"What's he doing?" Stinky asked.
Weird shook his head and grunted. "I dunno." He sounded kinda faraway when he said it. That's when I figured out that something was going on, but nobody had told me yet. Whatever Weird knew, he wasn't saying.
"Are you all right?" Weird asked.
Dad took a deep breath. "I was thinking about the moon." He pointed out at the big emptiness below us. "On the moon, there are craters this size everywhere. And bigger ones too. There's nothing special about a crater on the moon. Could you imagine living every day of your life in a place like this?"
Weird didn't answer. Neither did I. How do you answer a question like that? We just looked at each other.
Dad took another breath. "Y'know, people say that kids are the hope of the future—that a baby is the human race's way of insisting that the universe give us another chance. But I don't know. Sometimes it feels like a baby is just another chance to screw things up even worse than before. There's so much you kids don't understand, and I wish I could explain it to you, but I can't, because I'm not sure I understand it myself. And I can't ask you to forgive us because ... well, I don't have the excuse that we did our best, because I know we didn't."
I'd never heard Dad talk like this before and it sort of scared me. It was kind of like one of those movies where someone knows he's going to die soon and is trying to get all his good-byes said in two minutes. And everybody else is supposed to forgive him for being a jerk. I don't know why they always forgive each other. I wouldn't.
But whatever Dad was talking about, I didn't think he was dying. Instead, he started talking about the world and the mess it was in and all that kind of stuff. Corporate warfare. Chocolate dollars. Sugar dollars. Beef dollars. Oil dollars. Plastic dollars. Kilocalorie dollars. Silicon dollars. Cyberdollars. All of them spreading into new territories, like so many economic disease vectors, leaving a trail of infected and collapsing economies behind them. Governments unable to control their own economies because international corporatism had made all borders irrelevant. Money flowed like water seeking its level. Where it got too hot, steam rose—where it got cold again, rain fell. The economic weather was turning into a tropical storm and circling to become a global hurricane of dollars funneling around and around. According to Dad.
I couldn't see exactly how or why it would affect us, but he said it was "tear-down time." Every so often, people just get tired and frustrated with building—every twenty or thirty years or so, they start tearing down what the last generation built, even if it still works, just to tear something down and rebuild it. So the money was circling like flies, unwilling to land anywhere. Only this time, it wasn't landing. It was going away. That was why we didn't have the money for the reclamation projects or the recycling we needed and why everything was getting worse.
"This planet is no place to raise a family," he said bitterly. "It's just a matter of time until the whole planet turns into Calcutta." That part I understood. There were plagues in Calcutta. All over India. And Rome too. Black Peritonitis. African Measles. Europe was shutting itself down in panic, and brushfire wars had broken out all up and down the eastern half of Asia. Fifth World revolutions. Wars and plagues. Craziness everywhere. The planet didn't have the resources to manage itself anymore. Like the guy on TV said, "The machinery is breaking down faster than we can fix it."
"The problem is, we're all in it together, whether we want to be or not," Dad said. "More and more I look around at the way things are going, and I don't want to be part of it anymore. When I was your age, Charles, everything seemed so simple and easy. You don't know how easy it is to be a kid—"
"Yeah, right."
"—but then I grew up and everything got complex, and I just wish I could figure out how to get back to what's really important. You don't understand any of this, do you? And you won't, not until you turn forty." He sighed. "But wouldn't you just like to get up and go away sometime? Someplace new, where you can start fresh?"
Well, yeah. But there isn't any such place. It's all people, everywhere. So it's silly to dream of it. The best you can do is go up in the hills once in a while and listen to your music alone. But I didn't say any of this aloud. Why bother? In three and a half weeks, we'd be back in the war zone with Mom again.
I knew Dad wanted me to say something, but I'd stopped doing that a long time ago. There was no cookie there. When he realized I was simply waiting for him to do something, he stood up and brushed the dirt from his pants. "Well, come on, let's get going." He pointed toward the rim of the crater and we all started hiking upward. It was a difficult climb, not because it was too steep—it was just hard because it was all up.
Stinky whined the whole way that it was too hard and kept demanding that someone carry him, but no one wanted to touch him because he smelled so bad. I said, "You shoulda thought of that before you started running down." Then Weird made one of his pseudo-profound observations about how it's easier to cooperate with gravity than fight it, like this meant something, so I called him a techno-geek, and he said, "Yeah, so?"
Dad started to say something about that, one of those comfort-lies that grownups tell, but Weird interrupted him. "No, Dad—everybody's a geek about something. I am a techno-geek. You're a music-geek. And Charles is a nastiness-geek because he doesn't have anything else to be geeky for."
It was the longest paragraph I'd ever heard out of Weird that didn't have the word gigabyte in it. I didn't have the breath left to tell him what he was full of. I just grunted, "Devour my richard," which is the polite way of saying it. "And Stinky's a pee-geek," I added, just a little louder.
"Daddy—" Stinky wailed.
"Well, it's your own damn fault! Dad told you not to go running down! Now we've all got to hike back up—"
At this point, Dad should have been screaming at all of us to shut up. Instead, he stopped. He squatted down in front of Stinky to look at him eye-to-eye. "There's a lesson here," he said.
"Huh?" Stinky rubbed his eyes.
"Do you know what it is?" Dad asked.
Stinky shook his head slowly.
"Two things. First—never go anywhere unless you know how you're going to get back. Look down. Suppose we had let you go all the way down to the bottom. Do you think you could climb all the way back up to the top? Look how much trouble you're having going just this short way."
"It's not a short way!" Stinky wailed. "It's a long way."
Dad ignored him. "And the second lesson—go to the bathroom before you go anywhere. Either that or learn to poop in the bushes."
"I wanna go home," Stinky said flatly. "I wanna go home now."
Dad responded with that grunt of resignation he does so well, whenever he realizes that whichever one of us he's talking to isn't really listening. Without saying another word, he straightened and started back up the crater wall. If he was angry, it was a kind of anger I'd never seen before. He didn't show any emotion at all. I looked at Weird, but he was pushing Stinky up the slope and no one was looking at me and I wondered why I had bothered to come at all. Here we were, standing inside the biggest hole in the world where a ton of rock had fallen out of the sky and blasted a hole so deep you could put a roof on it and have a stadium large enough for the Godzilla Bowl—and the only important lesson to be learned from our visit was that you should go to the bathroom before you went anywhere. Sheesh.
We finally got to the top and Weird took Stinky into the bathroom and got him cleaned up and into some fresh clothes, while Dad and I sat on a bench and sipped sodas and waited. Dad didn't say anything. He was still off somewhere else. On the moon, I guess.