by Lance Rubin
Felix had spent nine years with our mom, so he threw the occasional gem my way. It generally fell into one of two categories: Fun but Superficial (“She loved rocky road ice cream”) or Revealing but Hyperbolic (“She was so funny, Dent. Like, actually funny. I remember us laughing together for hours.” Hours? Whatever you say). I never stopped feeling like it was a betrayal that he’d been complicit in the plan to hide her existence from me until I was eight. I mean, come on! Brothers gotta stick together, right?
This is all to say that, after months of steadfast devotion to it, the mission seemed impossible, a series of brick walls. My efforts resulted in this paltry list, the sum total of everything I know about my biological mother:
Her name was Cheryl Quinn. Then Cheryl Little.
She had curly light brown hair.
She had the same smile as me. (Well, I guess I have the same smile as her.)
She was funny.
She met my dad at grad school, where he was one of her pharmaceutical science professors. Apparently, they both had instant crushes on each other. Way to be a creepy teacher, Dad.
On their first date, my dad took her to a night of beat poetry. One of the poets took her top off during her poem, and my dad got really embarrassed, even though my mom thought it was hilarious.
She prided herself on being the rare breed of scientist who enjoyed being around people as much as she enjoyed being in the lab (i.e., the opposite of my dad).
Her favorite flavor of ice cream was rocky road. (Already said that, but I want to make my list as long as possible.)
She cared a lot about making the world better, and she was very passionate about doing things to help the environment.
The day I was born was the day she died.
And now, admittedly late in the game, I have two more bits of information to add:
Her doctor was a (weirdo) friend of hers named Brian Blum.
She wanted me, and my dad did not.
Consider my mission officially resumed.
There’s so much more my dad could probably tell me, but right now I can’t even look at him. He’s followed me in from the kitchen and is hovering uncomfortably on the other side of the room.
It sucks that he never wanted me, but it sucks even more that he’s withheld so much information from his dying son. His reticence used to be something that annoyed me, inspired a shake of the head and a roll of the eyes, but now I feel genuinely furious.
I need to talk with Brian Blum.
“You okay?” Taryn asks as I plop down next to her on the couch.
“Uh…Yeah.” I force a smile. “I am. Thanks.”
“It’s your turn, Felix!” my stepmom says.
While I was in the kitchen, a game of tell-your-favorite-Denton-story seems to have spontaneously broken out. I don’t think this will make me feel better; it’s possible I might cringe myself to death.
Felix tells the story of a three-year-old me accidentally taking a bite out of his tuna fish sandwich, even though I had my own. I still remember that. Felix got up to go to the bathroom, and when I looked down at the table, I suddenly thought I’d been given two sandwiches. Sweet little idiot.
Most of what people share follows this general trend—Denton the well-intentioned doofus—except for my aunt Deana’s story, which is about Felix.
“That wasn’t Denton,” my stepmom says.
“Oh,” Aunt Deana says. “You sure?”
Veronica is next, so I can only half pay attention to Millie’s story, which seems to involve spotting me singing a made-up song about snacks as I walked home by myself one day. It strikes me as a little creepy that Millie had secretly been watching me, but the thought is whooshed away by the flood of anticipation for Veronica’s words.
She begins: “Uh…can I pass?”
Oh. Burn.
“Well…,” my stepmom says.
“I’m joking, I’m joking.”
“Ha-ha, that’s funny,” I say, trying to quickly rearrange my facial expression from dejected to relaxed.
“My tale of Denton. Okay, so, when I was nine and Paolo was eight, I used to love messing with Paolo. I would hide his favorite toys, rearrange the furniture in his room, add facial hair to his posters, that sort of thing. He hated it.”
“Yeah, I did,” Paolo says.
“So one day, I borrowed some pink paint from Amanda Litensky’s garage—she lived a few houses down from us—and I carried this huge can all the way back to Paolo’s room.” Oh, this story. “I have no idea how; it felt like I was carrying a small planet, but I was determined. When I got home, Paolo was in the backyard with Denton, of course, the two of them pretending they knew how to kick around a soccer ball.”
