Anton's Odyssey

by Andre, Marc

  Ellen rolled her eyes. The rest of us were so stupid we had missed the pun completely.

  “Yeah, makes sense.” Hammond said, curling the toes on his new foot. “They must be really short there too.” Hammond’s new foot seemed only half as long as his old one.

  Allen looked pensive. “I’m not sure why they would be. You probably just got unlucky.”

  Hammond shrugged. His coping skills were remarkable.

  “You’re going to need a different size shoe for each foot.” Cotton laughed.

  “Cotton!” Ellen scolded.

  “Naw, it’s all right.” Hammond said. “It does look kind of funny having this tiny foot grafted on the bottom of my leg. Doc says he placed it so both my legs are the same length, which is good. Looks a lot better now than when I got shot.”

  “Yeah what did it look like?” Cotton asked, morbid curiosity getting the better of him.

  “Man, it was gory!” Hammond’s grin seemed inappropriate as he recounted his dismemberment in graphic detail. If Dr. Zanders didn’t have a suitable donor foot, perhaps Hammond’s demeanor would have been completely different. But with a relatively good clinical outcome, Hammond didn’t have to pretend he was terribly traumatized.

  “Must have been a million to one shot! To reach me, the round would have had to go through the gaps between at least four or five different steps of at least three different flights of stairs, hitting nothing else along the way. Doc says it was one of those non-penetrating rounds, like the ones in Joinksmokker’s gun in that video you showed us.” Hammond said to Allen.

  “Round hit right as I opened the door. Hit just past my heel and came out the top of my foot, shredding everything in its path. All my toes came off, except the big one. It just hung off the side by a small shred of meat.”

  Ellen gasped in horror. Allen looked uncomfortable. Too polite to dismiss himself, he continued to pretend to listen intently.

  “I still had my heel, though, so I could still sort of walk.” Hammond said. “I was able to push Mike out the door, but blood was gushing everywhere. When I tried to stand up again, I passed out. Doc says it was because the bullet ripped open several arteries and I lost a lot of blood.”

  “Why didn’t they just replace the part of your foot that was blown off?” Cotton asked.

  “Wouldn’t fit for starters. Doc said putting on a whole new foot was less complicated and more likely to be successful.”

  “Yeah, but now you’re going to walk in circles. I mean look at that puny thing!” Cotton joked.

  “Cotton! Stop!” Ellen shrieked. “Hammond, don’t listen to him. Your new foot looks just fine.”

  “Naw, it’s okay. I know it looks funny. I’m just glad the doc had a human foot to spare and didn’t have to graft on a hairy monkey fist or a goat hoof or something.”

  Hammond’s mirth added just enough levity to cut through the overwhelming tension we felt from see our friend hurt so badly. Even Allen smiled.

  Unofficially, Hammond was the hero of the ship for rescuing Mike. Officially, Hammond received a reprimand for breaking over a dozen ship rules. He was sentenced to a week of in-school suspension, which was really a non-punishment considering he spent most of his school hours in physical therapy learning to walk again on his new midget foot. Hammond never named us as co-conspirators of the rescue mission. He wasn’t selfish enough to hog all the glory, just too loyal to share the blame. A few people knew something was amiss. In the mess hall, we overheard murmurs and rumblings about how Hammond lacked the technical skills to reprogram a ho-bot. But with the nightmare of the abductions behind us, nobody on the ship wanted to probe further into what had became a very unpleasant memory.

  Classes resumed as we cruised the last few fractions of a light year toward Gliese 581e at a meandering pace. Allen locked himself in his living unit, saying he was too busy with homework to hang out with us. With Hammond recovering in the medical center, I spent most of my time with Cotton. Fortunately, our acceleration was so slow that Cotton didn’t experience motion sickness.

  My brother tried to teach me how to play video games, but I was hopeless, my fingers much too slow and uncoordinated to operate the game controller effectively.

  “Come on it’s not that hard!” Cotton said, trying to restrain the frustration in his voice. “Just hit the ‘B’ button to block.”

