by K. L. Denman
I knew those guys a bit, knew they were more mouth than anything, but they could get ugly at times. I walked over, said “hey” to them and tossed Ben my basketball. “So, ready to shoot some hoops?” I said. Ben caught the ball, and his face broke into this big surprise-party grin of gratitude; we’ve been friends ever since.
“That’s it, kid. All done.”
I’m jolted back to the present, back to the dingy tattoo parlor and Tony saying, “Want to check out the new you in the mirror?”
TWO
The bus ride home takes under two hours but it feels longer. I want to check my new tattoos, see if they’re okay, and I wish Ike was with me to tell me if Tony did them right. A few weeks ago, Ike and I watched a documentary on TV. The program was about Ötzi, the guy who died on a mountain in Italy over five thousand years ago. His corpse was found by a couple of German tourists who were out hiking in the Ötztal Alps. He’s the oldest natural mummy ever found in Europe.
The authorities hauled Ötzi’s body out of his melting glacier, picked up his stuff and took him in for examination. At first they thought his body hadn’t been there very long, but they quickly learned the truth. And then they went all out. They x-rayed and dissected and analyzed. They figured out all kinds of stuff, like what he’d eaten for his last couple of meals, what he might have done for a living (either a shepherd or a dude who smelted copper), how he might have died (blood loss from an arrow wound plus a blow to the head). They found fifty-nine carbon tattoos on his skin: simple dots and lines on his lower back, on his left leg, around his right ankle and around his left wrist.
The stuff Ötzi had with him included a copper ax with a yew handle, a flint knife, a longbow and a quiver of fourteen bone-tipped arrows. A couple of his arrowheads had traces of human blood on them. He was wearing a bearskin hat and clothes made out of woven grass and leather. He was carrying berries and a couple of birch-bark baskets. Me and Ike were gobsmacked.
I said, “Man, can you believe how much they can figure out from an old dead body and a few things he had with him?”
“Freakin’ incredible,” Ike said.
“It’s the crazy science we’ve got now. DNA testing and stuff. That blood on his clothes? They even figured out there was another guy on the scene.”
Ike laughed. “Yeah. CSI: Alps.”
“Absolutely. Forensics are cool. I mean, once you get past the part about being around dead bodies. If they’d found Ötzi even a hundred years ago, they wouldn’t have been able to figure out half of this. Imagine what they’ll be able to do in another five thousand years.”
“You actually think people will survive another five thousand years?” Ike asked.
I shrugged. “Who knows?”
“If we do last that long, we’ll be the ones who look prehistoric. We can shake our heads over the guy’s mushrooms on a leather string and his cloak of grass, but if someone from the future saw our stuff, they’d probably start saying ‘Ooga chucka.’”
“Ooga chucka?”
“You know. Caveman talk.”
“No way. They’d be able to tell we’re beyond that. Our artifacts would show them how advanced we are.”
“Yeah? What artifacts are those?”
“Just think about it,” I said. “What would a guy today be carrying around in a backpack?”
Ike said, “You tell me.”
“Okay. He might have books. Maybe an iPod. Some food. A cell phone. Some extra clothes or sports gear.”
“Sports gear would tell the future how smart we are?”
“No. But it would be part of the picture. It would show them we liked to have fun.”
Ike laughed. “Fun? You know what would really be fun?”
“What?”
“Being an Ice Man. Present day.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Just what I said. You gather up some modern stuff, which, five thousand years from now, will be ancient stuff, and you stash it on a mountain, along with a body. The body itself becomes another artifact.”
“That’s sick, man. Are you talking about getting a dead guy and taking him up a mountain?”
“No. Duh. I’m talking about you being the next Ötzi. You’d be famous.”
“Uh, yeah. But I’d also be dead.”
“So? All famous people end up dead. Most of the ones who are famous today won’t mean squat a hundred years from now. All these actors and rock stars—who’s going to even know their names? But a guy who’s, like, a messenger from the past, that’s special. Extraordinary. You should do it.”
“Why me?”