“Hey! I’m really good at soccer,” I say.
“No, you’re not,” Veronica says.
“I know.”
“So, anyway, the coast was clear. I sat down on the floor of Paolo’s room with his beloved box of action figures, and, one by one, I started—ha-ha—I started dipping them into the can of pink paint. Head to toe. And then I would leave them on a sheet of newspaper to dry.”
“Such a mean person,” Paolo says.
“I remember I’d just finished pinking Wolverine—”
“Poor Wolvy,” Paolo whimpers.
“—and I looked out the window to make sure the Bonehead Boys were still playing nerd soccer, that I still had time left, but only Paolo was out there. Suddenly I hear the door open behind me.”
I don’t think I’ve ever heard Veronica talk this much at one time about anything, let alone about me. There’s excitement pulsing beneath everything she says, her dimples bouncing around like fireflies, and I can’t help but smile, in spite of the fact that I can feel Taryn looking at me, wondering why I’m grinning like an idiot.
“And there’s Denton standing in the doorway, confused, while I crouched at the window, totally frozen. The can of pink paint was sitting there, big and obvious next to the pink action figures.” I remember that image so clearly, how my first thought was that it looked like a tiny aboveground pool and a small squadron of pink men lying on their backs, tanning. “I was caught red-handed. Well…pink-handed. And Denton was like, ‘I came to get us some shin guards. Paolo says we don’t need them, but I think we do.’ Which was also hilarious.”
“It was getting dangerous!”
“Sure it was, Denton.” It was. “And I see Dent taking the whole scene in, putting two and two together, and I’m getting ready for him to sprint into the backyard to tell Paolo, but instead he gives me a sly look and says, ‘Ninjas.’ And I was like, ‘What?’ And he was like, ‘You’re making them all into pink ninjas. This is so cool.’ Which made me confused for a few moments, like, What? No, I’m painting my brother’s action figures pink so I can ruin them. And I was even more confused—like, shocked, even—when he got down on the floor and started helping me dip the action figures in the paint.”
“You helped?” Paolo says, horrified.
“Wait, wait,” Veronica says. “The point is, I could tell Denton obviously knew I wasn’t making pink ninjas, and he was just trying to spin the whole situation in a cool light to help out his best friend.”
Oh. Wow, no. I really thought we were making pink ninjas. Like, honestly, to this day, that’s what I thought happened. Probably shouldn’t say that aloud.
“Which, of course, was not a good enough spin to convince Paolo that I wasn’t just trying to destroy things he loved, but it was a valiant effort.” Out of my peripheral vision, I notice that Taryn is texting. “And that was the first time I thought Denton might have the hint of the slightest potential to be kinda cool.” Though this can barely be considered a compliment, it’s accompanied by a sweet look from Veronica. I smile back, a little goofily, and I feel Taryn’s eyes on me.
“I didn’t think he was cool,” Paolo says. “I thought he was an idiot. They painted my shin guards pink, too.”
“Ninja guards,” I mutter. Once we started, I got really into
the pink ninja thing.
“Anyway,” Veronica says. “That’s my story.”
And she smiles at me once more.
I smile back.
And then I turn and smile at Taryn.
She gives me the ol’ face-is-smiling-but-eyes-are-not.
“What?” I say.
She shifts her weight away from me on the couch. Everyone in the room is watching, including Veronica. “It was a fun story.”
“Okay,” I say. “Great, then.”
“Yes, great,” my stepmom interjects. “So next, and last—but not least!—is Grandpa Sid.” He snores from his big chair. “Hon, you wanna wake your dad up?”
“No, hon, let’s let him sleep,” my dad says. “It’s so late.”
“I think he’d want to tell a story at his grandson’s Sitting, don’t you?”
“I’m not entirely sure that’s true.”
As my dad and stepmom debate the merits of waking up Grandpa Sid, Taryn and I detour from the main conversational highway onto a bumpy little side road, which, honestly, I would have preferred to avoid. Rocky patches of private conversation aren’t my favorite.
“You said you love me.”
“I do love you.” I try to wrap my arm around Taryn, but she wriggles away.
