Antsy Does Time

by Neal Shusterman

  He was throwing the dice, and apparently doing well. Adrenaline was high among the gamblers at the table around him.

  “Dad?” said Gunnar. He had to say it again to get his attention. “Dad?”

  With the dice still in his fist, he saw us, and it was like he was coming out of a dream. “Gunnar? Kjersten?” Then he saw me, and glared at me like their presence here was all my fault, which it was.

  “Sir,” said the craps guy, quickly sizing up the situation, “your children can’t be here.”

  “I know.” Mr. Ümlaut threw the dice anyway. I don’t know much about craps, but apparently eleven was good. The other gamblers roared.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” Mr. Ümlaut said to us. “Your mother isn’t here, is she?”

  “Just us, Daddy,” said Kjersten gently.

  “You should go home.”

  The craps guy handed him the dice, but was reluctant about it. Mr. Ümlaut shook the dice in his hand while the others standing around the table waited anxiously. Realizing we weren’t going to simply disappear, Mr. Ümlaut said, “Go wait for me in the lobby.” Then he hurled the dice again. Nine. This time only a few of the gamblers were happy.

  “Sir, I’m afraid I must insist,” the craps guy said, and pointed to us.

  In turn, Mr. Ümlaut pointed to the lobby. “You heard the croupier!” Which sounded a whole lot classier than “craps guy.” It makes you wonder why they haven’t come up with a better name for craps. Croups, maybe.

  By now the suit who managed the whole bank of craps tables came over. This guy’s title I knew. He was the pit boss. The croupier’s croupier. “Is there a problem here?” the pit boss asked.

  “No,” said Mr. Ümlaut. Then he whispered to Gunnar and Kjersten, “Leave the casino before you create a scene.” Kjersten quietly stood her ground, but Gunnar had enough lip for both of them.

  “A scene,” said Gunnar. “Right.” He nodded and backed away. I thought we were going to wait in the lobby, but then Gunnar turned around in the middle of the aisle. For a second I thought he might say something meaningful and thought provoking—like maybe a really well-chosen fake quote. But no. Gunnar decided it was time to sing. This wasn’t a quiet kind of singing either. He belted out at the top of his voice, and the sounds that came out of his mouth were like no words I’d ever heard.

  “Du gamla, Du fria, Du fjällhöga nord . . .”

  As far as interventions go, this was taking on a whole personality of its own.

  “It’s the Swedish national anthem,” Kjersten explained to me.

  “Du tysta, Du glädjerika sköna!”

  Mr. Ümlaut just stared at him with the kind of shock and embarrassment that can only come from a parent.

  “Jag hälsar Dig, vänaste land uppå jord.”

  Kjersten joined in, and now it was a duet. Since I didn’t know the Swedish national anthem, I improvised and began to sing the most Swedish thing I knew. I began to sing a song by that Swedish seventies group, Abba.

  So now the croupier looks at the pit boss, the pit boss signals the manager, and the manager comes running.

  “Din sol, Din himmel, Dina ängder gröna.”

  All gambling in the casino grinds to a screeching halt as we perform.

  “You can dance! You can jive! Having the time of your life!” I sing at the manager, who’s much less entertained than I believe he should be.

  Kjersten and Gunnar complete their anthem, and although I’ve still got a couple of verses of “Dancing Queen” left, I figure it’s wise to wrap it up early. Some of the gamblers applaud, and not knowing what else to do, we all take fancy bows, and the manager turns to Mr. Ümlaut and says, “I think you should leave now.”

  Mr. Ümlaut did not look happy as we crossed the casino toward the lobby. Gunnar, on the other hand, looked downright triumphant at his little victory. Even more triumphant than he did on the night of the rally. It was Kjersten who seemed worried, because she knew as well as I did that this was just one battle in a much bigger war. The security guard escorting us must have resented that look on Gunnar’s face, because he was rough with him, and got rougher when Gunnar tried to pull out of his grasp.

  “Are you gonna let this rent-a-cop beat me up?”

