Before We Go Extinct (2 page)

It felt like absolute power, if you want to know the truth. Being able to get past that part of you that says
stop
. Pushing through and past. It felt like infinity would feel if it could be a feeling. It was everything.

The King would stand out there and yell down to the street, “YOU WALK IN OUR SHADOWS, PEASANTS.” He wasn't being a jerk. Not really. He was just being a voice, a huge voice that was like weather, like anything immutable and imperfect and enormous. He was this tiny little guy, but his voice was the voice of a giant. Anyway, no one could hear him, not from that far away. Afterward, we'd lie back on the concrete floors, howling like wolves, dust in our mouths, in our lungs, the bruises pressed into our skin like victory scars. After a while, it became a normal thing.

Our
normal.

It might be a different normal from most people's but that doesn't make it any less true.

After a while, it was
normal
the way sometimes it felt like you were falling, even when you weren't, the street pulsing up toward you and then away, the yellow cabs like rows of bright plastic ants, swirling in the sweet chaos of your vertigo.

It was
normal
to force yourself to sit down, legs dangling, your shoes looking like seagulls flying miles above the ground.

That's how I know what happened that day was an accident.

Which means that Daff is a liar.

It's been twenty-one days since I spoke to Daffodil Blue of “He died because of
love
!”
Gawker
fame. She was an instant Internet darling, with her red lips puffed up like shiny new Volkswagen Beetles, glistening on the screen, all those fake tears spilling from her overly made-up eyes. It helps that her dad is so famous: Big Doc, a rap producer (“crap producer,” as she'd say). She was born to this, born famous, like The King, just waiting for her chance to appear on your screens, biting her lip, looking up through her lashes, daring you to comment on her ridiculously puffy head of hair.

And instantly, she became one of
them
, one of the people we hated, layers of fake nothingness concealing an empty bubble. She became someone who wasn't Daff. She became
Daffodil Blue
: the quirky beautiful rich kid that the weird ugly rich kid had killed himself over.

For love, don't you know?

But that's a
lie
.

It was an
accident
.

I know it was.

I was there.

“Je suis désolé,”
was the last thing that I said to her, right before I sidestepped away from her fake take-pictures-of-me hug and walked out the church door where the sun outside was burning the pigeons' feet on the sidewalk and people wilted downward to subways that might take them away from the heat. I walked only a few yards before my knees started to liquefy and I knelt right there on those famous stone steps and fought the urge to press my face into the filthy pavement, to push through it to the other side.

There were media vans parked up and down the road, reporters hanging around with microphones and cameras so maybe they could get a sound bite from The King's dad afterward, maybe a glimpse of a real tear on the great man's famous, chiseled African face or the equally famous faces of his plastic, soulless friends. And yeah, they might get a tear from this actress or that model, but it's not like
he'd
cry. As if.

To cry, he'd have to be human.

A few of them stared at me, too hot to bother raising their lenses for the most part, but a couple of cameras caught me. You probably saw that shot, too. I guess some jackass won an award for that image of me bent over on my knees on the steps of the church, looking at the gray hard stone that my black rubber-soled school shoes were melting on.

My knees burned.

What I was thinking then, at that exact moment, were the words
pink mist
.

Pink mist.

Pink. Mist.

See, I did this paper on 9/11 last year for my Social History class. I had to read all the news stories, eyewitness accounts, details. The
details
are what get to you when you start to look closely at things like that. One guy said that when people jumped out of the Twin Towers, they fell so hard onto the pavement that a pink mist was coming up off the ground.

Pink mist.

I threw up all over the church stairs, my puke running in rivulets between the stones. It surprised me as much as any of the gawking journalists. I haven't vomited since I was a little kid. It hurt, acid in my nose, the whole bit. Someone's cigarette butt moved along in my river of steaming puke, which made little tributaries around a piece of chewed gum. A candy wrapper. Cigarette butts ground into two-dimensional images of themselves. When I finally got up and walked past the reporters, no one looked me in the eye. My kind of mourning wasn't camera-ready, I guess.

