A Matter of Life and Death or Something

by Ben Stephenson

  When I go walking around in the woods it always feels like time stops. The problem is, it doesn’t really. Time is the one thing I’ll never understand. One minute I’m leaving the house and my watch says 4:00 and one minute later Simon is calling me for supper and it’s 6:30. Probably everyone wishes they had a time machine, and I probably do, too.

  Some Obvious Places I Would Go in My Time Machine:

  –The time when Adam and Eve were around and didn’t eat the apples yet, and were still naked (to tell them to be careful)

  –The time when Finch fell in the mud so hard and it was really funny

  –The time when the first pizza ever was invented and I could have the very first slice

  –The time when I crawled out of my real mom’s vagina, and I would make myself memorize who was in the room

  –The time when Jesus is supposed to come back again (to see if he will still wear a beard or not)

  –The time when the history book writers had to start rewriting all the history books because of how much I was changing with my time machine

  –The instant right before Phil was about to make himself die.

  WE WAIT

  WE SEE HIM. See the man walking under our branches, between our trunks, toward the river, carrying only a notebook. See him wearing white. He is bright and clear to us in white jeans, a clean white t-shirt and white sneakers. It’s a warm morning though it’s late fall, nearly winter—the soil is damp but holds no snow, and beneath us the sunlight sometimes reaches the man, and he glows.

  He walks with slow confidence, stepping carefully down the hill, his arms held at forty-five-degree angles to his body. He places one foot in front of the other and walks along a thick root until it nearly meets another. He stretches out his leg and switches to the next root, his arms still suspended, notebook in right hand; he balances and keeps his head down and walks almost musically, as if watching intently while treading along a piano, and picking out all the right notes in a melody he makes with his footsteps: bright, slow, rhythmic and lingering. He walks on our roots like this for some time, crossing a series of linked dark tightropes over the green-brown earth.

  He hops down and his thin black hair bounces and lands in his eyes. He brushes it aside and finds a nearby rock to sit on. He looks toward the river, watches the surface of the water in the small cove: an expanse of warm glass. He crosses his right leg over his left and continues to stare. He shuts his eyes so hard his face fills with creases, and he holds them shut. We see his teeth clenched. He opens the notebook and drapes it over his leg, takes a pen from his pants pocket and writes something quickly. He studies the top of the page with dark eyebrows drawn together, daring the word to stand up and swim away. He crosses it out and writes another. Immediately he crosses the second out as well. We watch him make seven more attempts before deciding.

  The next words come quickly, and he puts them down meticulously, precisely on the page. He seems as if he’s recalling a long phrase he’s never quite heard, but is transcribing it flawlessly. When he stops writing we watch him take a small translucent bottle from his pocket, and the sun plays in the bottle’s orangeness, silhouetting the tiny contents at the bottom against the colour of iodine. He twists the cap off and pours a small pile of fine white crystals into his left hand. With one finger he pushes the grains around, making patterns on his palm. Abruptly, as if of its own will, his hand raises and tips them into his mouth, and he tries to swallow.

  We watch him stare. He waits.

  Immediately he is writing again, almost illegibly, the words striking the page and landing where they must. More and more words charge at him and he writes.

  Then he is eliminating. He draws long lines, slashing through the abundance, shedding words and banishing them.

  Few are left when his body begins to ask itself what is happening. We hear his breathing grow heavy. We watch him shut the notebook and jump up, turning in all directions, wild and urgent. We see the book fall to the forest floor. We watch his muscles tense as he pulls his white clothes off. Carrying them with him, he heads for the beach, the book forgotten. It remains.

  We hear his feet crushing the gravel so roughly, so loud. His steps echo over the calm water, and across the river more of us are listening. More are watching. We watch his chest contract, as if strapped with belts quickly tightening. We listen as he coughs deeply, relentlessly. He stumbles along the gravel and then the grey sand, past thick tangles of driftwood collected on the shore. We hear his sloshing steps cutting into the shallow water and his splash into the deep.

  We wait in the silence. We listen for the next shimmering splash, the returning splash. We listen for the next rough breath breaking surface, and it does not come. And it still does not come.

  AN UGLY DUCKLING

  AFTER ALGEBRA I came home from school—which is what I like to call it when I’m done my lessons and I can run from the kitchen into the woods, because obviously there isn’t much difference between home and school for me—and I was in an amazingly bad mood. Simon was getting on top of my nerves, because during Math my brain wouldn’t stop thinking about the real dads and he wouldn’t stop telling me to pay attention.

  But God was in a good mood I think, ’cause it was just barely spring but he was shining all the light he could on our neighbourhood all day. He decided that the day needed no wind, or rain, or even clouds, and he painted the sky the prettiest of blues, as if he was a huge fan of postcards.

  So there God was making this amazing day, and there I was solving the hardest algebra ever. I couldn’t pay attention, and all I could focus on was how it was extraordinarily beautiful outside and how much I wanted to get out of the stupid house. I kept asking God to please make Simon get sick or get hurt (just a little) or even just fall asleep, but I think he was too busy painting the day, so I came home from school at 3:00 as usual. Does that guy ever do anything you ask him to?

