A Matter of Life and Death or Something

by Ben Stephenson

  My footsteps were getting closer and closer together. I was halfway there. My throat started to do funny things, like sometimes it would forget how to swallow, or try to swallow a big lump and get all shaky and tight. I stopped walking, and turned all around and pointed my flashlight quickly at everything. Nothing was around. I kept walking. There weren’t really any sounds around either. Well, it just sounded like God was rubbing two pieces of paper together, forever. What I mean is, in that dark early morning on my street the wind wasn’t quite silent, but it was close. It softly flicked millions of leaves in the woods all at the same time, so it made this hiss, hiss sound through the trees, and that’s all I could hear. I figured it was what being alone sounds like.

  When I was thirty steps from the hermit’s driveway my legs started acting up. They sort of loosened up and shook around, as if my scared brains were in my kneecaps instead of my skull. My heart punched my stomach and the brains inside my kneecaps were asking “What the hell are we doing?” and I kept walking even though my whole body was thinking all over the place.

  The driveway was about four times longer than all the other driveways on the street, and it went up a little hill at first with tall trees making dark walls on both sides, then it curved up to the left as the hill got steeper. I shone my flashlight up it for a while, but it wasn’t much use. From the road, you couldn’t really see where it went.

  This was it. I was actually at the hermit’s house and it was actually the middle of the most pitch black night. I was probably going to die. Here it was: the last day of my life. I was only ten years old. I hadn’t even become anything yet. All suddenly I got this empty feeling inside of me, as if my whole body was a completely empty jar and time was on pause. I stood there on pause and even though it was springtime, the breeze was cold enough on the back of my neck that my bones shivered. And it was just so black. What the hell was I doing? The crazy hermit wasn’t going to know anything about Phil; he didn’t even leave the house. The trees hissed. It was the last house to check. I had to do it. I’d made a promise inside myself. I couldn’t just give up. It’s not like Rosie just gives up every time God decides it’s going to get cold and dark.

  I thought about Phil and Page 43 and maybe it was just because I was so groggy and my brain was mental but somehow I all of the sudden realized I didn’t even care if I died. Or I cared, because it might hurt for a minute and Simon might be amazingly sad, but I also didn’t care because if I actually did die it would be while I was trying to do the most important thing, so my life would have been a good life.

  “Hello God,” I said out loud. “Whatever you do, please don’t let me get cannibalized.”

  I took one deep breath and then I was sprinting up the hill full speed, shining my flashlight on anything scary as I ran. I kept running like that, I just felt like it—like if I just kept going so fast and if I never lost my momentum then nothing could catch me and I couldn’t chicken out. I ran up the curvy driveway, through all the mucky leaves covering the gravel and I didn’t even think about the gravel on the beach because my brain was so empty and I went right up to the house without losing my momentum, splashing leaves everywhere the whole time.

  I jumped up the four squeaky steps to the porch and rang the doorbell before Scared Arthur could tell me not to. Scared Arthur wasn’t quite as fast as me. He was still running up the driveway and it was exactly when the doorbell ding-donged so loudly that he caught up and stood inside me so that we became the same Arthur and I realized. It was two in the morning. The porch light was on, but that didn’t mean he was awake. I was so paranoid and I felt so annoying, and what happens if you annoy a cannibal?

  I barely had the time to think about it before my knees started vibrating again. I crunched up my fists and made a squeak and stood there. I kept standing there. A sound came from inside the door and I was about to run but I closed my eyes. Hello God, Hello God, Hello...

  I heard the door creak and I opened my eyes.

  “Hello?” someone said.

  It was an old man in a wheelchair.

  “Hi,” I tried to say but I didn’t say anything.

  The man smiled at me.

  “Mr. Williams—what a delight—what the devil are you doing here, if you don’t mind me asking? Shouldn’t you be in bed?”

  I couldn’t say anything.

  “Come in, first of all! Come-in-come-in-come-in!”

  “How do you know who—”

  “Come in!”

  He was flapping his hand like a fish’s tail.

  I unlocked my knees. I looked backwards at the driveway and the yard, and I really hoped it wouldn’t be the last time I ever saw the world. Then I slowly started to move inside the house, tiptoeing.

  The man spun his wheelchair halfway around, in three tiny jerks, as if he’d been practising the move for years. He smoothly rolled through a doorway and into his living room, like how a swan swims. I mean like how a swan doesn’t have to go really slow-motion to be smooth, and they can go pretty fast but still stay smooth. That’s exactly how the man drove his wheelchair.

  “Sit-down-sit-down-sit-down!”

  I looked around the place and decided on the big red couch. It was red and black plaid, like a lumberjack couch. Somehow it was excruciatingly hard for me to do anything normal like sit down on a couch or breathe. But I eventually made it over to the red couch and it was so poofy that I sank really deep into the cushion. I put my backpack on the table right in front of me, which was so close to the couch that my legs almost didn’t fit in between. I was still so shaky and my heart was still fast but I manufactured some more bravery and started the routine. I took out the tape recorder, set it down and popped it open. I slid a brand new blank tape into it and pressed RECORD. But I didn’t want to give myself away completely, so I left Phil in my backpack for right then. The man just watched me start recording as if it wasn’t weird at all, as if people came over to his cottage every day at two in the morning and recorded tapes of him.

