Before We Go Extinct (6 page)

I missed the funeral. My best friend's funeral. What kind of person does that?

I do. I guess I'm a worse person than his dad, after all.
I'm
the bad guy.

I did it.

It was me.

 

10

I pack my stuff to take to my dad's: T-shirts. Shorts. Trunks. Hoodies. I don't know what I'll need. I don't care. I throw in some flip-flops and a pair of boots. It's cold in Canada, right? I've seen pictures that Dad has sent of the island where he lives. It looks shadowy and treed and like it possibly never stops raining, like even the air is wet. The ocean is a cold green-gray. His photos never have people in them. It's almost as if he lives on a different planet, a place where no one exists. I stuff in the sweater that Daff knitted and a pair of too-small kicks and a few extra T-shirts that aren't quite clean, but good enough, including my favorite that says,
I
♥
nuns
, which was funny only to me, Daff, and The King. Mom throws me a bag containing sunscreen and kid medicine, like Benadryl and After Bite. Granola bars. Vitamins shaped like gummy bears.

“Here,” she says. “Got some stuff you'd probably forget.”

I stare at her, bewildered.

“It's all they had,” she says, defensively. “Your dad might not have this kind of thing. I think there aren't any … stores.”

She suddenly hiccups and then starts to cry the kind of tears you cry when you're pretending not to be crying. She looks confused, like this wasn't her decision, or maybe like she didn't notice that I am not a little boy anymore, wearing imaginary red boots, staring out to sea. She has dyed her hair a light mauve in preparation for her trip. It makes her look older, grayer, more tired. Or maybe she is just older, grayer, and more tired.

“I'm going to cut your hair,” she says suddenly. “It's so shaggy. Can I cut it?”

I hesitate, then nod.

I follow her into the kitchen and I sit at the table and stare at the clock on the microwave. I wonder how many times I have sat exactly here while she cut my hair, how I've somehow gone from being a kid to being me all under the flashing blades of her scissors. The clock glows green. The microwave hasn't changed. Nothing is changed except the colors. I wish I had a time-lapse image of our kitchen, of the layers Mom has added, covering up each and every mistake. Every new boyfriend she had, once he left, the kitchen would change. Every new job. Every new thing. I wonder if I could take a lesson from that somehow. Just add more layers and more layers until the paint covering me would be so thick it would be armor. The clock blinks. The scissors cleave my hairs into pieces. The time always seems to change while I'm blinking. She cuts and cuts and cuts, the sound of my hair being sliced cuts through me and makes me want to cry like the kid I used to be, sitting here, doing this. She paints the ends with bleach, so that it looks like my head is glowing gold. But bleach isn't like paint. Bleach doesn't add a layer, it takes one away, leaving that hair more exposed than it was before. Like how I feel when I see Daff.

Revealed, somehow. Too seen.

So I won't see her.

I'm just trying to explain it to myself, you know.

I lie on my bed when Mom is done and I smell the chlorinated smell of my own head, and I watch
Sharkwater
over and over again, all night. I've watched it so much, it's like now I can remember actually doing the stuff that I'm seeing. The lines are blurred and blurred and gone. She's made my hair look even more like his. Now we're twins, clones, the same person and I'm the one who was diving with the sharks. I was releasing sharks from long lines.
I
was the hero.

I think when I'm old, I'll forget entirely that it actually wasn't me. And probably no one will know the difference.

Sharkboy.

Sharky.

Great White Me.

 

11

America is a monotony of land punctuated by sharp mountain ranges far below the plane that is hurtling me north and west. I don't think I ever realized how meaningless everything looks when it's small. How dry and tiny and squared off.

Just looking at the barren wasteland makes me crave water, a tall glass with ice cubes, not this plastic cup of warm toxins in front of me on the fold-out table that presses down on my knees. The lakes and rivers out the window are shrinking veins. The towns and cities are small tumors.

It's so easy to hate it from up here.

Then a blanket of clouds erases everything and I sit back in my chair and try hard not to think.

