Antsy Does Time

8. Who Needs Cash When You’ve Got Time Coming Out of Your Ears?

I have never been in the habit of cheating at school. I mean, sure, the occasional glance at my neighbor’s paper on a multiple-choice test or a list of dates written on my forearm, but nothing like what Skaterdud wanted me to do. Now not only did I have to write two passing papers, but I had to make one of them sound like he wrote it—which meant sounding all confusing but making enough sense to get a passing grade.

The Dud’s paper got a B with an exclamation point from the teacher, and since I used all the good stuff in his paper, I got a C-minus on mine. Serves me right. The Dud gave me my month commission the morning we got our grades back, slapped me on the back when he saw my grade, and said, “You’ll do better next time.”

That day I went off campus to get pizza for lunch, because the lunch ladies were secretly spreading the word that this was a good day to do a religious fast.

Problem was, I didn’t have any money. Rishi, who ran the pizza place down the street, was Indian. Not Native American, but Indian Indian—like from India—and, as such, made pizza that was nothing like the Founding Fathers ever envisioned. Not that it was bad—actually each type he made was amazing, which is maybe why the place was always crowded, and he could keep raising his prices.

I stood there, drooling over a Tandoori Chicken and Pepperoni that had just come out of the oven, and began rummaging through my backpack for spare change—but all I came up with were two nickels, and a Chuck E. Cheese game token that came out as change from one of those high-tech vending machines that was either defective or knew exactly what it was doing.

Rishi looked at me, and just shook his head. Meanwhile the people in line behind me were getting impatient. “C’mon,” said Wailing Woody, his beefy arm around his girlfriend’s shoulder. “Either order or get out of the way.”

What I did next was probably the result of low blood sugar. I opened my binder to see if maybe some coins got stuck under the clasp, and saw the page I had gotten from Skaterdud. My commission. I pulled it out, looked once more at the pizza, and desperately held it up to Rishi.

“I don’t have cash, but what about this?” I said. “One month of some guy’s life.”

A couple of people in line snorted, but not everyone. After all, I had been on Morning Announcements. I was legit. People actually got quieter, waiting to see what Rishi would do. He took it from me, laughed once, laughed twice, and I figured my religious fast was about to begin ... until he said, “What kind of pizza would you like?”

I was still staring at him, waiting for the punch line, when Woody nudged me and said, “Order already!”

“Uh ... how many slices is it worth?”

“Two,” Rishi said, without hesitation, like it was written on the menu.

I ordered my two slices of Tandoori Chicken-and-Pepperoni, and as he served them he said to me, “I shall frame this and hang it on the wall, there.” He pointed to a wall that held a bunch of photos of minor celebrities like the Channel Five weatherman, and Cher. “It will be the cause of much conversation! Next!”

At this point, I’m just figuring I’m lucky—that this is a freak thing. But like I said, other people saw this—people who hadn’t eaten, and maybe their brains were working like that high-tech vending machine, which, when I got back to school, gave me a can of Coke for a Chuck E. Cheese token, thinking it was a Sacagawea dollar coin.

The second I popped that soda open, Howie appeared out of nowhere, in a very Schwa-like way, complaining of the kind of thirst that ended empires. “Please, Antsy, just one sip. I swear on my mother’s life I won’t backwash.”

I took a long, slow guzzle from the can, considering it. Then I said, “What’s it worth to you?”

I walked away with two weeks of his life.

There’s this thing called “supply and demand.” You can learn about this in economics class, or in certain computer games that simulate civilizations. You also can blow up those civilizations with nuclear weapons—which is only fun the first couple of times, and then it’s like enough already—why spend three hours building a civilization if you’re just gonna blow it up? That’s three hours of your life you’re never gonna get back—and ever since time shaving became a part of my daily activities, I’ve become very aware of wasted time—whether it be time wasted on the couch watching reruns, or time spent destroying simulated nations. When I first got that game, by the way, it cost fifty bucks, but now you can get it in the sale bin for $9.99. That’s supply and demand. When everybody wants something and there’s not enough to go around, it costs more. But if nobody wants it, it costs next to nothing. In the end, it’s people who really decide how much something is worth.

As the undisputed Master of Time, I was the one in complete control of the time-shaving industry. That meant I controlled the supply, and now that I knew I could trade time for other stuff, I began to wonder how big the demand could be.

Turns out I didn’t have to wait long to find out. The next morning, Wailing Woody Wilson came to me with his girlfriend to settle a dispute.

“I forgot we had a date last night, and Tanya was all mad at me.”

“I’m still mad at you,” Tanya reminded him. She crossed her arms impatiently and chewed gum in my general direction.

“Yeah,” said Woody. “So I said I’d give her a month of my life.” Then he looked at me pleadingly, like I had the power to make it all better.

