Slob

by Ellen Potter

  Back home, we dumped our haul in my room. Mom wasn’t home yet—she never gets home before six thirty—and Honey’s back teeth were swimming she had to pee so badly, so first thing I did was take her for a walk. Honey is a pit bull that Mom found in front of our apartment building one evening. We named her Honey so that she wouldn’t seem quite so scary to people, but it never really worked. In the elevator people press themselves up against the opposite wall and give her the evil eye. She doesn’t seem to care. She wags her tail at them anyway. She’s so easygoing that she never fusses when I put the Crap Catcher on her. It’s one of my first inventions. Fairly primitive—a strap around the waist and a loop fitted under her butt, made of wire slipped into a sleeve of plastic. Attached to the loop is a tiny motor, scavenged from an electric shaver I found at a demo site on Seventy-seventh Street. What you do is you fasten a plastic bag around the loop with a rubber band and walk your dog. When she does her thing, you push one button on a handheld remote and the band cinches together quickly. The rubber band pings off the loop and the plastic bag falls to the ground, ready for you to pick up and put in the garbage can. It works beautifully. You wouldn’t believe how many people stop me in the street and ask where they can buy one. The only weak spot is the rubber band pinging off somewhere.

  After I walked Honey, I opened the fridge and found a plate on the bottom shelf with an apple, a slim slice of cheese, and a handful of zucchini sticks. My afternoon snack. I devoured it in two minutes flat. It made zero impact on the empty hole in my stomach where the three Oreos should have been.

  I knew where the package of Oreos was kept. The cabinet above the refrigerator. My mom calls it the Stop-and-Think Cabinet. In order to reach it, you have to find the phone book and the dictionary, drag over a chair, put the phone book on the chair, the dictionary on top of the phone book, then balance yourself on top of the phone book and the dictionary in order to reach the shelf. All that dragging and balancing, and potentially falling, gives you time to stop and think if what’s in that cabinet is really worth the trouble. It was. But here’s the thing . . . let’s say I did take a few unauthorized Oreo cookies. There was a chance that Mom wouldn’t notice they were missing. But there was also a chance that she would. If she did, she wouldn’t get mad. She wouldn’t yell or anything like that. What she’d do was worse. She’d look me in the eye and tell me that I had broken my promise to her. Pow. That’s like getting the worst sucker punch right in the gut. If you don’t believe me, you don’t know Mom.

  Three more hours till dinner. I went to my room with a sickish rumbling in my stomach. In the center of the room was a tripod on which stood an eighteen-inch satellite dish. On the floor was a black receiver, an old television set, a mass of wire coils, connectors, and various hardware.

  Her name is Nemesis.

  I’ve been researching and building Nemesis for a year and a half. She’s nearly finished.

  I’m not going to tell you what she will do once she’s complete. You don’t know me well enough yet. You probably think you do. Everyone thinks they know the fat kid. We’re so obvious. Our embarrassing secret is out there for everyone to see, spilling over our belts, flapping under our chins, stretching the seams of our jeans.

  That doesn’t mean we don’t have other secrets that you can’t see.

  I pulled out the metal toolbox from under my bed and opened it. As always, I took a moment to admire the sight—neatly organized nuts, bolts, and screws in the top shelf, tiny to medium-sized wire clippers and an X-Acto knife in the middle shelf, and needle nose pliers, wire strippers, and screwdrivers in the bottom shelf, arranged according to size, along with bottles of oil and grease and an ancient soldering iron.

  Thomas Edison once said, “To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.”

  I definitely had the junk. There was also a carton in my closet, full of old motors—motors from electric fans, automatic jewelry cleaners, and toy cars all the way up to a boat’s outboard motor—tangles of wires, spare parts from the auto salvage, an elevator cable, and much more.

  I sat down and started to work on Nemesis. When an hour flew I began to realize something alarming.

  I could try her now.

  After a year and half of researching and scavenging and tinkering, she was ready for a dry run. It made me feel squirrelly in my stomach. But maybe I was just hungry.

