Before We Go Extinct (7 page)

But I'd laugh because yeah, it was really at the expense of my dad, not me, and my friends got me. They knew what my dad was like. “You know,” Daff whispered behind her menu, “your dad is kind of like a visitor from another planet. I feel like a scientist, observing life on Mars. Let us take notes.” And just then, my dad stood up to go to the washroom and a server walked right into him with a tray of sizzling meat and Dad's legs were scalded and he kept saying, “Man, I am so sorry,” while the waiter said things like, “Yeah? Well, maybe I'll sue you, jerk,” and Dad apologized again and again as if he was a dog, which is what he reminds me of, specifically a golden retriever, he would have been wagging his tail exuberantly and knocking over more things in his effort to be forgiven. The King said, “I am a lawyer. I am a lawyer.” And Daff laughed and laughed and actually, so did I, and it was only actually just now that I realized that Dad wasn't really the jerk in that situation.

It's better not to remember stuff.

It's better to just focus on the now. Buddhism 101. Or, you know, what I think Buddhism is. I was never into that stuff. That was The King's thing and who knows how much he made up and how much was real, how much was the philosophy of The King and how much was ancient religious tenets that could change everything if only we would just get on with it and believe in love and hope and peace and not attaching to anything ever. Not attaching to anyone. Not putting your hands into a girl's hair while your best friend's eyes see you and his face sees you and his heart sees you and just for a split second, his face is lightning-split open and you can see his brokenness. But you can also see her lips, right there and you didn't kiss them but you could have. You should have. And if the timing was just a few seconds the other way, you would have. And you are such a jerk for thinking that because then he would have seen something even worse.

But then again, why did he get to decide?

The purple car, look at it. I look at the purple car. I am not at Daff's place, she is not here, The King is not breaking. I am here and I am breathing and that's over and I don't have to think about how even looking at Daff gives me panic attacks so intense that I feel like my heart is rolling on a tsunami and one day it will rip right out of my chest like an alien baby and anyway thinking about her makes it hard to breathe this tiny, peculiar Canadian air.

I concentrate on the car, but I still can't seem to move or wave. Instead, I let the time stretch and yawn between us, between me and Dad and his purple behemoth. Finally, he struggles out of the car through the window in a ridiculous painful-to-watch way, butt first.

Seriously.

I am incredulous
, I type to The King.
Incredulity rules the day.

“Yo, JC!” Dad shouts, half-in, half-out. Then he's out. “I mean, Shark Dude! Or Sharkboy! Yeah, Shark
boy
, right? Right,” he answers himself, crossing those twelve feet between us in about three leaping, loping strides. His face has new wrinkles, spraying out from his eyes like his eyeballs were dropped into his head from such a great distance that they made splash marks in his flesh. His stubbly beard is gray.

When did he get so old?

He's bouncing on his feet like a runner waiting for a light to change. The grin flashes on and off his face like one of the neon signs advertising
GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS
near Times Square.

“Hey,” he says. “Heyyyy.” He holds out his hand. There's a tattoo on his wrist that says,
Writers write
. It looks itchy. He smells weird, if by “weird,” I mean, “like someone who badly needs a shower,” which I guess is how I'm going to spend the summer smelling, myself. Smelling good is sort of important to me. Or it was. Maybe it isn't anymore. Maybe I don't care.

“How was your flight? Was it good? Was there food? There's never food. I wondered … I mean, I worried…” He trails off, squints at me like he can barely make me out. “I've been at Costco. Stocking up. I hope you like … cereal. And chips.”

I shrug. Everyone in the world likes cereal.

“What's your favorite? I didn't know so I bought…”

I know that Mom told him that I've stopped talking. I can tell he thought he'd be the miracle that would make me utter words again. Like now I'm going to say, “Cornflakes,” or whatever, just to make him the winner. Well, screw that. Also, all cereal is the same. It's fine. It's good. Whatever. Seriously.

“It will pass,” I'd heard Mom tell him. “Don't push him, John, okay? Leave him to sort it out.”

When they were together, she used to get so mad at him. She'd start out nice, trying hard not to lose her temper, but you could see it crackling there, right behind her eyes. He'd be goofy and dumb and she'd be trying to say or do something important, and by the end, she'd be throwing things: glasses, shoes, a paperweight.