  I thought I hit the “B” button, but instead of blocking, my swashbuckler did what looked like a dance step, which was ineffective at deflecting the rapier Cotton’s pirate had thrust toward my face.

  “No not the ‘Z’ button, the ‘B’ button, bonehead!”

  His eyeball skewered out, my swashbuckler collapsed and died. Cotton’s pirate performed a victory dance, waving his bloody rapier around for all to see.

  “That reminds me,” Cotton said, “I wonder if Allen ever figured out whose eye I poked out with his bayonet?”

  With Hammond getting hurt, the operation to retrieve the jano-bot seemed a far distant memory. “His program must have broken the security code at the medical center by now,” I said. “He either forgot, or he’s deliberately been putting off hacking the medical center’s computers.”

  “Why would he do that?” Cotton asked.

  I thought for a while, trying to figure out the best way to explain things not only to Cotton but to myself. Over the last few months, while lying in bed at night and before drifting off the sleep, I had performed some serious self-reflection. I had reached some rather unflattering conclusions about my brother and myself.

  “I think Allen feels a bit disturbed with everything that’s happened the last few months: You putting some guy’s eye out; Meddlenates getting ripped to shreds in the energy reservoir; Joinksmokker torn in half with the rail gun; Boldergat and Jackass Bob getting vented out into space with the rest of the armed response team; Hammond getting his foot blown off. That’s a lot of hurt and death even for our old neighborhood.” I explained.

  “Yeah, but I thought he’d be into that sort of thing. The way he researches all those weapons and collects all that space marine gear.” Cotton replied.

  “True,” I said, “but I think it was always just some sort of fantasy to him. He’s kind of a wimpy kid. I’m pretty sure he got picked on a lot by the bigger kids before he made friends with us. Learning about weapons and owning Space Marine gear probably gave him a sense of empowerment.”

  “Empower-what?”

  “You know, made him feel less wimpy,” I clarified. “Before this voyage, I don’t think he’d ever seen anything rougher than punk kids scuffling when teachers weren’t around. And that’s nothing compared to seeing somebody getting knifed. Now he’s realizing that it’s not just his wimpy body that’s preventing him from being a tough guy. He cannot be a tough guy. His brain is simply not wired that way. He’s going to have to be someone else entirely, someone who’s not a tough guy. In a way, he’s going to have to re-invent himself, and that’s a lot to bear.”

  “For him to lock himself in his room and not hangout with his friends though,” Cotton said, “that can’t be normal.”

  “Actually Allen is normal. We are the ones who aren’t normal.”

  “What do you mean?” Cotton asked.

  “How many nightmares have you had since you poked that guy’s eye out?”

  Cotton thought for a while. “A couple.”

  “How many nightmares that weren’t about the galley running out of food?”

  “None.”

  “You don’t have any flashbacks about the guy strangling you?”

  “No, I fought him off, so why should I?”

  “How many nightmares about Joinksmokker getting cut in half?”

  “None.”

  “Me neither! And hanging around Allen, Hammond, and Ellen these last few months, I realize now that the type of mayhem we’ve witnessed affects most people pretty deeply. The fact that it doesn’t freak us out at all goes to show that we’re the ones who are abnormal.”

  �
��Okay then,” Cotton said defensively, “let’s just pretend you are right and that somehow you and I aren’t quite normal —”

  “We’re not.” I interjected.

  “Then why are we abnormal?” Cotton asked.

  “Remember the first scuffle you got into?”

  “Actually I don’t. I’ve been in so many. Must have been sometime during kindergarten.”

  “I don’t remember my first scuffle either. Remember how Mr. Yongscolder practically had a heart attack when he reviewed your disciplinary file?”

  “Yeah, he acted like I was some sort of criminal, which I’m not.”

  “I don’t think you are either. Back home kids getting into scuffles is so common nobody really cares.”

  “Why should they? Nobody ever gets hurt too badly, unless one of them is a goon or a gangster.”

  “It’s a big deal up here because people just aren’t used to it. Now, here’s another question for you: When was the first time you saw adults fighting?”

