A Matter of Life and Death or Something

by Ben Stephenson

  AS THEY SAY

  FINALLY I had it. What I would do was I would do an investigation. I would just go around and ask the neighbours a few questions. Our neighbourhood was pretty big, but there weren’t actually that many people in it, and I’d just check out all the neighbours’ houses and see if anyone knew anything about someone named Phil. If something like that really happened, people would know about it. Unless they were complete idiots. I would make sure to check every single house in the neighbourhood and try to figure out where it came from and whose it was and if I could give it back. And if no one on the whole street knew anything well then I’d have to figure out a bigger investigation, or if I absolutely had to I might get a grown-up to do something, but only if I tried everything and it was still impossible.

  I opened my closet door and dragged out this cork bulletin board I had but had never used yet. Then I took some scrap sheets of paper and tore them very carefully into a couple different-sized pieces. I wrote a fact on each piece, and a title for the list on the biggest one. It wasn’t really helpful, but it was just a start:

  CLUES:

  –It was in the woods.

  –It must have been there a while.

  –Because of the mud and water and rust.

  –From the bent tree you take five steps away from the river and one sideways towards the house.

  –Someone named Phil.

  And I would keep adding more and more pieces every time I found a clue, and keep the clues organized in alphabetical order, or in order of hardest to discover to easiest, or in order of how true I thought they were, or a better system I would figure out later, and I would think hard about all the clues and rearrange them and come up with theories and illustrations and explanations et cetera and eventually get to the bottom of it.

  And my investigation would start that very afternoon, right after algebra.

  SO THEN LATER I was sitting in the woods on that mossy sea turtle rock, right before I went to check out the first house. I was thinking about Phil’s UNIVERSE. It was the middle of a grey Thursday afternoon, and I was sitting there thinking about it and adding my own parts in my head:

  (Only, a few of the humans weren’t sure exactly which penis had been placed into exactly which vagina, and exactly which vagina they crawled out of. The universe, or whatever, had tossed them to somebody else, just to mix things up. The universe loved to mix things up.)

  I kept drawing all the nothing in my sketchbook by pencilling the whole page black, and then I flipped my pencil around to the eraser side and erased the everything into it. I erased one tiny little explosion for the big bang, then the suns, the stars, the planets, including Saturn which is my favourite, Earth, the UFOs, the faraway galaxies, the penises and the vaginas, and everything else.

  It didn’t make sense though.

  I mean, how can a universe of nothing just turn into everything all the sudden? And if there is everything now, how could there have ever been nothing? This was a thing that I thought about quite often, to be honest with you, and sometimes I talked to people about it, like Finch, and smarter people, and it seemed like no one really knew what to say about it. Obviously no one knew what to say. But I mean I never even heard anyone with any really good ideas about it. No one even cared.

  So I drew it in my sketchbook like I said, and I tried to imagine it that way, but no matter how I imagined it, I couldn’t imagine it. Between the nothing and the everything must be something else. Like, what was around before the big bang? There had to be something, or else how could the big bang have even happened? If there was nothing, that meant there was no sketchbook first of all, and no eraser, and no me. If there was no eraser and no page and no me, then how did the erasing happen?

  If all that existed was a big, like, void or something, like a big black page, then that means there’s nothing different outside the page that could turn into the everything. Because everything is nothing. But if there was a something extra separate from the void, a little atom or something, it was still just as confusing because you can’t ask where it came from, or else you’re just asking the same question all over again.

  So: there was either nothing and then suddenly everything—which just doesn’t make sense—or there was nothing, plus another something that must have just been around forever, before the everything, before the nothing, and it was just always around. That didn’t make a lot of sense either, but maybe a little more sense.

  I decided that it was the guy with the eraser who was the thing that was around since forever. Most people just called the erasing guy “God,” I think, because what the heck else are you supposed to call something like that, and so I guessed I usually did too. But I also realized that no one could know for sure about anything before the big bang, and it was really too scary to look back farther than that, which made me kind of angry and sad at the same time, especially because what if it was a question that made me angry and sad for the rest of my entire life?

  After I erased the universe I made the page black again a few times and I kept thinking about the questions without answers, and eventually my page started to get all messy. It started to look kind of like the cover of Phil’s notebook, just white and black splotches all over.

  Then I swept the eraser shavings off of the edge of the messy universe and they fell and bounced off of the crinkly leaves on the forest floor. Where did the shavings fit into the puzzle? They were the rubber that was used to create everything from nothing. I thought hard. Maybe they were dreams? I didn’t want to even start to wonder where they went after slipping through the cracks between the dead leaves and into the soil.

  So I slapped myself in the face pretty hard. I looked at my watch, and was shocked. It was almost 5:00 PM already, and it was time to stop thinking. I had a house to check out.