  Mr. Ümlaut didn’t look at him. He didn’t say a word until we were off the casino floor, and the security guard returned to his duties, satisfied that we were no longer a threat.

  “Proud of yourself, Gunnar?”

  “Are you?” Gunnar answered, with such righteous authority that his father couldn’t look him in the eye.

  “There are things you don’t understand.”

  “I understand a lot more than you think.”

  Rather than letting the two of them bicker, Kjersten cut it off. “Daddy,” she said, “we want you to come home.”

  He didn’t answer right away. Instead he looked at them, perhaps searching for something in their faces, but you couldn’t read much in those two—in that way, they took after their father.

  “Didn’t your mother tell you?” he said.

  “What?” said Gunnar. “That you’re splitting up? Of course she did.”

  It surprised me that he hadn’t told them himself. Even if they already knew, he had a responsibility to say it in his own words.

  “I will let you know where I am, once I know myself,” he said. “There’s nothing to worry about.”

  “There’s a lot to worry about,” Gunnar said—then Gunnar got closer to him. All this time he had maintained a distance from his father, like there was an invisible wall around him. Now Gunnar stepped inside that wall. “You’re sick, Dad.” He looked at the casino, all full of whirring, blaring, coin-clanging excitement, then turned back to his father. “You’re very sick. And I think if you don’t do something about it . . . if you don’t stop gambling, somehow it’s going to kill you.”

  But rather than taking it in, Mr. Ümlaut seemed to just pull his wall in closer, so Gunnar was on the outside again. “Is that what your mother says?”

  “No,” said Kjersten. “We figured it out for ourselves.”

  “I appreciate your concern,” he said, like he was talking to strangers instead of his children. “I’ll be fine.”

  “What about them?” I said. Maybe I was out of line speaking at all, but I had to say something.

  Suddenly I found all his anger turned against me. “What business is this of yours? What do you know about our family? What do you know about anything?”

  “Leave him alone!” shouted Kjersten. “At least he’s around when we need him. At least he’s there.” Which I guess is the best you could say about me. “At least he’s not away day after day, gambling away every penny he owns. How much money have you lost, Dad? Then the car—and now the house . . .”

  “You’re not understanding!” he said, loud enough to snag the attention of another family waiting to check in. They peered at us over their luggage, pretending not to. Mr. Ümlaut forced his voice down again. “The car, the house—we were losing them anyway—if not this month, then next month. A few dollars gambled makes no difference.”

  I think he truly believed that—and for the first time, I began to understand what Kjersten and Gunnar were up against. Mr. Ümlaut had, once upon a time, been a lawyer. That meant he could create a brilliant and convincing argument as to why the hours, days, and weeks spent in a casino were the best possible use of his time. I’m sure if I sat there and let him make his argument, he might even convince me. Juries let guilty men go free all the time.

  Then Gunnar dropped the bombshell. It was a bombshell I didn’t even know about.

  “Mom’s taking us back to Sweden,” he said. “She’s taking us there for good.”

  Although the news shocked me, I have to say I wasn’t surprised. Apparently neither was Mr. Ümlaut. He waved his hand as if shooing away a swarm of gnats. “She’s bluffing,” he said. “She’s been saying that forever. She’ll never do it.”

  “This time she means it,” K
jersten said. “She has airplane tickets for all of us,” and then she added, “All of us but you.”

  This hit Mr. Ümlaut harder than anything else that had been said today. He looked at them, then looked at me as if I was somehow the mastermind of some conspiracy against him. He went away in his own head for a few moments. I could almost hear the conversation he was having with himself. Finally he spoke with the kind of conviction we had all been hoping to hear.

  “She can’t do that.” He shook his head. “She can’t legally do that. She can’t just take you from the country without my permission!”

  We all waited for him to make that momentous decision to DO something. Anything. This is what Gunnar and Kjersten wanted. Sure, it wasn’t reconciliation between their parents, but it was the next best thing—they wanted their father to see what he was losing, and finally choose to do something about it.