Ike heaved a sigh. “Why not you? What have you got going on in your miserable little life anyhow? You don’t have any friends, except for me. You don’t do anything. You suck at school. You’ve got no idea what you want to do after you graduate this June. You’re a nobody. This is your chance to be a somebody, Kit.” He snickered. “A some body. Get it?”
I got it. He was right. My life was crap and getting worse all the time. Still. He was talking about dying, and I wasn’t sure I wanted that either.
He went on. “Freezing to death is supposed to be a good way to go. Just like falling asleep and never waking up. Real calm. Real quiet. And you like the mountains, don’t you?”
“Yeah.” I do like the mountains. And that part about quiet and calm? I’d like that too. “What about you?” I asked.
“Hey, man, if you do it, I just might do it too. I’ll help you figure it out anyway.”
I was quiet, imagining this death on a mountain. Was he right that it was painless? I doubted that. “Freezing has to hurt. Before you fall asleep. Your survival instincts would kick in and you’d fight it.”
“Yeah, maybe. But here’s what you do. You take along a nice bottle of whiskey.” He chortled, then added, “Like that kind they serve in the Yukon, whatchama-callit, Yukon Sourtoe.”
“What’s that?”
“It’d be perfect. It’s where they put someone’s frozen toe into your shot of whiskey, and when you drink up, you’ve gotta be sure the toe touches your lips.”
“They put in an actual toe? A human toe?”
“You got it.”
“Man, that’s disgusting.”
“Guess it is for weenies like you. So don’t get the whiskey. Get a nice big two-six of vodka. You down it, pass out, and that’s it. Game over.”
“Where am I going to get a two-six of vodka?” I asked.
“Come off it. Fred might boot for you, right? Or check out your parents’ liquor cabinet. Didn’t they stock up for that Christmas party they had? Bet there’s leftovers.”
There were leftovers. Lots. I knew that. I told him I’d think about it. But Ike is like a pit bull: he gets hold of something and he doesn’t let it go. Over the next few days, he convinced me. I would be the next Ice Man. I would be somebody.
Somebody.
That reminds me of another time I was watching TV, a few years ago, with my family. We started off watching a documentary that time too, about World War II. I remember I didn’t like it, all the footage of soldiers in tanks, in bomber planes, marching in combat boots. Scenes flashed across the screen, images of emaciated bodies piling up in pits, images of children screaming, of an enormous mushroom cloud…
“I can’t take this,” Mom said. “Isn’t there something else on, like a nature show?”
“This is nature,” Dad said grimly. “Human nature.”
I said, “It’s disgusting.”
“Yeah,” Dad agreed, “it is. But it’s a reality we shouldn’t forget. We have to remember, otherwise we’ll make the same mistakes again. We need to learn from the past.”
I couldn’t keep watching. I said I had to finish my homework. I went to my room, opened my books and tried solving some math problems. But behind the numbers, the grotesque images from the TV rose up and I felt nauseous. Helpless.
I gave up on the math and thought hard about how I’d run the world, given the chance. There wouldn
’t be such a thing as war in my world, no starvation, no pillaging of the planet. People would cooperate. They’d work together, get along, respect one another.
I thought harder yet about how to make this happen, how one of the first things I’d do is ban all weapons. It would be a large job because I figured people have been at war since there were people. How could they be convinced to put aside their differences? I didn’t know. I ended up looking out the window. A bird flew past, and I remembered that I wanted to be a pilot. Not an army pilot though.
I called Ben and it took a while for him to pick up.
“Hey,” Ben muttered.
“What’s up?” I asked.
Ben paused. “Not much. Just playing Civilization.”
Civilization was our favorite computer game. I paused too, as images of conquest and war resurfaced. Then I remembered that Ben was mad at me. I hadn’t done anything, not on purpose anyway. It was that girl, Justine, who caused the problem. Ben liked her, and when he finally got up the courage to talk to her, all she wanted to talk about was me.
Back then, quite a few girls seemed to have a thing for me. I didn’t know why, and one of my basketball buddies, Joel, said his sister told him a lot of the girls thought I was hot. Joel played it up, put a towel around his face, puckered his lips and mimicked his sister’s voice: “Ohhh, Kit is soooo adorable. He’s got those amazing blue eyes, and he moves like a dancer on the court. Plus he looks so sweet and mysterious and sensitive.”
