A Matter of Life and Death or Something (12 page)

“No. Thank you.”

“Sure?”

“Yeah.”

The thing about grown-ups is when you visit them at home, they always offer you something to eat and drink. And sometimes you just aren't hungry, is the thing. Still, if you say no thanks they make you feel like you're
insulting
them or something. Like you're calling them something awful, almost. It's like you're not letting them do their job, which is being a grown-up. Also, they always tell you to make yourself at home but they never stop offering you things, which makes no sense. When I'm at home making myself at home, no one's around, and I get things for myself and make cinnamon toast. You can't make yourself at home and also have a waiter at the same time. And they always expect you to sit down, it seems like. I was only on the second house but I was already getting used to the plan. Come in, get offered food, sit down, spill the beans.

After I was finished looking over everything in the living room—the model ships with flappy sails and tiny ropes, the photographs of the river and people I didn't know, papers in frames with little red stickers shaped like the sun, the collection of atlases on the small bookshelf, and the unbelievable old map of the world from way before they had discovered hundreds of countries we've found now—after I was finished looking it all over, I sat down in a very stiff armchair.

Mr. Peterson came out of the kitchen, and his navy blue slippers slippered across the wooden floor with a scorching cup of tea. The tea made sense: the place was tidy enough, but I'd found five empty mugs sitting around with tea bags still inside. He put down his tea on the coffee table—did that make it a tea table?—and sat in an armchair that looked even stiffer than the one I was in.

“So what's this about?” He got to the point, just like I predicted in my plan.

That was fine by me. I took out my tape recorder and put it on the tea table, and then I unzipped Phil out of my backpack and held it up like one of those special TV lawyers. It was fun to be creating a bit of a new routine.

“Exhibition A,” I told Mr. Peterson, like the exhibitionists on TV.

“Exhibit,” he corrected.

I kept my cool.

“Obviously.”

“What is it, your journal?”

“Close, but no cigar. It's
somebody's
journal. I found it in the woods.”

I realized I had forgotten to press RECORD on the tape player, so I did. I felt nonprofessional. But at least it didn't record me saying my wrong word.

Then Mr. Peterson didn't say anything for a little while, he just sipped his tea once and looked at me like he was trying to remember something, but the something didn't exist. He looked confused. I expected him to say “Can I please take a look at the journal?” I hoped he'd say “I know exactly where that came from.” I
dreamed
he might say “Don't worry, because that guy is still alive,” but he didn't say any of those things.

He said, “Well it's not mine, if that's what you mean.”

(That's not what I meant.)

“No,” I said, “I mean, do you have any idea where it could have come from?”

He looked like he was trying to remember what he was trying to remember.

“I'm not so sure about that.”

“Well, do you know anyone named Phil?”

“Well, yes I suppose. I had a good friend Philip in school. In college. He... passed away this year, in fact.”

My throat turned into a fist.

“I'm sorry to hear that,” I squeaked.

“It's fine,” he said. “It was a little while back.”

“How did he die?”

“He got sick. Like most people, I suppose.”

“Was he your best friend?”

“Oh... no.” He scratched the back of one hand with the other one. “No. It was a while ago.” He took a drink of his tea.

“Uhmmm,” I said.

I looked around the room again and sat up straight to make the chair hurt less.

“So have you been running around interviewing the entire city then?” Mr. Peterson asked.

“Just the entire street so far.”

“Looking for the author?”

“Looking for clues.”

“But you hope to give it back to him? To this ‘Phil,' is it?”

My throat had a crumpled up sponge stuck in it.

“Uhmmm,” I said. “I don't think so.”

“Oh?”

“I guess I was just wondering where it came from. How it got to our street. I mean it didn't just
appear.
”

“Sure,” he said.

He took another sip of tea and scratched the floppy part of his neck, below his Adam's apple. I didn't know what to do. I felt like it was useless for me to be there but I didn't want to just run away. I felt like I wasn't even there in the first place. Maybe there was a window I could climb out of, or a trap door. I wished I was a master escapist.

Mr. Peterson folded his arms on top of his blue sweatshirt. He gave me a really quick smile, and then scratched his neck.

“What is your job?” I asked.

“I'm retired.”

“... Retired of what?” I said, because I was trying to be funny.

Mr. Peterson looked out the window. “A couple of things. I did some architecture, and some engineering later. I ended up doing a lot of both, really.”

“What did you engineer?”

He looked at me. “Do you know the Vine Street Theatre, downtown?”

“Obviously.” That theatre was actually one of my favourite buildings, if I had to like buildings. Sometimes Maxine would take me to a play there or to see a symphony, which was cool, but I never liked anything we went to see as much as I liked the gigantic chandelier that hung overtop of the audience there, which was like an upside-down wedding cake made of icicles.

“I helped build that, about thirty years ago,” he said. “I don't know if there's anything else you might recognize.”

“Amazing,” I said.

I thought for a moment about that building, with all the gargoyles and things on the outside, and with the pretty chandelier, and how he had helped make it.

Then I said, “So if you're such a good architect, why did you make yourself such a regular house?”

Mr. Peterson frowned. He looked up at the light-blue ceiling. “I didn't design it, actually.”

“Why not?”

Mr. Peterson looked back down at me again. Then he changed the subject.

“Later on I became the chief demolition engineer on some projects—”

“Demolishing engineer?”

“Precisely.”

“So you built buildings...”

Mr. Peterson nodded.

“... and then you tore them down?”

He took a quick gulp of tea.

“I suppose so.”

I was a little bit demolished. I took Phil from the table and held the corner of the pages and let them flip by really fast. I watched the page numbers flash by like an animated movie:

25, 27, 29... 35, 37... 41, 43

Just then, the tape recorder clicked off.