“So why are you looking at Veronica over there with googly eyes?”
“I wasn’t,” I say, but even I’m unconvinced by my delivery.
“Why did you show up here with Paolo and Veronica? Were you guys all hanging out or something?”
I flash back to an image of Veronica at my knees in her underwear.
“No, no, not at all.”
Half paying attention to the scene across the room, I see that my dad has won and Grandpa Sid has been granted permission to continue sleeping. The Denton story game thus concluded, people begin to shuffle around us, but we hold strong on the couch.
“It’s okay if you were,” Taryn says. “I’m just curious.”
“Sorry to interrupt, hon,” says a grating voice, “but we have to get going. Tiffany’s tired.” Aunt Deana gives me a quick, emphatic kiss on the cheek. “We love you, and we’ll miss you.” She speaks the Language of Obligatory Things to Say, with little detectable emotion underneath.
“Oh, sure, love you, too. I, uh…” I want to say something more meaningful. Instead, I look to Tiffany. “Probably never been up this late, huh?”
She rolls her eyes and heads to the front door. Sweet goodbye. So sad I won’t get to see her grow up into a hideous lady-beast.
Uncle Andre looms up behind Aunt Deana and puts out his hand for a shake. “Bye, buddy,” he says as I stand up, and his massive bear paw envelops my tiny hand. He gives me a wink that seems all out of context, more You’re gonna get laid tonight than Goodbye forever, nephew.
“Bye, Uncle Andre. Take care.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he mumbles as he heads out. “Thanks, Rocky, bye, guys.” He calls my stepmom Rocky.
As they leave, I’m reminded of what a unique little trio they are: they all have the same deathdate. It’s not for another thirty-eight years, but still. Will all of them be in the same car accident? Same natural disaster? Victims of the same lethal virus spreading across the US? Or—and this is my favorite—a crazy shoot-out between those three during their Sitting, which ends with them (and maybe others) lying bloody on the family room floor? I realize that’s not the kindest fate to imagine for family, but it’d also be pretty badass, the three of them in their family room, caught in a Tarantino-style web, Tiffany’s gun trained on Deana, Deana’s on Andre, and Andre’s focused squarely on Tiffany. One of them moves to wipe a bead of sweat off an eyebrow, the others freak out, and BLAM!
“Goodbyes are hard,” Taryn says, completely misreading the look on my face.
I nod.
“But,” she continues, “so, you really weren’t hanging out with Veronica?”
Damn. I thought I had been saved by Aunt Deana, but Taryn’s persistent. If I’m gonna be interrogated, I decide to return the favor. “Who were you texting before?”
“What?” She squirms.
“You were texting. During Veronica’s story.”
“Oh, that, nobody, it…it wasn’t a big deal.”
“Nobody?”
“No, well…It was Phil, okay?”
Rage sneaks out from a trapdoor and floods my entire body. It’s not rational, but Phil has that effect on me.
“You’re texting that jerk-bag during my Sitting?”
“I see what you’re doing, how you’re flipping this away from your googly eyes to make this about me and Phil.” She’s smart. “There’s nothing happening with me and Phil, Denton, and there never will be.”
“So what’d he say?”
“Hey, my babies,” Paolo says, appearing behind the couch, his arms around both of us. “Life is precious; let’s not argue.” He’s always had a keen friend-in-distress radar.
“You’re right,” I say. I dive into the shiny magenta bag sitting at Taryn’s feet and flail around in there until my hand finds the plastic rectangle it’s looking for.
“Stop! Get out of my bag, Dent! Seriously!”
I keep her at bay with one arm as I check the messages on her phone. Paolo stands back with his hands up, trying to disengage.
There, at the top of Taryn’s queue of texts, is what I’m looking for:
PHILLY 2:33 am
Is he dead yet?
Fucking Phil.
“Whoa,” Paolo says, looking over my shoulder. “That dude is cold.”
“Yes, he’s a total jerk,” Taryn says. “Which you’ll notice is what I told him in my text back, that he’s a jerk and that you’re still totally alive.”