And he'd stand there grinning like a simpleton. Wagging.

Like now.

I put my sunglasses on.

The dads of the kids in my class do important stuff, like surgically repair cleft lips on orphans in Africa. Or they are philanthropists, pouring millions into finding a cure for breast cancer or tapeworm or whatever, or they at least own boutiques or grocery chains or star in crappy action films while running around with starlets. McFatty's dad is dead but everyone else has one, usually on wife number two or three or four. Rich guys, man. They'd make you sick, if you knew. But poor guys are equally bad, just in different ways. They aren't nobler or inherently better people, they are the same stupid idiots, but with less money. I wonder if it's necessarily true that all boys grow up to be disappointing men. I can't actually think of a single adult man I know who is a decent person.

Not one.

“So,” says Dad. “So, so, so … hey.” He cocks his head. “Think you'll start talking again soon? 'Cause I've gotta be honest, this is tough. Talking to you and having you not answer. I feel weird about it. Man.”

I shrug.

“I really want you to talk to me,” he says. “About everything. Anything. I want to be here for you. It's going to be tough if you won't tell me what's going on. Look, I know it's your decision. Everything's a decision. But I … want to help.”

Right.

Sure.

The truth is that Dad wants me to talk so he can validate his own role in my life. He can be all heroic and like, I'M LISTENING TO YOU BECAUSE I'M SUCH A GOOD DAD, LOOK AT ME! LISTENING! HURRAY FOR ME! His need for my voice is like a vibration on a guitar string, quivering between us. If I could, I would reach out and twang that string. Snap it between my fingers. My silence is unbelievable to him, like he's so
shocked
that his declaration didn't make me suddenly start pouring out my heart and soul. My silence makes him louder and louder, like he can make up for my silence with all-caps-level volume.

“OKAY. SO I GET IT,” he says. “I'M A BIG BOY AND I CAN WAIT. YOU'VE GOT YOUR STUFF. YOU GOTTA DEAL. IT'S OKAY. SO
I'LL
TALK. LET'S SEE. WEATHER? BEEN SUPER HOT, OF COURSE WATER IS RATIONED AND THE GRASS IS ALL DEAD HERE BECAUSE WHO CARES ANYWAY BECAUSE THAT'S NATURE, RIGHT? THERE AREN'T LAWNS ON THE ISLAND. IT'S NOT THAT KIND OF PLACE. SUBURBIA, ICK. YOU'LL LOVE IT THERE, ON THE ISLAND, BECAUSE IT'S QUIET. UNTOUCHED. LIKE HOW THE WORLD SHOULD BE. I LIKE QUIET. YOU'LL SEE. YOU MUST, TOO, RIGHT? HA HA. BUT WOW, YOU MUST BE GLAD TO BE HERE, OFF THAT PLANE, AWAY FROM NEW YORK AND EVERYTHING, WELL … THIS MUST FEEL LIKE A DIFFERENT PLANET, HUH.”

Shut up
, I want to say.
Just shut up. Please shut up.

He grins and bounces and stares at me. I hold up my hand in the universal sign of
seriously, stop now.

“You could tell me to shut up,” he says finally. “But I guess not. Not yet anyway. We should get going. But it's so good to see you. It's so
good
.” He takes a lurching step toward me and there it is: the hug. My skin shivers with revulsion. If I had a superpower, I'd like for it to be awkwardness repulsivity. I'd be like a reverse magnet. Anything awkward wouldn't even be able to get close. I smile a tiny bit, then stop, hoping he didn't see that.

I don't smile.

I stopped smiling.

I will never smile again.

Why was I smiling? It wasn't even funny.

My best friend is dead.

Hey, here's a joke, self! What do you get when you fall off the forty-second floor? Answer: dead!
Bad um cha!

Not funny, no? Too soon?

I pick up my bag and move toward the car, not looking at him. I don't know what happens next, but I guess Dad's puppy-legs wound around each other, tripping him up, because suddenly he's lying facedown on the sidewalk and blood is dripping from his nose as he pushes himself back up, looking dazed. I blink hard because
bam
out of nowhere, I'm right back there, on Eleventh and Fifty-Third and the blood on the sidewalk the blood on the sidewalk the blood on the sidewalk the blood.

