Antsy Does Time ab-2

by Нил Шустерман

  I understand hell now, and you don’t have to leave this world to get there. You can get there just fine sitting in a hospital waiting room.

  ***

  Coney Island Hospital’s emergency room didn’t seem to have much to do with health. It seemed more like this sickly mix of bad luck, bad timing, and even worse news. My father got rushed in right away, and the rest of us were left to wait in the reception area, where people who weren’t immediately dying waited for service like it was a deli counter.

  “Did they have to bring him here?” says Aunt Mona. “What’s wrong with Kings County, or Maimonides?”

  There were a lot of people with bloody clothes, poorly bandaged wounds, and bloated, feverish faces—all hanging their hopes on a single overtired receptionist who was, in theory, calling names, although it was more than half an hour until I heard her call a single one. I tried to read a magazine, but couldn’t focus. Christina played halfheartedly with a battered old Boggle game she got from a toy chest that smelled of small children. Mom seemed to be studying the pattern of the carpet.

  “Why aren’t they telling us anything?” says Aunt Mona. “I don’t like how they run this hospital.”

  There was a huge fish tank filled with fake coral rocks and a plastic diver all covered with green tank scum. There seemed to be only three fish in the giant tank, and I’m thinking, If this place can’t take care of their fish, what does it say about patient care?

  “I don’t know what this stain on this seat is,” says Aunt Mona, “but I’m going to sit over there.”

  My phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number, so I didn’t pick up. But then it had been ringing a lot, and I hadn’t picked up for anybody. Thinking of the phone reminded me of something.

  “You gotta call Frankie,” I told Mom.

  Mom shook her head. “Not yet.”

  “You gotta call Frankie!” I told her more forcefully.

  “If I do, he’ll come driving all the way from Binghamton in the middle of the night in this weather at a hundred miles an hour! No thank you, I don’t need two in the hospital! We’ll call your brother in the morning.”

  I was about to protest—but then I got it. Even though I couldn’t see the look in her eyes, I got it. You gather the whole family at a deathbed. So as long as Frankie’s not here, it’s not a deathbed, is it? It’s the same reason she hadn’t asked to talk to a priest.

  My phone rang again, and I finally turned it off. Did people think I would actually answer it? As if their need to know was more important than my need not to talk about it.

  An hour later a doctor came out and asked for Mrs. Benini. I took no notice until Mom says, “Do you mean Bonano?”

  The doctor looked at his chart and corrected himself. “Yes—Bonano.”

  Suddenly I think the heart attack might have spread to me. We all stand up.

  “Mrs. Bonano,” the doctor said, “your husband has an acute blockage of the—"

  But that’s all I hear, because I get stuck on one word.

  Has.

  Present tense! “Has” means “is,” not “was.” It means my father’s alive. Never have I appreciated tense so completely. I swore I’ll never take tense for granted again.

  “He’s going to need emergency bypass surgery,” the doctor told us. “Triple bypass, actually.” The fact that they had a name for it was a good thing, I figured. If they knew what they had to do, then they could do it, but Mom covered her mouth and found a new wellspring of tears, so I knew this wasn’t so good.

  “It’s a long operation, but your husband’s a fighter,” the doctor said. “I have every hope that he’ll pull through.” And then he added, “There’s a chapel on the second floor, if you’d like some privacy.” Which is not something you say to someone if you truly believe their loved one is going to pull through.

  The doctor said he’d keep us posted, and disappeared through the double doors. Mom said nothing. Christina and I said nothing. But Aunt Mona said, “It’s all that cholesterol in his diet. I’ve warned him for years. Our father, rest his soul, went the same way, but did Joe listen?”

  Back in eighth grade, I had a geology unit in science. We studied volcanoes. Some erupt predictably, spewing magma, and others just explode. The rock is so hot it actually becomes gas, and the blast is more powerful than a hydrogen bomb.