  I switched her on, tuned the TV to Channel 37, a station which we don’t get on our regular television. Then I waited. Nothing happened. I adjusted the angle of the Satellite dish a dozen times. Nothing.

  Two more hours flew by. There was a quick knock at my door, and Mom popped her head in. I’ll give you a description of Mom’s head. She has heavy-lidded green eyes without many eyelashes, which is, unfortunately, very apparent due to her thick glasses. The glasses have pink frames. Her nose is . . . just a nose, nothing remarkable there. Her lips chap pretty easily. Her hair is blond and thin, and she often wears it in a short ponytail. You wouldn’t notice her in a crowd. Or if you did, you might mistake her for the woman who makes appointments for you at the orthodontist’s office.

  It’s her voice that is unusual. It’s velvety. It brushes against your eardrum and slips down your ear canal and it makes you feel like everything will turn out okay, no matter how bad things look at the moment. Which is a good thing since Mom is a 911 dispatcher for the NYC Police Department.

  Every year, she gets Christmas cards from people who have spoken to her on the 911 line, thanking her. They address the letters to The Woman with the Beautiful Voice or The Lady Who Sounds Like an Angel. The guy who distributes the mail always knows who they mean and he drops the cards on Mom’s desk.

  “What’s cooking, good-lookin’?” she asked.

  “Nothing much,” I answered a little glumly.

  “How’s the radio thingy coming?”

  She thinks Nemesis is a satellite radio. Well, she thinks that because I told her that. It was a lie. I also lied about where I got the parts. I told her I have a friend whose father owns a junk shop. She would be furious if she knew Jeremy and I were crashing demo sites.

  “It needs work.”

  “It looks fine to me,” she said. “Very . . . scientific.”

  “It doesn’t matter how it looks. It has to work. And so far, it doesn’t.” I try to be patient with her.

  “How was school?”

  “Same old. How was work?”

  “Same old.”

  We were both lying, of course. There was no way I was going to tell her how school was. It was too gruesome. And there was no way she was going to tell me how work was. Again, too gruesome. Although lately I think Jeremy gives her more anxiety than the stuff she hears at her job.

  For instance, this was the conversation at dinner:

  “How was the math test, Caitlin?” Mom asked Jeremy.

  “It was fine, Zelda,” Jeremy said.

  They have this thing. Mom refuses to call her Jeremy. She thinks it’s ridiculous. So Jeremy refuses to call her Mom and uses her real name instead.

  It drives them both insane.

  I try to stay out of it, though.

  “You know, Owen,” Mom said, “you look thinner.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “No, really,” she said. “I see a difference. Around your face, I think.”

  “Watch, I’ll probably only lose weight on my face,” I said. “Then I’ll have a tiny pinhead attached to a fat body.”

  “It doesn’t work that way, Owen.”

  “He’s being sarcastic, Zelda,” Jeremy said.

  “Besides,” Mom said, attempting to ignore her, “you were thin once. I’ve seen the pictures. You were very well proportioned.”

  “Can we not talk about this?” I said.

  Mom frowned and bit her lip. Then she said, “Oh, jeez. Sorry, honey. Of course.”

  She misunderstood. She thought it was the past I didn’t want to talk about. Actually it was the fact that I had once been skinny. Tha
t embarrassed me. I felt like I had failed some tests along the way. Like I had started out with fine biological potential and through my own weakness had wrecked it. I still had a bag of my old clothes from two years ago sitting in the back of my closet. Normal-sized clothes. I should have dumped them, but I didn’t want to. They reminded me of what I once was. The stupid thing was, though, I couldn’t look at them either, because they reminded me of what I once was. Consequently, they just sat there, taking up too much space. Much like myself.

  After dinner I flew through my homework, which was laughable, and took the elevator downstairs to apartment 5A. I pressed the buzzer, and in a minute the door was opened by a small, wiry man with skin the color of a Bit-O-Honey candy bar. This is Nima. He’s Tibetan, but he grew up in India and only came to New York a few months ago.

