Antsy Does Time

1. The Real Reason People Sit Like Idiots Watching Parades

It was all my idea. The stupid ones usually are. Once in a while the genius ideas are mine, too. Not on purpose, though. You know what they say: if you put, like, fourteen thousand monkeys in front of computer keyboards for a hundred years, aside from a whole lot of dead monkeys, you’d end up with one masterpiece among the garbage. Then they’d start teaching it in schools to make you feel miserable, because if a monkey can write something brilliant, why can’t you put five measly sentences together for a writing prompt?

This idea—I don’t know whether it was a brilliant-monkey idea, or a stupid-Antsy idea, but it sure had power to change a whole lot of lives.

I called the idea “time shaving,” which probably isn’t what you think it is, so before you start whipping up time machines in your head, you need to listen to what it’s all about. Nobody’s going back in time to nuke Napoleon, or give Jesus a cell phone or anything. There’s no time travel at all. People are going to die, though—and in strange and mysterious ways, too, if you’re into that kind of thing.

Me, I was just trying to help a friend. I never meant for it to blow up like a giant Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon that gets taken away by the wind.

Which, by the way, is exactly how the whole thing began.

On Thanksgiving morning, my friends Howie and Ira and I were hanging out in my recreational attic. We used to have a recreational basement—you know, full of all our old cruddy furniture, a TV, and a big untouchable space in the corner that was going to be for a pool table when we could afford it in some distant Star Trek-like future. Then the basement gets this toxic mold, and we have to seal it off from the rest of the house, on account of the mold might escape and cause cancer, or brain damage, or take over the world. Even after the mold was cleaned out, my parents treated the basement like a radiation zone, uninhabitable for three generations.

So now we have a recreational attic, full of new old furniture, and space maybe for a Monopoly board instead of a pool table.

Anyway, Howie, Ira, and I were watching football that Thanksgiving morning, switching to the parade during commercials to make fun of the marching bands.

“Ooh! Ooh! Look at this one!” said Ira, with an expression that was a weird mix of joy and horror at the same time.

To the band’s credit, they were playing an impressive rendition of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” but anything cool about it was ruined by their pink-and-orange uniforms. Howie shakes his head. “As long as they dress like that, they’re never getting any satisfaction.”

“Antsy, don’t you have a shirt like that?” asks Ira. My name’s actually Anthony, but people have called me Antsy for so long, I oughta get it legally changed. I like it because there are so many Anthonys in the neighborhood, if some mother calls the name out a window, the stampede stops traffic. I’m the only Antsy, though—except for this one time a kid tried to steal it and call himself Antsy, so I had to start writing my name “Antsy®,” and I threatened to punch him out for identity theft.

So anyway, about the shirt, although I hate to admit it, yeah, I do have a shirt in orange and pink, although it was a different shade of pink.

“Just because I have it doesn’t mean I wear it,” I tell Ira. The shirt was a birthday gift from my aunt Mona, who has no kids or common sense. I’ll give you one guess how many times I’ve worn it since my fourteenth birthday.

“You think anyone’s documented seizures from looking at that color combination?” asks Howie. “We should run some tests.”

“Great. I’ll get my shirt, you can stare at it for six hours, and we’ll see if you go into convulsions.”

Howie seriously considers this. “Can I break for meals?”

Let me try to explain Howie to you. You know that annoying automated customer-service voice on the phone that wastes your time before making you hold for a real person? Well, Howie’s the music on hold. It’s not that Howie’s dumb—he’s got a fertile mind when it comes to analytical stuff like math—but his imagination is a cold winter in Antarctica where the penguins never learned to swim.

On TV, the band had almost passed, and one of the giant parade balloons could be seen in the distance. This one was the classic cartoon Roadkyll Raccoon, complete with that infamous tire track down his back, the size of a monster-truck tread. We were about to turn the TV back to football, but then Ira noticed something.

“Is it my imagination, or is Roadkyll on the warpath?”

Sure enough, Roadkyll is kicking and bucking like he’s Godzilla trying to take out Tokyo. Then this huge gust of wind rips off the band members’ hats, and when the gust reaches Roadkyll, he kind of peels himself off the street, and heads to the skies. Most of the balloon handlers have the good sense to let go, except for three morons who decide to go up with the ship.

Suddenly this is more interesting than the game.

Howie sighs. “I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. Helium kills.”

The cameras were no longer watching the parade—they’re all aimed at the airborne raccoon as it rises in an updraft along the side of the Empire State Building, with the three balloon wranglers clinging like circus acrobats. Then, just as it looks like Roadkyll might be headed for the moon, he gets snagged on top of the Empire State Building and punctures. In less than a minute the balloon has totally deflated over the spire, covering the top of the Empire State Building in rubber coonskin and stranding the three danglers, who hang from their ropes for their lives.

I was the first one out of my seat.

“Let’s go,” I said, because there are some events in life that are better experienced in person than viewed on TV.

We took the subway into Manhattan—usually a crowded ride from our little corner of Brooklyn, but since it was Thanksgiving, the trains were mostly empty, except for others like ourselves who were on their way to the Empire State Building to watch history in the making.

Ira, who has an intense and questionable relationship with his video camera, was lovingly cleaning the lens as he prepared to record today’s event for future generations. Howie was reading Of Mice and Men, which we all had to read for English. It’s a book the teachers use to trick us—because it’s really thin, but it’s like, deep, so you gotta read it twice.