Man. We were in the locker room after a practice and all the guys cracked up, carrying it on for a while. I was embarrassed but flattered too, in an uneasy sort of way. I didn’t know what to do with this information, just knew I’d never live up to the stud label some of the guys gave me. Ben thought it was funny too, up until Justine, but he had to know that wasn’t my fault.
“So,” I asked him, “are we okay?”
“Whatever,” Ben muttered. “Yeah.”
“Good. Later then?”
“Yeah. See ya tomorrow.”
I went back downstairs, made popcorn and took the bowl into the family room to share.
My parents had switched to watching a standup comedy show. They were laughing at the jokes, and soon I was laughing too. I felt better. Everyone just needed to lighten up—that was the solution. The last comedian was the best, a guy who did a routine about his immigrant father, who laid on beatings, but only after giving a warning: “Somebody’s gonna get hurt real bad.”
The comedian said he always found hope in the word somebody because maybe, just maybe, it meant that he wasn’t the one about to get hurt.
THREE
I get home from the tattoo parlor around the same time I would have if I’d gone to school, and as usual no one else is there. There’s a message from my school on our answering machine, reporting my absence. I delete it. I’m in my room, parked at my computer, by the time Mom gets home. Hard to believe how easy it all was.
She opens my door, pokes her head in and says, “Hi, Kit. Doing your homework?”
I nod.
At this point she should leave, but instead she walks in. I minimize the page on the screen and say, “What?”
She sighs. “Nothing, really. I was just thinking. You haven’t been seeing much of your old friends lately.” There’s a pause and she adds, “Have you?”
She isn’t sure. That’s how much she knows about me. There was a time when she knew pretty much everything, back when she stayed home with me and Fred. But at some point I guess she got bored, figured we didn’t need her so much anymore, and she returned to the work she did BC—her jokey little acronym for Before Children.
“I see them as much as ever,” I say. “Guess you’re just not around enough to keep track.”
Again with the sigh. “If you say so, Kit. You’re sure everything’s all right?”
I give her a sideways look. “I’m fine, okay?”
She sets her hand on my shoulder. “Okay. I’m going to make dinner. Just remember, if you need to talk, your father and I are here for you.”
“Yeah, right,” I mutter. But when she flinches, I relent and add, “Thanks.”
She gives my shoulder a parting pat and turns to go. I listen to her footsteps crossing my room, listen for the door closing behind her, keep listening as her steps carry her down the stairs and the sound fades. Part of me wants to follow her and tell her, Yes, Mom, something is wrong. But I wouldn’t know what to say after that.
“What’s wrong?” she’d ask. And I’d be stuck. How can I tell her that it’s not me, it’s everyone else, including her, who isn’t right? Not that she’d change anything if I told her to. Not that I want her to. No, I like the privacy, the quiet, the freedom. I need it. I’d go crazy if she was around all the time, watching me. Besides, she loves her paralegal job, likes wearing the nice clothes, hanging out with her coworkers. She really wouldn’t want me to tell her there’s a problem. She wants me to say I’m okay.
I maximize the web page and continue checking out the latest in Blackberries. The one I need costs plenty, but it’s state-of-the-art. Of course it includes a phone and the standard Internet stuff, but it also has a built-in camera, video, mp3 player and GPS. How cool is that? I make a note of the model number, then move on to my music list.
The Blackberry can hold hundreds of songs, and that’s good, but it’s not easy to figure out which ones are necessary. I mean, I’m no expert on the latest, greatest in music and that’s subjective anyway. The best tunes to one person might be the worst to another. I could just go with my own tastes, but I’m trying not to make this personal. It’s got to be generic, which might turn out to be a jumble, but if I’m creating a musical time capsule—yeah, that’s what it is—then I need to capture the essential music of our time, right? How long is our time? A year? A decade? A century? A millennium?
