Slob

by Ellen Potter

  “That’s not soon enough,” I grumbled.

  Nima looked at me thoughtfully. Then he took a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, shook one out, and went to the window. He opened the window wide and sat on the sill while he smoked, careful to blow the smoke out into the cool early evening air. We were quiet for a while. I was deciding if I should tell him the truth about me, and I suspect he was simply waiting for me to decide.

  “My parents owned a deli on Broadway and Eighty-fifth Street. It’s a shoe store now,” I said.

  Nima turned away from the view outside the window and looked at me, his cigarette hand poised outside the window.

  “They had really good knishes,” I said. “You know what knishes are?”

  “Like potato dumpling?” Nima said.

  “Yeah, something like that. Anyway, it was just them, running the whole thing, and a guy who helped out on the weekends. They worked a lot. They didn’t want to hand us over to a babysitter every night, so they fixed up a room for us in the deli’s basement. Nothing fancy. Just an old sofa and a table for us to do our homework at, a TV, and two little cots. We liked it. It was sort of a clubhouse.” It was so strange to be talking about this. My old life seemed to bloom before my eyes as I spoke. I could see that basement room so clearly—the cinder block walls, with each cinder block painted some crazy bright kid color. The shelf full of board games. The old yellow tent that we set up in the corner.

  “Most nights Mom would take us home around eight and Dad would close up, but once a month Mom would stay late so she could take everything out of the coolers and wipe down the shelves. That night she was cleaning, so we were there late. Jeremy was sleeping already, but I was just lying down on my cot, thinking. Suddenly I heard yelling upstairs. I sat up in bed and listened. Sometimes homeless people would wander in the store, and some of them were sort of nutty, but my dad was really good at calming people down, giving them a little something to eat and sending them away. But this sounded different. The yelling came in short spurts. And it didn’t stop. I looked over at Jeremy. She had the covers pulled up over her head and she was sound asleep. If she’d been awake, she would have run upstairs, I know she would have, but I didn’t know what to do. The yelling grew louder and then I heard my mother yell back and then I heard a gunshot. Still, I just sat there. I was too scared to go up, too scared to move. Jeremy didn’t wake up and I just sat there, I sat there like a rock, like a boulder. I sat there and let it all happen. Then there was another gunshot, and this time Jeremy woke up. She sat up in bed, her eyes all wide, and she said, ‘What was that?’

  “I didn’t want to tell her. If I told her, she’d run upstairs and I would run after her and then we’d both be killed. So I told her that I thought it was the furnace.”

  I glanced over at Nima to check his expression. He didn’t look appalled. I went on.

  “After that there were some thumping noises, like stuff was being thrown around. Jeremy got out of bed and started for the stairs. I ran after her, and grabbed her to stop her, but she squirmed out of my grasp and ran up the stairs. Her hair was long, just like it is now, because our mother told her to wear it like a badge of honor, so I grabbed it and held her back just before she opened the door. Then I ran by her and at the top of the stairs I blocked the door that led out into the deli. She was pounding on me, trying to get around me, but I wouldn’t move. I just stood there and wouldn’t let her by. I was afraid the man was still out there. Jeremy started to scream, but I quickly clamped my hand over her mouth and held it there while I waited. I don’t know how long I waited. It felt like hours. It was probably minutes. Then everything went quiet. Completely quiet. I opened the door. You could hear the hum of the cooler, it was so silent. My parents were lying on the floor behind the counter. It was—” I felt my lips crumpling, so I put my hand in front of my mouth to hide it.

  “No need to say,” Nima said, slipping off the sill and shutting the window. He tossed the cigarette butt in a glass and sat down beside me on the couch.

  I felt a terrible ache in my throat, but I wanted to finish. “I called 911. It was Zelda who answered. Her voice . . . well, it’s like when you are a little kid and have a nightmare and you’re trembling and your mother holds you close and tells you that everything will be fine, and you just sink into her voice, just sink. She stayed on the phone with me until the police came. She kept telling me that I had done the right thing. She meant about holding Jeremy back from bursting into the deli. I didn’t tell her everything. I didn’t tell her that I had heard the screaming and the two gunshots and didn’t do anything. I never told Jeremy either. I think she would have hated me.

