Maybe it’s just me, but I’d rather be scared of rat holes than not care.
As Gunnar went off in search of boxes we could carry the stuff in, Skaterdud called me aside and waited until Gunnar was too far away to hear.
“Something ain’t wrong about that friend of yours,” said the Dud.
I was a little too tired to decipher dud-ese right now, so I just shrugged.
“No, you gotta listen to me, because I see things.”
That didn’t surprise me entirely. “What kinds of things?”
“Just things. But it’s more the things I don’t see that’s got my neck hairs going porcupine on me.” Then he looked off after Gunnar again, shaking his head. “Something ain’t wrong about him at all—and if you ask me, he’s got iceberg written all over him.”
We rode home from the junkyard in a public bus, carrying heavy boxes of car parts that greased up the clothes of anyone who passed. We didn’t say much, mostly because I was thinking about what Skaterdud had said. Talking to the Dud was enough to challenge anyone’s sanity, but if you take the time to decode him, there’s something there. The more I thought about it, the more I got the porcupine feeling he was talking about—because I realized he was right. It had to do with Gunnar’s emotional state. It had to do with grief. All this time I was explaining away Gunnar’s behavior, as if it was all somehow normal under the circumstances, because, face it, I’ve never been around someone who’s got an expiration date before. There was no way for me to really gauge what was standard strangeness, and what was not.
But even I had heard about the five stages of grief.
They’re kind of obvious when you think about them. The first stage is denial. It’s that moment you look into the goldfish bowl that you haven’t cleaned for months and notice that Mr. Moby has officially left the building. You say to yourself, No, it’s not true! Mr. Moby isn’t floating belly-up—he’s just doing a trick.
Denial is kinda stupid, but it’s understandable. The way I see it, human brains are just slow when it comes to digesting really big, really bad hunks of news. Then, once the brain realizes there’s no hurling up this double whopper, it goes to stage two. Anger.
Anger I can understand.
How DARE the universe be so cruel, and take the life of a helpless goldfish!
Then you go kick the wall, or beat up your brother, or do whatever you do when you get mad and you got no one in particular to blame.
Once you calm down, you reach stage three. Bargaining.
Maybe if I act real good, put some ice on my brother’s eye, clean the fishbowl and fill it with Evian water, heaven will smile on me, and Mr. Moby will revive.
Ain’t gonna happen.
When you realize that nothing’s going to bring your goldfish back, you’re in stage four: sadness. You eat some ice cream, put on your comfort movie. Everybody’s got a comfort movie. It’s the one you always play when you feel like the world is about to end. Mine is Buffet of the Living Dead. Not the remake, the original. It reminds me of a kinder, simpler time, when you could tell the humans from the zombies, and only the really stupid teenagers got their brains eaten.
Once the credits roll, and you’ve completed stage four, you’re ready for stage five. Acceptance. It begins with a flush, sending Mr. Moby the way of all goldfish, and ends with you asking your parents for a hamster.
So I’m sitting there on the bus holding car parts while Gunnar’s browsing through his catalog again, and I suddenly realize exactly what Skaterdud meant.
Gunnar never faced stages one through four.
He went straight to acceptance. This crisis, which would have thrown most people’s worlds into a tailspin, instead left Gunnar in a perfect glide. There was something fundamentally wrong about things being so “right” with Gunnar. So maybe, as Skaterdud suggested, Pulmonary Monoxic Systemia was just the tip of this iceberg.
Gunnar and I invited our whole English class to our dust bowl for dinner a few nights later, promising “authentic dust-bowl cuisine.” Since everyone knew my dad had a restaurant, more than a dozen people actually showed—including our teacher, so we were able to present our report right there. We served everyone a single pea on dusty china, to emphasize what it meant to be hungry in 1939. Our classmates thought we were jerks, but Mrs. Casey appreciated the irony. People kept asking what the faint chemical smell was, and I kept looking to the sky, praying for rain, probably looking like one of Steinbeck’s characters—although I wasn’t interested in making the corn grow, I just wanted the herbicide to wash away. Gunnar gave the verbal presentation, and I handed Mrs. Casey the written contrast between the book and the movie. She said we did a credible job, which, I guess is better than incredible, because we got an A. I wonder what she would have said if she saw Gunnar’s unfinished gravestone, which I forced him to cover with a potato sack before anyone showed up. When she gave back the written report, it came with a contract for two months, signed, witnessed, and stapled to the back of the report.
I went to my computer that night to escape thinking too much, or at least to force myself to think about things that didn’t matter. See, when you’re on the computer, you get really good at what they call multitasking, and usually the tasks you have to multi are so pointless you can have endless hours without a single useful thought. It’s great.
So I’m chatting online with half a dozen people, trying to maintain all these conversations while simultaneously trying to read all these e-mails filled with OMGs and LOLs that aren’t even F, while attempting to delete the obvious spam, like all those people in Zimbabwe who have like fourteen million dollars to give me, and the e-mails offering pills “guaranteed” to enlarge your muscles and other things.
Anyway, there I am, sorting online crud, when I notice something I rarely give any attention to: the ad banner at the bottom of the screen. Usually those ad banners are bad animations that say things like SHOOT THE PIG AND QUALIFY FOR OUR MORTGAGE. I’ve never lowered myself to shooting the pig. But right now the only thing on that banner was a single question, in bright red.
WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?
I think I must have seen this one before but it was all subliminal and stuff, because there are many times I’m sitting at this computer asking myself that same question. Meanwhile, all the chats are demanding responses. Ira’s is on top. At first he was trying to convince me about how old movies are better than new ones. He’s gotten snooty all of a sudden that way, and anytime you’re over his house, he forces you to watch classic movies like Casablanca and Alien. After chatting for like half an hour, he’s gotten tired of movie talk, and now he’s just telling dead-puppy jokes. This is where things go with Ira, no matter how snooty he pretends to be. I ignore it, and keep my eyes on the ad. Now the answer dances across the banner to join the question.
WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU? ASK DR. GIGABYTE!
At first I just chuckled. Everything’s a website now. It was the next line that really got me.
WITH DR. G, DIAGNOSIS IS FREE!
I sat there staring and blinking, and shaking my head. Gunnar’s doctor was also a “Dr. G.” I figured it was just a coincidence. It had to be. I mean, one out of every twenty-six doctors would be Dr. G, right? Well, not exactly, but you know what I mean.
A scoop of ice cream, some root beer, and a dead puppy, Ira’s instant message says. He’s waiting for my LOL, but right now I’ve got bigger puppies to fry.