It's nothing the same.

Why do I think it's anything like something that is the same?

Dad gets to his feet and there is blood gushing down his lip, which he licks. I look away. He says, “I can't believe that happened.” He half laughs. “First day, new feet.” He points at his sandals, which look like something a German tourist would go crazy over. You can always tell the German tourists in the city by those dumb shoes and none of them are tripping over their own feet. I shrug in a way that is meant to communicate everything:
You're a loser. You're clumsy. I hate you. I don't know you. I don't want to be here.
You know, all of that.

Dad wrenches the passenger door open and finds a filthy-looking tissue on the seat and stuffs it up his nose. “There,” he says. “Better.” Which sounds like “bedder.” There is blood on his stupid hipster stubbly beard and his stupid inside-out, probably ironic T-shirt.

“By dose hurds,” he says. “Shood.”

I take my phone out of my pocket, switch it over to my photo app and take a picture of him, filtered to look like an old Polaroid, the photo even more hipster than the hipster himself. I send the picture to Mom. I type,
Dad's here.

Swooop.

Let her look at that.

Let her see what she's done to me.

 

14

Outside the car window, fields become a town and then become fields again and forests. I feel carsick. I miss the stupid F train and even the overcrowding and stench of the 6. If I try hard enough, I could even miss the bus. “Everything is a decision,” Daff said. “You can decide how much pain to feel.” I press a point on my wrist and believe that it works. The car heaves back and forth. Daff was always right and always wrong and I have to stop thinking about her, but she's in my head and I can't get her out, like a song that won't leave me alone.

Dad talks and weaves between lanes. Maybe he thinks if he doesn't hurry the island won't still be there when the car stops. I guess the ferry could leave without us. I kind of hope it will. Even
this
place looks like a smaller town than I've ever seen and we are going away from it? To an … island? It seems so crazy. Absurd. And every other SAT synonym for
stupid
that you can think of:
vacuous, vapid, daft
. The whole escapade is something you'd see in a sitcom and you wouldn't understand how things connected until the misunderstanding was cleared up in the last scene or until you just stopped caring and changed the channel.

Except it's real.

It's my summer.

Well, yippee for me.

I close my eyes. Closing your eyes when you are mute is like shutting the blinds on your office door. It says,
Thank you for stopping by, but I am currently unavailable.
A message that Dad does not receive, evidently.

“… and I make extra money with the scallops. Selling them. I have a friend who is doing it, too. Really lucrative. You'd be surprised. I mean, I didn't think I'd like doing that, but you know, a guy has to make money and HEY
,
LOOK AT THAT, AN EAGLE? Bald eagle. I've never seen one in America, but here they are everywhere. Ironic, right? Amazing birds. Take some pictures and wow your friends when you get home. Seeing them never gets old and…”

I want to reach up and peel off my ears so that the silence inside me and the silence around me can find each other. I make a show of leaning back in the seat and sighing deeply, like I'm about to nod off.
The office is closed, Dad. God, would you shut up already?

The King's dad had an office that took up a whole floor of their apartment, which wasn't even one apartment, it was four that had been ingeniously attached together to make one massive space. He did not have the kind of office with blinds. His office had push-button everything, shades that opened and closed with a muffled hush like a footfall in thick carpet. Everything in his rooms was like that. Even the bathroom had air as soft and fresh as golf-course grass. In fact, there was actually a real flat square of grass on the counter that he trimmed with nail scissors. He could tell if one blade was out of place. He hated it when we touched it, but it was impossible not to do it. Impossible not to lay your hand flat there and see the outline of your fingers pressed into that rich man's golf green.

The grass didn't fit him. Not at all. A bathroom that would fit The King's dad would be made of jagged rock and broken things, ice, and steel blades.

The King's dad was neither fresh nor hushed.

The grass was another test that we failed again and again so he could hate us more. There was probably a reason for that, right? Like maybe he was locked in the attic when he was a kid. Maybe he was beaten with snakes. Or maybe he's just the worst person who ever lived.