Everything Matters!

by Ron Currie Jr.

  I don’t think we’re going to get to meet Harry Caray, son, I say. I’m surprised at how breathless I am.

  I know, Rodney says. I just wanted you to stop choking him. I don’t want you to go to jail.

  Oh he’s fucking going to jail, Green says. Fuck. He sits up slowly, rubbing at his throat. He’s going to jail, and you’re going to be wearing a Cubs uniform next year, kid.

  I make a move toward Green, but Rodney steps in front of me and pushes me back, and I’m surprised that he’s strong enough to move me even though by now he’s an inch taller and probably ten pounds heavier. He herds me out of the room, and I see as I pass backwards through the door that the bartender is smiling at the sight of Green sitting on the carpet in front of his nice leather chairs, the bartender is smiling for the first time that I’ve seen, and so I must have done something right even though I’ll probably end up in a cell and my boy won’t get to see the game or have a Wrigley dog or meet Harry Caray.

  We beat it out of there, back to the elevator, down the stairs, past the training room and batting cage and clubhouse, where now all the players are sitting around in their uniforms, listening to music, talking, playing cards, reading the newspaper. Rodney pauses in front of the open door but I grab him by the arm and pull him along. Then we’re out onto the sidewalk, which is still packed with a slowly flowing stream of Cubs fans. Obviously there’s no car waiting for us this time. We make our way against the current to the El stop, take the red line downtown and pick up the blue line, which takes us all the way out to O’Hare. It’s a long ride, and I’m getting more and more worried that the police will be waiting for us when it finally ends, but the only cops at the airport are standing around looking bored. They obviously haven’t been told to be on the lookout for anyone, let alone us.

  When we get to the ticket counter, though, it’s a different story. Our vouchers have been canceled. At first I’m pissed because now I’ll have to spend money on bus tickets but then I figure if the worst thing that happens is Green doesn’t pay for our trip home then we’re getting off easy. I ask the lady at the ticket counter where the Greyhound station is, and she tells us we have to go back into the city, which is more money for the El, but eventually we find the station and I buy two tickets and spend the rest of my money on sandwiches. It take two days for us to get home, and we’re hungry the whole way and I do something I’ve never had to do in my life, which is ask someone for a couple of bucks to get Rodney something to eat. I ask the driver and it makes my teeth hurt from embarrassment, but it’s my hot temper that got us into this so I have to eat shit so my son can eat, period. I borrow five dollars and buy cheap stuff like doughnuts and I don’t eat anything myself, though Rodney keeps trying to make me. Here Dad have some of my sandwich, he says. I get the driver’s name and address and promise to send him the money, which I do, with interest, a couple of weeks later, when Debbie has calmed down from thinking Rodney and I were dead and everything sort of goes back to normal.

  Junior

  So Amy is the only person I can approach about it. I mean really full-on, you’re-going-to-think-I’m-crazy-but-here’s-the-thing approach about it. It’s true that in the past I’ve made mention of it here and there, especially when I was younger. I remember drawing these horrific picture books in grade school: dead things of every variety littering the ground, a smoldering, barren earth, the remnants of skyscrapers bent and twisted against dark skies. These projects got me invited more than once to the office, where an ascending succession of school administrators—nurse, vice principal, principal, superintendent—would take a shot at figuring out what was going on in my head. Finally they called in the psychologist kept on retainer for emotionally unstable students. But no one really got anywhere with me. I was drawing pictures and making cryptic little asides not because I felt a need to communicate what I knew to anyone, but more to sort out what it meant to know these things. To figure out what this knowledge made me. Since I wasn’t particularly interested in talking about it, my talks with the conga line of administrators were uniform in their pointlessness:

  They: “Junior, what do these pictures mean?”

  I: “M’Idunno.”

  And so on. These interviews were usually very brief, as conversations with the monosyllabically responsive tend to be. Sooner rather than later I was released back to my classroom of two, and the administrators were left scratching their figurative heads, relieved that I had departed and taken my strangeness with me, but probably more than a bit worried that something truly scary was going on inside my brain, something they hoped would remain dormant until I was no longer their responsibility.