  “Later Zelda tracked us down. She told me that she couldn’t stop thinking about us. She hears all kinds of awful stuff every day, but she said that my voice haunted her. I never told her, but her voice haunted me too. Whenever I started to think about that night, just as the memory started to get unbearable, her voice would break in and wrap itself around me and protect me.

  “We had nowhere to go to, no relatives, just a grand-mother who was in a nursing home. Zelda stepped up and said she’d take us in. Because of her job, she knew people who were able to speed things up and keep me and Jeremy out of foster care. She adopted us legally last January. She didn’t make us call her ‘Mom’ or anything but she said we could if we wanted to. Jeremy never wanted to. She doesn’t have the same feelings toward Zelda as I do. She wasn’t the one who spoke to her that night. But I told Jeremy that we should at least try to call her Mom. After everything she’s done for us.”

  “They did not catch the man who did this?” Nima asked quietly.

  “There were no witnesses. It was late at night, and cold, so there weren’t that many people on the street. The magazine store next door was closed, and so was the clothing store on the other side of the deli. The people in the building upstairs had heard gunshots, but no one had seen anything. We had a surveillance camera, a good one, wireless. But my parents weren’t really good about checking it every so often to make sure everything was working. One of them must have taken out the tape at one point and forgotten to replace it. The camera had caught the event, but there was no tape in the machine to record it. So that was that. It looked like the man would never be caught. Then I saw the show about the ghosts in The Black Baron Pub, and I remembered that I still had the deli’s surveillance camera system. I figured if I could build a radio telescope and hook it up to the surveillance camera’s receiver, I had a chance at recapturing that old signal. Of seeing his face. So I built my radio telescope. And right now I’ve got a whole boxful of old television guides to help me figure out the dates of any old signals that Nemesis might pick up.”

  “And?” he said. “How she is working?”

  I shook my head.

  “She not work?” he asked.

  “The signals aren’t coming in strongly enough. I think I need a low-noise amplifier but I’m not sure. Maybe a bigger satellite dish. Or maybe it’s all just impossible.”

  “Mmm.” He thought for a moment. “Do you mind if I say prayer?”

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged. “I’m not religious, but I guess it would be okay.”

  Nima sat down in front of his shrine and said many things in Tibetan. It sounded like he was chanting. It was a strange sound. Sort of soothing. The Dalai Lama kept staring at me from his portrait, smiling like he was remembering something funny that happened a long time ago.

  “What did you say?” I asked.

  “I pray for your honored parents. Also, I pray for the man who killed your parents.”

  I wasn’t sure I liked the last part of his prayer, but the rest was nice. I thanked him. He waved away the thanks.

  Later, when Jeremy, Mom, and I were sitting down to dinner, there was a knock on our door. Mom got up to answer it. When I heard Nima’s voice, I rushed to the door in time to see Mom do a little half bow and say, “Please come in.” I think she had this idea that he was a monk or something b
ecause I told her about the shrine in his house.

  “This come from my cousin’s house,” Nima said as he placed a piece of electronic equipment in my hands. “He bought a new one, so this one not necessary.” It was a low-noise amplifier. A good one. And it looked new.

  “Nima, you bought this! No, I can’t take it.” I held it back out to him. I knew how much those things cost, and it was more than a momo maker should spend. Especially one who is saving his money to bring his wife and sick mother-in-law to America.

  “No, no,” He stepped back, away from it. “My cousin. He not need it.”

  “I don’t believe you for a minute,” I said.

  “Ms. Birnbaum,” Nima said to Mom, “please tell Owen that Buddhists do not tell lies.”

  “Owen, you’re offending him,” Mom hissed at me, horrified. That made Nima smile, the good-natured pirate smile.

  I knew he was lying.