I heard someone say that flying was a suspension of disbelief and I guess it really is. If this metal tube weighing thousands of pounds can stay up, why couldn't one kid fly?

I think of how his shirt billowed, wanting to inflate.

I turn my phone back on and it buzzes.

Daff:
R U GONE?

Daff:
F U. SRSLY. F U.

Daff:
MISS U.
<3

Daff:
TXT ME.

Daff:
Pls.

Delete, Delete, Delete. Delete all.
Je t'aime, Daffodil Blue. Au revoir. Je ne regrette rien. Je regrette tout. Je wish I had been paying enough attention in Français class to dit what I really mean. I wish I had been paying enough attention in French class to know why I'm doing this. Je ne sais pas. Je sais rien.

I text The King instead:
Have a great summer, man. See ya in the fall. Catch ya on the flip side. Smell ya in September. Dude, text me if you wanna hang out.
Send, Send, Send, Send, Send. A flock of pigeons breaking free of the plane and soaring on the exhaust back to the East Coast, taking all my meaningless words with them to dissolve on a screen that is buried in a freaking coffin under the ground and what is wrong with me? What?

I take a photo out the window and filter it through so many filters that it just looks like a brown-tinted blur, crosshatched with tiny lines. Send again, because why not? A picture of my kicks. A shot of the aisle. A picture of the crappy cup of water. I can't stop. I am sending and sending and sending. I can picture the grass that must now be growing on his grave, vibrant and lush, sprinkled on the hour by a fancy irrigation system, vibrating with every notification on his phone even while his body is
decomposing
, which is a word that is dead leaves in my mouth, thick and fetid and brown, and, after all, how can anyone breathe in this tin can? The taste in my mouth is foul compost because I am rotting from the inside out because we both died that day because I deserve to die too because of what I did and because of what he saw and Daff. Daff. Daff.

Seriously,
stop
.

I can't make it stop.

The look on his face when he came leaping up the stairs of her brownstone, flinging open the door, and saw us. And she had just said, “Sharky,” in a voice that meant that something was going to happen and my hands were in her hair in her hair in her hair and her face and my face and neither of us had been drinking and we were going to … It was going to happen and before he barged in, shattering the air like so much glass, like he'd stomped on something crystal with heavy shoes on. And he'd gone, “Whoa!” And we'd jumped apart, guilty, but for what? Nothing, nothing, nothing happened.

But his face. I mean, I don't know. I didn't know. He was …

It was a face you didn't forget, then I knew.

I got it.

He loved her, I guess.

He loved her and I got her.

But now neither of us does, so I hope he's happy wherever he is, I hope he knows that nothing will ever work now, ever again, between me and her. Or me and him. Or him and her.

It's all gone away, as soon as he let go, and his shirt

billowed

and he

tipped.

I start to cry hard, finally, and for real. My shoulders are shaking in a way that would be totally embarrassing if I cared. But I don't care. I can't stop. It's like somehow something inside me has come unplugged and there's nothing that could stop it and I am hemorrhaging snotty tears everywhere. I won't stop, maybe not ever. Not for the older businessguy who angles his body away from me in the next seat. Not for the fake concern of the flight attendant. Not for anyone. Not for anything.

But when we touch down, I do.

I stop.

I am empty. Lighter.

Different.

I expect to look down at my hands and see feathers, ready to push me upward and away from here. But my hand is still my hand. And now I'm in Canada.

I am still me. Just me, for the first time in so long, I can't remember. Inhabiting me, I guess, is what I mean. I'm not Sharky The King Daff. I'm not one of three. Or, then, one of two. Or gone, zeroed out.

I'm here.

And when I walk to the baggage claim and wait for my bag to drop down onto the belt I feel like something inside me has been shaken free.

 

12

A car pulls up in the roundabout in front of the airport. This Canadian air feels thinner and somehow smaller than the air at home, like even the molecules of oxygen are more compact and more polite, not big sprawling stinky American air. It smells like sleep breath and the threat of a storm, something crackling behind something else.