  “Tashi-deley,” he mouthed to me as he held a phone to his ear, and he nodded for me to come in. It was the dinkiest apartment you could imagine—one little room that served as a kitchen/dining room/living room/bedroom. You’d think that would be depressing, but it wasn’t. In fact, it was a really cheerful place, with bright wall hangings, and colorful cloth draped over the couch and bed (which was just a thin mattress tucked into a corner of the room). On top of the television set were framed pictures of a very pretty woman. In one picture she wore a long blue dress with a striped apron hanging down from her waist, and in another she wore jeans and a white tank top. That was his new wife, Pema. I tried not to stare too much at her.

  He had a little shrine on an end table in the corner, which was covered with a red, blue, and yellow cloth. On it was a statue of Buddha and a framed picture of the Dalai Lama, who is the leader of Tibet. Also, there were seven silver bowls filled with water, a bell, candles, and, depending on the day, a bunch of flowers or some pieces of fruit, which are offerings to the Buddha. Buddha doesn’t eat them, of course. It’s a Santa-and-the-milk-and-cookies kind of thing, without the presents or the ho, ho, ho. Although the Buddha definitely has that jolly fat man look about him.

  I sat down on the couch and waited for Nima to finish his call. He was speaking in Tibetan, but I was pretty sure he was talking to Pema, who was still living in India, because he barely said anything, and when he did talk, he kept being cut off mid-sentence. He didn’t get mad, though. It’s really hard to ruffle Nima. When he hung up, he smiled at me.

  “She have a hot temper,” he said. He’s secretly proud of that, I think, even though I’m under the impression that a hot temper is un-Buddhist.

  “What’s she mad about?”

  “Oh, I went to party at her cousin’s house in Brooklyn last week. Family party, such kind of thing. She heard I was flirting with her cousin.”

  “Were you?”

  “Actually, it’s possible.” He smiled. His left front tooth is covered with gold, which makes him look like a very good-natured pirate. You could see how he might flirt with some girl without really trying. He’s youngish, maybe twenty-one or twenty-two, something like that, and I bet girls would like him. He always looks like he’s about to wink at you, though I’ve never seen him actually wink.

  Nima made me some sweet tea and opened up a Tupperware container full of cold momos. Momos are Tibetan dumplings filled with meat and vegetables and garlic and other things. They are so good you could cry. Nima makes them by hand and sells them from a cart that he parks in front of the Museum of Natural History. We used to bump into each other in the elevator when I was walking Honey and he was coming back home from work. He was fascinated by the Crap Catcher and I was fascinated by the smell coming from his bag of leftover momos. It was a match made in heaven.

  Today, as always, he asked me how Nemesis was coming along. Fine, fine, still needs some work, I said. He didn’t know what Nemesis would do when it was finished. He once asked, back when I first met him.

  “If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me,” I said.

  “Perhaps not,” he’d replied. That was that. He’d never asked again. But he liked hearing about it. He told me that when the Dalai Lama was a kid, he used to be able to fix movie projectors and clocks and cars and that if the Dalai Lama hadn’t been the Dalai Lama, he would have been an engineer. I guess that puts me in pretty good company.

  I didn’t tell Nima about the thing with Mr. Wooly. It was just too humiliating. I did tell him about the missing Oreo cookies and Mason, though.

  “You’ve got to see this kid. He’s pure evil,” I said.

  “Hmm.”

  “Oh no. Are you going to tell me something Buddhist?” I said warily.

  “You don’t want to hear?” he asked, smiling.

  “Not really. But go ahead.”

  “This boy, Mason, he is your enemy?”

  “Well, he’s stealing from me, so yeah, it’s safe to say he’s my enemy.”

  “Good,” Nima said.

  “How is that good?” I asked.

  “Because enemies are very helpful. Better in some way than friends. If you stay calm when your enemy harms you, you become much stronger-type person.”