  But I needed the amplifier.

  “I’ll find a way to pay you back,” I said to Nima.

  Mom asked him to come in and join us for stuffed squash surprise and he agreed happily, which was pretty brave in my opinion.

  FYI, it is said that the Buddha died of food poisoning after eating at someone’s house.

  Nima actually cleaned his plate and asked Mom what the brown, chewy things were, and she told him it was tempeh.

  “Which is really just a fancy term for blechh!” Jeremy said. Then added, “Sorry, Mom.”

  Did you catch that? She said Mom.

  Mom smiled as she said, “No problem, Jeremy.”

  It was one of those gooey moments that we were all embarrassed by, so Jeremy put a piece of tempeh on Honey’s nose and we watched her flip it in the air and catch it in her mouth. It’s the only trick that she can do.

  After dinner I hooked up the low-noise amplifier and turned on the Freakout Channel. Then I did one more thing. I opened my desk drawer and pulled out the little slip of paper with SLOB written on it. Carefully I placed it under the new amplifier. It was an offering, like Nima’s offerings at his shrine. A sort of prayer.

  A two-hour Love Boat special was being aired on the Freakout Channel. This was going to be a long night. I watched for a solid hour until I finally couldn’t take it any longer and I took out my English homework. Every so often I glanced up listlessly to catch a glimpse of what was happening on the show before sticking my nose back in my homework.

  Then something happened.

  You know when you are walking along, minding your own business, and you suddenly trip and fall on your face? For that half second when your feet are no longer touching the ground, everything is in slow motion and you think, Wow, this is bizarre.

  That’s what happened when the TV made a little pift sound and suddenly Charlie’s Angels was on. The picture was pretty fuzzy, just like the ghost images at The Black Baron Pub. I stared at the TV for a second or two and actually said out loud, “What? What’s hap—what?”

  My eyes grew wider as I watched a blond Charlie’s Angel jumping around, dressed as a cheerleader.

  “Okay, Okay, this is it, Owen,” I said, still talking out loud. I needed to hear my own voice to convince myself this was real.

  My heart was thumping harder than any thump that Andre had ever given me. This was it. I had done it! Me, twelve-year-old Owen Birnbaum, had done it with junkyard scraps and brainpower. And Nima’s amplifier, of course. The feeling of success was so overwhelming that for a while I nearly forgot what all this hard work had been for.

  Okay, I said to myself. Calm down. You may have managed to get an old signal but now you have to figure out when that signal was first sent out. I’d have to check the old Retro TV Magazines for the dates on which that episode was shown. Chances were they’d shown that episode more than once in the past two years. After that, I’d still have to capture some more old signals and recheck the magazines to pinpoint the dates of these old signals. If they were from before October 25, 2006, the day my parents were killed, I still had time to possibly capture the surveillance recording from that night. I could hook up the deli’s surveillance camera receiver to Nemesis and start looking. But if the signals were from after that date, it was all for nothing. Well, Nemesis would be a success, but any hope of identifying the person who had shot my parents would be lost forever. I ran to Jeremy’s room and pounded on the door.

  “What?” she yelled on the other side of the door.

  “Come in my room and look,” I called, and rushed back to my bedroom.

  In a minute she came in my room and stared at the TV.

  “Charlie’s Angels. Stupid show,” she said.

  “But I was watching The Love Boat.”

  She stared at me for a second, then her eyes went wide. “You mean it worked?”

  I nodded.

  “You did it?” Her voice was getting shrill.

  I nodded again.

  “I can’t believe it. Owen! You are a total genius!”

  Almost.

  Still, I loved the way she said that.

  We watched the show for ten more minutes, though Jeremy kept making gagging noises whenever the cheerleaders appeared. Suddenly the TV went pift and The Love Boat came back on.

  Crap.

  I ran up to Nemesis and checked the equipment. Everything looked fine. I had simply lost the signal.

  “Do you think it will come back again tonight?” Jeremy asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, there’s no school tomorrow . . . Teachers’ Conference Day. You can watch the Freakout Channel all day long to see if you can catch the signal again.”