  I snapped my sketchbook shut and headed out of the woods and had supper with Simon. It was nothing special, it was the usual: meat, potatoes, carrots, green beans and white milk. I finished my milk, shaved my moustache, and asked to be excused.

  “Where are you rushing off to?”

  “Frankly,” I said, “I’ve still got a lot of work to do in the woods,” but obviously I was lying because where I was rushing off to was actually the beginning of my investigation.

  “Alright, I guess. Be home before dark though, Arthur?”

  “Yup!” I slid off my chair.

  “Oh, Arthur, will you change those sheets, please?” Simon said for the nine-thousandth time.

  “Dooon’t wooorrryyy,” I crooned while heading for the door.

  I picked up my backpack from the floor near the hallway and shoved my arms through the straps. Phil was in there.

  I shut the front door behind me, dropped off the porch and headed up the street. It was still grey outside, and kinda damp from the rain the day before. There were shrivelling worms on the side of the road every once in a while, who had evacuated their burrows when the flood had started, but then didn’t make it back home afterwards. Aha! They had transmigrated, in the first meaning of the word. And maybe in the second meaning too. Two or three of them were still moist and slimy though, so those ones I picked up and put in the grass on the side, where they had probably come from. Then I kept walking.

  My stomach felt a little funny, I don’t know why. I pictured the potatoes in there with all the carrots and the steak and the milk. The mashed potatoes trying to calm everyone else down. One thing I like about potatoes, now that I think about it, is I like how when potatoes sit on your counter and get old they just grow more eyes. I like how they’re called “eyes,” and not warts or lumps or chicken pox or anything stupid. It would be nice if by the time I was twenty I would have another eye grow somewhere, like on the back of my hand, or right above my belly button. I would cut holes in the belly of all my shirts so I could look around with that eye too, and check out things without
anyone noticing, like secretly check the soles of their shoes to draw their footprints if I was investigating them or something. Then I’d keep growing more eyes every couple of years, and the older I got the more directions I could see in, and by the time I was eighty I’d be covered. All over my arms and legs and everywhere. I would have so many eyes that if I rolled them backwards far enough I could see everything inside all of me. And when I blinked them all it would make a sound like someone jumping up and clacking their shoes together at the heels, and sometimes, obviously, I would actually do that at the same time as I blinked. And my clothes would look like moths had eaten holes through every inch of them, but really it was because I was getting so old that I could see in all directions at once and never miss anything.

  I’d decided to use the most obvious system, which was beginning at the houses closest to my own house, and working my way farther and farther up the street. So, going by this plan, the first house I’d check out would be the house of these people called the Beckhams. There was actually a house before them, but no one lived there ’cause it was for sale, then Finch’s was next, but I wasn’t going to put Finch’s or Victoria’s houses on the list of houses I had to check, obviously, because if Finch’s parents or Victoria’s dad actually read any of Phil they might think I was being a weirdo, and they might call Simon on the phone or something. Then next I would check the house that said “PETERSON” on the mailbox, and then, if I absolutely had to, the hermit’s.

  When I got to the Beckhams’ driveway, I stood on the seam between the old dusty grey pavement of our street and their fresh black tar. I think that they had the only driveway on our street that wasn’t gravel. Maybe it would be less noisy to walk on. I stood there for a while and observed the scene. There were no cars in the yard, the garage was closed, and the lawn was a bit tall.

  “Maybe no one is home,” I said out loud by accident.

  I tried to think of the last time I’d actually seen the Beckhams. All I could come up with was a time where I walked along the side of the road and they drove past me and smiled and waved. I felt like that happened often. I tried to think of a time other than those times when I had seen the Beckhams, and I couldn’t. I could barely even picture them, except that I thought Mrs. Beckham had blond hair.

  I started to wobble back and forth on my feet and kick rocks.

  “Ahh, who cares about Phil,” one of the voices inside my brain said.

  I turned around to leave.

  “Wait, I do,” the other voice said.

  I turned around again.

  In the cartoon of myself standing almost in the driveway, there was an angel on one of my shoulders and a devil on the other. In the cartoon, I looked at the devil, he smiled and winked, or something, and then I looked at the angel. He raised his eyebrows and nodded his head slowly. I knew that what I should do was I should pick the angel, and walk up to the Beckhams’ and ring the doorbell and try to find out clues about Phil. Because in the cartoon of my life, if I picked the devil, I might have an easier day, but I might also get flattened by a steamroller, or exploded by dynamite, or accordioned by a giant anvil.

  “Excuse me?” said someone. Mrs. Beckham was on her doorstep, with the door open behind her.

  I stared at her, trying to think of what to say.

  “Yes,” I said.

  She did have blond hair. It was straight, a bit longer than most moms’, and looked dry. I couldn’t tell if it was real blond or fake blond. She was wearing a yellow apron that looked like it was too small, tied right overtop of a navy blue business-man suit.

  “Sorry?” she said.

  “Yes!” I said again but I didn’t know why.

