We Are the Ants(26)

Nothing will make me change my mind about the button, but I’m trying my best to maintain the status quo for the days that remain. I figure if I keep my head down, maybe I can serve out the balance of my life sentence in relative peace. Wake up, go to school, go home. Repeat until the world ends.

? ? ?

The house was quiet when I got home from school—Mom wasn’t screaming at anyone, and Charlie wasn’t being Charlie. It was nice. Living in a house with my mother, brother, and Nana means that someone is usually shouting or dashing from one room to the next as if everything is of monumental importance. I wish they understood how little their actions matter. With the end of the world looming, I can finally see the pointlessness of everything. How the whole of human civilization is nothing more than a mosquito’s annoying buzz to the universe.

My stomach rumbled, so I figured I’d make a snack and watch TV while there was no one around to bother me. The fridge was pretty barren, so I settled for peanut butter and jelly. The bread had some mold on it, but I cut it off, too hungry to care.

A sonogram with HAWTHORNE, ZOOEY printed across the bottom clung to the refrigerator door—held in place by a magnet from our favorite Chinese takeout joint. The picture looked like a miniature monochrome galaxy, teeming with stars and worlds and boundless potential. I took the sonogram to the kitchen table and tried to determine which part of the amorphous blob was my future niece or nephew. It was a game: find the fetus. Was it too early to know the sex? Probably. Not that it mattered. It wasn’t even a baby yet. It was just a little parasite, and it would never be anything else.

A shadow fell across the table, startling me. Nana hovered to my left, staring at the picture over my shoulder. “Jesus, Nana, you scared the crap out of me.”

Nana’s flaccid, wrinkled cheeks pulled back into an impish grin. “Mission accomplished.” She eased into the seat next to mine and snatched the sonogram, turning it this way and that, examining it from every angle. “What the devil am I looking at?”

“Charlie and Zooey’s kid. I think.”

“Are you certain? It looks like an ink blot test.” Nana covered her right eye. “I see Jonah and the whale.”

“I won’t tell Zooey you called her a whale.”

Nana snorted. “I wonder if they’ve thought about names.”

“Probably not. I call it the little parasite.”

“I like that,” Nana said. “That little parasite is lucky. Its life is just beginning, while mine is nearly over.”

“Don’t say that.”

“You’ll understand when you’re my age, Henry. You spend your life hoarding memories against the day when you’ll lack the energy to go out and make new ones, because that’s the comfort of old age. The ability to look back on your life and know that you left your mark on the world. But I’m losing my memories. It’s like someone’s broken into my piggy bank and is robbing me one penny at a time. It’s happening so slowly, I can hardly tell what’s missing.”

I tried to think of the right thing to say, but sometimes the right thing to say is nothing.

“I look at people and I don’t know them. Yesterday, I spent twenty minutes trying to figure out who the grumpy woman sitting beside me was before I realized it was your mother.” I laughed, and Nana offered me a feeble smile in return. “I’ve led a rich life, Henry, but I’m terrified of dying a pauper.”

While there are some memories I wish I could dispose of, sometimes my memories are the only things that keep me sane. There are times when I walk along the beach and smell the hot tar and sand, and I think of all the summer days Jesse and I spent lying in the sun, making our plans to rule the world. Then there are times when I see something funny on TV or hear a great song, and I pick up my phone to text Jesse before I remember he’s dead, and the wound tears open, bloody and raw all over again. A person can become a part of you as real as your arm or leg, and even though Jesse is dead, I still feel the weight of that phantom limb. I have a thousand amazing memories of Jesse, but his suicide is leaking into those recollections, poisoning our past. I can hardly remember him without hating him for taking his life and leaving me alone in mine.

I honestly don’t know whether it would be better to forget or be able to remember, but it physically hurts being forced to watch Nana diminish. Charlie and Zooey’s baby will never know the terror of creating memories only to lose them, but Nana knows all too well.

“I love you, Nana.”

? ? ?

I was sitting in the living room, flipping through the channels, unable to find anything worth watching, when Charlie and Zooey came home. I didn’t want to be in the same room with Charlie, but I wasn’t about to leave and let him think he’d beaten me. He mumbled about needing to take a shower before stomping toward the bathroom.

Zooey looked cute in a pair of little jean shorts and blousy white top. I’ve never been able to figure out what magic my brother cast to make someone like her stay with him. To want to have a kid with him. When they first began dating, I assumed she must have been blind, but she wasn’t. She actually and improbably seemed to like Charlie. Love him, even.

“Whatcha watching?” Zooey asked. She flopped down onto the couch with a thick book and a legal pad.

I’d stopped on the Bunker live feeds, but no one was doing anything interesting. You could watch for hours and never see any good action. It was a miracle the producers were able to cobble together enough entertaining footage for three weekly shows. “Nothing.”