  To which I would now say, given the chance: You have no idea, sirs. I am not your routinely disturbed adolescent, pissed off about some generic bullying or a lack of attention from my daddy. I see visions that make Hiroshima look like a cherry bomb. Visions you would find terrifying even if you did not know, as I do, that they are true.

  Of course through these administrators my parents became peripherally involved, insofar as they were asked to come in and discuss my artwork and state of mind, but they had no real insight to offer, as I shared little of myself with them. I think this is how we all prefer it. My father doesn’t know how to talk to anyone, and though we feel genuine affection toward one another, the rare conversation between the two of us is even shorter-lived than my talks with the administrators, as conversations between two monosyllabically responsive people tend to be:

  “Junior, put some coffee on.”

  “. . .”

  Or, when I’ve carefully lifted the television remote from the arm of his easy chair and changed the channel, while he sits reclined and, to all outward appearances, very much asleep:

  “I was watching that.”

  “. . .”

  So even if I saw him more than two hours a week, my father would be a poor choice for the first person to reveal my visions to. My mother might have, at one time, been a marginally better option, but since Rodney left for Chicago she’s transformed into a sad, catatonic version of herself. These days she spends most of her time sitting at the kitchen table with a plastic Turbo Chug! cup from the Hasty Market, complete with red plastic lid and half-inch-diameter straw, filled to varying levels with vodka and ice. Beads of condensation collect on the cup and form rings of enormous diameter on the tabletop. There are hundreds of big sixty-four-ounce stains on the part of the table that occupies the southern end of the kitchen.

  This time of the year it’s dark before suppertime, and my mother sits at the table and doesn’t bother to turn on a light. Just sits there with her hand on the Turbo Chug! cup so she doesn’t lose it in the dark. She holds the cup for so long that the pads of her fingers prune up from the condensation. Coming home from Amy’s I’ll open the front door and fumble for the light switch and turn it on and there she’ll be at the table. Her pupils contract so violently I can see it from eight feet away. It’s got to hurt but she never squints. She just sits there and when her eyes stop cramping and she sees me the faintest hint of a maternal smile tugs at the corners of her mouth and she says, “Hi, babe.”

  “Ma, you look tired,” I’ll say. “Maybe you should go to bed.”

  She’ll pick up the Turbo Chug! cup with both hands to test its weight. She’ll shake it and the ice and vodka will make a sound somewhere between sloshing and rattling. “I’ll be up just a while longer,” she’ll say, setting the cup back down. To look at her, especially in the light from the overhead fluorescent in the kitchen, it’s hard to believe she’s less than forty years old.

  So Dad and Ma are out, obviously, as people I could confess to. Which leaves Rodney and Amy. Even if Rodney weren’t a thousand miles away, life has already bitten off more for him than he can reasonably be expected to chew—he just finished his fourth season with the Cubs, was second in National League MVP voting, and is the most popular baseball player on the North Side. He’s got more money than he could spend in three lifetimes. His salary
with the team is starting to look more and more like pocket change when compared to the money he’s getting from Mizuno and Pepsi and even some of the smaller regional endorsements he does, like the deal he got with Portillo’s because his love of hot dogs is well publicized and made him the perfect celebrity endorser for them. In return for his voice and image, he not only gets money but free hot dogs for life. As if he needs them. But there in his basement he’s got a walk-in freezer full of Portillo’s. Stacked floor to ceiling. This is my brother’s life now. And considering that he needs a live-in attendant to get him to the buses and planes on time and to make sure he doesn’t pack a suitcase full of nothing but underwear or go three days without eating, it’s safe to say he’s got his hands full without having to hear about my problem. Even if that problem is the rather pressing and certainly relevant knowledge of the end of all things.

  So it’s down to Amy. Which is a prospect well beyond daunting. I’ve given it plenty of thought. How to approach her, I wondered, and wonder still.