The car is purple and makes a sound like a gray whale singing for a mate. Which is great and majestic if you're a whale, but not so good for an old station wagon. Underneath the peeling purple paint are patches of green, brown, and rust that look like bad camo gear. I had no idea that people really drove cars like this. It looks like something from a movie about hillbillies, something that is nothing to do with me.

Shame crawls around under my skin like an army of caterpillars with sticky feet. It's a good thing I'm not talking because I don't have to decide what to say. Hello, hi,
hey there
. And there are no names for him that fit: JC Sr.? Papa? Dad? Father? Sir? Yeah, right. Dad is about the furthest thing from a “sir” you could ever imagine. He's a “hey, dude” at best.

The King's dad is a “sir.” He commands it. The way he moves into a room. The way his smile crawls into place with a slow deliberation that puts you in your place. My dad doesn't smile. Dad is a
grinner
.

The word
PEACE
is painted in gold sparkly paint in letters about a foot high across the rear door of the purple car, like it's been graffitied by a band of wayward hippies. The sight of that word and the way it is crooked lets me know all I need to know about my dad's so-called life, which involves caretaking a stopped-in-progress hotel building site on an island with nothing else on it.

No roads.

No stores.

No residents.

No one.

Nothing but trees and whatever animals lurk in their shadows. Deer, I guess. Probably rats.

Dad's “career” involves running off kayakers and campers to protect the property from fire and vandalism. For that, he gets paid in room and board and who knows what else, and he buys time to write his painfully crappy novels that he self-publishes and makes enough money from to send Mom a check for fifty dollars once a month. Impressive my dad is not.

My phone buzzes. Daff.

I type
Arrête
without reading what she wrote.

I add,
Au revoir.

Why doesn't she get it? Why don't
I
get it?

I am quickly running out of French. Pretty soon I'll be reduced to saying,
Where is the library?
and
Please pass me a pen.
Or
Can you show me the way to the metro?

The car grinds to a stop, then revs up, chokes, and goes again, circling. Sweat drips down my face and into my shirt, which is good because it disguises the wet patches I made when I was crying, but sucks because I stink. I'm guessing a washer and dryer are not things he has, and I know for sure there is no Laundromat.

The purple car circles me.

And circles me.

And circles me.

I am prey, with nowhere to go. Pretty much stunned into submission, unable to surface to get a breath of air. I only hope that it doesn't hurt too much when it finally bites.

 

13

I have only ever seen my dad when he comes to Brooklyn to visit me, which he does because that's what the judge said he has to do and not because he wants to do it, which is painfully obvious whenever it has happened.
Awkward
is stuck on him like a cobweb he walked into by mistake, covering his face and hands and everything he says. He takes me places I hate and fills up the space around us with a bunch of joviality and
trying
: baseball games and the Empire State Building and the freaking zoo, like he didn't get any updates when the calendar flipped over each year and I went ahead and got older and older and older and older and I hate baseball and I think zoos should be illegal and the Empire State Building?

Well, it's boring.

Sorry, but it is.

The elevator in the Empire State Building smells like hospitals. The view is something you've seen in pictures so many times that when you actually see it, it feels old already, like you're watching a rerun on TV. Unless you're my dad, and then you're snapping pictures like no one will ever go up there again, like no one would ever see
this
.

Last time he was in town, he took me and The King and Daff to a “fancy” dinner. We ended up at TGI Fridays on Forty-Second, uncomfortably making conversation over plates full of terrible shrimp, The King and Daff shooting looks at each other over the rims of their Shirley Temples. I tried to pretend it was so lame that it was actually cool. Ironic. But no one was buying what I was selling and Dad was trying too hard. Like always. Afterward, I seriously considered just drowning myself in the East River so that I'd never have to go through anything like that again. But I went along with it because after that it was all, oh, it's lunchtime, who wants a formal shrimp plate? Shall we take the town car to TGIs? Hmmm? Oh, that isn't funny? No, it isn't? Want to call your dad? He'll wear his fanciest T-shirt! Not funny?
Oh, okay.