  “First grade. Some drunk who hung out by the schoolyard cracked another drunk over the head with an empty bottle of Thurgood MacDougal’s Southern Style Bourbon. The bottle shattered and there was blood everywhere.”

  “Did that give you nightmares?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “It did. You had them for weeks. You also had nightmares when you saw some guy take a knife in the gut outside the grocery store. It wasn’t until after you’ve seen over a dozen real fights, muggings, and knifings that it quit bothering you. It took a lot of mayhem for you and me to alter our mental defenses so that we could see that kind of violence without completely shutting down.”

  “What you’re saying doesn’t make any sense at all. If anything, my defenses are better now because they stop me from feeling bad or from having nightmares.”

  “No, you don’t get it! The feeling bad, the nightmares, they make you normal. You get that way because it’s normal to empathize with other people and feel distressed when they get hurt. We’re not normal in that way anymore.”

  “But we’re not bad people. It’s not like we’re kidnapping folks and holding them for ransom.”

  “At some kind of visceral level, we are bad people. Sure we are not rotten to the core, and we don’t deliberately choose to go out and hurt people, but let’s say things played out differently on the asteroid. Let’s say the smelly kid and the goons managed to kidnap us. What do you think would have happened then?”

  “Well mom wouldn’t have been able to pay off the ransom.”

  “You got that right. She couldn’t even give us three lousy M-notes without taking one back for herself.”

  “Allen and the others might have saved us, the way we used the ho-bot to save Mike.”

  “True, but let’s say they didn’t.”

  “I guess the goons would have killed us.”

  “Let’s also pretend they didn’t. Let’s pretend they decided to keep us alive as long as we proved useful.”

  “We could always try to escape.”

  “You’re kind of missing the point.” I snapped.

  “Well it’s a stupid scenario.”

  “I suppose it is,” I sighed. I just wasn’t reaching Cotton. “The point I’m trying to make is that we would have ended up like the smelly kid, become lesser goons ourselves. At first we’d do it just to survive, but the problem is that, unlike the smelly kid, we’d be good at it because we don’t feel the horror and revulsion as strongly as others do when we see someone get hurt. We could keep doing lesser goon things over and over again. Soon we’d forget why we started doing it in the first place, and it wouldn’t be about survival anymore. We’d rise up the ranks, and before we knew it, we’d whack Duffy and the leader of the Tunnel Serpents, and we’d be running the entire Libra Space Station underworld.

  “Deep down, you and I are abnormal. But, other than getting into a few minor scuffles and breaking some rules here and there, we still act pretty normally because we live in an environment that still sort of rewards us when we act normally. We don’t deliberately go out and hurt people. In the wrong environment, had we stayed in the asteroid or even stayed back home in Yucaipa, there’s no telling what would have become of us.”

  Cotton scratched his head and sniffed. To a certain extent he was following me, but I could tell he didn’t like what I had to say. “What about violent TV shows and video games. We always hear how those mess you up pretty bad. Allen loves gory games and shows, and yet you say he’s not abnormal like us.” My brother retorted.

  “Video games and TV shows aren’t real. They might help create tough guy fantasies in kids, and that might be why Allen is so fascinated with weapons. But I doubt games and shows affect people the same way watching real violence does. Let’s say I wrote a book about this voyage and some normal person read it. I bet they’d still get sick if they saw someone get ripped in half the next day.”

  “You’re going to write a book?” Cotton asked.

  “No I’m not.”

  Cotton was deliberately forcing me down a tangent. I could tell he wanted to pretend this conversation was pointless and boring. Honestly, I didn’t feel like fighting him anymore. “I don’t think a book about this ship is going to make you any money. You should write about Hollywood. Books about life in Hollywood sell big time.”

  “I can only write about what I know. If I find myself in Hollywood, I should go ahead and wake up, because I’d be dreaming.”

  Cotton returned to his video game, defeating his next two opponents without really exerting himself. I was about to leave the room when he said, “We really should find out whose eye I poked out.”

  “I’ll talk to Allen about it eventually.” I replied. “Right now, though, I’ll give him some space. Once we land on Gliese 581e, I am sure Allen and I will figure out how to tip off the authorities before they start thawing out the cryogens. That way Fiona Mammalot won’t wake up to the shock of being twenty light years away from home.”