  She loves me.

  “I love you,” she says.

  So I should, in a perfect world, be able to tell her anything. On the other hand, she is not the type of girl to abide by nonsense, and I don’t want her thinking I’m crazy, as her attitude toward the mentally ill is, to put it mildly, ungenerous. She concluded an essay regarding the fate of Mark David Chapman, vis-à-vis a government class debate on how best to deal with the criminally insane, thusly: “It’s my opinion that Chapman got exactly what he deserved: a lifelong stay at luxurious Attica State Prison. And I don’t even like the Beatles.” She became a fan of Sylvia Plath’s after reading The Colossus, printed up “The Eye-Mote” and tacked it on the wall next to her desk, and this was just another of many reasons why I love her, because who else would hang poetry up on prime pop star poster real estate? Except that “The Eye-Mote” came down the same hour Amy read about Plath’s suicide. When I brought up Ted Hughes, Amy said, “He didn’t shove her head in the oven. Besides, she had kids. And leaving the windows open so they wouldn’t asphyxiate doesn’t make her mother of the year.”

  This lack of sympathy for the mentally ill can be traced to Amy’s mother, who is crazy, and who has pretty much made a career of beating Amy up since her father bolted a while back. Over the years Amy’s family has become a cascade of domestic abuse: her father beat on her brother, who grew big and furious and beat on her mother, who had no one but Amy to vent her anger on. Based on this pattern, you’d think that if there were someone in the family after Amy, that someone would do well to take karate classes, or hit the weights. But this theoretical younger sibling would in fact have nothing to fear, because Amy seems immune to the rage that’s been passed on from fist to fist. She’s wry, and people who can pull off wry, put some real sting into it, rarely need to take up violence.

  Her mother is not wry, and about once a month I can reliably expect to find bruises on Amy’s upper arms, or scratches on her back. If she’s reluctant to take off her clothes I know her mother’s been smacking her around. More than once she’s appeared at my window in the middle of the night, her nose bloody and her face tattooed with screaming red palm prints. Each time I fume and curse and vow revenge, or at the very least a stern talking-to with lots of overt and insinuated threats.

  “You’re a head taller than she is,” I say. “Why do you put up with this?”

  But Amy calms me, touches my face with her hands. Pressed against me on the same Cracker Jack box of a bed that I’ve had since I graduated from a crib, she offers no explanation. Without speaking she somehow makes clear she won’t allow or tolerate retribution. The police will not be called, and I will not say or do anything. So I walk wide silent circles around her mother, and when Amy’s not looking I shoot the woman hard glances, so she knows that I know.

  So thanks to her mother there is the problem of Amy having no patience or sympathy for crazy people. And there is, of course, the better-than-fair chance that she will, on hearing what I have to say, think that I am crazy. But the more I ponder it, the more I realize that strange as it sounds, this is an essential part of who I am, and if I don’t share it with her I’m being dishonest in some fundamental way. With the few other people in my life—Ma and Dad, Rodney—this dishonesty, and the distance it creates between us, is something I’m accustomed to and have learned to accept. But with Amy I can’t tolerate it any longer. Increasingly it permeates our days, and, more often, our nights, which is always the worst time for me. Say her mother’s out of town, which she often is these days, and I sleep over. When we get into bed and she curls into me and puts her head on my belly and her hair is fanned out across my chest and there’s no light except from the one votive that she lets burn on the stand on my side of the bed, I am as safe and content as I’ve ever been in my life. I could die there. But then inevitably, in the early morning, the darkest thoughts and fears come over me, and I’ll rise and put on my clothes and go out into the streets and wander around smoking and fielding questions from suspicious police officers. And when I return, usually just as the sky is starting to brighten, Amy naturally will want to know where I went, and why, and not only have I wasted a good portion of our best time together but now, on top of that, I have to lie. Bad stomach, I tell her. She asks sleepily if I feel any better, and I lie again and say yes, and she pulls me into bed and puts her back against me and wraps my arms around her and clutches my hands against her chest, but by now the whole thing’s ruined and I feel almost nothing.