  So Simon was on top of my nerves, or I was on top of his, and either way when school was finally done I walked across the yard and into the woods thinking angry things.

  (Meanwhile my real dad was pulling his solid gold car into his huge driveway, after a long day of work at the Mint. He was exhausted from a long hard day of printing money. My real dad was very important and respected at the Mint, so they let him choose his own salary and print off as much money for himself as he wanted. So he made money for twenty-two hours a day, and the Mint didn’t keep track anymore.

  He turned the ruby doorknob and burst through the door of his mansion and all seven of my real sisters and brothers jumped on him like leeches who only wanted hugs, not blood. He called them all by name and kissed them all on their foreheads, one by one, and then they all said together, “What did you bring us today, Daddy?”

  With a cunning smile he distributioned to them all of their favourite chocolate bars and slipped misprinted twenty dollar bills into their tuxedo pockets so that they could play stock market later. He went into one of his ten bathrooms and clapped for the tap to turn on, then washed the green and blue ink stains from his shining hands.

  My real mom came and leaned against the door frame in her tangerine-orange summer dress and took off her sunglasses, then leaned in and frenched my real dad for about five minutes. Then she said “Honey, a boy named Arthur is calling for you on line three... he says he’s your son?”

  “Nonsense,” my real dad swiftly replied, “Put him on hold. Can’t you see I’m ever so tired from such a long day of printing money?”

  My real mom strutted back over to the phone and pushed the HOLD button, hung up, and put a kettle on to make coffee.)

  Jazz piano hold-music was stuck in my head as I walked underneath the huge skinny trees. I took out my almost-great-grandfather’s binoculars and peeped around, except when Simon gave them to me he said that my almost-great-grandfather actually would have called them “fi
eld glasses” instead of binoculars. Looking through the field glasses, I only spied all the ordinary things: a sticky-looking bird’s nest, my favourite boulder shaped like a sea turtle, a couple squirrels squirrelling around in the roof of shadowy branches, and the treehouse sitting way over there on the cliff. For a millisecond I thought maybe I’d go in the treehouse and work on some stuff but then I thought I should just stick to the woods.

  The Woods By My House:

  –The trees are all cedar and birch, with a couple pines and spruces and fat oaks popping up every once in a while.

  –A bunch of little hills covered in brown pine needles, crushed up old leaves, dirt, a little bit of old snow.

  –Some jagged cliffs by the water, a tiny gully, a clearing, and, farther down, a not-very-sandy beach.

  –Rocks with creeping green moss like soft emeralds, bright orange lichens that look like when cars rust apart and get flaky, and white stringy stuff like cauliflower spaghetti.

  –Spiderwebs that always get wrapped around your face but then you can’t find the spider.

  –Trees so tall and skinny that it feels like wandering through an NBA team’s potluck dinner party on your knees.

  –A rotten smell that is kind of sweet and isn’t gross.

  –In the summer you look up and there’s a smudge of different greens against the blinding sky light so bright, and dark thin trunks stretching up and kind of jumping towards it.

  –Ants.

  –Paths that aren’t real paths, they’re only kind-of-paths, because I walk on them so much.

  I reached one of my favourite spots in the woods. It’s this small clearing with no trees except on the sides, which are very nice to sit under. It was so beautiful out that day, and spring was coming up quick. That was amazing, because kind of soon after that it would be summer vacation. The snow had been disappearing: the street was extraordinarily clear, but it still stuck around the ground in the woods. The snow was 50% still there. I wandered through the trees, thanking God for not making winter last forever.

  I didn’t know why Simon worried about me playing in the woods so much. One time he called me a “little escapist” when I was going out the door, and I didn’t know what that meant, so I decided to have fun in the woods and forget about it instead of figuring it out. I found out later that it means someone who chains themself up and dunks themself underwater but gets out without drowning. Which is weird, and I still didn’t know why Simon called me that; it’s not like I ever pretended to be an escapist or anything.

  I sat down on the sea turtle rock and photosynthesized. I let the sun hit me in the face and make me feel glowy. In the shade it was chilly, so I was wearing my green jacket over my t-shirt, but in the sunlight it was so warm. I thought about the trees and how they were basically doing the same thing: letting the sun warm them up and keep them alive. I thought about some other things.

  Like how my street was so long, and all the houses stood far apart like they hated each other. And a bunch of people lived inside the houses, but I didn’t know any of them yet. As far as kids my age, there’s only Finch and Victoria. Simon Alexander Finch is an annoying boy one year younger than me, who lives three houses away, which is way farther than it sounds, because of how separate the houses are. I already have enough Simons in my life as it is, obviously, so I just call him Finch. Finch and I only saw each other once in a blue mood, and that was fine by me.

  I mean I didn’t hate Finch. Sometimes I wanted to call him my nemesis, but that was only because I liked the word “nemesis,” and not because it was the 100% truth. The truth is that I just didn’t care much about him at all, really, and that’s why we weren’t friends. The thing is that his mom and my Simon thought that Finch and me were superb friends, so sometimes they made us play. It also didn’t help that Finch was confused for some reason into thinking we were friends.

