After Eli

by Rebecca Rupp

  Walter sat down across from me on Jedediah Kimball, 1857–1904, who was now IN A BETTER PLACE. His corduroys rode up to show white socks and some white hairy leg. You could tell Walter was the type who would never get a tan.

  I pointed at all the little Wheeler stones.

  “What do you suppose they died of, all at once like that?”

  “Diphtheria,” Walter said. “Before inoculations, it sometimes killed eighty percent of children under ten.”

  His eyes started doing that back-and-forth thing. I know now that it was the cerebral manipulation of information, but at the time I figured he was having an epileptic fit. I’d heard about epileptic fits, and I knew that if somebody had one, you were supposed to put a stick in their mouth to keep them from biting off their tongue. But just as I started looking around for a good strong stick, Walter started talking again.

  “It makes you think,” Walter said. “All the scrambling around and worrying and stuff we do. And then we die. We’re gone, just like that. And we think all the time that it matters, all the stuff we do, when the truth is that we’re all nothing anyway. Mathematically speaking.”

  I realized right then that I’d been hanging around with the twins too much because the first thing I thought was that if Walter was a Pooh character, he’d be that depressing donkey. Eeyore.

  “What do you mean, we’re all nothing?” I said.

  Walter said, “The universe has maybe a hundred billion galaxies in it. And each of those galaxies has somewhere between a billion and a trillion stars.”

  “Yeah?” I said.

  Walter said, “And orbiting around just one of those trillions and trillions of stars is our planet, which has six billion people on it. We’re like dust spots on a dust spot in the middle of a dust spot. Mathematically speaking, we average out to absolutely nothing.”

  Mathematically speaking is one of Walter’s expressions.

  I knew there was a good reason I hated math.

  “You know what else?” Walter said. “There’s a philosopher who thinks maybe we’re not even here at all. He says our whole reality might be a computer game played by some incredibly advanced civilization. You know, like we’re the Sims.”

  “That’s nuts,” I said.

  But I could feel myself starting to worry about the time when I took the ladder out of the Sims’ little swimming pool and just left them to swim back and forth until they croaked.

  Then I thought how pissed I’d be if that turned out to be true and Eli died because some dumb-ass Little Green Kid from Alpha Centauri got bored and clicked DELETE.

  Walter got down off Jedediah, walked over, and started poking with his high-top sneaker at the little Wheeler graves.

  “What do you think happens after we die?” I said.

  Walter got that struggle expression people get when you’ve asked them an awkward question and they’re about to give you an answer you don’t want to hear.

  “Nothing,” Walter said finally. “I think once the brain stops working, we cease to exist and all the molecules and atoms that we’re made of drift off to become part of something else.”

  “Like what kind of something else?” I said. “Like reincarnation?”

  Walter rolled his eyes and kept poking the grass with his toe.

  “Like recycling,” he said. “Like grass. Squirrels. Worms.”

  I thought Eli might like to be part of a squirrel. Or maybe a bird. Eli always said if he could have one X-gene mutant superpower, he’d like to be able to fly.

  “What about your soul?” I said. “Don’t you believe in souls?”

  Pastor Jay and the Methodist Sunday School had been pretty definitive on the subject of souls.

  “Look, you asked me,” Walter said. “I’m not saying there’s no heaven full of people running through fields of flowers. I’m just saying what I think, is all.”

  “Hey. That’s cool,” I said.

  “Not usually, it isn’t,” Walter said.

  He grinned at me suddenly, and I saw that he had this crookedy grin that went up a little bit more on one side than the other, just like Eli’s. I realized I’d never seen Walter smile before.

  I guess that was when Walter and I became friends.

  Things Walter loves are irrational numbers, Big Bang theory, Rube Goldberg machines, chess, licorice, Linux, the Grand Canyon, the M13 galaxy, octopuses, graphing calculators, Dr Pepper, and the Periodic Table of Elements. Things he hates are nonserious people, astrology, baseball caps on people who aren’t playing baseball, Mickey Mouse, the British royal family, Twinkies, lima beans, social events, homeopathy, and preemptive war. The people he admires are Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, Alan Turing, Albert Einstein, and Bertrand Russell.