A millennium is too long. A year is too short. Some people live for a hundred years, so I think I’ll go with the music of a century. Maybe the top hit songs of each decade from the last hundred years? That ought to capture the flavor of now. If such a thing is possible.
“Kit?” My brother’s voice booms up the stairs. “C’mon, let’s shoot some hoops.”
I look out the window. It’s dark, a drizzling January evening where we’d have to play by streetlight, and I don’t feel like going out there. “Forget it,” I yell back.
Mistake. I hear him pounding up the stairs. My door bursts open, and he’s got me in a headlock before I’m even out of my chair. “What’s that?” he says. “Forget it? You’re turning me down, bro? Eh? You think?”
Crap. My tattoos. If he starts pounding on my back, I’m toast. “Get off me, jerk!” I twist out of his grasp and glare at him.
He gives me his lopsided grin and holds up his hands, palms out. “Whoa. Sorry. Didn’t know I was messing with a tough guy.”
“Shut up,” I say.
His brows shoot upward. “Shut up? You, little brother, are telling me, big brother, to shut up? That’s a penalty. Noogie or wedgie?”
“Jeez. Give me a break, Fred. I don’t want to shoot hoops, okay?”
“Why not? What else are you doing? And don’t give me some bull about homework. More like checking out the action online, maybe?”
“That’s only for desperate losers like you.”
His grin returns. “Nope. I got a real live one.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah. Her name’s Jen and she’s in my history class. Smart, beautiful, the perfect woman. For me, the perfect man.”
I snort. “As if.”
“What, you don’t think I’m the perfect man? Okay, so you can’t admit it. I understand. That whole jealousy thing, I can handle it. The main thing is, she thinks so.”
“So is that why you’re never around anymore?”
Fred pretends offence. “Kit, you know how much work college is. You think I spend all my time fooling around? Moi? No way. The college dude has to study, man.” He raises a freedom-fig
hter fist for emphasis. “Study.”
“Yeah, right. Tell me another one.”
“Haven’t got any more.” He flops onto my bed. “So what’s new with you?”
I stare at him. “Did Mom put you up to this? You spying for her?”
He frowns. “What are you talking about?”
I turn away. “Nothing.”
“No? So who pissed in your cornflakes today?”
“Nobody. Jeez.” I shouldn’t have said that about spying. He’s still looking at me like I’ve got two heads. Time to change the subject. “Hey, do you remember when we went hiking in Strathcona Park last summer?”
“Yeah. What about it?”
“We’re studying mountain climates in geography, and I was thinking, some of those mountains, up past the glacier, they had snow on them in the summer, right?”
“For sure. There was that one, Puzzle Mountain, that still had lots of snow. Some of the other ones did too.”
“Does that happen every year? Or does it all melt sometimes?”
Fred shrugs. “I don’t know for sure. No, wait. Didn’t that park ranger say some of the mountains always have snow year-round?”
“That’s what I thought.”
“Doesn’t it tell you this stuff in your textbook?”
I shake my head. “Nope. We’re supposed to do a report on our own mountain-climate experience. Pretty lame, huh?”
Fred yawns. “Beats writing a Shakespearean sonnet.”
“Uh. Yeah. Is that what you’re doing?”
“Nope. If memory serves, that’s what you get to do toward the end of English Twelve.” He smirks.
I almost tell him that won’t be happening but catch myself in time. Instead I ask, “You don’t still have your sonnet lying around by any chance, do you?”
He shakes his head. “Kit, trust me. You wouldn’t want to use it. You’d barf. I was heavily under the influence of Xbox at the time and I got an F.”
I grin at him. “You wrote a sonnet about Xbox?”
“Don’t ask.”
Mom’s voice rises from the kitchen. “Boys. Dinner. Now.”
We take the stairs at double time and skid into the kitchen together. Dad’s there, smiling his slow smile, and together we sit down and eat Mom’s pasta special with green salad and buttery garlic bread. It’s like the clock went back a year; it’s that easy and that ordinary. We talk: Dad about the big plumbing contract he’s landed, Fred about his car needing new tires, Mom about a case where some guy is suing the parents of a kid who wrote his initials in the guy’s new cement walkway.