“Oh wow, thank you for that bold display of loyalty. So glad you told Philly I’m alive.”
“That’s old. I just never got around to changing his name back to Phil in my phone. Because I don’t care about him!”
“Then why did you text back?”
“Aarrgh! I’m just trying to do the right thing here, okay? My boyfriend is dying, and I’m trying to do the right thing.” Tears are streaming down Taryn’s face, and I feel bad and angry and tired as she propels herself off the couch and out of the room.
“Taryn, wait…,” I say halfheartedly, even though I genuinely want to stop her. Millie sits across the room, having witnessed this whole scene, her eyes still focused in my direction, as if I’m a semi-engaging movie.
“Your neck is purple,” she says.
I lean back on the couch and close my eyes.
“Are you dead yet?” Paolo asks.
I wake up to the sound of Phil shouting outside.
I hadn’t wanted to fall asleep. Sleeping during your Sitting means you might die in slumberland, so holy crap, don’t do it! But it turns out deathdates are kinda exhausting.
One moment, you’re pissed at your girlfriend and your dad; the next, your eyelids are sandbags. I’d draped a throw blanket over most of myself—so my parents wouldn’t see the small bit of ominous splotch that had made its first public appearance—and reluctantly fallen into a strange cycle of groggy wakefulness and short bursts of sleep.
I awoke at one point, still unsettled by the surprise appearance of Brian Blum at my funeral. Couldn’t he have reached out first by phone? Or email? It occurred to me that maybe he had reached out via email. As my deathdate got nearer, I had cut myself off from everything Internet and put up a vacation responder (Hey, hey, everybody! I’m done with email! Yes! It may have something to do with my upcoming deathdate. Or maybe I’m just one of those cool people who disassociate themselves from all technology to make some statement about society. No, it’s the first thing. If you wanna tell me something, call me on my cell! And/or come to my funeral on Thursday! Love, Denton) because, really, what’s important in life? Whenever I hear of those rare cases where people died while checking their email—in spite of the fact that they knew it was their deathdate—it makes me incredibly sad. Your last ti
me on earth, and you’re staring at a little screen with words on it?
But in that moment, that was exactly what I felt I needed to do.
And there was indeed a message with an address I didn’t recognize and a subject line that read for denton—IMPORTANT. I got excited, as one does when faced with an all-caps personalized message. But it was just spam encouraging me to use Viagra for huger erections! !! No thanks, happydinosaur@happydinosaur.com! My erections are perfectly huge already.
There was also an email from Dave Chu, a close friend of Paolo’s and mine, who graduated last year and is now at NYU. He apologized for not being able to make it to my funeral. He had a final he couldn’t miss.
But nothing from Blum. Otherwise, my in-box was filled with notifications from my Facebook wall, which was completely blowing up. That was nice. I know, a series of completely superficial messages (Gonna miss you! or Love you, Dent! or RIP DENTON!!!) ultimately means very little, but it made me feel like People Care.
Just as I was about to turn the screen off, I noticed—stuck amongst the nettles and thickets of homogeneous four-word goodbyes—an email from the government. The subject line read Your deathdate, and it was a standard form letter, apologizing for my upcoming loss (of life) and thanking me for my time as a US citizen.
Niceties out of the way, it proceeded to go into a checklist of things Uncle Sam wanted to make sure I’d handled before I took my leave: Had I handed over my ID, passport, birth and death certificates, etc., to a trusted loved one or stored them in easy-to-find places? Had I given permission to have my organs donated, if that was my preference? And then lots of questions about my will and my dependents and any student loan debts I might have, queries I could assume didn’t apply to me based on my inability to understand them. (My parents always said that my bank account—$312.88—and my belongings—even with my extensive movie collection—didn’t merit creating a will. I tried to write one up just for dramatic effect, but then I found myself thinking way too hard about who should get what, which was making me sad.) The email was signed by one Karen Corrigan, Secretary of the US Department of Life Conclusions (USDLC), and my last thought before I fell back into sorta sleep was that her closing (Finest regards and thank you, Karen Corrigan) was irritating.