  And the guy who wrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

  I know that because in his Facebook picture he’s got two heads and he claims his name is Zaphod Beeblebrox.

  Walter and Isabelle and I started hanging out together that summer because of the twins and werewolves and the full moon.

  Once I started working at the Blue Potato, the twins would come out to the farm every day and eat Emma’s weird cookies and hang around with the goats and the chickens and try to con Jim into letting them drive his secondhand John Deere. Jim never fell for it, even though Jasper was pretty convincing about being an expert with heavy machinery, which I think proves that Jim’s brain isn’t as fried as my dad says it is.

  “Will those potatoes turn your tongue blue when you eat them?” Journey said, hanging over the fence where I was hoeing. “Like drinking grape Kool-Aid turns your tongue purple?”

  Journey was wearing rhinestone sunglasses, overall shorts, and pink ballet slippers. Jasper was wearing cowboy boots and a T-shirt that said COME TO THE DARK SIDE. WE HAVE COOKIES.

  Journey stuck out her tongue at Jasper, who stuck out his tongue back.

  “No,” I said. “They do not turn your tongue blue.”

  “I thought they’d turn your tongue blue,” Journey said mournfully.

  “Well, they don’t,” I said.

  I turned around so that my back was to the twins and hoed harder, but they didn’t take the hint and go away.

  “We wondered if you might want to come over to our house tomorrow night,” Jasper said. “Isabelle said to ask you.”

  My heart gave a sort of electric thunk.

  “She said to ask you day before yesterday,” Journey said. “But Jasper forgot to tell you. Jasper is very forgetful. If you could see the inside of Jasper’s brain, it would be full of soft, fluffy balls of wool.”

  In microseconds I thought of several creative awful things I’d like to do to Jasper’s soft woolly forgetful brain.

  “If you could see the inside of Journey’s brain,” Jasper said, “it would be full of razor blades.”

  Walter says that the twins are the conversational equivalent of a computer virus.

  “Our parents think it’s good that Isabelle is showing social interests,” Jasper said. “When our dad said we were spending the summer here, she said oh, no, she wasn’t. She said she wasn’t going to go to some stupid little podunk town that didn’t even have a symphony or an art museum. She wanted to stay in New York and live by herself in a hotel.”

  “Like Eloise,” Journey said. “Eloise is a girl in a famous picture book. She lived in the Plaza Hotel in New York and got her meals from room service and had a pet turtle who ate raisins. But Isabelle couldn’t do that because we don’t have enough money for a hotel.”

  “Have you ever had a pet turtle?” asked Jasper.

  “No,” I said.

  “So are you going to come over tomorrow?” Jasper said.

  “It’s because of the full moon,” Journey said, bouncing up and down on the fence. “There’s a full moon tomorrow night. Isabelle has a thing about the full moon.”

  “If Journey was in outer space,” Jasper said, “she would not be the moon. She would be an Apollo object. That’s an asteroid that’s ai
med at smashing into the Earth and destroying all life as we know it.”

  “If Jasper was in outer space,” Journey said, “he would be puny pathetic cosmic dust.”

  “What time tomorrow?” I said. Resisting a natural impulse to hit them with the hoe.

  “Seven thirty,” Journey said. “I’ll give Isabelle your R.S.V.P. That’s how you answer an invitation. It stands for Répondez, s’il vous plaît. That means ‘Answer, please,’ in French. Did I say that I can speak French?”

  “You said it,” Jasper said. “You say it a lot. But you can’t.”

  “Also Jasper might turn into a werewolf,” Journey said.

  “I have all the signs,” Jasper said. “Like I have unusually long middle fingers.” He showed me his hands and spread out his fingers. “See?”

  “No,” I said.

  “And my ears are a little pointed, and I’m pale,” Jasper said. “Werewolves are always pale.”

  “That’s vampires,” I said. “Vampires are always pale. Werewolves are toothy and hairy. Nobody wants to be around a werewolf.”

