Authors: Neal Shusterman
“Not a problem,” the bartender says. “We’ll bill your insurance.”
He pours the concoction into a crystal champagne flute and hands it to me. The brew bubbles red and yellow, but the two colors do not blend. My cocktail is a lava lamp.
“Drink up, drink up,” says the parrot. He turns his head slightly and watches me with his good eye.
I take a sip. It’s bitter but not entirely unpleasant. A faint flavor of banana and almond. “Bottoms up,” I say, then I down it in a single gulp, leaving the empty glass on the bar.
The parrot bobs his head in deep satisfaction.
“Excellent! You’ll visit the crow’s nest twice a day.”
“What if I don’t want to visit the crow’s nest?” I ask him.
He winks at me. “Then the crow’s nest will visit you.”
Our family took a trip to New York a long time ago. Since all the convenient hotels were either booked or required multiple pounds of flesh in payment, we ended up off the beaten tourist path.
Our hotel was somewhere in the left armpit of a fat guy in Queens. It was an area of Queens with the unfortunate name of “Flushing.” New York’s founding fathers, like most New Yorkers, had a keen sense of irony.
Long story short, as a New Yorker might say, we had to take the subway everywhere, which was always an adventure. I believe one time we ended up in Staten Island, and there isn’t even a subway line that goes there. We kept running out of money on our MetroCards, which vomited digital cash every time you went through a turnstile, and Dad lamented the golden age of the brass subway token, when you could count your journeys in the palm of your hand.
My mother was very clear about THE RULES OF THE SUBWAY, which involved lots of Purell, and never making eye contact with people.
During that week I became a student of the crowd, studying the unwashed and un-hand-sanitized masses. In the streets, for instance, I discovered that New Yorkers never look up at the awe-inspiring buildings towering above them. They move fast and efficiently through dense mobs, as if they have a Teflon coat, very rarely bumping into one another. And in the subway, where everyone must stand still as the train rattles from station to station, not only don’t people make eye contact, but they exist in their own extremely tight universe, as if wearing an invisible space suit. It’s kind of like driving on the freeway, except that your personal space is only half an inch from your clothes, if that. I marveled that people could live so close—that you could literally be surround by thousands who were only inches away—and yet be completely
isolated. I found it hard to imagine. It’s not hard for me to imagine anymore.
Our house is now termite-free, and the wonders of Sin City are memories best suppressed. But home feels no more comfortable. I have this urge to pace. Back and forth, back and forth. It’s pointless. When I’m not pacing, I’m drawing; when I’m not drawing, I’m thinking—which just leads me back to pacing and drawing again. Maybe I’m being affected by the pesticide residual.
I sit at the dining room table. Before me is a spread of colored pencils, oil pastels, charcoal. Today I work in colored pencil, but I hold them so hard and press so powerfully, the pencils keep breaking. Not just the points, but the pencils themselves. I toss the ruined ones over my shoulder, not allowing for delays.
“You’re like a mad scientist,” my mother observes.
I hear her about ten seconds after she says it. It’s too late to respond, so I don’t. I’m too busy to respond anyway. There’s this thing in my head that I have to purge onto the page before it changes the shape of my brain. Before the colorful lines cut into it like a cheese wire. My drawings have lost all sense of form. They are scribbles and suggestions, random, and yet not. I wonder if others will see the things in them that I see. These images have to mean something, don’t they? Why else would they be so intense?
Why would that silent voice inside be so adamant about getting them out?
The magenta pencil breaks. I toss it and pick up vermilion.
“I don’t like it,” says Mackenzie, passing with a spoonful of peanut butter that she licks like a lollipop. “It’s creepy.”
“I only draw what’s called for,” I tell her. Then I get a flash of impulsive inspiration; I reach over, dig my thumb into her spoon, and smudge an ocher arc across the page.
“Mom!” yells Mackenzie. “Caden’s drawing with my peanut butter!”
To which Mom replies, “Serves you right. You shouldn’t be eating peanut butter before dinner.”
Still, Mom spares a glance from the kitchen at me and my project. I feel her wave of worry like a patio heater—faint and ineffective, but constant.
