Turns out I didn’t have to wait long to find out. The next morning, Wailing Woody Wilson came to me with his girlfriend to settle a dispute.
“I forgot we had a date last night, and Tanya was all mad at me.”
“I’m still mad at you,” Tanya reminded him. She crossed her arms impatiently and chewed gum in my general direction.
“Yeah,” said Woody. “So I said I’d give her a month of my life.” Then he looked at me pleadingly, like I had the power to make it all better.
Well, maybe I’m psychic, or maybe I’m smart, or maybe my stupidity quotient was equal to theirs, because I had anticipated just this sort of thing. In fact, the night before, I had printed out a dozen blank contracts—all they needed to do was fill in the names. I reached into my backpack and pulled a contract out of my binder . . . along with a certificate that would give me my own bonus week as payment for the transaction.
“Oh, and while we’re at it,” said Woody, “I’ll throw in a month for Gunnar, too.”
Tanya stenciled hearts all over her certificate, had it laminated, and posted it on the student bulletin board for the whole world to see. From that moment on, any guy who was not willing to give a month of his life to his girlfriend didn’t have a girlfriend for long. I was swamped with requests. And on top of romantic commerce, there were other kids who came to me with same-as-cash transactions.
“My brother says he’ll give me the bigger bedroom for a month of my life.”
“I broke a neighbor’s window, and I can’t afford to pay for it.”
“Could this be used as a Bar Mitzvah gift?”
Between all this new business, and the months that were still pouring in for Gunnar, I was collecting commissions left and right. In a few days I had thirty weeks of my own—which I was able to trade for everything from a bag of chips to a ride home on the back of a senior’s motorcycle. I even got a used iPod; trading value: three weeks.
I could not deny the fact that I was getting amazing mileage out of Gunnar’s imminent death. I felt guilty about it, since I never got permission from Gunnar to shamelessly use his terminality but as it turns out, Gunnar was actually pleased about it.“‘Misery loves company, but it loves power to a greater degree,’” he said, quoting Ayn Rand. “If my misery has the power to change your life, I’m happy.”
Which I guess was okay—if he could be happily miserable, it was better than being miserably miserable—and Gunnar was definitely the most “up” down person I knew.
Even so, I couldn’t tell him about the daydreams. Some things are best kept to oneself. See, you can’t help the things you daydream about—and they’re not always nice. In fact, sometimes they’re more nightmares than dreams. Daymares, I’d guess you’d call them. Like the times you get all caught up imagining irritating arguments you never had but might have someday—or the daymares where you put yourself through worst-case scenarios. The sinkhole daymare, for example. See, a while back there was this news report about a sinkhole that opened up beneath a house in Bolivia or Bulgaria, or something. One morning in this quiet neighborhood, there’s all this moaning and groaning in the walls, and then the ground opens up, a house plunges a hundred feet into the earth, and everyone inside is swept away in an underground river that nobody knew about except for some braniac in a nearby university who’s been writing papers about it for thirty years, but does anybody read them? No.
So you get a daymare about this sinkhole, and what if it happened right beneath your house. Imagine that. You wake up one morning, hit the shower, and as you’re drying off, suddenly the ground swallows your entire house, and there you are wrapped in a towel, trying to figure out which is more important at the moment—keeping the towel on, or keeping from being washed away in the underground river?
In these daymares you always survive—although occasionally you’re the only one, and it ends with you telling the news reporters how you tried so desperately to save your family, if only they could have held on and been strong like you.
My current recurring daymare involved me at Gunnar’s funeral. I’m there and it’s raining, because it’s always raining at funerals, and all the umbrellas are always black. Why is that? What happens to all those bright flowery umbrellas, or the Winnie-the-Pooh ones? So anyway, there I am holding a depressingly black umbrella with one hand, and my other hand is holding Kjersten, comforting her in her grief. I’m strong for her, and that makes us even closer—and yeah, I’m all broken up, but I don’t show it except for maybe a single tear down one cheek. Then someone asks me to say something. I step forward, and unlike in real life, I say the perfect thing that makes everyone smile and nod in spite of their tears, and makes Kjersten respect me even more. And then I snap myself out of it, seriously disgusted that in my head, Gunnar’s funeral is all about me.
In a couple of days I had gone through my entire paper supply printing out time-contract forms, and donations were still pouring in. The student council, refusing to be outdone by a lowly commoner like me, put up a big cardboard thermometer outside the main office. I was instructed to notify them daily how much time had been collected for Gunnar so they could mark it off on the thermometer. The goal they set was fifty years, because fifty additional years would make Gunnar sixty-five, and they felt that giving him time beyond retirement age would just be silly.
“It’s amazing how generous people can be when you’re dying,” Gunnar said when I handed him the next stack of months.
“So what’s the word from Doctor G?” I asked him. “Any good news?”
“Dr. G is noncommittal,” Gunnar told me. “He says I’ll be fine, until I’m not.”
“That’s helpful.” I wondered which was worse, having a disease with few symptoms, or one with enough symptoms to let you know where you stood. “Well,” I offered lamely, “at least your lips haven’t gone blue.”
Gunnar shrugged, and swayed a little, like maybe he was having one of his dizzy spells.
“So ... you think you might make it all the way through next year?” I asked.
Gunnar looked at the stack of time in his hands. “It’s possible that I could linger.”
Which was more than I could say for his backyard. I went over to his house that Wednesday to continue work on the dust bowl. It was hard spending time in the Universe of Ümlaut now. There were just too many things hanging in the air. Gunnar’s imminent death, for example. And the weirdness with their father, and then there was the looming date with Kjersten.
I know that a date with the girl of your dreams shouldn’t “loom,” but it does. It’s worse when you gotta see each other after you’ve asked her out but before the actual date. It’s kind of like saying good-bye to somebody and then realizing you both gotta get in the same elevator. You can’t talk because you already said good-bye, so usually you both stand there feeling like idiots.
So now I’d asked Kjersten out, she said yes, and here I was at her house two days before the actual date. I knew as soon as she got home from tennis practice, it would be elevator time.
As for the Ümlaut backyard, it was officially dead—nothing had survived our herbicidal assault. Even a few of the neighbors’ plants had suffered, because the herbicide had seeped into their soil a bit.
“That’s what you call ‛collateral damage,’” Gunnar said. He looked at the growing desolation around us. “Maybe we can hire some bums and urchins to populate the scene.”
Right about then Mrs. Ümlaut called from the house, asking if we wanted hot chocolate since it was getting cold. Instead we asked for “a cuppa joe straight from the pot,” which was satisfyingly Steinbeck-like. Of course it would have worked better if she hadn’t brought out an automatic-drip glass pot with a floral design.