A Matter of Life and Death or Something Read online

  I took a swig of milk from my thermos. It was very relaxing, sitting on the sea turtle rock drinking milk and ice cubes and forgetting about death and things. I tipped my thermos up and took another sip of milk with the bright sun closing my eyes, and when I tipped my head back down I saw something strange on the ground. Down the hill a ways, there was a corner of something sticking out from some leaves. I figured I probably had a milk moustache as usual, so I shaved it. Then I slid off the rock and climbed down to check out the whatever-it-was.

  It was a book. A splotchy black and white notebook, beat up and damp, half covered in leaves. I knelt down and pulled it out from the mucky leaves and brushed it off like a palaeontologist. I looked around for a second to check if there was anyone else on the hill, or up in the clearing, anyone who might have lost it. But I realized that the thing looked like it had been there for ice ages. Obviously, whoever owned it must have lost it a while ago and had no idea where it went.

  The cover was black and white like I said, this small speckly pattern of strange black shapes and strange white shapes crashing into each other and covering each other up. Someone had written their name on the cover, but their last name was all smudged.

  I hiked back up to the rock again and sat and opened it up. I examined the first page. Faded and sketchy handwriting filled the paper, written in black ink all attacked by the rain and wind and bugs and racoons and whatever else it had dealt with. I flipped through the rest of the book and found a bunch of pages pretty similar to the first. Most of them were filled with black handwriting, and each page was numbered in the top corner, because the book must have came with numbers already printed in it. Big parts of the writing were really hard to read because of how wet they’d gotten, and the ink was so runny. There were a couple diagrams, and there was a lot of stuff that was crossed out. Some pages looked like they were written carefully and slowly, with nice loopy letters and perfect spaces, like an intelligent sloth might write, but then some pages were more mashed together and had writing at weird angles, kind of angry looking. It must have been someone’s journal.

  “Aaaarrrr-thurrrr!”

  I was almost all the way to the beach but I could still hear Simon’s voice. It was time to eat.

  I went over and put the book back on the ground where it was, but then I picked it up again. I was having a mid-life crisis. For some reason, I skimmed through the pages over and over, like I was having a case of Alzheimer’s right there in the woods. Like I said, I’d found lots of things in the woods, all the time, but I always put them back where they came from. I’d just never found anything that was so obviously someone else’s before.

  “Aaaaaarrrrrr-thurrrrrr!”

  “Ohhhhh-kayyyyy!”

  I put the notebook into my little white backpack with my thermos and my sketchbook and my field glasses. Before I zipped it up, I looked at it again, and I looked at the spot where I found it. I measured it in steps, and memorized that it was five steps from the bent tree, heading away from the river, and one step sideways towards the house. I was breaking my own rules. I was breaking the rules that I thought the woods had. I looked up to the trees for advice, kind of, but they obviously said nothing. They just whooshed in the breeze. I decided that I would put it back where it had really come from, which was in the hands of whoever wrote it. Still. I was breaking the rules. I put my backpack on over my shoulders and it felt like it weighed a ton.

  “Aaaaaaaarrrrrrrr-thurrrrrrrr!”

  “OOOOOOOHHHHHHH-KAAAYYY!”

  I went home and slid the book under my pillow and ate supper.

  OTHER GALAXIES

  I REALLY did have Alzheimer’s. It wasn’t until the next day that I even thought about the notebook again. Simon and I had finished my school, and I was using the computer. I had just solved the hardest equation known to man, and I was proud of myself, so I celebrated with a cold glass of milk and a visit to www.rosiearoundtheworld.co.uk to see how Rosie was doing. Rosie is a woman whose husband died of cancer, and she’s running around the world because she knows that you only get one life and you have to grab it by its horns, and also because orphan kids need lots of money which she will raise for them. I’d found out about her about a year before when I was searching the internet for extraordinary people. She was about 80% finished her run around the world. I knew this because there was a picture on the site that showed the whole world and the line she was making around it, and I made a big drawing of it myself to keep track of her, with a star for where she started in Wales. Something about her really expired me. A lot of things about her did. I mean, she even ran through Siberia, for crying outside.