29. Some of My Best Friends Are Cirque-ish
I sit with my friends for lunch. And yet I don’t. That is to say, I’m among them, but I don’t feel
with
them. Used to be I could easily fit in with whatever friends I was hanging out with. Some people need a clique to make them feel safe. They have this little protective bubble of friends that they rarely venture away from. I was never like that. I could always flow freely from table to table, group to group. The athletes, the brainiacs, the hipsters, the band kids,
the skaters. I was always well liked and well accepted by all, and I always managed to fit in like a chameleon. How strange, then, that now I find myself in a clique of one, even when I’m with a group.
My friends scarf down their lunches, and laugh about something I didn’t hear. It’s not like I’m intentionally zoning out, but somehow I can’t land myself in the conversation. Their laughter feels so far away it’s as if there’s cotton in my ears. It’s been happening more and more. It’s like they’re not even talking English—they’re speaking that weird fake language the clowns speak in Cirque du Soleil. My friends are all conversing in Cirque-ish. Usually I’ll play along. I’ll join in the laughter so I can stay camouflaged and appear to be in step with those around me. But today I’m not in the mood to pretend. My buddy Taylor, who is slightly more observant than the others, notices my absence, and raps me gently on the arm.
“Hey, earth to Caden Bosch—where are you, man?”
“In orbit around Uranus,” I tell him, which makes everyone laugh, and it starts a whole round of rude puns that all sound Cirque-ish, because I’ve already checked out again.
While we crewmen do our business, pacing back and forth on deck with no seeming point to the endeavor, the captain stands above us at the helm. Like a preacher, he pontificates his own peculiar brand of wisdom.
“Count your blessings,” the captain says. “And if you count less than ten, cut off the remaining fingers.”
I watch the parrot checking in with the crew members one at a time, landing on their shoulders, or perching atop their heads for a few moments before flying off to the next. I wonder what he’s up to.
“Burn all your bridges,” the captain says. “Preferably before you cross them.”
The navigator sits on a leaky barrel of yuck that was once full of food, but its stench testifies to the fact that the foodstuffs have decayed into something other. He creates a new navigational chart based on the movements of flies swarming around the barrel. “Their motions are more truthful than the stars,” he tells me, “because common flies have compound eyes.”
“Why does that make a difference?” I dare to ask.
He looks at me as if the answer is obvious. “Compound eyes confound lies.”
I can see why he and the captain get along so well.
The parrot lands on my shoulder as I do my endless shuffle across the deck. “Crewman Bosch! Hold fast, hold fast!” He then peers into my ear with his unpatched eye, bobbing his head as he does. “It’s still there,” he says. “Good for you! Good for you!”
I assume he’s talking about my brain.
He flies off to check in the ear of another sailor. His low whistle betrays disappointment at what he finds—or fails to find—between the boy’s ears.
“There is nothing to fear but fear itself,” the captain announces from the helm, “and the occasional man-eating monster.”
31. Is That All They’re Worth?
Although the pesticide residue is gone from our house, I can’t stop thinking about termites. If antibacterial soap creates super germs like they say, what if toxic tenting creates super insects? I sit with my sketch book in this New Age kind of rocking chair we have in the living room—a piece of furniture left over from when Mackenzie and I were babies, and Mom breast-fed us. I’m sure I must have some old sense memory, because when I sit in the chair and rock, I usually feel a little more relaxed and content—although, thankfully, the memory of breast milk has been lost in the tunnels of time.
Today, however, I’m not feeling relaxed at all. I can’t stop thinking about squirming things evolving. I begin drawing what’s in my head, as if maybe by drawing it, it will exorcise the super bugs from my brain.
After a while I look up to see Mom standing there, watching me. I have no idea how long she’s been there. And when I look down again, I see that the page is still blank. I haven’t drawn anything at all. I even flip the page back to see if maybe the drawing is on a previous page, but no. The bugs are still in my head, and won’t come out.
She must see something unsettling in my face because she says, “A penny for your thoughts?”
I don’t feel like sharing my thoughts, so instead I challenge the question. “Really? Is that all they’re worth? A penny?”