  I felt sure Gunnar and Kjersten had finally broken through that wall. Until Mr. Ümlaut released a long, slow sigh.

  “Perhaps it’s all for the best,” he said. “Have your mother call me. I’ll sign all the necessary papers.”

  And it was over. Just like that, it was over.

  There are some things I don’t understand, and don’t think I ever will. I don’t understand how a person can give up so totally and completely that they dive right into the heart of a black hole. I can’t understand how someone’s need to gamble, or to drink, or to shoot up, or to do anything can be greater than their need to survive. And I don’t understand how pride can be more important than love.

  “Our father’s a proud man,” Kjersten said as we drove away from the casino—as if pride can be an excuse for acting so shamefully—and yes, I know the man was sick, just as Gunnar said, but that didn’t excuse the choice he made today.

  I felt partially to blame, because I was the one who convinced Gunnar and Kjersten to come. I honestly believed it would make a difference. Like I said, I come from a family of fixers—but what happens when something simply can’t be fixed?

  I thought about my own father, fighting for his life, and winning, even as Mr. Ümlaut threw his life away, surrendering—and it occurred to me how a roll of the dice had given me back my father, and had taken theirs away.

  The day was bright and sunny as we drove home, Gunnar in the back, me shotgun beside Kjersten. I wished it wasn’t such a nice day out. I wished it was raining, because the mind-numbing sound of the windshield wipers swiping back and forth would have been better than the silence, or all the false emotions of the radio, which had been on for a whole minute before Kjersten turned it off. Kjersten looked a little tired, a little grateful, and a little embarrassed that I had seen their seedy family moment. It made driving home now all the more awkward.

  A lot of things made more and more sense now. Gunnar’s illness, for one. I wondered when he first began suspecting they might move out of the country. But being sick—that would change everything, wouldn’t it? It could keep his parents together—force his father to spend money on treatment instead of gambling it away. And since the best treatment was right here in New York, no one would be going anywhere. If I were Gunnar, I might wish I had Pulmonary Monoxic Systemia, too. Because the sickness of the son might cure the sickness of the father.

  I held off filling our driving silence as long as I could, but there’s only so long you can resist your own nature.

  “I had this friend once,” I told them. “Funny kind of kid. The thing is, his mom abandoned him in a shopping cart when he was five—and his dad treated him like he didn’t even exist . . .”

  “So, do all your friends have screwed-up families?” Gunnar asked.

  “Yeah, I’m like flypaper for dysfunction. Anyway, he had it rough for a while, did some really stupid things—but in the end he turned out okay. He even tracked down his mom.”

  “And they lived happily ever after?” said Gunnar.

  “Well, last I heard, they both disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle—but for them that was normal.”

  “I think what Antsy’s saying,” said Kjersten, sounding a little more relaxed than she did before, “is that we’re going to be fine.”

  “Fine might be pushing it,” I said. “I would go with ‘less screwed up than most people.’” That made Gunnar laugh—which was good. It meant I was getting through to him. “Who knows,” I said, “maybe your dad will turn himself around someday, and you’ll hear his wooden shoes walking up to your door.”

  “Wooden shoes are from Holland, not Sweden,” Gunnar said, but I think he got the point. “And even if he does come around, who says I will?”

  “You will,” I told him.

  “I don’t think so,” he said bitterly.

  “Yeah, you will,” I told him again. “Because you’re not him.”

  Gunnar snarled at me, because he knew I had him. “Now you sound like my mother,” he said.

  “No, it’s much worse than that,” I told him. “I sound like my mother.”

  The fact is, Gunnar and his father might have been a lot alike—embracing their own doom, whether it was real or imagined. But in the end, Gunnar stopped carving his own tombstone. In my book, that made him twice the man his father was.

  20 Life Is Cheap, but Mine Is Worth More Than a Buck Ninety-eight in a Free-Market Economy

  On Monday I finally listened to my phone messages—they were all back from the night we first went to the hospital, because my voice mail maxed out in just a couple of hours. The messages were all pretty much the same; people wondering how my father was, wondering how I was, and wanting to talk. The wanting-to-talk part always sounded urgent, suggesting something that was, at least in their worlds, of major importance.