  Dr. Zanders sent me a message asking me to take Cotton into the medical center for a quick visit. While we were there we checked in on Hammond, who seemed very glad to see us. He could walk short distances quite well on his little midget foot but still needed crutches for longer voyages.

  Dr. Zanders explained that we would be decelerating soon. Since my brother was unusually prone to motions sickness, Dr. Zanders wanted to be proactive. “If we start Cotton on an antiemetic now, you might not have to bring him in for a shot later.”

  I thought the idea was great. I wouldn’t have to clean up Cotton’s vomit, nor would I have to strain my back lugging him to the medical center. Best of all, I wouldn’t have to see his ugly pimply ass when Dr. Zanders gave him a shot. Cotton agreed he would rather take pills now rather than get a shot later.

  “Give him one pill in the morning right before breakfast,” Dr. Zanders explained. “From what I hear, landing on Gliese 581e is pretty rough. The atmosphere is unusually dense, and very high winds are a given. This ship is pretty much guaranteed to experience some sort of turbulent-mediated centrifugal yaw acceleration, so give him two pills the day of the landing. As a side effect of a double dose, he might get a little loopy, but he should be able to keep his lunch down.”

  Outside the medical center, Cotton asked if he could take a triple dose right then and there just to see what the doctor meant by “loopy.” “Don’t be stupid,” I barked angrily. The last thing I wanted was to have to explain to Dr. Zanders why I let Cotton poison himself.

  Mr. Yongscolder posted that classes would be canceled the day of the landing. I could hear cheering throughout the ship as kids read the announcement on the vid screen.

  Ellen sent me a message asking if I wanted to go to a tea party at her place the next morning, right before landing preparations. Without Boldergat around to pitch a fit, tea parties and potlucks were becoming commonplace in living units. At first I thought Ellen was asking me out, but as I read the next few lines my heart rate returne
d to normal, my dreams dashed. She also invited Allen, Hammond, and Cotton and explained that she expected us to wear shirts with collars and “no tough guy baggy pants,” which were the only kinds of trousers I owned.

  I gave Cotton his double dose of antiemetic before breakfast. After we ate, we put on our collared shirts. Cotton’s made him look like a total dweeb. I hadn’t worn mine in years, and I had out grown it. My arms barely fit through the sleeves making me look like one of those meatheads you see pumping themselves at the gym.

  Cotton was cackling by the time we arrived at the door of Ellen’s living unit, pointing at every shadow and laughing, “tee hee hee.” I guess this is what Dr. Zanders meant by “loopy,” I thought.

  I pressed the buzzer and a slim woman in a classy dress opened the door, Ellen’s mother no doubt. She looked just like her daughter, only with the hint of crow’s feet lining her eyes and a few grey streaks in her hair.

  “What’s with all the adults on this ship cloning themselves,” Cotton mumbled loudly, “first Hammond’s dad and now Ellen’s mother too!”

  Ellen’s mother was clearly expecting better manners. “What’s wrong with your brother?” she asked.

  “Sorry ma’am. Dr. Zanders gave him some medication so he won’t puke during the landing.” I explained. “He’s experiencing some side effects. Normally he’s not this bad.”

  Ellen’s mother cringed slightly when I said the word “puke.” Perhaps she also expected Ellen’s friends to be a little less vulgar.

  The elegant lady led us inside. Practically every boy on the ship was there, even Charlie, the jackass son of the first mate. Most of the boys had brought Ellen flowers from the commissary. Bouquets were stacked seven high in the living room.

  “Why didn’t you get Ellen flowers, doofus?” Cotton said loudly. “Now she’ll never go out with you.”

  “Shut up!” I said softly, my face turning red.

  “Hey check out Mr. Biceps! You been going to the gym without me?” a familiar voice said. Hammond sat on the couch, his midget foot propped up on the ottoman, and his crutches leaning against the wall. He was still holding his bouquet of flowers. Apparently he had not yet found a chance to give them to Ellen.