She sighs. “It’s just an expression, Caden.”
“Well, find out when the expression was thought up, and then adjust for inflation.”
She shakes her head. “Only you would go there, Caden.” Then she leaves me to stew in thoughts I refuse to sell.
I read somewhere that they’re going to be doing away with pennies entirely one of these days, because I guess thoughts are all they’re good for. Bank accounts will be rounded to the nearest nickel. Fountains will reject copper. Purchases will be required by law to end in either zero or five. Nothing in between will be allowed. Except that there
is
something in between, even if everyone denies it.
It’s like all those subway tokens that became obsolete when New York started using magnetic cards instead. No one knew what to do with those tokens. It was like this dragon’s hoard of worthless brass that not even Smaug’s underachieving brother would want—and with real estate being so expensive in the city, the cost of storing them was probably astronomical. I’ll bet they just hired the Mafia to dump them into the East River, along with the body of whatever city planner thought MetroCards was a good idea.
If pennies become worthless, does that devalue our thoughts to less than nothing? It makes me sad to think about it; billions
of copper bits spinning down the yellow funnel into oblivion. I wonder where they’ll go. All those thoughts have to end up somewhere.
I decide to try out for the track team, to keep my mind from being idle, and to reconnect with my fellow human beings. My father is overjoyed. I know he’s secretly marking this as a turning point for me. The end of my anxious days. I think he wants it so badly, he doesn’t seem to notice that I’m still anxious—but him thinking that I’m okay makes me feel like I am, too. Forget solar energy—if you could harness denial, it would power the world for generations.
“You’ve always been a fast runner,” he says, “and with those long legs, I’ll bet you could be a hurdler.”
My dad was on his high school tennis team. We have pictures of him in ridiculous Adidas shorts that leave nothing to the imagination, and a headband holding back long hair, most of which has since washed down the drain.
“The coach wants us to walk or run everywhere,” I tell my parents. Now I walk to and from school each day. My feet develop calluses and sores. My ankles hurt all the time.
“It’s a good kind of hurt,” my father tells me, then he quotes some sports guru, saying, “Pain is weakness leaving the body.”
We go out to buy new, expensive running shoes and better
socks. My parents say they’ll try to make it to my first meet, even if they have to take off from work. This would all be fine, if it weren’t for one thing. I’m not actually on the track team.
I didn’t lie about it—not at first. I really did go out for track, but I only went to practice for three days. As much as I tried, I just wasn’t feeling it. Lately there’s this subway-like bubble of isolation around me, and when I’m in a place filled with camaraderie, like on a team, it’s only worse.
Don’t be a quitter
my father always told me. That’s how I was raised, but is it quitting when you never really joined?
So now I walk after school, instead of run. It used to be that walking was just a way to get from place to place, but lately it seems to be both the means and the ends. It’s like that urge to fill an empty space with drawings. I see a vacant sidewalk, and I have to fill it. For hours at a time I walk. The calluses and aching ankles are all from walking. And I see things. Not so much see, but feel. Patterns of connection between the people I pass. Between the birds that swoop from the trees. There is meaning out there, if only I can find it.
I walk for two hours in the rain one day, my hoodie soaked, my body chilled to the bone.
“I should have a talk with that coach of yours,” my mom says, fixing me some hot tea. “He shouldn’t make you run in this kind of downpour.”
“Mom, don’t,” I tell her. “I’m not a baby! Everyone on track does it, and I don’t want to be singled out!”
I wonder exactly when it was that lying became so easy.
“Caden, I have fer you a challenge,” the captain says, “to prove whether or not you have the mettle for the mission.” He puts his large hand on my shoulder and squeezes so tightly that it hurts, then he points to the front of the ship.
“See there? The bowsprit?” He indicates the mast-like pole that pokes out at the front of the ship, like Pinocchio’s nose after the second or third lie. “The sun has aged it and the sea has weathered it. It’s high time the bowsprit was polished.” Then he puts a rag in one hand and a tin of wood polish in the other. “Get to it, boy. If you succeed without perishing, you shall be a part of the inner circle.”