I wasn't famous.

I was nobody.

The King has now been gone for twenty-four days. He was more than just the strange-looking kid of an obnoxiously rich real estate tycoon. He was The King. He was complicated, funny, smart, crazy, kind, brilliant, and sometimes a total jerk. He was my best friend. And no one knew him like I did.

But now he's nothing.

He's dead. A body in a box underground.

Well, what's left of a body.

Pink mist.

Dead
is a word like a smooth marble you've put in your mouth to see what it was like and then inhaled by mistake leaving your windpipe suddenly and perfectly blocked. I wonder if the dead try to breathe right after they die, not knowing yet that they can't, that they won't. Not ever again. I wonder what that must feel like, knowing that the air isn't coming in to fill you up, not this time.

I wonder when The King stopped breathing.

If he thought, What happened?

When he fell, there was a
whoomp
as the wind filled his white school shirt. It billowed so big, a cleanly laundered sheet against the clouds, like a parachute in cartoons. For a split second, I thought he might be lifted back up into the sky.

For a split second, he looked beautiful.

But that thin white shirt didn't even slow him down. He was gone so fast, he couldn't have really thought anything. He probably didn't even hear me screaming. He probably couldn't even see me standing there, helpless, doing nothing.

He didn't know there wasn't anything I could do to save him.

 

3

The phone in my hand vibrates.

Daff:
R U there?

I squeeze my eyes shut like you do when you're a kid and you don't want anyone to see you. I half wish I had a blanket fort to crawl into, to hide away in for good. Maybe with a glass of milk and some cookies and some Lego guys and a video game and a life that is not this life.

Not
my
life.

Non
, I type.
Je ne suis pas ici maintenant.

French seems to be the only way I can type back to her without saying anything, the only way I can answer without being myself.

I put the phone in the sink and turn on the tap, hard, water splashing off it and onto the mirror, onto me. But it's one of those phones that are waterproof, which, as it happens, The King gave me for my birthday. He said my old flip phone was embarrassing to everyone. “Seriously,” he said. “No one needs to see that.” Like my flip phone was actually insulting people's eyes. I'd taken it, but the gift stung. Did my phone matter? What else mattered? That I didn't have anything and that he was as rich as Trump? How soon was it going to be that money mattered more than all the other stuff we had, all the other stuff we did? Our dusty footprints that were twin shadows up on the brick walls, the jokes that no one else got, the way we moved through the school like it was ours, and so, we owned it. We got each other. That was a pretty big thing. Not everyone gets you in life. Not everyone understands. But we were tight and we were untouchable: me, Daff, and The King. Undisputed royalty of the School of the Sons and Daughters of Rich Pricks (and me).

I wonder who is going to pay the monthly phone bill now that he's gone, how long it will take his dad's accountant to realize that The King couldn't possibly be using it anymore. The water sluices off the screen, leaving the greasy path of my fingerprints behind.

The gulls on the Steins' roof laugh cruelly. Someone on the street yells in hard-edged language and there's the sound of something heavy and metallic falling, a silence, then a barking laugh. Then a honk and a squeal of tires. The roar of a bus going by. More laughter. (How dare you
laugh
, I think. How dare you. The King is dead. Are you stupid? Don't you
know
?) That's how I feel about all of it, like the whole world should stop laughing, even the seagulls. Don't they get it? We are all on our way out.

Music with too much bass reverberates from the window across the gap. I read once somewhere that so much bass eventually does something to the muscles in your colon and people who listen that way will end up in adult diapers sooner or later. I make a mental note to stick some coupons for Depends on the guy's front door. Jerk. He deserves it.

I turn the water off and pick up my phone and wipe it on my pant leg. I like the heft of it in my hand. That stupid phone makes me feel connected to everything and everyone, even to the people it can't connect me to anymore.

It makes me feel safe.

