The Book of Fred

by Abby Bardi

  When Christmas finally blew over, I went back to my routine, and everything seemed fine. A lot of people in our community were worried about the Y2K problem. I figured, we had a lot of wood, we had some tuna fish, and as long as the Y2K didn't interfere with heroin production, I was okay with whatever happened. Some of the wackier people in the neighborhood had predicted that we were headed for some kind of nuclear-winter-like thing, and they were actually looking forward to it, since it would cause society as we know it to grind to a halt, which would be better for the environment. They thought that what happened to people was not nearly as important as what happened to the bald eagle or the wild bluebell, or something like that. It was all the same to me, people, eagles, whatever.

  So this was the buzz in Sonny's Kitchen on New Year's Eve, where I sat with a bunch of my buddies, Zeke and Dave and Tom and a few guys I didn't know. Zeke was strung out too, so we had a kind of special relationship, but Dave and Tom were not addicts and didn't seem to realize that we were. Dave was married to some lawyer who paid all his bills, and he hung around in town with a pad of paper pretending he was working on a novel, while Tom was a plumber who specialized in stuff like Jacuzzis and bidets, so he made good money and didn't work much. We sat at the counter at Sonny's, drinking coffee, watching people come in and out, stocking up onKorean dumplings just in case all the power went out at midnight. Every so often, Zeke would go into the bathroom, then me, and we'd come out sniffling a little, like we had colds. Zeke was a big dude who was missing some of his teeth, and when he'd come back, he'd wipe his nose on his sleeve. We were a gorgeous bunch of fellows, and women took one gander at us and ran away. The waitresses in Sonny's all looked like lumberjacks, and they weren't afraid of us, but I thought we were pretty scary.

  “I got a case of water, I got two cords of wood, I got about a million cans of vegetarian chili, I figure I'm ready to roll,” Dave was saying.

  “Same with me, but Marla won't eat chili. She went to Sutton Place Gourmet and bought cans of all kinds of French stuff. Evian water. Canned chestnuts. That kind of shit,” Tom said. He had a big face like a rump roast, with a little fringe of curls sticking out from beneath his bald, spotty dome, and it was hard to figure what Marla was doing with him, especially since he ran around on her.

  “I tried to get Alice to buy me some Spam but she wouldn't do it,” I said. Then I felt all creepy because it sounded like she was my wife or girlfriend or something instead of my sister.

  “Nitrates,” Zeke said. He was very into health, not counting the drugs. “She did the right thing.”

  “Well, whatever happens, I'm going to have a good New Year's Eve anyway,” Tom said, winking. He had a new girlfriend, about his twenty-seventh one this year. He met a lot of women through plumbing, and Marla never found out about most of them. His eyes drifted to the plate glass window at the front of the restaurant. “Hey, will you take a look at that.”

  I looked out the window and saw Puffin and Mary Fred walking by. “Hey, asshole, that's my niece.”

  “Not Puffin, man, the other one. The blonde. She's—” Tom happened to meet my eyes in that moment and his voice just died in his throat. He must have figured out instantaneously that if he said one lecherous thing about the Little Chick I was going to take his bottle of organic root beer and jam it right up his snout.

  “That's Mary Fred,” I said. “She lives with us.” I said it like I was just daring any of them to say anything about her, but no one did.

  That night when I got home, everyone was out. The girls had gone to some dumb teen party, and Al was already next door at Paula's, helping her (him?) set up for her (his?) Y2K bash. Al wanted me to go to Paula's with her, but I had bigger fish to fry. I was going to sit home and get high all night, and that's what I did. (I had bought a large amount just in case the runners' computers went out and shut down operations.) In the morning, when I finally got up, the power was still on, and everything was normal. Of course, the lightbulb business took New Year's Day off, so I went to Sonny's, where I found a bunch of tree-huggers sitting around complaining that western civilization had not ground to a halt. I thought of telling them about the Little Chick's gloomy predictions for January 7, since that might have made them feel better, but I didn't feel like talking about it. I had told Zeke about what the Little Chick had said, and he had been unimpressed. “Like some teenybopper Nostradamus,” he said. I told him to shut up. “Bunch of wackos,” he said, dismissing it. I was sure he was right, but I felt disloyal to the Little Chick making any jokes about the whole thing, so I just kept it to myself.

