Now Is Not the Time to Panic(7)

The copier was an old model from the late eighties, and nobody that my brothers knew wanted to buy it, and then they broke it after sitting on it a hundred times and they spent a whole day arguing about which one of them had ruined it. It was this huge piece of junk now, and my mom had told them a hundred times to get rid of it, and they told her that they would, but they just covered it with a tarp and forgot about it. That was how it worked. If you couldn’t see it, if you pushed it into a dark corner, it didn’t exist. But here it was. I was claiming it. It was mine now. Ours.

“This could be pretty cool,” Zeke admitted.

“Well, maybe, but my dumbass brothers broke it. We could try to fix it, but maybe we could just go to the library and use that one.”

“Broke it how?”

“They broke it so it doesn’t work anymore,” I said, though it didn’t really seem to register with Zeke.

He looked at the machine, opening the lid, and then rubbed his chin. “Did they read the manual?” he asked.

“Did my brothers read the manual? Are you serious?”

“Did they?”

“No!” I shouted. “They broke it with their asses and that was that.”

We found an extension cord and turned it on, the light blinking, but nothing happened when he pushed the button to copy. I just watched him as he went through a little checklist of possible issues, each time whispering, “No, okay, no,” and moving on, opening up the machine, poking around.

Just as I was about to suggest that we quit, Zeke said, “Oh, wait!” I watched him wriggle his fingers inside the copier, and then he gently, little by little, pulled out a crumpled piece of paper, folded like an accordion, as if the copier had done origami, and then he handed the sheet to me. I smoothed it out. It was the ass of one of my stupid brothers.

“It was just jammed in there,” he said, smiling.

Now Zeke placed his palm down on the glass and made a copy, which took a while, and then there was his hand, all the lines running across his palm. It worked. I knew this didn’t make Zeke a genius, but it did make him smarter than my brothers, the only boys I spent time around, so I felt like I’d made a good choice for the summer.

“If I moved my hand all over the glass,” he said, “it would be like an animation. Like a cartoon.”

“But we’d need some kind of machine to flip the pages,” I said. “Or a stop-motion camera, right?”

“I guess,” he said, a little disappointed.

Still, we spent the next hour wandering around the garage, picking out items to place on the glass of the copier. We liked how, if the object was too big, it distorted the image, made it seem unreal. Then I found an old Vogue magazine and tore out a photo of Cher, her long black hair and smoky eyeliner. I pushed the button, but then started to drag the photo across the glass. The copy that the machine spat out showed half of Cher’s face as it regularly appeared, but then the rest of the image smeared across the page, streaking, like she was melting sideways.

“Oh, that’s cool!” Zeke said, impressed. He ripped out a page that featured some random model, and then made a kind of zigzag with the image as the light emanated from the machine. It wasn’t super clear, but the result was trippy, slightly ominous.

“Can you make art with a copy machine?” I asked him.

He smiled. “Maybe,” he replied. “Why not?”

We were teenagers in the middle of nowhere in Tennessee. We didn’t know about Xerox art or Andy Warhol or anything like that. We thought we’d made it up. And I guess, for us, we had.

I pressed one side of my face against the glass, and the result made me look like some baby in the womb, my features all flattened out.

“Wait,” Zeke said. “If we put our faces side by side, it’ll be like those optical illusions where you see either two faces in profile or a vase. Yeah?”

“Oh,” I said, “okay, yeah.”

So we put our faces against the glass, our mouths so close together. “Wait,” Zeke said, seemingly unfazed by the proximity of our lips, “I’m trying to find the button.”

What resulted didn’t really look like an optical illusion. It looked like two dead people, two kids who had suddenly been pulled into a black hole or something.

“It’s cool, though,” Zeke said. “It looks like an album cover for a death metal band.”

“Let’s try again,” I said. I felt resolute. I felt like we were making something important. I felt like, I don’t know, I was in control. I was making the decisions. And as long as I was choosing, it was okay.

So we put our faces next to each other, but this time, when he pushed the button, I inched forward and kissed him, our mouths touching, this light slowly streaming past us. It didn’t feel real at all, which is what I thought kissing would be like. And we had to hold it, until the copier finished humming. My first kiss.

“Um,” Zeke said, bumping his head on the copier. “What did you do that for?”

“I don’t know,” I said, which was true. “I’ve never kissed anyone before.”

“Me either,” he told me.

“And this felt like a nice way to do it,” I said. “Like, you know, art.”

We looked at the copy that the machine spat out. We looked so ugly, our faces smashed together, but the blackness around us made it seem like a fairy tale. Was this what people looked like when they kissed? I guessed it wasn’t. It was what people looked like when they kissed against the glass of a copier. It’s what, I imagined, art looked like. Ugly and beautiful at the same time.