by Sean McGinty
I pirated GoldenGoose™, where this goose sits on your head and every half hour lays a bonus egg. I pirated PooGrabber™, where you grab Poo for FUN®. I pirated PrimalTravel®, where there’s this monkey on your back and it won’t shut up about last-minute deals on flights to the Midwest. I pirated the AccelRator™, which is supposed to make time seem like it’s passing really fast by blanking out frames in your vision—but all it does is give you a headache.
I pirated the Animals of Wonder & Light®, the entire menagerie—the Buffaloon™, the Camelroo™, and the Owligator™. The Apecock™, Bearboon™, and Hawkalope™. The Mighty Amphibious Shaarkvark™. They followed me around the house, crying out for love and food. You were supposed to feed them. Evie called to check in and see how I was. I told her I was fine.
The next day another wave of the Avis Mortem hit: I stepped outside to find a dozen little birds flopping around in the gravel. They were having some kind of seizure. I tried to grab one, but it flopped out of my hands.
“Homie™!”
> sup original boy_2?
u r a FAIL!
“I need help. Directions. Like how to save a dying bird.”
> one moment please!
:)
A couple of the birds had stopped flopping around. They were just lying there in the drive. I touched one with the toe of my shoe. It didn’t move.
“Hurry up!”
> birds r feathered egg-laying vertebrates!
“But how do I save them?”
> they r need of saving original boy_2?
“Yes! Can’t you see? I need, like, instructions or something!”
> please hold on…
accessing instructions…
instructions accessed!
would u like to view instructions?
“Yes!”
> ok here are instructions!
very important instructions for repair of broken wing!
“No! That’s not what I need. They’re all dying!”
Homie™ hung in the air.
> no worries original boy_2!
FUN® is issuing a patch for that!
“A patch?”
> yay!
FUN® is issuing a patch!
It was too late. They were done flopping around now—all but one. And then it, too, died. I went inside the house. What was the point? The birds were dying, Shiloh was pissed, Katie was gone, there wasn’t any treasure, and I was so deep into FAIL it’d be like a million years before I was able earn my way out, let alone pay back my dad or Evie. Let alone give Oso the money to get Los Ojos de Dios off his back.
The world is just full of so much suck and so much fail. It’s everywhere. We’re just swimming in it. The biggest suck that ever sucked. So what’s it all about? Why are we here? Just to screw up, suck on some fail, grow old, and die? Some people, their whole life is just one big fail, so sucky it’s disturbing to your very soul—I’ve seen the video to prove it—and then it’s over. How can life be worth anything, how can there be any God or any good, if there’s so much suck?
What’s the point? You live, you screw up, you fail, the suck comes rolling in. You YAY! some stupid shit, you have some fun, you feel better. For a second. Something happens. You fail. The suck comes back. You YAY! some stupid shit. And the whole stupid, boring suckcycle repeats itself again, a wheel rolling down the most sucky road. And then you die. And is that all there is?
When I went back outside, the flies had gathered in buzzing swarms over the dead birds. Flies are smart like that. They figure it out pretty quick. I looked at the little yellow corpses. I looked at the flies. I looked at the land spreading out to the horizon. One by one I picked up the birds, grabbing them by their tiny claws, and tossed them into the brush.
The part that sucked continued to suck, which is part of what made it suck so much. (YAY! again for Dyson.) Days went by—weeks, even—and I sat on my butt, playing stupid games, watching stupid videos, eating my way through all the food in the house until there was nothing left but the cans I’d dug up. The first one I opened was vegetable soup. It smelled OK. I ate it cold. For dinner I had three-bean salad. For breakfast the next morning I opened a third, unidentified can with just a scrap of label clinging to it. It was some kind of strange beef stew—or so I thought. A couple bites into it, though, I read the warning printed on the remainder of the label: DO NOT FEED FROM CAN. DOG MAY CUT OR INJURE ITSELF.
Thpth. Thpppt. Thpppppppt. (The sound of me spitting it out.)
I continued to neglect to feed the Animals of Wonder & Light®, and they began to bray and falter, and then over the course of a morning I got to watch almost the entire menagerie die off, one by one, in alphabetical order: the Armadillodile™, Bearboon™, Buffaloon™, Camelroo™, Hawkalope™, Owligator™, Rhinostrich™—all of them looking at me one last time with those big anime eyes. The last to go was the Mighty Amphibious Shaarkvark™. It struggled mightily for an hour, living off the fly-ridden corpses of its fellows, but then it, too, succumbed.
I didn’t feel anything. Nothing.
If anything, the feeling of nothing was even worse than feeling the suck—just this empty hole inside of me.
> hey original boy_2!
r u ok?
u seem unhappy
“Yeah, I don’t really feel so—I don’t feel so anything.”
> i can help u feel!
what do u want to feel?
want to feel cool?
say yay!
“Yay.”
Homie™ showed me a video of skateboarders jumping off a high ramp into a lake. I didn’t feel anything.
> want to feel scared?
say yay!
“Yay.”
Homie™ showed me a picture of a ghost in a creepy old house in New England. I didn’t feel anything.
> want to feel excited?