  But the fact was, the whole January 7 thing was a big problem for me. Alice was insisting that I go along, and this presented me with a logistical dilemma. I mean, I'm in the car with them for three and a half hours, then we're at some religiouscompound with a bunch of lunatics, then the world ends and we get blown to kingdom come—when do I get high? I didn't think I could just bring a bunch of dope in my pocket and every now and then sneak some up my nose. Alice wasn't very observant, owing to living in her own little world of clouds all the time, but she would surely notice that.

  I was dreading the day, just dreading it, but I didn't see any way around it. I could see that everyone else around me was dreading it too, the Little Chick because she thought it would be our last day on earth, Puffin because she was missing a chemistry test and there would be hell to pay, and Alice because she didn't like driving in Virginia because the roads were tricky and the weather wasn't very good so conditions might be treacherous. I was dreading it the most, but the way Alice put it to me, I could either come with them or she was going to throttle me till I was dead anyway, so it was pretty much a lose-lose proposition. The truth was, I'd have joined them regardless because I could see that the Little Chick really wanted me to come just in case I was going to get to go to heaven or whatever just by being in the right place at the right time—it was certainly clear to all of us that my behavior in my earthly life was not going to get me a good placement in the other world. And I wanted the Little Chick to be happy, especially just in case she turned out to be right and it was our final moment on earth. I wanted the last thing I saw to be her smiling face—and then I felt like a big jerk for thinking that.

  Mostly, I felt worried. When I got up the morning of the seventh, I went into the bathroom and snorted a little, like I always did. Then I went downstairs, had some coffee, went back up, snorted some more, then I went downstairs, pretended I forgot something, went back in the bathroom, snorted as much as I possibly could without passing out, then somehow managed to get myself to the car.

  The next thing I knew, we were out in the middle of Fucking Nowhere, Virginia, trying to break into what looked to me like some kind of prison camp. The Little Chick actually knew the password to the gate, and we drove into this creepy, empty, frozen landscape, a bunch of cabins at the foot of a big frosty mountain, and a weird little white church in the center. The place looked totally deserted. I didn't know much about the predictions for this event, but I was under the impression that it was supposed to be well attended. As it was, there was no one in sight, and the only person I was expecting to see at this point was David Duchovny.

  So when Al and the girls got out of the car and started toward the church, I had time to take a capsule out of my pocket, break it open, roll up a dollar bill, place a little dope on the dashboard, and snort it up before they turned around to ask where I was. I walked toward the church—I almost floated there, filled with the light, delight, the holy fire, just so relieved and happy and serene, and let me say relieved again, that when I walked through the church doors behind the three of them I genuinely expected to be met by a choir of angels, by the heavenly host, by God Himself, or Jesus, or Buddha, or whoever was in charge. But instead, of course, there was no one there, and the next thing I know, the Little Chick is crying her eyes out. She sits down in the front pew sobbing and will not get up, even though the church is so cold that we can see our breath, and Al and Pu
ffin are trying to comfort her but she cannot be comforted. I stand there watching, and all I want to do is put my arms around her and rock her, just rock her, till she feels as well as I feel, till everything in that sad moment is healed for her. But of course I don't do anything at all, since what could I possibly do, and finally they help her into the car and we go home.

  The first thing I do when we get home is run to the bathroom. When I come out, feeling okay again, recharged, I find Al and Puffin in the living room with the lights out, and the Little Chick is upstairs in her bed, still crying, I guess, and there's not a damn thing any of us can say. Instead of feeling glad that we were not all liquidated into nothingness by the Final Judgment, I think we're all wishing that for her sake, the Little Chick had been right, and that the end of the world had come instead of us having to sit here listening to the sobbing noise we can hear every so often coming from upstairs.