  That’s the closest I can come to explaining what happened to me next. I could feel it coming the moment Aunt Mona opened her mouth, and I had no way to control it.

  Mom saw me about to blow. She tried to grab me, but I shook her off. There was no stopping this—not by her, not by anybody.

  “Shut your freaking mouth!” I screamed. Everyone in the waiting room turned to me, but I didn’t care. “Shut your freaking mouth before I shut it for you!” Mona gaped, unable to speak as I looked her in the eye, refusing to look away. “You sit there and complain every day of your stupid life, passing judgment on everyone, and even now you won’t shut up!”

  And then I said it. I said the words that had been brewing inside since the moment my father went down on that stage.

  “It should have been you.”

  She looked at me like I had plunged a dagger through her heart.

  “Anthony!” my mother said, losing all her wind with that single word.

  I kept Mona locked in my gaze, feeling as if my eyes could just burn her away. “It should be you in that operating room. I wish it was you dying instead of him.”

  So now it was out. I meant it, she knew I meant it—everyone in the waiting room knew.

  And from somewhere beside me, I heard Christina, in a tiny voice say, “So do I...”

  Suddenly it felt like there was no air in that room, and the walls had closed in. I had to escape. I don’t even remember leaving. The next thing I knew I was in the parking garage, searching for our car, and I found it. I didn’t have the keys, but Mom, in her panic, had forgotten to lock it. Good thing, too, because I was fully prepared to break a window. I almost wanted to.

  I sat in the car that smelled so strongly of Aunt Mona’s perfume, and I pounded the dashboard. Mona was the one with all the anxiety. She was a human propeller churning up stress until everyone was drowning in it. Why couldn’t it have been her? Why?

  I was starting to cool down by the time my mom came, and sat in the car beside me.

  “No lectures!” I yelled, even before she opened her mouth.

  “No lectures,” she agreed quietly.

  We sat there for a while in silence, and when she finally did speak, she said, “Aunt Mona decided it was best if she took a hotel room across the street from the hospital. That way she can be close.” Which meant she wouldn’t be staying with us anymore. I wondered if I’d ever see her again. I wondered if I cared.

  “Good,” I said. I might have cooled down, but it didn’t change what I said, or the fact that I meant it. But then my mother said something I didn’t see coming.

  “Anthony... don’t you realize I was thinking the same thing?”

  I looked to her, not sure that I had heard her right. “What?”

  “From the moment I knew your father was having a heart attack, I had to fight to keep it out of my mind. ‘It should have been her, not Joe—it should have been her...’” Mom closed her eyes, and I could see her trying to force the worst of those god-awful feelings away. “But honey, there are some things that must never be said out loud.”

  Knowing she was right just made me angrier. I gritted my teeth so hard I thought I might break them—and then what? We’d have dental bills on top of bypass.

  “I’m not sorry.”

  Mom patted my arm. “That’s okay,” she said. “Someday you will be, and you can deal with it then.”

  Somewhere in the garage a car alarm went off, echoing all around.

  “No word from the doctor?” I asked.

  “Not yet. But that’s good.”

  I knew what she meant. It was a four-, maybe five-hour operation. There’s only one re
ason it would end early.

  “I’d better get back,” Mom said. “Come when you’re ready. We’ll be in the chapel.” And she left.

  My anger at the unfairness of it all still raged inside, but some of that anger was bouncing off of Mona and sticking to me. Wasn’t I the one who dumped that pitcher of water on Boswell, making life that much harder on my father? Wasn’t I always talking back, creating problems, making things harder at home? Could I have been the one who pushed him one step too far?

  And then I got to thinking about the time contracts, and how I, in a way, had been tempting fate—playing God. Was this my punishment? Was this, as they say, the wage of my sin?

  My brain had already turned to cottage cheese, and now it was going funnier still. You can call it another volcanic burst, you can call it temporary insanity, you can call it whatever you like. All I know is that in my current dairy-brained state, the letters in my own mental Boggle game suddenly came together and started talking in tongues.