  I thought of Valya Starikova, this Russian kid in my Book of the Dead. She was dragged into the forest and eaten by wolves. Nothing was left but pieces of her shoes.

  “Yeah,” Journey said. “Because werewolves bite. Like this.” And she started to gnaw on Jasper’s arm.

  Jasper began to yell.

  Then Journey said, “I’ll go tell Isabelle!” and cut off running toward the road, and Jasper hollered, “No, I’ll tell her!” and went batting off after her.

  So I went back to hoeing and hoed blue potatoes so fast that I came close to hoeing off my toes. I was that excited about having an invitation from Isabelle.

  It was just lousy timing that right then Peter Reilly called up to see if I wanted to go to the movies that next night, because his brother, Tony, was going to drive him and Amanda into Fairfield and if I came along, Amanda would bring her girlfriend Yvonne Boudreau, who has a belly-button ring and blue hair. Any other time I would have wanted to go. The blue hair makes Yvonne look like a Martian, but a cute Martian, and she talks a lot, which means you don’t have to say much but can just nod every once in a while and think about your own stuff and look at her chest.

  Peter got ticked off when I said no, I was busy.

  “Busy with what?” he said. “What have you got to be busy with?”

  I didn’t want to tell him, but he kept at it until finally I said, “I promised I’d go over to the neighbors’.”

  Then Peter wanted to know which neighbors and what were we going to do there, and I said it was sort of like a club meeting, which was the only thing I could think of to get him off my back. I’ve always been a lousy liar, which is one of the things Eli was always saying we had to work on someday. When he got back from Iraq, he said, we’d devote a whole Education Day to deception and prevarication.

  Peter said I sounded stupid, and what was wrong with me and was I turning into a douche, and then he hung up. Which is because the only kind of club Peter knows about is the one his father goes to at the VFW on Friday nights to drink Jim Beam and play poker.

  By Saturday, though, I was so nervous that I wished maybe I’d just répondez-vous-ed no to the twins and gone to the movies with Peter and Amanda and blue Yvonne. By seven, I’d changed my clothes three times, brushed my teeth twice, and had had a lot of time to get myself all worked up thinking about what a loser I was going to look like in front of Isabelle, what with not knowing what month I’d be if I was a month and not having a favorite poem.

  Then I decided that if things went really wrong, I’d just run away from home and come up with a new identity, like those people in witness-protection programs. I’d go someplace really far away, like Cincinnati, and I’d pretend to have lost my memory, which always works for people in the movies. I doubted anybody would even bother to look for me, because frankly I figured my parents would be relieved.

  Actually that all made me feel better, because like Eli always said, it’s always important to have a backup plan. Later I told Walter about it, and he said “Great scheme, Danny,” in a way that told me it wasn’t.

  I told my mom where I was going and she said “Fine” without looking away from where she was not exactly watching the TV, in the sort of voice that showed she really wasn’t paying any attention. It left me wondering, the way I always did, if she’d say anything different if I said, “Well, good night, Mom, I’m going out to knock over a liquor store,” or, “Gee, I’ve made this cool parachute out of an umbrella and I’m going to go jump off the Matteson River Bridge and see if it works,” or, “Good-bye, Mom, I’ve decided to move to Timbuktu.”

  She didn’t used to be this way. When Eli was home, we’d go out to the kitchen most nights and help Mom make dinner, and she’d say, “Well, tell me things, boys; I haven’t seen you for hours.” And after Eli left for college, she was the same, even though then it was just her and me.

  Now I think she wouldn’t even notice if I dropped dead right there on the floor. Like those people in city apartments who die and nobody realizes it for years. Or until there’s a smell.

  Once last year I didn’t talk at all for three whole days, just to see what would happen. Nothing did. Which just goes to show.

  I waited until twenty past seven, because I didn’t want to be too early, because it’s not cool to be early. Then I took a flashlight, because even though it was still light out, being summer, I knew I’d be coming home in the dark, and also by my third change of clothes I was wearing a black T-shirt, which doesn’t show up on the road if a pickup truck comes along with somebody like Timmy Sperdle in it, full up to the eyeballs with testosterone and Coors. Then I headed off for the Sowers house.