  Anyway, her website was updated every three days, on average, and I visited it just as often. It had lots of pictures of her all over the world—on the side of snowy highways, in the hot sun with sweat pouring off of her, smiling in front of famous statues, just her and Icebird. Icebird was the trailer that she pulled behind her everywhere she went because it kept everything she needed to survive inside of it, and sometimes I think she even slept in it.

  It was really crazy because on the website that day there was an update saying that she would actually be running through our town on April 19th, if everything went according to schedule. This was amazing news. I had been expecting that she might come somewhere nearby, but I mean I wasn’t expecting her to go through my exact town in a week. I went over to the National Geographic photo calendar on our fridge and wrote her name on the 19th. Even if she didn’t come exactly on that day, it was good to be prepared.

  It was right then, when I was staring at all the numbers on the calendar, that I finally remembered. The book! Simon was taking over the computer to do work stuff as I left the kitchen and walked through the living room and down the short hallway to my room. I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten about that book.

  I’d hid it under my pillow to keep it safe but then it was so well hidden that it had just fallen right out of my brain. My pillow felt kinda hard and flat with that thing under there. No wonder I had so many dreams. I took it out.

  It was exactly the same as I remembered it being, except I hadn’t remembered it. The black and white speckled cover, bulging and warped from the rain. The black ink running in places, all shaky. Hundreds of pages all stiff and brittle, crackly in the margins. The wire coil made of rust. The page numbers, the crossed out words.

  I spent a long time reading it. Basically, it seemed like a long story about a man named Phil, and also written by him. Only it was confusing because he didn’t always tell the story like a normal person, like saying “I did this and then I did this.” He did talk like that sometimes, but then sometimes it was like he was talking about someone else doing everything but he was saying the name Phil so I think he was still talking about himself. I mean, half the time he would talk like “Phil did this, Phil did that.” He was sometimes really mean, or sad. He was sometimes kind of nice and funny too, but mostly he seemed kind of angry. It was sorta weird. Some of the things I read I didn’t understand, but most things I did.

  I looked at the cover again:

  Of course his last name was all smudged out. That’s the way it always was in crazy detective shows. I got out my magnifying glass and examined the half-signature really close up, just in case, but I still couldn’t read it. I did find something weird though. I realized that the long ink blob had a pattern to it: it ended in sort of a fingerprint. It seemed like whoever this “Phil” guy was, he had tried to get rid of the last name on purpose, like he licked his finger and blurred out his own name.

  “A curious specimen,” I said out loud for some reason. Sometimes I say things out loud by accident. I don’t know why it happens. Then I drew an amazing picture of the fingerprint, which took me forever, and I put it away in a drawer in my desk. But I was still curious. I opened to the inside back cover, and saw that he had made a list of quotes like on the backs of grown-up books: />
  “Without a fraction of a scrap of a doubt our best living journal-writer... [his] prose glistens with such slippery dripping intellect... [the journal] will leave you entirely speechless.”

  —The New York Times

  “One of the worst things they’ve ever sent us to review, and that’s saying a lot.”

  —Rolling Stone

  “The only thing that’s come along in the past bundle of decades just shimmery enough to lead me—nearly against my will, and with no stingy amount of hand-holding—out of the house, let alone to the bookstore.”

  —J.D. Salinger

  I kept reading. I just sat at my desk for a long time, reading parts of the book and getting more confused. Was he making the stuff up or was it all real? It seemed like one second he would be talking about one thing and the next he was way off somewhere else. Or I couldn’t figure out the order he was putting it in. It made sense but at the same time it didn’t. It was weird because I kind of liked it that way, how strange it was, but I felt other things about it too and I didn’t know what those things were. I could never tell if he was actually upset about something or if he was just pretending or what. It was confusing, and I kept reading it.