  Fact: My father’s heart attack happened within moments of him signing a contract for two years of his life.

  Fact: It was my fault the contract even existed.

  Fact: There was a fat black binder filled with almost fifty years sitting in Gunnar Ümlaut’s bedroom.

  ... but I could get those years back.

  Maybe if I got all those pages and brought them to my father—or better yet, brought them to the chapel and laid them down on the altar ... Did a hospital chapel have an altar? If not, I would make one. I’d take a table, and sprinkle it with holy water. I’d renounce what I had done—truly renounce it, and those pages would be my bargain with God. Then, once that bargain had been struck, the morning would come, the operation would be a success, and I would still have a father.

  This wasn’t just an answer, it felt like a vision! I could almost hear the gospel choir singing the hallelujahs.

  I left the car, my breath coming in fast puffs of steam in the midnight cold, and took to the street, searching for the nearest subway station.

  18. Go Ahead... Tenderize My Meat.

  There were things I didn’t know, which I didn’t find out until much later—like what happened in the auditorium after my father was rushed out.

  My God—he gave two years of his life and he died!

  It hadn’t occurred to me that others had heard that—and even though news of my father’s death had been greatly exaggerated, it didn’t matter. What mattered was the possibility that he’d die. Just like my eruption at Aunt Mona, it was something everyone was thinking, but it was too dangerous to say aloud.

  In the awkward, uneasy moments after we had left, Principal Sinclair tried to get things back on track—the show must go on, and all. It was no use. The crowd was murmuring up a cloud of worry—not about my father, but about themselves. Then someone yelled, “Hey, I want my month back,” and all eyes turned to Gunnar.

  In less than a minute, people were asking him, tugging at him, grabbing at him, demanding their time back—and when he didn’t give it back right then and there, things started to get ugly. People were yelling, pushing one another, and then kids who didn’t even care took this as their cue to make further mischief, by fighting, throwing stuff, and creating a general atmosphere of havoc. Mob mentality took over.

  Gunnar and Kjersten escaped through a back door, along with the superintendent, leaving poor Mr. Sinclair and a skeletal faculty desperately struggling to bring back sanity, like that was gonna happen. In the end, Wendell Tiggor led about twenty semihardened criminals and delinquent wannabes on a rampage through the school. The rest was history.

  But I didn’t know any of this when I arrived at Gunnar and Kjersten’s house at twelve-thirty in the morning.

  I rang the bell and knocked, rang and knocked, over and over until Mrs. Ümlaut came to the door in a bathrobe. There was luggage just inside the door, and I knew she must have arrived home that evening. I didn’t bother with pleasantries, I pushed right past her and bounded up the stairs.

  “What are you doing? What do you want?” she wailed, but I really didn’t have time for explanations.

  Gunnar’s door was closed, but not locked. The one thing I had going for me tonight was unlocked doors. I found a light switch, flicked it on, and Gunnar sat up in bed, blinking, not entirely conscious yet.

  “Where is it?” I demanded.

  “Antsy? Wh-what’s going on?”

  “The notebook. Where is it? Answer me!”

  It took him a moment to process the question, then he glanced over at his desk. “It’s there, but—"

  That’s all I needed to know. I grabbed the notebook—and noticed right away that it felt way too light. I opened it up and saw that it was empty. The pages were all gone.

  “Where’s all the time? I have to have that time!”

  “You can’t!” Gunnar said.

  Wrong answer! I pulled him out of bed so sharply, I heard his T-shirt tear. “You’re giving them to me, and you’re giving them to me now!” I never muscled other kids to get what I want, but right now I was willing to use every muscle in my body to get this.

  Behind me I heard Kjersten call my name, I heard their mother scream, and that pushed me all the more to push him. I slammed Gunnar hard against the wall. “Give them to me!”