There are footsteps in the hall, then Mom knocks. I shove the phone into my pocket, quick, like she can see through walls and doors, like she knows I'm texting a dead guy like someone who is too stupid to understand that dead is dead is a marble choking you to death.

I gag and spit in the sink.
Pink mist.

“I need to talk to you about something important, JC,” she says. “I wish you'd come out of there. I have to go to work in an hour. One hour, do you hear me? One. I can't miss this train. And I want to … I have to … Well, just come out, would you?”

Her voice wobbles a bit, which bugs me. It makes me mad. I'm still
me
. Why can't she see that? I'm so angry with her for treating me like I'm broken, even if I am.

Ahem, ahem,
Mom coughs.
Ribbit ribbit.

“Sharky?” Mom leans on the door and I can tell the full weight of her is there, pressing. The door is wood. Brown. Wood makes me think of coffins. The idea of coffins makes me feel like I am breathing through a straw with holes, nothing is filling up my lungs. I inhale and inhale and inhale until I'm dizzy, dizzier, the dizziest. The King's coffin isn't even wood, it's marble. There are stones inlaid across the top that look like actual jewels. I don't know what they are. Diamonds? Crystals? His coffin is worth more than everything I've ever owned in my life.

“Sweetheart?”

I shove the window open farther and gulp in the garbagey, fishy, hot-pavement scent of the alley. My lungs drown in the humid stench, that damp stink that seems to have stuck around long after they cleaned up Hurricane Sandy, like everything went moldy and now can never really be cleaned.

My mom sighs so loud I can practically feel it. “JC…,” she starts again. She rattles the knob. “What are you doing in there? Do I need to
do
something?” She delivers a solid kick to the door, which rattles but doesn't break. “Ouch,” she says. “Shit. I mean, sugar.”

I take my phone out of my pocket and type,
Am OK. Sorry
, and send it to her. The
swoop swoop
of those invisible birds carries it right through the door into her pocket and I hear her phone buzz and then I can hear her reading it. I know you shouldn't be able to hear someone read, but somehow, now, I can. Sharks can read the electrical impulses in the water; I can read the electrical impulses in the air.

Everything vibrates.

The last thing I said to The King was, “Hey, Chief Not Scared of Heights, you're going to fall.” I was sort of laughing, sort of not. I took a picture.
#dontlookdown
He was too far out for it to be funny, maybe five or six feet from safety. That's not much when you're two feet off the ground, but when you are on the forty-second floor, trust me: it's a lot. He bounced a little on the balls of his feet, like he was going to start jogging. Then he wobbled, sat down. “HEY!” I yelled. “Seriously.”

He was looking at his phone. Typing.

“Don't text and drive!” I said, which was a joke because of this campaign at school about texting and driving that we all made fun of because we were kids in New York: none of us could
drive
.

Then my phone buzzed. I pulled it out of my pocket while I was yelling, “Come
on
. You're going to get blown off, dude.”

I angled my phone to cut the glare on the screen and read it. It said
srry
. It was from The King. “What?” I said. “Dude. WHAT?”

The distance between me and The King stretched like melting plastic and then there was that forever second, my WHAT? hanging in the air between us, becoming as thin as a thread, breaking in the sky, long strings of it dangling down toward the ground like a jungle of plastic vines.

The King didn't hear me because of the wind and because he was already tipping backward, scuba diver–style. His face like the weather, all jumbled up: storm clouds, rain, lightning, and the sun.

I saw him raise his eyebrows and

It was really gusty by then, the wind was

Anyway he was already

Some things are too hard to

Screw this. I mean, seriously.

“Please,” Mom says, from the other side of the door. “Please, Sharky.”

OK ok ok,
I type. I hesitate. I stare myself down in the mirror. Suck it up, Buttercup, I think. My cold dead eyes glare back at my cold dead eyes. My lips curl in a sneer. My face has forgotten how to arrange itself properly. I allow it to fall back into flat nothingness, expression free. When did I get so skinny? I can see the bones in my face, the skeleton of me pushing to get through.