  Finch just thinks he’s the best at everything. If you’re playing soccer with him, he’s going to tell you what a rainbow kick is, for the billionth time, and show you how he’s so good at doing them. And the thing is, he’s just not even good at doing them. I’m not either, to be honest, but it’s not like I go around telling everybody I am or something.

  Like one day a couple months before, Finch was in my woods with me, and we were over by the treehouse because Finch loves the treehouse because he doesn’t have his own one, so he always wants to go look at it. So one second he’s telling me about how awesome my treehouse is, and then one second later he’s showing me some mistake that me and Simon made building it, and telling me that if he’d made it, it would’ve been ten times stronger and ten times bigger and ten times cooler. But I couldn’t think of anything ten times less true. I doubt he even owns a hammer. Then like always he asked why can’t we just play in the treehouse, and I told him because it was so boring in there, but he climbed up anyway.

  Then, to top it all off, he starts bragging to me.

  “Victoria said she wants to be my girlfriend.”

  He was always trying to make Victoria be his girlfriend.

  “Finch, quit being so moronic. And she’s way too much of a babe for you.”

  Victoria Brown is too much of a babe for Finch. Victoria’s a girl that me and Finch know, who lives way up our street. She’s a year older than Finch and the same age as me, and I am a way better match for her. But I don’t like her, if you’re wondering. I mean she’s beautiful and she’s a babe and she’s not a moron and all that, but I don’t care if she’s my girlfriend or not. Because I don’t think I’m old enough yet that I like girls much, and also because I have too much self-esteem.

  “You’ll see,” Finch said, climbing up the ladder to the top floor. “And I already said stop calling me ‘Finch.’”

  Victoria Brown had brown eyes and brown hair and her skin was just slightly browner than say, mine or Finch’s, more like Uncle Max’s. Anyway, her last name was perfect for her, and one time I told her that and she said “I know!” The only part that wasn’t brown was that she always wore these white dresses. She lived so far up the street, she even lived three or four houses farther away than the hermit, for God’s saints.

  That’s a weird thing: people always said there was a hermit living in the small grey house close to Victoria’s. The house was kind of dirty and scary looking, like some Halloween cottage or something stupid like that. It really was pretty scary though. Everyone said all this stuff about the hermit doing all these evil things. Like all he ever did was really bad things. No one ever told a nice story about him petting a dog or anything like that. He’d probably be sawing the dog in half. I didn’t know anything about hermits, other than the hermit crabs we’d sometimes find if Maxine drove us way out to the ocean. I liked to imagine the hermit on our street poking his claws out from under the bottom of his old grey shack and kind of scuttling all over the neighbourhood, eating up the deer and stuff. But I didn’t think he ever really did that; I figured he was the kind of hermit who didn’t move around. Simon never talked about him though, even when I asked. He always said if there was a hermit on our street, he’d never met him. To which obviously I said “That’s because you don’t meet hermits.” Simon didn’t say anything else. That’s just what he’s like—sometimes he acts all quiet and mysterious. It’s so annoying. I usually wouldn’t even bother asking him about stuff. Anyway I won’t tell you every single thing I heard the hermit did right now, but it was all really evil.

  I was sitting on the sea turtle rock forever, because I was thinking about infinities and infinities of things. I do that a lot. I know it’s weird. I think because of how much I think about stuff, grown-ups sometimes call me things like “smart” or “special” or “delightful,” and Finch always calls me a “weirdo.” I guess I know what they’re all talking about. The good thing about being so weird is that I can kind of be friends with all types of people, because I
have so many thoughts that I usually have one in common with everyone. I mean like I can sort of be friends with most grown-ups if I want, and kids, and also kids who act like grown-ups and also grown-ups who act like kids. The bad thing is that I’m usually too weird to have more than one thing in common with anyone, so really I guess I’m nobody’s friend except myself.

  Then BLAM! A huge sharp sound ripped through the air, and the river echoed it over and over. I jumped to the ground behind the rock and waited with my heart shaking. Nothing else happened. I waited more. The loudest part of a big noise is the quiet afterwards. I could hear nothing but a few branches rustling, and one of my crazy neighbours dropping a pin somewhere. I coughed, to break the ice a little, and realized that I was lying on my side, with my legs scrunched up like a baby still inside a vagina.

  Finally I remembered that it was probably just someone hunting ducks. I’d heard the same sound lots of times before, but it still scared the heck out of me and it was still good to use my excellent reflexes just in case. I slowly got back up and sat on the rock. I felt a little bit sick when I thought about how something had probably just died, so close to where I was. I mean, something probably dies every millisecond, I know, but still. I thought that a duck would have a family, and if it wasn’t an idiot it might have friends, and maybe even a girlfriend if it wasn’t an ugly duckling or anything, and if it was rich. Anyway, there were other ducks out there, somewhere, and when that one duck didn’t show up at home that night, they would wonder where he might have gone and probably be excruciatingly depressed. I shivered but I wasn’t cold.