  “Yes, what?”

  I tried to do some unboggling of my mind for a moment but it was hard work.

  “What’s that?” she said, pointing at me.

  “Huh?” I thought, it’s me, obviously. I walked slowly up the quiet new pavement.

  “What’s that on your shoulder?” she said as I got to the doorway. I wondered if it was the angel or the devil. But it was just a leaf.

  “Oh, it’s a leaf there,” she said.

  I said nothing.

  “A leaf there, just there on your shoulder,” she said in a jumpy way. She was almost singing. “Did you need something, honey?”

  I took the leaf off my shoulder.

  “Uhhhm, I’m kind of investigating,” I said, giving myself away right at the start.

  “Oooh, investigating me?”

  “No. No. I was just wanting to talk to you, though.”

  After a second, she said “Sure!” and invited me inside.

  It was really weird to go into someone-I-didn’t-know’s house by myself, and I felt like I was a house intruder even though I was invited. I took off my red rubber boots and left my backpack on. She walked through a doorway on the left and into the white kitchen, and she offered me a chocolate chip cookie. I accepted, obviously. I sat at the kitchen table, even though I might as well have been sitting on a chair alone in the corner, or behind a big brick wall or inside a jail cell or something, because the table was covered in stuff. It piled up over my head. Laundry baskets, a couple dishes, a stapler, a ball of yarn, plastic bags of things, other things on top of more things, a roll of masking tape, a vase of flowers, and everything else, covered the table. The wall of stuff was so tall that I couldn’t even really see Mrs. Beckham on the other side of the kitchen. I felt like I was a prisoner in sanitary confinement. On one side the mess spilled onto the floor. I looked around. The whole house was like that: walls of stuff.

  I took the little black tape recorder that Simon gave me for my birthday out of my backpack and put it on top of a book called Basic Gardening.

  “How professional!” said Mrs. Beckham when she saw my tape recorder.

  I pushed RECORD.

  “So, Mrs. Beckham—”

  “Brenda.”

  “So Brenda. What are you doing this evening?”

  “Arthur, right?”

  “Arthur Williams.”

  “Well Arthur, I took the day off of work. I called in sick. I told them I was up to my neck in mucus and I might be back tomorrow. Really, I wanted to dig up my garden.”

  “Spring fever,” I said cleverly.

  She laughed. “Certainly!”

  “Isn’t it too early for that still?”

  “Well maybe,” she said. “Who knows.”

  I knew. The ground was probably still frozen solid. But that wasn’t the point so I kept interviewing.

  “Where is everybody else?”

  “Sam’s at work still. He works late. The kids are all moved out of course, well you know that. Yup, too many cowboys and not enough Indians, as they say.”

  “Native Americans,” I said.

  “Hmm?”

  “It’s ‘too many cowboys and not enough Native Americans.’”

  “Oh yes, yes of course.”

  “Also First Nations.”

  My brain started to boggle itself. It was a good thing she was a good talker, because I was not a good interviewer. It was really hard to figure out what we were talking about, so I didn’t even know which questions to ask. But she was kind of interviewing herself anyway.

  “So, I’ve just had my fingers in all the pies this afternoon—cleaning the house, reading, doing this and that, well you can probably tell.”

  I couldn’t tell.

  “—And I haven’t even got to the garden yet! But you know, a stitch in time saves nine.”

  I nodded.

  “Umm, so what do you need all this stuff for?” I asked.

  “Which stuff?”

  “I mean, well, nevermind.”

  I wanted to get the heck out of there. Mrs. Beckham had sat down on a chair across the table and
across the fort made of stuff, and I peeped over the top, between a checkery shirt and the edge of a DVD case. She was giving me a funny look, like kind of serious. I didn’t want to waste any more time.

  “What I really wanted to talk about was this,” I said.

  “Brass tacks.”

  “What? No,” I said. I took the notebook from my backpack.

  “What’ve you got there?”

  “I found this book in the woods, and someone named Phil wrote it.”

  “You think it’s Phil’s?”

  “Well, I know it’s Phil’s,” I said. “It’s got his name on it. And also everywhere inside it.” I held the book out way up high for her to have a look, but she didn’t move her hand to take it from me, and she didn’t even really look at it. She looked like she was thinking, like she was staring at something, and her eyes were moving backward and forward. My arm got a little sore of holding Phil in the air so I stopped reaching and slowly put Phil down in my lap. Mrs. Beckham’s shiny lips were mumbling things under her breath.

  “Five, four... well, it’s probably only four or five there, right now,” she said. “I’ll try him!”

  She got up and rushed over to the phone, and then I realized what I hadn’t been realizing yet. There was a person I’d entirely forgotten about, and he was Mrs. Beckham’s son, and his name was Phil Beckham. Once, a long time ago, he babysat me. Just once.

  “No, that’s okay,” I said pretty loudly, “it’s probably not—”