  As long as I can remember, the Sowers house has been empty, just sitting there with its wood rot and its bats and the irreversible water damage happening to the grand piano that nobody ever bothered to move out of the parlor. There’s something spooky that happens with old empty houses, especially houses that are empty of people but still have all the furniture in them. I think that’s what brings ghosts. When you leave things the way they were, so that nothing changes in what they left behind.

  Jim Pilcher said that when he was a kid, his uncle Steve put a twenty-dollar bill in the Sowers house, on this big old carved chest of drawers in one of the bedrooms upstairs, and said anybody could have it who would go into the house and get it, all alone at midnight.

  “Did anybody ever get it?” I said.

  “Not on your ever-loving life,” Jim said. “I gave it my best shot, thinking I could sure use a nice crisp twenty-dollar bill, and besides it would have been fun to shake it under my uncle Steve’s nose. So I went out to the house and I got the front door open, which freaked me out right there, because it squeaked and creaked something fierce, and then I got into the front hall — have you even been in the Sowers house front hall?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But not in the dark.”

  “Well, it’s spooky as hell in the dark,” Jim said. “All these weird shadows and big black looming stuff that you can’t tell what it is. And then that hall chandelier — you remember that chandelier?”

  “With all those glass prism things,” I said.

  “So I’m just standing there in the front hall,” Jim said, “and all those little bits of prisms suddenly started shaking and shivering and clinking around, and I knew it wasn’t anything I’d done. It was like somebody was walking around right over it, upstairs. I didn’t like that one bit, but I took another step or two, because I still wanted to put one over on my uncle Steve. But then I heard what sounded like one of the stairs up above from the second floor creak — real loud, like somebody or something was stepping on it, coming down. And that was enough for me.”

  “What did you do?” I said.

  “What did I do?” Jim said. “I took off running, and believe me, you’ve never seen anybody run so fast outside of the Summer Olympics.”

  Now, though,
the house looked all lived in and warm, with yellow lights in the windows, and not the least full of ghosts. I figured any specter creaking around inside it would have been scared off by now by the twins. There were candles burning on the porch, the kind that are supposed to keep mosquitoes away but don’t very well, at least not around here, because our mosquitoes are too tough for citronella.

  “You’re late,” Journey said.

  The twins were sitting side by side on the porch steps, looking fairly human, so nobody had turned into a werewolf yet. Journey was wearing a yellow taffeta party dress and a pair of green rubber boots with frog faces on the toes. Jasper was wearing two left sneakers and a T-shirt that said I FIGHT ZOMBIES IN MY SPARE TIME.

  “You know that you guys have a very unusual fashion sense?” I said.

  “We were watching for you,” Jasper said. “But we didn’t see you because you’re wearing black like a spy.”

  “If you were a captured spy,” Journey said, “would you rather be hanged by the neck until dead or shot by a firing squad?”

  “Or sizzled up in the electric chair?” Jasper said.

  “I’d rather not be captured,” I said.

  “Shut up, twins,” Isabelle said. “Come on, Danny. Come up here and sit down.”

  She was sitting in a wicker rocking chair and wearing one of those Indian-print skirts and a white top with skinny straps and silver earrings the size of hockey pucks. And she had those blue, blue eyes. Isabelle always took my breath away.

  “You know Walter, don’t you?” Isabelle said.

  And there on the other side of her was old weird Walter with his too-short pants and his chewed-up haircut, sitting on a little wicker stool so that his knees bent up practically to his ears.

  It’s something you can’t explain exactly, why people become friends. It’s chemistry, is what they say. Maybe it’s just being the right people with the right feelings in the right place at the right time. But whatever it is, that summer Walter and Isabelle and I had it. And maybe even the twins too.

  I wish I’d written down somewhere everything we talked about that night on Isabelle’s porch. At the time I thought I’d always remember, but then I didn’t, and now all that’s left of those conversations is a sort of flavor of something special and exciting and strange.