make money.
Krzys Szczerba’s father died on the boat in the middle of the ocean.
His body was sent down naked into the water with prayers and a medallion of Saint Casimir.
Krzys Szczerba’s family never came to their son.
Chris Szerba ended up in southern Minnesota, where he met a grocer’s daughter named Eva Nightingale. Eva had breasts like frosted cupcakes and skin the color of homemade peach ice cream. Her body was a soft and generous pillow of endless desserts. Chris Szerba’s semen found its way into Eva Nightingale’s tummy, where it produced a good, cigarette-smoking, Catholic Polish boy named Andrzej.
Sometimes when I wrote my history, I would slip in pages I drew about Krzys Szczerba and his lonely and sad life in the United States.
It was hard for me, at times, to separate out the connections that crisscrossed like intersecting highways through and around my life in Ealing.
It was the truth, and I had to get it down.
And that was our day. You know what I mean.
I took off my boxers and went to bed.
It was 6:01 a.m.
The end of the world was about four hours old. Just a baby.
Johnny McKeon was picking up two dozen donuts at that moment.
Ollie Jungfrau was waking up, trying to decide if he should masturbate or not.
It was just after three in the afternoon in Afghanistan.
Louis, the Chinese cook at The Pancake House, whose real name was Ah Wong Sing, was taking a shit in the public restroom at the Ealing Coin Wash Launderette.
History never tells about people taking shits. I can’t for a moment believe that guys like Theodore Roosevelt or Winston Churchill never took a shit. History always abbreviates out the shit-taking and excess consonants.
In about a week, the pieces started coming together.
In a week, we figured out history.
Eventually, we would learn this:
The thing inside the globe, the Contained MI Plague Strain 412E, wasn’t anything remarkable unless it came into contact with human blood.
Contained MI Plague Strain 412E really was contained and harmless inside Johnny McKeon’s glass universe.
Tyler dropped that universe directly onto the spot where earlier that day Robby Brees began spelling out GRANT WALLACE MURDERED ME in his own blood.
The Contained MI Plague Strain 412E was happy to meet Robby Brees’s blood.
Robby Brees was my best friend. He taught me how to dance. We smoked cigarettes. He kissed me. To be honest, I kissed him back. Robby was homosexual. I didn’t know if I was anything.
I wondered what I was. None of that mattered. Nobody knew anything about it except for me and Robby.
The man whose scientific company invented the Contained MI Plague Strain 412E died when his plane crashed into the ocean. The plane’s engines were destroyed by billowing plumes of caustic ash. The ash came from a volcano in Guatemala. It was called Huacamochtli. Robby Brees’s dad was filming the Huacamochtli eruption at precisely the same moment that Dr. Grady McKeon’s jet disintegrated on impact with the surface of the Gulf of Mexico.
Water is unyielding when you’re moving at 500 mph.
We were in seventh grade then. My brother, Eric Christopher Szerba, joined the United States Marines that year. At the same moment Huacamochtli was being filmed by Robby’s father and Dr. Grady McKeon’s body was being torn apart by the force of impact, my brother, Eric, was on his way to boot camp. Robby Brees’s dad never came back to Ealing, Iowa. He didn’t want to see Robby’s mom ever again.
We found this out later:
The Contained MI Plague Strain 412E said hello to Robby Brees’s blood on the asphalt in Grasshopper Jungle.
And the end of the world began at about 2:00 a.m., around three and a half feet away from a discarded floral-print sleeper sofa infested with pubic lice in Ealing, Iowa. One time, Travis Pope unfolded the sofa and fucked his wife, Eileen, on it.
Both of them had pubic lice.
It didn’t matter.
History is my compulsion.
I see the connections.
PART 2:
WATERLOO CORNFIELD
PALINDROMES
KRZYS SZCZERBA WAS Catholic.
He smoked cigarettes.
Christopher Szerba was Catholic.
He did not give up smoking cigarettes when he gave up the excess consonants.
All the Szerba boys were cigarette-smoking Catholics until my father fell in love with my mother and married her. He quit smoking, converted, and as a result, his semen created two strong Lutheran sons inside her body.
Their names were Eric Christopher and Austin Andrzej Szerba.
My dad picked up some discarded consonants from the wastepile of history.
It is pronounced Uhnn-zhay.
Don’t ask me why. It’s Polish and shit.
I smoke cigarettes. I hate church. But one day, after I talk to my father about my confusing sexual impulses, I will change my name back to Szczerba.
My father’s name was Eric Andrew Szerba. My mother was Connie Kenney before she married him.
People from Iowa like vowels and rhymes.
Lutherans in Iowa like John Deere tractors and big breakfasts on Saturdays.
Usually, my dad would only have to stand outside my door and speak my name to get me out of bed for our Saturday breakfast. That morning, the morning after Robby and I went up on the roof of the Ealing Mall to find some shit, my father had to come into my room and shake my shoulder.
“You stink, Austin,” my father, whose name was Eric, told me.
“I have B.O.,” I agreed.
“Ingrid needs to shit,” my father said.
That was how we told each other good morning that day.
I sat up.
I would have gotten out of bed, but I realized I was naked under the sheet. I’d taken everything off when I finished writing, when I went to bed.
No sixteen-year-old boy wants to stand up naked in front of his father.
I thought about my decision to talk to him. I wanted to ask him if maybe he was confused about sexual attraction when he was my age. Or if maybe he was still confused about sexual attraction. Experimenting. Things falling into place. Where else would things fall, if not a place? It’s not like things are just going to float away. Gravity works. Dr. Grady McKeon certainly knew that when he was watching the Gulf of Mexico get closer and closer and closer.
Maybe the guys who painted the caves in Lascaux and Altamira were sexually confused, too.
I could not bring myself to talk to my father about sexuality while I was naked.
I decided it could wait.
Things would have to float a little while longer.
My father could tell I was naked. He watched me, like he was testing to see if I would get out from under the sheet.
But I was naked. I wasn’t going anywhere.
We watched each other, both of us caught up in eyeballing the palindrome of each other’s lives.
My mother took an antianxiety drug called Xanax. It was a little blue pill that looked like a tiny kayak. Robbie’s mother took it, too. Our moms were like Xanax sisters, except they didn’t know much more about each other than first names, who their baby boys’ best friends were, and Ealing gossip.