  The next few days were horrible, just horrible. We all wandered around the house like ghosts. I kept getting this weird, familiar feeling, like I had seen this before, maybe in a movie. I couldn't think of what movie it was, and it was driving me crazy, and I thought about it for days and days until finally, one day, I came home from work and I saw that the Little Chick was sitting in the living room with Puffin, watching Jerry Springer, looking perfectly normal, like nothing bad had happened, like nothing bad had ever happened, to anyone, and when I saw her little heart-shaped face, even though her hair was the wrong color, and in fact it was all pulled back in a clip that Puffin made her wear sometimes so she would look hip, though it never really worked, I knew instantly what movie it was: Snow White. I realized that for the past few days, I had felt like one of those dwarves, probably Grumpy, when Snow White was lying there in that glass coffin. Later, I thought of this as the Snow White Epiphany, because I had managed to understand exactly what my feelings for the Little Chick were: they were exactly like those of Grumpy for Snow White. It was a relief to me to realize this because once I put them in this context, I could be sure that there was no funny business about my relationship with her, nothing I should be ashamedof except possibly that I had all the emotional depth and maturity of a cartoon character.

  We were all so relieved that for the next week, everything seemed to go back to normal. In fact, the next week was about the most normal one of our whole lives, looking back on it, the last week I remember where everything was just as plain, straightforward, and familiar as Velveeta cheese, Jell-O, Skippy peanut butter and Welch's grape jelly, all the ordinary things of the world. We got up, we went to school and work, we did our heroin, we came home, we had dinner, and everything was fine. When I think about that week now, it seems all lit up, with gold around its rim, a series of moments that you don't know at the time you should be treasuring. That seems like a funny word for me to use, treasuring, since I had always been the kind of person who didn't believe in treasure of any kind, not material or spiritual or metaphorical, nothing. But I see now that there are times in your life when just the fact that there is a stillness is enough that you should go grab a camera and take a picture so you can remember it forever exactly as it was.

  I came home that Friday around three, and no one was there. It had been a good day in the lightbulb business—I had kept some old church janitor on the phone for forty minutes while I promised him free flashlights, hunting knives, and incandescent bulbs in return for his business. “Don't forget,” I told him, “check all your Exit signs. It's only a little bulb, but it makes a big difference.” The guy had thanked me profusely, and hadn't whimpered when I asked him for his purchase order number, assuring him a twenty-percent markdown because of his patronage. I went upstairs and got high, I came downstairs again, I sat around for a while whistling, I put on the stereo and listened to some Miles Davis, which I couldn't do normally because Puffin would scream at me, I finallyturned Miles off and wondered where everyone was, I wondered what was for dinner, since I was a little bit hungry, I turned on the TV to wait for Oprah, just in case she was doing a show on single moms with drug-addict brothers, but before I could even find out what was happening on General Hospital, I saw that there was a special news report. I hunkered down to see what new war had been declared or what celebrity had died in a fiery plane crash, but instead I saw a bunch of reporters standing outside of a school that looked very familiar, and the word “Live” at the bottom of the screen. As I stared at the screen to see where in America this latest school tragedy in a series of school tragedies had occurred, the camera panned a row of people who stood crying next to a bunch of ambulances. Then it zoomed in close on one of their faces, and it took me a minute to realize that it was Puffin. I stared stupidly at Puffin's tear-soaked face on the TV, right where Oprah's would have been. Then I grabbed my coat and started running.