“Yay.”
Whatever Homie™ offered, I didn’t feel anything—and then it asked me if I wanted to feel disturbed. And I said, “Yay.” I wish I wouldn’t have. I wish I would’ve had the self-control to say no to that one. I won’t say what it was, I’ll just say I wish I could unsee it. I wish I could unfeel it.
I found myself later sitting at the kitchen table with my grandfather’s .410. The final shell was loaded, the last of his ashes, and a little sucky voice was speaking to me from inside my head. What would happen if you pointed it at your face and just pulled the trigger?
I told the voice to shut up, but it wouldn’t.
What would happen?
Nothing would happen. I’d just burn my face with ashes or whatever.
You never know for sure until you try….
Shut up.
A horn sounded. Like, an actual horn.
I went out to find a big white truck idling in the drive. The window slid down and a flappy old arm waved me over. Anne Chicarelli. She had on those giant sunglasses that old people wear and was smoking a cigarette.
“Tell me, Adam. Have you seen it yet?”
“Aaron. Seen what?”
“It. The holy light all around. It’s everywhere, you know.”
And I almost laughed at her. It just seemed so ridiculous for people to go around talking about holy light when there was so much suckitude everywhere. I almost laughed, but instead I said, “Not really, no.”
Anne took a drag of her cigarette and looked at me. “The time has come. We knew it would be soon. They say Georgia is on her last breaths now, plucking at her bedsheets and babbling on about her grade school days.”
And it took me a moment to figure out what the hell she was talking about. At first I thought it was like, The time has come for you to see the holy light, and then I thought she was talking about the state of Georgia—but then I realized no, she was talking about her sister, Georgia. The one in Arizona who had cancer, now floccillating around on her deathbed. More evidence of suck.
“If I leave now, I can be there by tomorrow morning. Can you still watch my horses for me, Adam?”
She gave me instructions for feeding them and filling their water trough, and then she said, “Remember, it’s OK to ride Abel. But Cain’s a little jumpy. I shouldn’t be gone more than a week, and I’ll tell you the same thing I told your grandpa: help yourself to anything in the house. There are Pecan Sandies in the cupboard, and I’ve got satellite. Water the houseplants if they look like they need it.”
In the end, I guess that’s what saved me from my suck of fail. If nothing else, I had to take care of the horses, and I couldn’t take care of the horses with a burned-off face. So that evening I went over to Anne’s place, fed the horses, and topped off their water. When I returned to the house, the gun was still there on the porch. The stupid gun. My grandfather’s ashes. Never point it at a human being, he’d said. I thought about what Anne had said. The holy light. I thought about the holes I’d been digging—they were pretty holey, weren’t they? And that made me laugh—just a little—nothing’s holy but this hole I got here.
I took the .410 and aimed it at the sky.
Squeezed the trigger. Fired off that last round.
BLAM!
A cloud of ashes floated in the darkness.
Then nothing.
I dreamed that night of horses and an endless field of waving grass, and woke the next morning with a splitting headache. I didn’t know what to do about the headache, but as for the horses I thought maybe I’d let them out of their corral to graze a little bit—just, you know, to give them a treat. Or better yet, why not bring the grass to them?
In my grandpa’s basement I found an old gas weedwacker. It was old and hard to start—and probably nothing like holding a brand-new Craftsman® 30cc 4-Cylinder Straight Shaft WeedWacker™ with comfort strap (YAY!)—but at least it worked. For a while, at least.
Starting from the porch, I worked my way out in an ever-widening radius, sweeping the spinning line over cheatgrass and rabbit brush, watching the brittle stalks disintegrate into dust—pebbles and seeds zinging up at my arms and face. It was actually almost kind of fun. I ran that wacker until it was smoking. Just before it died on me, an object whipped up out of the brush and thumped me on the shin. I retrieved it from the lower branches of a sagebrush, where it had been snagged. A ring. Katie’s birthday present. I put it in my pocket.
As I was heading back to the house, I got a message:
unidentified: hey bro i got something i wanna discuss
u at home?
Oso showed up and slapped a baggie in my hand.
“Check it. VPHPs.”
“What’s that?”
“Very Powerful Hallucinogenic Pills, bro. Remember? I was slinging them for Los Ojos de Dios? I stole a package from Pedro Santistevan’s house that night we went werewolfing, and guess what? They were just aspirin after all. See the little A’s? Those guys were scamming me!” Oso surveyed the property. “By the way, the place looks different, bro. Groomed. I like it. So how goes the dig?”
“It doesn’t. It’s over. There’s nothing there but junk. It doesn’t matter. I did something stupid, man. I messed up. I mean, I really outdid myself this time.”
“That serious, huh?”
“Yeah. I feel like shit and I’ve got a headache, too.”
“Well, I can help with the headache. Have an aspirin. Have two.”
So I did. But I didn’t feel any better.
“Listen, bro. You gotta remember: like my uncle says, there’s a light in the monkey.”
“Yeah, you told me that one before.”
“I figured it out, though,” he said. “Did I tell you that? We’re not the monkey.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean the monkey is inside us, and the light is in the monkey!”