  “How are you doing, Arthur boy?”

  Could he read my mind and see my name in there? I told him I was fine.

  “You seem a bit... shaken up, I might notice.” He had a way of saying half a sentence fast and half of it slow that somehow made it easy to listen to him. It made him sound kind of smooth or something, like how he wheeled his chair. It sounds stupid, but that’s how it was.

  “Maybe a bit,” I said, and my voice shook when I said the word “bit” so that it sounded like two or three sounds instead of one. I laid my back against the back of the couch.

  “Well I’m not going to kill you, for God sakes.”

  I blinked and looked at him. His face looked worried. He really wasn’t going to kill me.

  “Are you going to kill me?” he asked.

  I looked at him for a second then shook my head.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Good!”

  He wheeled out into the kitchen, humming something I didn’t recognize, from deep down in his throat. It sounded kind of wet and grumbly, but also triumphing, like some war-ending song or something. He was out of my sight soon, doing something inside the kitchen. I looked in and saw that his countertops were all half the height of ours at home, and there were no cupboards overtop, just photos and letters and things in frames. The walls were the same colour as robins’ eggs, or maybe a little greener. I heard the sink running for a moment and then it stopped.

  “You must drink coffee then,” he yelled, “on the graveyard shift and all?”

  “No thanks!”

  “Water?”

  “No thanks!”

  “Milk?”

  “Okay!”

  “Chocolate?”

  “Yes please!”

  “‘Yes please,’ he says!”

  I didn’t think I was supposed to keep ans
wering then, so I sat quietly and calmed down my shaking and kept checking out the place. The living room was a dark red colour, kinda like the colour of my room at home. It was either maroon or burgundy, whatever the difference is. As far as furniture, there was the lumberjack couch I was on, and the oval table at my shins, and a pale green comfy-looking chair with flowers on it, and a giant bookshelf full of billions of books, every size and colour. But the books were only on the bottom half of the shelves, with the top shelves empty, probably holding only dust. Ice ages worth of dust. There were three other square tables against some of the walls, and they had lamps and small stacks of papers and books, two cameras, big boxes of matches, and a pair of field glasses. The coolest thing was against the wall on the right side of the room, on top of a low dresser. It was a pretty big fish tank, and it was all lit up glowing green, with four little turtles swimming all around. They looked very young. I wanted to go over and put my forehead on the glass and say hello, hello, hello, hello to the four of them, but I was still nervous so I didn’t.

  His house was tidy. Everything was tucked away somewhere and there was nothing lying on the floor. The orange carpet spread to every room around except for the kitchen, and it was clean looking, but it had these pairs of skinny lines faded and dented into it, because they must have been the paths that the man’s wheelchair took every day. There was a path from the door of the bedroom to the kitchen that was really faded orange, a path from the kitchen door to the dinner table in the corner which was almost as faded, and a path that went all the way from the kitchen to the woodstove on the back wall, and then continued over to the front of the turtles, which was lighter orange than I would have expected. I couldn’t really find a path from anywhere to the front door.

  There were also a whole bunch of old pictures on the wall of some beautiful woman. Sometimes she was alone and sometimes she was hugging some other guy. She looked really pretty, and I wondered who she was. She seemed to be in almost all the pictures on the wall. I took my field glasses out of my backpack and took the lens caps off and looked through them at the pictures of the lady. I looked at each one and held my field glasses steady and tried to find clues, because it seemed like the type of place to find them, but I couldn’t get the focus right and the pictures looked blurry like I was waking up.

  I heard the man’s chair moving along the kitchen floor, and I looked over with my field glasses and saw a big blurry version of him rolling himself out of the kitchen slowly with one hand, pushing himself off the door frame and then steering towards me, while somehow holding a tray with a coffee and a chocolate milk in the other hand. I put my field glasses down and stood up, because I wanted to help him, obviously, but he yelled “Sit-sit-sit!” so I sat down again. It didn’t make any sense how he rolled over so quick with one hand and put the tray on the table in front of me with the other, so I was kind of sitting there shocked. He drifted over to the woodstove, took a log from the box beside it, opened the hatch and tossed it in the fire, which had been crackling and rumbling the whole time. He was such an expert. He shut the hatch, zoomed over to the turtle tank, opened a container and shook some pellets of food in for the turtles. They flapped up to the surface and chewed at the food while I watched them. I finally got my field glasses focused, and the turtles all grew into full-grown adult sized turtles in my eyes. They kicked their webby green feet and floated at the surface and ate, and I watched them.

  When the man rolled back over to the table he had his own pair of field glasses on his lap and he put them up to his eyes and sat there staring at me. I must have looked taller than the tallest tree in the world to him. He put his field glasses on the table and took a sip of his steaming coffee. Then I put my lens caps back on and took a drink of my chocolate milk, which was delicious, and shaved my chocolate moustache. Simon never buys chocolate milk.