  By the time I reached the school, which took about ten minutes, the same reporters I had seen on TV were standing before me in the flesh. This was one of the weirdest moments of the whole thing, I later thought, because all of my life I guess part of me had believed that the things that happened on TV were not real. But here they were, the same tiny faces that had been on my screen moments ago were now life-sized people that I recognized from my living room. A bunch of cops hustled me away from the front of the building, where a team of ambulances were, and I staggered through the crowd that had gathered, looking for someone I recognized. Everyone looked vaguely familiar, probably because I had seen them all at one time or another in Sonny's Kitchen.

  When Alice saw me, she hurled herself into my arms. She was shaking and breathing very hard, and I tried to hold hertightly, stroking her back so she would calm down, but it didn't help much. When she could talk, which took a moment, she told me she had just gotten there—the school had called her. I told her that I knew Puffin was okay, because I had just seen her on TV a few minutes ago, but for some reason my mouth could not form the words “Mary Fred.” I put my arm around Alice and led her to the edge of the police line, near the ambulances, and we stood in a crowd of hysterical parents and curious bystanders, everyone making a noise like a flock of birds, geese maybe, as if we were all going to take off into the sky, and I thought the noise was going to drive me crazy and I began to wonder if it was inside my head. Alice and I stood not saying anything, holding hands, which we hadn't done since I was about six and she was nine, until we saw Puffin running toward us, the mascara Alice always told her not to wear to school streaked all over her face, her mouth open but no sounds coming out of it. We both grabbed her and Alice said, “Oh, Puff, oh, Puff, what happened? Is she—” She was taking little dog-like breaths between syllables. Puffin's face crumpled and she pointed to the ambulances and shook her head. As I stood there, the school, the ambulances, the crowd started spinning around me. I tried to grab onto Alice for support, but she too seemed to be falling, and the two of us just floated in this vortex, whirling around.

  As the ambulances started to pull away, we tried to get close to see if Mary Fred was really in one of them, and if so, where they were taking her, but the police kept us back as if we were trying to riot. “But my daughter is in there,” Alice yelled to the cop in front of us, who said he was sorry but that the victims were all being taken to the Trauma Center at the nearby hospital and that we would have to check there. “Were they all—?” Alice asked him, but he didn't seem to hear her, and in the distance,we saw a guy in a medical-looking uniform carrying two black plastic bags and disappearing into one of the ambulances. Alice clutched my arm and started to say something, but I just told her to take Puffin home and said I would go to the Trauma Center and see if Mary Fred ended up there. “I'm sure she's okay,” I said, more for my own benefit than for Alice's, probably. Puffin was still wild-eyed and hysterical, so I didn't have to do much to convince Alice to take her home. She offered me a ride, but I said I would walk, that it wasn't far, though it was actually a lot farther than I had imagined, since I had been in a car the other times I'd gone there—when Puffin cut herself on a piece
of broken glass, and when Alice went into anaphylactic shock after being stung by a wasp. I ran most of the way. It was cold out, and my breath felt jagged, going in and out of my lungs like crushed ice. When I got to the hospital, there were ambulances parked in front of the Emergency entrance and a small crowd of people milling around the front, including some of the same reporters I had seen earlier. I took a side door, since I was clever like that, and ended up in the Emergency Room at the head of the line.

  “I'm inquiring about a patient,” I said. “Mary Fred Anderson. From the school. Blond, sixteen—”

  “We don't have anyone ID'd yet,” the woman behind the desk told me. “You can wait over there.” She pointed to a bunch of vinyl couches next to a rack of magazines and a TV that was blaring coverage of the local school tragedy, as they were calling it, though I still hadn't figured out exactly what had happened. I sat down and started watching. They were showing a yearbook photo of some scruffy, creepy-looking kid, the one who evidently had been driving a car that had somehow plunged into a bunch of students, as some reporter blabbed on about him, how he was a member of the NationalHonor Society or some shit like that. There were photos of a few of the victims, and none of them were of Mary Fred. I sat clutching my stomach, rocking back and forth, and after a while I noticed that I was praying that she would be okay. I had remembered scraps of the Beautiful Prayer that she used to say before dinner, and I seemed to be reciting it.