  How to approach her, is the thing. Because obviously it’s not something I can just drop casually: “Oh, you know that reminds me, did I mention that the world is going to end in nineteen years, give or take? No? Are you sure? I could have sworn I told you about that.”

  But after a couple of weeks of trying without luck to come up with a way to broach the subject, I realize that what I’m lacking isn’t a good context in which to tell her, but simply the courage to do so. This will never be anything but the world’s biggest, strangest non sequitur. And so there’s nothing to it but to say it. Predictably, the courage finally comes to me at a weird, inappropriate time: while we’re watching a movie in her basement after school.

  “Amy,” I say.

  “Mm.”

  “There’s something I need to say to you.”

  But then I balk.

  We’re lying on top of the covers on her brother’s old bed. Though he went out west a couple of years after Amy’s father split, the space has been only slightly modified for use as a second living room. Hence the addition of the television and VCR, perched on a loose-legged TV tray, and the subtraction of his Night Ranger and Warrant posters. Whenever Amy and I come down here to watch a movie, I always have to battle the creeping feeling that her brother’s going to come home any minute and rag us out for being in his bedroom, even though I know he’s in Salt Lake City.

  We’re lying on our sides, Amy’s back to my front. She turns her head away from the television to glance at me, lizard-like, out of the corner of her eye. “Okay,” she says. “Then, uh, you know. Say it.”

  I open my mouth again but succeed only in making a strange choking noise. I try to swallow, but I’m too dry and the walls of my throat just rasp against one another, making me wince. My heart’s going like a bull getting spurred in the chute.

  Now Amy pauses the movie and rolls over. She’s flashing that look of amused exasperation she uses on me all the time. “Want to try that one more time, kid? Start over. Go slow.”

  This is just another thing I love about her—like her Dinosaur Jr. T-shirts, her purple Doc Martens, the bands she listens to that I’ve never heard of, and the relaxed, boyish way she carries herself—she calls me “kid.” I’m four months older and outweigh her by about eighty pounds, but I’m the kid.

  I hesitate. She’s staring at me, calmly expectant. I could try to backtrack, claim she misheard, deny I said anything at all. But there’d be no point. She heard exactly what I said the first time I said it
, and now she’s waiting for me to finish the thought.

  Oh, I have screwed up. Oh, this was a mistake.

  “Yes?” Amy says, sliding a hand between my ribs and the mattress, tickling my back with her fingertips to prod me.

  “Shit,” I say, not meeting her gaze.

  “Indeed,” she says.

  “I don’t suppose I could get a takeback on that,” I say.

  “I’m afraid not.”

  I sigh. “Okay,” I say, “now listen, before you get mad or jump to any conclusions, just hear me out.”

  The grin fades from her face, replaced by a look of burgeoning concern. She sits up. “This isn’t going to be one of those ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ conversations, is it?”

  “No,” I say, “no, no way. God, don’t worry about that.”

  “Okay,” she says, cautious now. “Then what?”

  I hold my breath for a second, eyeing her. Then I speak, quickly, before I have a chance to hesitate any more. “The world is going to end in nineteen years. Give or take.”

  Amy stares at me. Understandably, she doesn’t know what to think. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  I drop my gaze to the comforter. “Precisely what I just said.”

  “And did I hear you correctly?”

  “I’m pretty sure you did,” I say.

  “And you’re serious.”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay,” she says, “okay, and you’re going to have to forgive me here, but I guess I’m going to need a little more explanation. Like, what exactly you’re talking about, Junior, when you say the world is going to end in nineteen years.”

  “Give or take.”

  She folds her arms across her chest. “I’m waiting.”

  Right, so. “It means,” I say, “that on a day in the near future, a day we both will likely live to witness, the world—civilization, humanity, ninety-six percent of marine species and ninety-one percent of terrestrial species—will cease to be.”