Now Is Not the Time to Panic
Kevin Wilson
Dedication
In memory of Eric Matthew Hailey
(1973–2020)
Mazzy Brower
I ANSWERED THE PHONE, AND THERE WAS A WOMAN’S VOICE on the other end, a voice that I didn’t recognize. “Is this Frances Budge?” she asked, and I was certain it was a telemarketer, because nobody called me Frances. In the living room, my seven-year-old daughter had made her own set of drums, including a tin plate for a cymbal, so it was loud as hell in the house, with this ting-bang-ting-ting-bang rhythm she had going on. I said, “I’m sorry, but I’m not interested,” and started to hang up, but the woman, understanding that I was done with her, tried her best to pull me in.
“The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers,” she said, her voice rising in pitch, and I froze. I nearly dropped the phone. And together, in harmony, we both completed the phrase, “We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us.”
“So you know it,” the woman said.
“I’ve heard it before, yeah, of course,” I said, already trying to run away. I could feel the world spinning around me. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, fuck, no in my head, a kind of spiraling madness, because, you know, it had been so long ago. Because, I guess, I’d let myself think that no one would ever find out. But she’d found me. And I was already trying to figure out how to get lost again, to stay lost.
“I’m writing an article for the New Yorker,” she told me. “My name is Mazzy Brower, and I’m an art critic. I’m writing about the Coalfield Panic of 1996.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Mom!” my daughter Junie was shouting. “Listen! Listen to me! Listen! It’s ‘Wipe Out,’ right? Doesn’t this sound just like ‘Wipe Out’? Mom? Listen!”
“And I think you made it happen,” the woman said, treading carefully. Her voice sounded nice, honest.
“You think I made it?” I said, almost laughing, but it was true. I had made it. Not just me, but I was part of it. Me and one other person.
“I’m almost one hundred percent certain that it was you,” Mazzy Brower said.
“Oh god,” I said, and I realized I was saying it out loud. My daughter was banging away. I felt dizzy. There was a pizza in the oven. My husband was finally fixing the latch on a window in our bedroom, which we’d been meaning to fix for four solid months. Our life, which was so boring and normal, was still happening. Right at this moment, as everything was changing, it was like my life didn’t know it yet. It didn’t know to just stop, to freeze, because nothing was going to be the same. Let the pizza burn. Forget about that stupid, shitty latch on the window. Pack up your stuff. Let’s get the hell out of here. Let’s burn down the house and start over. For a split second, I thought maybe just I could get out of here and start over.
“Was it you?” the reporter asked. Why had I picked up the phone?
“Yes,” I finally said, and I could feel my whole body being pulled through time. “Yes, it was me.”
“Just you?” she asked.
“It’s complicated,” I replied. My daughter was now standing beside me, pulling on the back of my shirt. “Mama?” she asked. “Who are you talking to?”
“Just a friend,” I told her.
“Let me talk to her,” Junie said, the most confident person I’d ever known, holding out her hand for the phone.
“I have to go,” I said to Mazzy.
“Can we meet?”
“No,” I said.
“Can I call you back?”
“Sorry, no,” I told her. And before she could say anything else, I hung up the phone.
I started to pace around the kitchen, trying to remember every word of the conversation, what I’d said to this woman. But Junie hates pacing, hates when she sees me go inside myself, and so she started tugging on my pants.
“What’s your friend’s name?” Junie asked.
“What? Oh . . . Mazzy,” I said.
“Mazzy sounds like an imaginary friend,” Junie said.
“Maybe she is,” I told her. “I’m not entirely sure that she’s real.”
“You’re so weird, Mama,” Junie said, smiling. And then, like it didn’t matter at all, because she’d already forgotten, she said, “Listen to me play these crazy drums!”
There was still time. I sat on the couch. And I watched my daughter, with two wooden spoons in her hands, absolutely whale away on anything that was around her. And my heart was pounding in my chest. It was over, I kept thinking. It was all over. And it was beginning. It was just beginning.
Part I
The Edge Is a Shantytown Filled with Gold Seekers
SUMMER 1996
One
AT THE COALFIELD PUBLIC POOL, THEY WOULD BLOW A WHISTLE and everybody had to get out of the water, and we’d all stand there, hopping on one foot and then the other because the concrete was so damn hot, burning the bottoms of our feet. And some lifeguard, barely older than I was, sixteen, looking like the bad guy in a teen movie, blond and buff and absolutely never going to save you if you were drowning, would wheel out a greased watermelon. There was a three-inch layer of Vaseline, which made the watermelon shiny, almost like it was turning from a solid into a liquid. And the lifeguard and one of his evil twins, maybe with crazier muscles and a scuzzy mustache, would dump this watermelon into the water and then push it to the middle of the pool.