  “Thanks a lot,” I said.

  “Most welcome.”

  He rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, which almost matched the couch I was on, because it was kind of lumberjacked too except it was green instead of red. He scratched the front of his crazy grey hair.

  “So what brings you here, Mr. Williams?”

  “How do you know my name?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I suppose that’s right, isn’t it? Francis, first of all.”

  He reached across the table and shook my hand and smiled. His hand felt like it weighed a ton, and he squeezed hard.

  “Francis,” I said for some reason.

  “I know your father,” Francis said.

  “You do?”

  “Of course of course. Simon Williams, what a man.”

  “He’s not really my father.”

  “Oh yes,” Francis said. One of his curly eyebrows went up and he looked at his knees. “Yes of course, my apology. But you know what I mean. He’s a good man though, Simon. Talks about you all the time. You’re a lucky little guy, you know. A great man... helps me a lot. Anyhow, don’t suppose you came over here to chat about him now, am I right?”

  “Right.”

  “Right.”

  Then I didn’t remember how to explain exactly why I did come over and my head was a little boggled and I didn’t understand how he knew Simon so without thinking about it enough I said:

  “Are you a hermit?”

  Francis started laughing really hard. “Sorry,” he said in between bunches of laughs and then he kept on laughing even harder. His laugh was amazingly powerful. His eyes squinted and he sounded like some kind of jungle animal roaring or like a squawking bird mixed with a lion, with a big puffy chest and grey hair.

  “Sorry,” he said again. “Yes, I suppose you could call it that.”

  “What’s so funny?” I said.

  “No one’s ever asked me that.”

  “Oh.”

  “I mean, they have. They’ve asked it a million ways, but never like that.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I felt kind of rude.

  “No no no no no. Don’t think twice.”

  Then I tried to be more professional and get into detective mode better, so I asked “How long has this been your residence?”

  Francis laughed again and then said, “Oh, must be fifteen, no... seventeen years. Yes, seventeen.”

  “That’s longer than my whole life,” I said.

  “Wow, would you look at that,” he said. “That’s something.”

  “It’s almost twice as long as my life.”

  Francis laughed but not as much and then said “Okay, okay” and I decided to try hard to stop being funny, even though I wasn’t trying in the first place.

  “So you’ve been living here all by yourself for seventeen years?”

  “Mmm-hmm. That’s right.”

  “Do you get lonely?”

  Francis’ big laugh started squawking all over again. “Arthur,” he said, “you’re going to be a damn comedian, you know that? Do you know that?”

  “No,” I said. I didn’t get what was so funny.

  “Lonely.” He sighed. “Yes, sometimes. I suppose so. Don’t you get lonely sometimes?”

  I thought about it.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess so. But not excruciatingly.”

  “Well then me neither.” He smiled and drank some of his coffee.

  I was feeling kind of funny about how a hermit had just asked me if I was lonely. I decided to try and get back to sticking to the plan. I took Phil out of my backpack and put him on the table. “I found this in the woods by my house,” I said. “Have you ever seen it before?”

  Francis picked up Phil and looked him over, front cover and back cover, and his eyebrows slowly lifted. “You found a book!”

  “Yeah.”

  “In the woods?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I-see-I-see-I-see. Strange. And you want to know how it
got there, eh?”

  “Well at first I did, yeah. I wanted to know where it came from, and how it got there, but now... now I just want to know...”

  I squinted and looked at the floor. My throat lumped a little, like brown sugar does when it won’t come out of the bag into your porridge. I thought about Phil again and I couldn’t swallow for a second. I pictured him alone and I didn’t really know what I was trying to say and no one else did either. I looked at Francis and he was watching me and nodding and he looked really serious all of the sudden.

  “Oh no,” he said.

  “What?”

  Francis didn’t answer me for a second. Then he said:

  “Well I better read this, then.” He looked at me. “Yes?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  He held Phil and stared at his name on the cover for a while, and then he opened it and started reading the first page.

  “An investigation,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “Can’t say I know who he is though.”

  “Nobody does. I asked the whole stupid neighbourhood.”

  He read all the way down to the bottom of Page 1 and turned it over. Then he kept reading Page 2. He read with the book on his lap and his body kind of leaned over it like the book tied ropes to him and was pulling him in. His eyes moved back and forth and every once in a while he scratched his hand through his grey jungle hair. When his head turned to the right a little and he was on Page 3, I realized he wasn’t kidding around with me. He was going to read the whole thing. No one else had even looked inside it. Well, Simon did, but he wasn’t supposed to. But Francis was the first person I interviewed who actually read any of Phil. I didn’t even notice that was weird until then. But of course it was weird. How could anyone just not read something like that? I felt a little funny just watching him read. I decided I didn’t really want to wait all week for him to finish reading, and I also didn’t want to just sit there being useless, so I started explaining. Francis laid Phil down on the table so we could both have a look, and we went through the book together for a long, long time.