  I shook my head. “It doesn’t work like that. I won’t be able to catch the signal until around the same time tomorrow night. Come here, I’ll show you.”

  Jeremy came to the window, and I pointed out into the black, star-freckled sky.

  “See that star up there?” I said. “Between the water tower and the Fuji Towers?”

  She nodded.

  “Pretend that’s the Nemesis star. It’s not, but just imagine. That star will only be in that particular spot for a certain amount of time this evening. Soon it will pass out of sight behind that water tower. Tomorrow night, at around this time, it will be there again for a while, although over weeks it will drift a little. When Charlie’s Angels came on, the Nemesis star was at just the right spot for me to catch signals off of it. I’ll have to wait until around the same time tomorrow night to get the signals again. If I can get them again. Understand?”

  “Got it.” She nodded once, although she looked so confused that I doubted she really did.

  “But,” she said after a moment of thought, “how will you know when that old Charlie’s Angels episode aired two years ago?”

  “I’ll have to go through all the Retro TV Magazines and write down the day and time the episode was on. If I’m lucky, it will only have been on once in the past two years. If not, I’ll have to make a list of all the dates and times it was on. Then I’ll try to pick up an old signal tomorrow. Let’s say I manage to pick up an old episode of I Love Lucy. I’ll have to go through all the guides again, find that particular episode of I Love Lucy, and pinpoint the day on which it was aired a day after the cheerleader episode of Charlie’s Angels. Then I’ve got my date.”

  “Oh,” she said. “All right.” It was hard to know if she understood what I was talking about. She left the room then, and I sat back down and watched the Freakout Channel for a little longer, just in case. No luck.

  All right, all right, I told myself. No big deal. I had my episode. The angels were posing as cheerleaders to catch a bunch of kidnappers. Now I could look it up in Retro TV Magazine and figure out what date it was aired on.

  I went to the box full of magazines and knelt beside it. I even remembered to put on the white gloves. That was when I realized exactly what a task lay before me. I had to leaf through 104 issues and hunt down every Charlie’s Angels episode. I made it through forty-eight issues before I fell aslee
p sitting up in bed, my back propped against the wall and the white gloves still on my hands.

  13

  In the morning I woke up late and went out to the kitchen to eat a bowl of Cocoa Puffs cereal with milk. Actually, it was the fake Cocoa Puffs, with the organic this and that, and it tastes almost nothing like the real Cocoa Puffs, but that morning I hardly noticed. I was too anxious to get back to the Retro TV Magazine issues. I even took a couple of the issues into the kitchen with me, and after I finished my cereal, I put the white gloves on and began to search through them again.

  Jeremy came into the kitchen wearing her jacket and a black ski cap pulled down around her ears. Her ice skates were slung over one shoulder. She stood in the doorway and watched me for a minute.

  “I’m going skating with Arthur,” she said.

  I waited for her to ask me if I wanted to come. She didn’t. Again, I felt her watching me.

  “What?” I said.

  “I was just thinking,” she said. “Even if you see the person who did it, even if the police can find him and catch him and stick him in jail, it won’t change things. Not really.”

  “How can you say that? Of course it will change things!” I said.

  “It won’t change things for us, I mean,” she said. “Or for Mom and Dad. It won’t make them less dead.”

  “It will change things for the person who killed them, won’t it?” I said. My voice sounded all strangled, I was so angry. “Living in a prison cell for the rest of your life is a pretty big change, in my opinion. Jeez, Jeremy, I would have thought you of all people would see why this is so important!”

  “It’s just—”

  “It’s just that now you have a bunch of friends and you and Zelda are getting along, so everything is fine, right? Well things are not fine for me, in case you haven’t noticed. Things are pretty lousy, if you want to know the truth. I’m the butt of everyone’s jokes, someone is helping themself to my lunch, and Mr. Wooly is going to humiliate me in front of the entire class. Yet again.”