  And so on Monday I finally went back to school for the first time since Black Wednesday, ready to take care of business.

  At first people slapped me on the back, offered their support, and all that. I wondered who would be the first to say what was really on his or her mind. I should have guessed that Wailing Woody Wilson would be the first to cross the line of scrimmage, and go deep.

  “Hey, Antsy, I’m glad your dad’s okay and all—but there’s something I need to talk about.” The awkward look of shame in his eyes almost made me feel bad for him. “About those months I gave Gunnar. I know it was just symbolic and all, but I’d feel a whole lot better if I could have them back. Now.”

  “Can’t do that,” I said, “but how about this?” Then I pulled a notebook out of my backpack, snapped open the clasp and handed him two fresh contracts, which I had already signed. “That’s two months of my life,” I told him. “An even trade for the ones you gave Gunnar. All you have to do is sign as witness, and they’re yours.”

  He looked at them, considered it, and said, “I guess that works,” and he left.

  It was like that with everybody. Even easier with some. Sometimes people never got past “Listen, Antsy—” before I handed them a month, told them vaya con Dios, which is like French or something for “go with God,” and sent them on their merry way.

  I witnessed the true nature of human greed that day, because everyone seemed to be on the dole. Once people realized what I was doing, it became a feeding frenzy. Suddenly everyone claimed to have given multiple months, even people who never gave at all. But I didn’t care. I was willing to go the distance.

  By the time the bell rang, ending the school day, the feeding frenzy was over, and I had given away 123 years of my life. I told Frankie this when I got to the hospital that afternoon. I thought he’d call me an idiot like he always does, but instead he was very impressed.

  “You had an Initial Public Offering!” he told me. Frankie, who was on the fast track to being a stockbroker, knew all about these things. “A successful IPO means that people believe your life is worth a lot more than it actually is.” And then he added, “You’d better live up to expectations, though, otherwise you go bankrupt and gotta file chapter eleven.”

  And since chapter eleven was pretty annoying, I’d
just as soon avoid it.

  Of all the conversations I had that day, the most interesting was with Skaterdud, who was skating up and down my street when I got home from school. As it turns out, things were not well in the world of Dud.

  “Bad news, Antsy. I’m reeling from the blow, man, reeling. I knew I had to talk to you, because not everyone couldn’t understand like you, hear me?”

  “So what happened?”

  “The fortune-teller—the one who told me about my burial at sea. Turns out she was a fake! Wasn’t even psychic. She’s been ripping people off, and telling them stuff she just made up. Got arrested for it. She didn’t even have no fortune-telling license!”

  “Imagine that,” I said, trying to hide my smirk. “A fortune-teller making stuff up.”

  “You know what this means, right? It means that all bets are off. There ain’t no telling when I do the root rhumba. It’s all free fall without a parachute until I meet the mud. Very disturbing, dude. Very disturbing. I could get hit by a bus tomorrow.”

  “You probably won’t.”

  “But I could, that’s the thing. Now I gotta restructure my whole way of thinking around a world of uncertainty. I ain’t none too unhappy about this.”

  I thought I knew where Skaterdud was leading me, but with the Dud, conversational kickflips are not uncommon, and directions can suddenly change. “So I guess you want your year back, right?”

  He looked at me like I had just arrived from someone else’s conversation. “No—why would I want that?”

  “The same reason everybody else does,” I told him. “My dad’s heart attack suddenly made you all superstitious, and you’re afraid you’re going to lose all that time.”

  He shook his head. “That’s just stupid.” He put a scabby hand on my shoulder as we walked, as if he was an older, smarter brother imparting deep wisdom. “Here’s the way I see it: that fortune-teller’s a crook, right? Tried and convicted. And in a court of law when someone is guilty of theft, they usually gotta pay damages to the plaintiff, right? And is there not justice in the Universe?”