Well, maybe I’m psychic, or maybe I’m smart, or maybe my stupidity quotient was equal to theirs, because I had anticipated just this sort of thing. In fact, the night before, I had printed out a dozen blank contracts—all they needed to do was fill in the names. I reached into my backpack and pulled a contract out of my binder . . . along with a certificate that would give me my own bonus week as payment for the transaction.

“Oh, and while we’re at it,” said Woody, “I’ll throw in a month for Gunnar, too.”

Tanya stenciled hearts all over her certificate, had it laminated, and posted it on the student bulletin board for the whole world to see. From that moment on, any guy who was not willing to give a month of his life to his girlfriend didn’t have a girlfriend for long. I was swamped with requests. And on top of romantic commerce, there were other kids who came to me with same-as-cash transactions.

“My brother says he’ll give me the bigger bedroom for a month of my life.”

“I broke a neighbor’s window, and I can’t afford to pay for it.”

“Could this be used as a Bar Mitzvah gift?”

Between all this new business, and the months that were still pouring in for Gunnar, I was collecting commissions left and right. In a few days I had thirty weeks of my own—which I was able to trade for everything from a bag of chips to a ride home on the back of a senior’s motorcycle. I even got a used iPod; trading value: three weeks.

I could not deny the fact that I was getting amazing mileage out of Gunnar’s imminent death. I felt guilty about it, since I never got permission from Gunnar to shamelessly use his terminality but as it turns out, Gunnar was actually pleased about it.“‘Misery loves company, but it loves power to a greater degree,’” he said, quoting Ayn Rand. “If my misery has the power to change your life, I’m happy.”

Which I guess was okay—if he could be happily miserable, it was better than being miserably miserable—and Gunnar was definitely the most “up” down person I knew.

Even so, I couldn’t tell him about the daydreams. Some things are best kept to oneself. See, you can’t help the things you daydream about—and they’re not always nice. In fact, sometimes they’re more nightmares than dreams. Daymares, I’d guess you’d call them. Like the times you get all caught up imagining irritating arguments you never had but might have someday—or the daymares where you put yourself through worst-case scenarios. The sinkhole daymare, for example. See, a while back there was this news report about a sinkhole that opened up beneath a house in Bolivia or Bulgaria, or something. One morning in this quiet neighborhood, there’s all this moaning and groaning in the walls, and then the ground opens up, a house plunges a hundred feet into the earth, and everyone inside is swept away in an underground river that nobody knew about except for some braniac in a nearby university who’s been writing papers about it for thirty years, but does anybody read them? No.

So you get a daymare about this sinkhole, and what if it happened right beneath your house. Imagine that. You wake up one morning, hit the shower, and as you’re drying off, suddenly the ground swallows your entire house, and there you are wrapped in a towel, trying to figure out which is more important at the moment—keeping the towel on, or keeping from being washed away in the underground river?

In these daymares you always survive—although occasionally you’re the only one, and it ends with you telling the news reporters how you tried so desperately to save your family, if only they could have held on and been strong like you.

My current recurring daymare involved me at Gunnar’s funeral. I’m there and it’s raining, because it’s always raining at funerals, and all the umbrellas are always black. Why is that? What happens to all those bright flowery umbrellas, or the Winnie-the-Pooh ones? So anyway, there I am holding a depressingly black umbrella with one hand, and my other hand is holding Kjersten, comforting her in her grief. I’m strong for her, and that makes us even closer—and yeah, I’m all broken up, but I don’t show it except for maybe a single tear down one cheek. Then someone asks me to say something. I step forward, and unlike in real life, I say the perfect thing that makes everyone smile and nod in spite of their tears, and makes Kjersten respect me even more. And then I snap myself out of it, seriously disgusted that in my head, Gunnar’s funeral is all about me.

In a couple of days I had gone through my entire paper supply printing out time-contract forms, and donations were still pouring in. The student council, refusing to be outdone by a lowly commoner like me, put up a big cardboard thermometer outside the main office. I was instructed to notify them daily how much time had been collected for Gunnar so they could mark it off on the thermometer. The goal they set was fifty years, because fifty additional years would make Gunnar sixty-five, and they felt that giving him time beyond retirement age would just be silly.

“It’s amazing how generous people can be when you’re dying,” Gunnar said when I handed him the next stack of months.

“So what’s the word from Doctor G?” I asked him. “Any good news?”

“Dr. G is noncommittal,” Gunnar told me. “He says I’ll be fine, until I’m not.”

“That’s helpful.” I wondered which was worse, having a disease with few symptoms, or one with enough symptoms to let you know where you stood. “Well,” I offered lamely, “at least your lips haven’t gone blue.”

Gunnar shrugged, and swayed a little, like maybe he was having one of his dizzy spells.