  I must have looked unimpressed because he added, “Also, it is good for your karma. You do good thing, good thing happen for you. You do bad thing—” He shook his head gravely. Then he smiled. It’s hard for Nima to stay too serious.

  “Fine,” I said. “So I stay calm and think nice Buddhist thoughts about Mason. Then tomorrow he goes pawing through my lunch bag and takes my cookies again.”

  “Possibly you could leave a note,” Nima said.

  “A note?!” My voice grew shrill. “And what do you suggest I say?”

  “You could say, ‘Kindly not to take my cookies.’”

  “Ha!” Sometimes Nima was very unrealistic. I think it came from him always assuming that people were sensible.

  “Or maybe . . . actually . . .” He glanced at me as though he were about to suggest something he thought he shouldn’t.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You could make a thing. Like your Crap Catcher. Only a Teef Catcher.”

  He had trouble with the th sound, so it took me a moment to realize that he meant “Thief Catcher.”

  I blinked.

  “I could,” I said.

  “Just to prevent him from doing so again. Not harming him, of course.”

  “Of course not.” I was liking the idea more and more with each passing minute.

  Nima, on the other hand, looked more and more apprehensive. He was probably wondering if this suggestion was going to bring on some bad karma for me or something like that.

  “But maybe you give this kid another chance. Maybe it was such kind of one-time mischief. Like flirting with your wife’s cousin.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll wait till tomorrow. I’ll give him another chance. We’ll see if it happens again.”

  4

  It happened again. My three Oreos were gone. And the top of the eco-container was sealed tight. It felt like Mason Ragg was leaving me a message. Something like: I can get in and out of your lunch so easily that I even have time to seal up your eco-container. And PS, an eco-container is very hard to seal. You are powerless against me.

  Maybe that sounds paranoid to you. You’ll see, though, that it wasn’t.

  When I got home that afternoon, I put aside my work on Nemesis and started working on my new idea right away. It had to be small and inconspicuous. And lethal.

  Just kidding.

  I only wanted it to inflict a moderate amount of pain.

  I rummaged through my cardboard box and pulled out the half a handcuff that Jeremy and I had found. It looked like someone had managed to smash the chain link between the two manacles. Why they did that, I have no idea. Jeremy suggested that the person may have been handcuffed to a top secret briefcase, like you see on old movies, and a thief had smashed the chain to get it away from him. Seemed far-fetched, but who knows. Anyway, I always wanted to use it for something, but I’d never had an opportunity before now. I pulled out my yellow graph paper notebook and
my mechanical pencil and began to draw my plans. When I was satisfied, I dug around through my box and found a spring from the hood latch of an old Buick, a Swiss Army knife, and a dog collar with some very nasty spikes on it. I opened my toolbox and pulled out my trusty soldering iron, and I borrowed a tiny sewing kit from Mom’s desk.

  By the time I was finished, I had lined my lunch sack with a mechanism that looked like it had come straight out of the Spanish Inquisition. Spiked handcuffs, high-tensile springs. I dubbed it the Jaws of Anguish. It was genius. I actually felt sorry for Mason. I imagined him shrieking in pain as the Jaws of Anguish snapped tight around his wrist, my sack of lunch attached to his hand. Teachers would poke their heads out in the hallway. Busted. Immediate suspension. If there was such a thing at our school.

  I called up Izzy and told him my plan, fully expecting him to be as excited as I was.

  “I don’t know, Owen,” he said guardedly.

  “What? Come on, it’s perfect!” I said.

  “Yeah, but you’re dealing with Mason Ragg, dude. The guy is capable of anything. Do you really want to be pulling that particular tiger’s tail?”

  “Well, I have to do something,” I said.

  But once I was lying there in bed, in the dark, I kept imagining Mason’s face . . . scarred, evil, and really, really angry.

  I almost lost my nerve. By morning, though, the prospect of being carved up by Mason’s switchblade seemed less likely. Slightly.

  I checked the Jaws of Anguish several times that morning using a section of old pipe as a “wrist.” It worked like a dream.