  Then I flipped way ahead in the book and I found the part I wish I never had to find and that I don’t really like talking about. I found Page 43. The handwriting at first was way more steady than the other pages, like it was written a lot slower. He was more organized. It was also kind of like a list, and I liked that. There was some stuff about a beach, and other stuff. He had a lot of things crossed out too, almost all of it, but I could still read it all. Then as the page went on his writing got more crazy again and everything was crossed out except a couple of words that didn’t make whole sentences, and then the empty sentences started to make me feel weird. I read it and read it again. I kind of stared at it, that one page, until my throat got tingly, and like it was poking my stomach in the elbow, trying to get its attention. My stomach was just feeling huge and empty. Finally I turned to the next page but there was no next page. Page 44 didn’t exist. The whole rest of the notebook was all blank.

  I shoved the book back under my pillow and me and my throat and my stomach all sat on my bed for a long while, trying to think about nothing and getting nowhere.

  Then Simon called me to eat supper, so I went and ate supper. We had macaroni and cheese, which was barely even cheesy at all because Simon only puts half the cheese package in. After supper Simon said he had to go meet someone for coffee, which was weird, because it was almost nighttime, but I didn’t ask him who he was meeting or why, mostly because I had a huge amount of things to think about and I was just excited to be the man of the house.

  Hours later I was working on a list at my desk and Simon opened my door.

  “Storytime yet?” he asked.

  I didn’t hear our squeaky car come back and I hadn’t even noticed my window get dark. I must have been listing for years.

  “Five minutes?” I said.

  “Sure thing, boss. Get ready for bed.”

  I was getting a little old for storytime, but I could tell that Simon was not. He always wanted to read to me. Mostly it was pretty annoying, him always wanting to read to me, but that night I thought maybe it would be OK. I don’t know why.

  I went to the bathroom mirror and watched the Arthur behind it. I practised a few faces for a second: an angry one, a surprise party one, a fat fish one, a heartbroken one, a squinty but focused one, a cyclopsed one. I thought about trying a Phil one, but didn’t know how and I was too nervous, so I didn’t. Then I took my green toothbrush out of the medicine cabinet on the wall next to the mirror. I rinsed the toothbrush with scalding water for fifteen seconds and all the germs living in it burned up. I took my toothpaste and squeezed a blob of it out of the tube and onto my toothbrush. Right as I started to brush, a reflection of Simon appeared in the mirror over Reflection Arthur’s right shoulder and at the same time the actual Simon was behind my actual left shoulder.

  “Anything good in there today?” Simon and his reflection asked at the same time, leaning on door frames.

  “Im ma teef?” I said, looking at Simon’s reflection’s eyes, and almost spitting out green foam everywhere.

  The Simons laughed.

  “No, in the woods. Anything good?”

  “Na,” I said, still brushing, “nuffing ard all.”

  “Same old?”

  I spit into the sink and turned the tap on.

  “No. I mean, yes.”

  As I was rinsing off my toothbrush Simon started doing this extremely annoying thing he does where he takes his thumb and finger and flicks the top of my head, not to hurt my head, but to move pieces of my hair around. I filled up a glass of water for rinsing my mouth, and he just kept flicking tufts of my hair around while I did it. I looked at his reflection’s eyes.

  “Stop it,” I said.

  He messed up my entire hairdo for a second with his hand, like he brushed it all around and then stopped. I drank my little glass of water quickly, then took the black plastic comb from inside the medicine cabinet and slowly and carefully started combing my hair, practising frowns.

  “If you want to know about it,” I said, “I heard a gunshot because someone was probably shooting ducks like they always do.”

  “Oh, wow,” Simon said. “They’re really getting an early start. I don’t even think that’s legal.”

  I dragged the comb down the right side of my head and the left side of my reflection’s head, to part my hair where I always do.