“So ... you think you might make it all the way through next year?” I asked.

Gunnar looked at the stack of time in his hands. “It’s possible that I could linger.”

Which was more than I could say for his backyard. I went over to his house that Wednesday to continue work on the dust bowl. It was hard spending time in the Universe of Ümlaut now. There were just too many things hanging in the air. Gunnar’s imminent death, for example. And the weirdness with their father, and then there was the looming date with Kjersten.

I know that a date with the girl of your dreams shouldn’t “loom,” but it does. It’s worse when you gotta see each other after you’ve asked her out but before the actual date. It’s kind of like saying good-bye to somebody and then realizing you both gotta get in the same elevator. You can’t talk because you already said good-bye, so usually you both stand there feeling like idiots.

So now I’d asked Kjersten out, she said yes, and here I was at her house two days before the actual date. I knew as soon as she got home from tennis practice, it would be elevator time.

As for the Ümlaut backyard, it was officially dead—nothing had survived our herbicidal assault. Even a few of the neighbors’ plants had suffered, because the herbicide had seeped into their soil a bit.

“That’s what you call ‛collateral damage,’” Gunnar said. He looked at the growing desolation around us. “Maybe we can hire some bums and urchins to populate the scene.”

Right about then Mrs. Ümlaut called from the house, asking if we wanted hot chocolate since it was getting cold. Instead we asked for “a cuppa joe straight from the pot,” which was satisfyingly Steinbeck-like. Of course it would have worked better if she hadn’t brought out an automatic-drip glass pot with a floral design.

That’s when Kjersten got home, and came out to say hello. I was happy to see her, in spite of it feeling awkward.

“I hear you’re the school’s official Cupid,” she said with a smirk, obviously referring to the new currency of love in our school, for which I was supplying the paperwork.

“I don’t shoot the arrows, I just load the bow.”

Gunnar groaned and rolled his eyes at that. The smile Kjersten had for me faded when she looked at the big hunk of granite in the middle of our dust bowl. I had gotten so used to seeing the unfinished tombstone there, I had forgotten about it.

“You should move that thing,” Kjersten told him. “It’s an eyesore.”

“Naa,” Gunnar said. “People died in the dust bowl, so having a gravestone makes it more authentic.”

Kjersten threw me a look, but I turned away. I knew better than to put myself in the middle of this. Instead I just busied myself brushing dirt clods off my jeans.

“Are you staying for dinner?” Kjersten asked.

“No,” I told her, way too quickly. “I’m working at my dad’s restaurant tonight.” After the last Ümlaut meal, I’d rather be pushing menus and pouring water than having to sit at that table again. I think I’d rather be ON the menu than have to eat with their father, if he came home.

Kjersten must have read my mind, because she said, “It’s not always that bad.”

“Yes it is,” said Gunnar, chugging some of the hot coffee.

“Do you always have to be so negative?” Kjersten asked. I wanted to tell her that maybe she should cut her dying brother a little slack, but siding against a prospective girlfriend in any situation is unwise.

Gunnar shrugged. “I’m not being negative, I’m just telling the truth.” Then he glanced at the coffeepot. “Just like Benjamin Franklin said, ‛Truth can only be served from a scalding kettle; whether you blister or make tea is up to you.’”

Kjersten gave him a disgusted look that actually made her appear slightly less beautiful, which I hadn’t thought was possible. “My brother’s nowhere near as smart as he thinks he is.”

Then she turned to storm off.

“I’m smart enough to know where Dad goes,” said Gunnar.

It stopped Kjersten in midstorm, but only for an instant. Then she picked up her stride and continued inside, without even turning back to give Gunnar an ounce of satisfaction.

Once she was gone, Gunnar and I continued to hurl plants into Hefty bags in silence. Now that Kjersten had reminded me of the gravestone, I couldn’t stop looking at it. The elephant in the dust bowl. But for once Gunnar wasn’t obsessing over his own eventual doom. His thoughts were somewhere else entirely.

“Three times,” Gunnar said, finally breaking the silence. “Three times I checked the odometer in my dad’s car before he left and after he got back, then did the math. All three times, he traveled somewhere that was between a hundred and thirty and a hundred and forty miles away.”

It was good detective work, I guess, but was only half the job. “It doesn’t mean much if you don’t know which direction he’s going.”

“Try northwest.” Then Gunnar reached into his pocket and flipped me a red disk. “I found this in his car.” Even before I caught it, I knew what it was.

“A poker chip? He’s playing poker?”

“Probably blackjack or craps,” Gunnar said “Take a closer look.”

The chip was red with black stripes around the edge. There was an A printed in the center.

“The Anawana Tribal Casino,” Gunnar said. “And, according to MapQuest, it’s one hundred and thirty-seven miles from our front door.”