  Then something hit me. Mrs. Ümlaut had attacked me. She was armed, and swinging, wailing as she did. I felt the weapon connect with my back, the blow softened slightly by my jacket, but still it hurt. She swung it again, and this time I saw what it was. It was a meat tenderizer. A stainless-steel, square little mallet. She swung the kitchen utensil like the hammer of Thor and it connected with my shoulder right through my coat.

  “Ow!”

  “You stop this!” she screamed. “You stop this now!”

  But I didn’t stop. I didn’t stop until Kjersten entered the battle, and with a single blow that bore the force of the dozen or so other Norse gods, her fist connected with my face and I went down.

  You don’t know this kind of pain—and if you do, I’m sorry.

  Had it been my nose, she would have broken it. Had it been my chin, my jaw would have to be wired together for months. But it was my eye.

  All those muscles that were, just an instant ago, ready to tear Gunnar limb from limb suddenly decided it was time to call it a night, and they all went limp. I didn’t quite pass out, but I did find myself on the ground, with just enough strength to bring my hands to my eye, and cry out in pain.

  My left eye was swollen shut in seconds, and in the kind of humiliation beyond which there is only darkness, I allowed Kjersten to guide me downstairs and into the kitchen. I had just been beaten to a pulp by my girlfriend in a single blow. Social lives did not get any bleaker than this.

  “I had to do it,” she said as she prepared a bag of ice for me. “If I didn’t, my mother would have taken that meat tenderizer to your head, and knocked you silly.”

  “Silly works,” I mumbled. “Better than where I was.”

  She seemed to understand, even without me telling her—after all, she was right there in the front row when my dad had the heart attack. I told her where things stood with my father, and she went out into the living room, explaining everything to her mother. She spoke in Swedish, which, I guess was the language of love in this family. I could see Mrs. Ümlaut glance at me as they spoke. At first she looked highly suspicious, but her distrust eventually faded, and her motherly instincts returned.

  Gunnar joined me in the kitchen. It kind of surprised me on account of we now had a perp/victim relationship. He seemed unfazed by my unprovoked attack. Maybe because there were plenty of other things to faze him.

  “I don’t think we’re going to be a National Blue Ribbon school,” he said, and he explained to me the madness that ensued after my family and I had left the rally.

  “I couldn’t give anyone back their months,” he said. “You can’t have them either. Because last week my dad found them, and burned them all in the fireplace.�
�

  And there they went, all my hopes of redemption up in smoke. Without those time contracts, I could not undo what I had done. But I had already regained enough of my senses to realize getting those pages would not help my father.

  Gunnar went on to tell me how his dad had officially left the minute his mom came home.

  “They’re splitting up,” he told me.

  I almost started to say how that wasn’t such a big deal, considering—but realized that I would sound just like Aunt Mona. Trauma? You don’t know from trauma until your father’s had a heart attack. And they’re much worse in Chicago.

  I wouldn’t invalidate his pain. Every problem is massive until something more massive comes along.

  In a few moments Mrs. Ümlaut came in with Kjersten. Mercifully she did not have the meat tenderizer. Mrs. Ümlaut sat beside me, far more sympathetic than when I pushed through the front door.

  “Your father?” she asked.

  “They’re still working on him,” I said. “At least they were when I left.”

  She nodded. Then she took both my hands in hers, looked into my one useful eye, and then Mrs. Ümlaut said something to me that I know I will remember for the rest of my life.

  “Either he will live, or he will die.”

  That was it. That was all. Yet suddenly everything came into clear focus. Either he will live, or he will die. Simple as that. All the drama, all the craziness, all the panic, didn’t mean a thing. This was a gamble—a roll of the dice. I don’t know why, but I took comfort from that. There were, after all, only two outcomes. I could not predict them, I could not control them. It was not in my hands. I had been afraid to say the word “die,” but now that it had been said, and with such strength and compassion, it held no power over me.

  For the first time all night, I found myself crying like there was no tomorrow—although I knew there would be a tomorrow. It might not be the tomorrow I wanted, but it would still be there.