  “Maybe there’s just a lot of people wanting duck hats this year. Maybe the mayor ordered this one special guy to shoot just one for him, so he could have the very first hat of—”

  “What?” Simon said.

  “The very first hat of the year?”

  “Ducks don’t get made into hats, chief.”

  “What?”

  “Ducks get eaten. And sometimes made into pillows and jackets.”

  I thought about how a duck might taste, with all that grease soaked into it from its raincoat, and I figured it would be disgusting. Then I thought about how uncomfortable it would be, really, to sleep with your head on a duck, or to try to fit your arms into one.

  “Why don’t they just make them into hats?” I said.

  The Simons laughed at me.

  “The whole duck? Or just the feathers?”

  I put the comb back in the cabinet, and walked down the hall to my room. Simon followed me. I sat at my desk and got a piece of blank paper from my drawer. I made him a quick picture of what I always figured duck hats looked like, with the guy’s head, and then a duck. Simon watched over my shoulder.

  “So it’s just a whole duck sitting on your head.”

  “I guess.”

  He laughed at me.

  “Well, they make racoon hats don’t they?” I walked slowly around my room and acted like I was pointing at something, because it’s easier to explain things when you do that. “Plus, if a duck hunter was smart, he’d make one into a hat for himself first, and then use scuba gear and maybe an underwater gun, like a harpoon gun or something, and then he would stay under the water but with the duck hat sticking out above like it was swimming, and sneak up to a normal duck like ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ and then BLAM!”

  Simon laughed and then didn’t say anything. He was standing around staring at the papers on my wall like a tourist in a museum.

  “Who lives in there?” he asked while pointing at my drawing of the hot-air balloon.

  “How should I know?” I went and sat on my bed.

  He shrugged and slowly walked over to me.

  “Arthur, will you please change your bedsheets tomorrow? It’s been a while. Unless you want me to have to do it for you.”

  “No! I’ll do it mysel
f. Tomorrow.”

  Then he suddenly tackled me onto my bed and tickled the heck out of me. So annoying. I am so ticklish and I’m way too old to be getting tickled. I eventually yelled and bit his arm enough to break free and he started reading to me. I can’t even remember what book he was reading, because he reads so many different books, and because I wasn’t really paying attention. I couldn’t concentrate.

  (Meanwhile my real dad was busy accepting his Nobel Prize and giving a speech to the press and the fans. He had created an all-new perforated bread loaf, and it was easily the best thing since sliced. Other than the obvious cool looks, perforated bread also let you choose the thickness of your slice, so thick and thin sandwich fans could both live off the same loaf. Also, you could create the all-new “half sandwich,” “ring sandwich” and even “zig-zag sandwich” types amazingly easy:

  On a lucky side note, a chemical my real dad’s research team invented to inject into the yeast and make the bread stretchy also turned out to be excruciatingly anti-cancerous, and it was the greatest scientific surprise in decades.

  “But I’m not just here to brag about curing cancer,” he said. “I’d like to thank my heroes: Neil Armstrong, Albert Einstein, Aunt Jemima, of course my extremely beautiful wife Marsha, and my son James, a perfect example of excellence in bloom.”

  He looked around the gigantic auditorium and squinted.

  “... I feel like I’m forgetting someone,” he said.

  I stared out over the rest of the crowd from my back row seat, and tried to make eye contact with him. He kept glancing over me and beside me and really close to me, but no luck.

  “... Oh yes!” he exclaimed, “how could I forget my wonderful German shepherd, Tilly!?”

  A drooling dog ran onto the stage and the crowd thundered in applause. As the standing ovation started I ran straight out the front doors of that stupid theatre and fell into a bottomless dark abyss and a bunch of dreams.)

  WHEN I WOKE up the next morning I was back in my room again. I woke up too early and I stayed there for a while before going to eat breakfast. Maybe I should give you a tour.