Mr. Peterson watched me as I popped it open, flipped the tape over and poked the door shut. I made a gigantic sigh, and hit RECORD again.

“What do you want to be when
you
grow up?” Mr. Peterson asked.

The thing about becoming a grown-up is that you forget how annoying it is to be asked by someone what you want to be when you grow up. When I was tinier I used to have answers for that stupid question. Silly answers.
A fireman. A garbage man. A dolphin jockey.
Pretty much anyone who got to ride on something. But it'd been a long time since I knew what I
really
wanted to be. Maybe forever. The most annoying thing about being asked what-you-want-to-be-when-you-grow-up is that you know the grown-up asking it thinks you
have
to grow up in order to be anything.

So I didn't know what to say. I stared at the tape recorder which was going to hear me say whatever silly thing I was going to say. I sat there for a while thinking about it and Mr. Peterson kept looking out the window, like he was just waiting for a deer to walk by. I tried to think of something not silly, something that made sense. Then I knew I was trying too hard, and I decided to say the next exact thing that came to my brain. It was pretty silly.

“Well one time I had a dream where I drew the Leaning Tower of Pisa really big, because I could cover the real thing with my drawing, because I made it not leaning anymore.”

Mr. Peterson turned his head towards me again. His bushy eyebrows went up, and he had a small smile, like I made a joke that wasn't quite funny enough to laugh at.

“I guess maybe, I'd like to do that,” I said. “I mean, I don't know.”

I felt like a real live idiot.

“I see,” Mr. Peterson said. “You know, that's got a lot to do with what I was doing, too.”

“Not really.”

“Sure it does.”

The tape recorder recorded fifteen long seconds of silence. Then, the sound of Mr. Peterson yawning.

He pointed at a big photo of some war boat.

“Have you ever heard of the Philadelphia Experiment?”

“No. How come every time I say ‘Phil,' everyone starts talking about
Phil
adelphia?” It was not fun to be creating a routine anymore.

Mr. Peterson laughed, which was weird, but then quickly became a corpse again.

“I hadn't thought of that. Anyhow, the Philadelphia Experiment is a strange story. A mystery. It's widely considered to be a hoax, but anyway there were miniscule pieces of evidence, suggesting that...”

(Meanwhile my
real
dad had discovered the last
living
trilobite known to man. He hiked through the woods to this cliff to search for trilobite fossils, but after he'd been digging for five minutes, a real live trilobite scurried between his legs. He was in shock at first. But he snapped out of it, and because he had such excellent animal communication skills, he followed it, and when it noticed him, he crouched down to show it that he was friendly, and he succeeded in petting it. Then my real dad took it in and cared for it as a pet. As even more than a pet—as a friend. After three months of study he became fluent in its language of high-pitched squeals, and learned that it was actually a she, and that she had spent millenniums searching for a mate.)

“... so not only did the electromagnetic field render the ship invisible to
radar,
it also bent light around it, so not even the human eye...”

(My real dad trained her to scurry faster than the fastest racing car, because he knew what they were up against. There was a group of scientists who were determined to hunt down the trilobite and perform all sorts of cruel tests on her to understand how she had survived the last extinction. My real dad wasn't going to let that happen. He built a wooden saddle chair for her back and he guided her from town to town, protecting her.)

“... the green fog returned, and instead of being visible again, apparently the ship was accidentally teleported. There was this flash of blue light and...”

(Every day was a tough day for my real dad and the trilobite. They rested in damp caves at night, one sleeping while the other kept watch. One night by the campfire, he asked the trilobite what he should name her. She asked what the point of having a name was, and he didn't know the answer.)

“... still the legend goes that people reported seeing the ship in both Norfolk, Virginia, and Philadelphia in the same day...”

(He never did find her another trilobite for company. In the end, he took a bullet for her when they were finally discovered. She escaped though, and they never caught her. As my dad sat against the cave wall, dying, he only had one regret. He had a wish.)

“... at almost the exact same time.”

(He wished he could have met his son.)

I jumped when I realized Mr. Peterson was staring at me.

“Right?”

“W-what?”

“I mean, isn't that incredible?”

“Yeah. Amazing.”

I felt like I got knocked out in a boxing match and woke up and a week had passed but I was still at Mr. Peterson's house. I thought maybe I'd look up whatever he was talking about on Wikipedia later, in case it really
was
amazing. But mostly, I felt confused and I really wanted to go home. I pressed the STOP button and started putting the tape recorder and Phil back into my backpack.

“Is the interview over?”

“Yeah. I got lots of stuff to work with—”

“So sudden?”

“I gotta get home for supper. I'm probably missing it already. Thanks for answering my questions.”

“Oh, no trouble. Anytime.”

I stood up and my back hurt from the stiff chair. I went straight to the door and put my boots on.

“See you later,” I said, even though it was probably a lie.

“Goodbye.”

WHEN I GOT home I checked Rosie's website for new updates but there weren't any so I just looked at all the photos of her in the most amazing places on Earth again and I read one more time about how you only get one life and I tried to grab things by the horns but instead I felt excruciatingly sad, for some reason. Then I didn't feel much better while we ate mini-pizzas for supper. And after that I went in the woods like always except everything looked different. I went between the first few trees on the edge of our lawn, down the reddish-brownish path into the thicker woods, over roots, past the treehouse, then I turned right and walked that way for a while. I jumped across the little ditch, heading towards the beach that's just a bit farther in, down at the bottom of the hill with the tallest trees that in the summer have dandelion-yellow leaves but had no leaves yet. The sky was so grey, and somehow it was like the trees were closer together than usual. They looked a bit taller, like they had all grown as tall as an extra person standing on top of them in the nighttime.