“So?”
“So—don’t you see?! Inside all of us is a screaming monkey. It’s jealous and mean and it wants food and water and power and it can barely keep from tearing itself apart because it knows the truth…that one day it’s going to die. You can get hung up looking at that monkey, seeing it in everyone else. But the truth is it doesn’t end with the monkey. Because inside the monkey there is a light.”
“And what’s in the light? Another monkey?”
“Inside the light is more light,” said Oso, “And the light is good.”
“Wow. That’s maybe just two steps too hippie for me.”
Oso frowned. “OK, how about this, then? You see this finger? If I took this finger and stuck it in my butt, what do you think it would smell like?”
“I don’t know. Are we gonna find out?”
“It would smell like doody, bro. Why? Because from a scientific perspective, we’re all the same on the inside. Get it? Every single one of us. You, me, murderers, politicians—the hard-corest sociopath you can ever imagine. We’ve all got doody up our butts.”
“Gee, this is excellent news.”
“But also the good ones, too, bro. The grandmas and saints. All of us. We’re all just stuffed full of shit. That’s a scientific fact. So unless you murdered someone or—”
“Look, I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but—”
“Bro: How many people are there on this planet? Billions upon billions. And what percent of them are super-extra-sleazy douche bags? Even if it’s as low as one percent, no matter what you did, thousands upon thousands of people have already outdone you just in the time we’ve been sitting here having this conversation.”
“Yeah…maybe…”
“Not maybe—definitely! I’ve been thinking about it a lot ever since I got caught. You just can’t compete with all the evil in this world. Like, every four seconds a baby seal is clubbed to death.”
“Jesus! Every four seconds?”
“Who can really say? That’s just a statistic I made up for an example.”
“OK, because every four seconds sounds way too frequent. Who clubs a baby seal?”
“That’s what I’m saying! Did you club a baby seal?”
“That’s kind of what it feels like.”
“But did an actual baby seal actually die as a result of your actions?”
“No.”
He threw up his hands. “Then don’t beat yourself up! You’re free as a bird! Whatever you did, and whatever you do, in the grand scheme it doesn’t even register. That’s the power of statistics working for you, bro.”
I wasn’t convinced. “Here’s what I want to know: If life is full of so much shit, how can there be a God? Who is this dude? What kind of God allows for all that?”
“There doesn’t have to be a God, bro.”
“Well, I know that. But I don’t want to believe in nothing.”
“Even believing in nothing is believing in something. Humans want to believe. But it doesn’t have to be yes or no. It doesn’t have to be God or nothing. It can be something else. It can be something bigger than that.”
“Like what?”
“Like beyond our comprehension, bro, like so big it’s all around us and yet we only get glimpses every now and again. The point is, who knows? So be good, but also don’t beat yourself up.”
We sat on the porch, and I thought about what Oso had said. Morality as a bell curve. Forgiveness by way of numbers and averages. It was an interesting take, the only problem being: How was I supposed to see myself as a statistic? How do you view yourself from that kind of distance? You can’t be two places at once. You can’t look down at the top of your own head by climbing up a ladder.
“What’d you do anyway, bro?”
So I told him about Katie and Shiloh.
“Ah,” said Oso. “The classic double-grab fail. Look, I can’t undo what you did, but I can help with the treasure.”
“Like I told you, there’s nothing there.”
“You think? Are you one hundred percent sure?” Oso gazed darkly into my eyes. “Let me ask you this: how much faster you think the dig would go with—a backhoe?”
“A backhoe?”
“Yes!”
> “And where do we get a backhoe?”
“Come on. I’ll show you!”
He led me over the ridge and down into Coyote Heights, where there was a single backhoe sitting next to a utility shed. YAY! for Case 810 Super N with PowerADD™ CG technology and ComfortSeats—the best in the industry.
“I saw it the other day. Look at that poor old dinosaur just WAITING for someone to fire her up.”
“Oso, we can’t steal a backhoe.”
“Not steal. Borrow. I know how to work it—my uncle had me running one last summer. You ask me, the whole idea of private ownership is a shackle on the spirit anyway. Like anyone really owns anything on this earth! I promise you: we’ll return her even better than we found her.”
“How do we run a backhoe without a key?”
He held up a screwdriver. “Two words: hot and wire.”
“Hot-wire? But you’re about to go on trial!”
Oso gazed at me with dark eyes. “Hey, we’re all on trial, bro. Are you gonna tell me that after all the work you put into the dig, just because you found some kitchen crap on the top—which is probably, by the way, just a decoy—are you telling me you’re just gonna give up at the end? Do you even know what tonight is? Tonight is a special night. A night that only comes twelve times a year. Or maybe thirteen. I’m not sure. Tonight is the new moon, bro. Meaning no moon. Meaning complete and total blackout. Meaning perfect night for a backhoe heist.”
“I don’t know, man.”
Oso recoiled in disbelief. “What do you mean, you don’t know?! It’s the perfect opportunity for me to practice my hot-wire skills! We can get this whole operation completed, ninja-style, in under an hour. Easy. Piece of cake. Tell me one thing wrong with this plan.”