Across from us in the train was Gunnar Ümlaut—a kid who moved here from Sweden when we were all in elementary school. Gunnar’s got long blond hair he makes no excuse for, and a resigned look of Scandinavian despair that melts girls in his path. And if that doesn’t work, the slight accent he puts on when he’s around girls does the job. Never mind that he’s been living in Brooklyn since he was six. Not that I’m jealous or anything—I admire a guy who uses what he’s got.

“Hi, Gunnar,” I said. “Where you headed?”

“Where else? The Roadkyll debacle.”

“Excellent,” I said, and filed the word “debacle” in the special place I reserve for words I will never know the meaning of.

So Gunnar’s sitting there, all slouched and casual, his arms across seats on either side like maybe there’s a couple of invisible girls there. (Don’t get me started on invisible. Long story.) Then he takes one look at Howie’s book and says, “The dumb guy dies at the end.”

Howie looks up at Gunnar, heaves a heavy sigh that can only come from a lifetime of ruined endings, and closes the book. I snicker, which just irritates Howie even more.

“Thanks, Gunnar.” Howie sneers. “Any more spoilers you care to share with us?”

“Yeah,” says Gunnar. “Rosebud’s a sled, the spider dies after the fair, and the Planet of the Apes is actually Earth in the distant future.” He doesn’t smile when he says it. Gunnar never smiles. I think girls must like that, too.

By the time we got off at Thirty-fourth Street, the parade crowd had all gravitated to the Empire State Building, hoping to experience the thrill of watching someone they don’t know plunge to his death.

“If they don’t survive,” said Gunnar, “it’s our responsibility to witness it. As Winston Churchill once said, ‛An untimely end witnessed, gives life deeper meaning.’”

Gunnar always talks like that—all serious, as if even stupidity has a point.

All around us the police are screaming at the crowds, one hand on their batons, saying things like, “Don’t make me use this!”

Up above, the Empire State Building was still wearing a coonskin hat, and the three unfortunate balloon handlers were exactly where they were when we left home—still clinging on to their ropes. Ira handed me the camera, which had a 500X zoom, just in case I wanted to examine one of the guy’s nose hairs.

It was hard to hold the camera steady when it was zoomed in, but once I did, I could see firefighters and police inside the Empire State Building, trying to reach the men through the windows. They weren’t having much luck. Word in the crowd was that a rescue helicopter was on its way.

One guy had managed to tie the rope around his waist and was swinging toward the windows, but the rescuers couldn’t get a grip on him. The second guy clung to the rope and also had it hooked around his feet, probably thanking the New York public school system for forcing him to learn how to do this in gym class. The third guy was the worst off. He was dangling from a stick at the end of his rope, holding on with both hands like a flying trapeze once it stops flying.

“Hey, I wanna look, too!”

Howie grabs the camera from me, and that’s just fine, because I was starting to get a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. Suddenly I started to wonder what had possessed me to come down here at all.

“How much you wanna bet those guys write a book about this?” says Howie. It seems Howie assumes they’re all going to survive.

All the while, Gunnar just stood there quietly, his eyes cast heavenward toward the human drama, with a solemn expression on his face. He caught me watching him.

“For the past few months I’ve been coming to disasters,” Gunnar tells me.

“Why?”

Gunnar shrugs as if it’s nothing, but I can tell there’s more to it. “I find them ... compelling.”

Coming from anyone else, this would be like a serial-killer warning sign, but from Gunnar it didn’t seem weird at all, it just seemed like some profound Scandinavian thing—like all those foreign movies where everyone dies, including the director, the cameraman, and half the audience.

Gunnar shakes his head sadly as he watches the souls up above. “So fragile ...” he says.

“What,” says Howie, “balloons?”

“No, human life, you idiot,” I tell him. For an instant I caught a hint of what actually might have been a smile on Gunnar’s face. Maybe because I said what he was thinking.

There’s applause all around us, and when I look up, I can see the swinging man has finally been caught by a cop, and he’s hauled through the window. The helicopter has arrived with a guy tethered to a rope like an action hero, to go after the trapeze dangler. The crowd watches in a silence you rarely hear in a city. It takes a few hair-raising minutes, but the guy is rescued and hauled away by the helicopter. Now only one dangler remains. This is the guy who seemed calmest of all; the guy who had it all under control. The guy who suddenly slips, and plunges.

A singular gasp from the audience.

“No way!” says Ira, his eye glued to his camera.

The guy falls. He falls forever. He doesn’t even spin his arms—it’s like he’s already accepted his fate. And suddenly I find I can’t watch it. I snap my eyes away, looking anywhere else. My shoes, other people’s shoes, the manhole cover beneath me.

I never heard him hit. I’m thankful that I didn’t. Yeah, it was my idea to come here, but when it comes right down to it, I know there are some things you just shouldn’t watch. That’s when I saw Gunnar—for all his talk about witnessing disaster, he was looking away, too. Not just looking away, but grimacing and covering his eyes.

The gasps from the crowd have turned to groans of self-loathing as people suddenly realize this wasn’t about entertainment. Even Howie and Ira are looking kind of ill.

“Let’s get out of here before the subway gets packed,” I tell them, trying to sound less choked up than I really am—but if I’m a little queasy, it’s nothing compared to Gunnar. He was so pale I thought he might pass out. He even stumbles a little bit. I grab his arm to keep him steady. “Hey... Hey, you okay?”

“Yeah,” he says. “I’m fine. It’s nothing. Just a part of the illness.”

I looked at him, not quite sure I heard him right. “Illness?”

“Yes. Pulmonary Monoxic Systemia.” And then he says, “I only have six months to live.”