It was a nice year for Antarctica. I spent it studying ice and surviving on grape snowcones, and protein pills. It was my first real job, me, twenty five, straight out of college with a PhD in Arctic Survival, and it really is quite a tale, a great story. But it will have to wait. I don’t feel like talking about it right now, to close, but I will talk about what happened to me on when I returned home to spend the summer with my parent’s in Las Cruces, New Mexico. That was a different, -70 to 101, like suddenly walking on the sun. Change can be hard if it' sudden, if you weren't there to ignore it.
A train dropped me off in the quiet past midnight. The night air tepid and a reminder of the heat waiting with the rising of the six o'clock sun. It would be a scorcher.
The front of the house was pushed against the sidewalk and as I stepped through the front door I heard someone behind me. A red hooded jogger ran down the road with real purpose. 1 AM’s an odd time to work out, but not unreasonable considering the sunshine a jogger has to face during the day. Heat stroke comes in a hurry and you can’t get much of a workout if you have to stop to drink water every five minutes. The real odd thing about the jogger was he – and I’ll say “he” for convenience sake – was skinless, has no flesh muscle, no eyes, no tongue, just a skeleton with a mocking grin chiseled in stone below hollow eyes. He disinterested in me, not even waving or nodding, and he didn’t seem to be purposefully avoiding eye contact, either.
I locked the door behind me slowly and tiptoed to my room for the sake of my parents. It’s an older home so my room’s off the kitchen. The bed side lamp was on, which I wasn’t expecting, but I guess I wasn’t really “expecting” anything in particular, same frayed red carpet and wood paneling. But there was a lump in my bed. Someone was sleeping. First I figured my Dad was in the dog house, or family was visiting. The covers were fur, and flowed past the bottom of the bed, piling onto the floor like velvet ruffles on a Victorian gown. They were the kind of covers I’d only seen in my childish dreams of Antarctica, before I’d been there. I leaned over the bed and peeled them back. The crown of a skull was revealed. I uncovered the whole head, another skeleton, browned like an apple core. The fur blankets rose and fell with each of its long, long breaths.
I headed to the living room’s pullout. There were no sheets, but it would be fine. I would have just slept on the floor, but I think my mother would have given me hell.
“What’re sleeping on the floor for? We have a closet full of sheets.” or maybe “Skeleton? Why didn’t you go back in there and get rid of it? It's your room.” For a moment I thought of going back into my room and kicking the skeleton out, but I decided to forget about it. I figured I was twenty six; should be doing what feels right.
I was about to fall asleep when my father stumbled in the room. His breath stank from across the room, whiskey, or bourbon, or something. I don’t know.
"You're probably wondering about the skeleton in your bed," he said, sitting on the squeaky corner of the bed. He wiped his nose and mouth with the back of his flannel cuff then adjusted his glasses.
"It seems like a good question," I said.
"That's your grandmother" he said, pointing to my room, "she's spending the summer with us."
"Why is she a skeleton?”
He said, "It has to due with the company that came out with I.O.. There's really no point in doing anything else once you've started playing I.O.. I play it most of the day and so does everyone else."
"And what about the skeletons?" I said.
"Well, the company's branched out into pretty much everything. The new thing is to take the pill that turns you into a skeleton at night."
"What about you?" I asked
"I just like to get drunk."
"It seems a little odd doesn't it, the whole skeleton thing?"
He said, "Well, Andrew, sometimes we're given great things. And it's our place to enjoy those pleasures, and not to question them." His lips curled and he looked at me like I didn’t know a damned thing. “When you left your mother and I were able to fall in love with each other and things all over again.”
He stood and dragged his feet to the master bedroom, presumably to lie next to my skeleton of a mother.
I couldn’t sleep much that night so I headed out early to take care of some errands at the mall. The walk was hot, but as the sun climbed, more people joined me on the burning sidewalk. It seems we were all heading to the same place. The mall parking lot was a mob, a rally, or eventually a riot given the proper spark. The mass of people roiled and churned like a boiling ocean. I tried to get through but it was impossible. What were all these people doing congregating in a mall parking lot, yelling and pushing in this hot sun? Really I didn’t even want to go the mall, but I had nothing else to do and now with the mop here, I felt a sudden need to get inside the mall. Nothing would stop me from where I was going, not even to the most trivial of destinations, not even a million sweat drenched bodies in the way. After fighting through the torrent for ten minutes I got to the center and I saw the source of the frustration. There were a couple of volunteers passing out voter registration cards and water. They even had a fold out table. One sandy-haired volunteer was, Doug, a childhood friend of mine. I guess he had never gotten out of Las Cruces, neither had I for that matter, back already, only after a single year, a single year of whale blubber and jerking off into old mittens.
“Did you vote in the primary,” he smiled.
"I'm register in Antarctica," I told him. He nodded, apparently satisfied with my answer.
How do you start talking to someone after a year has passed, especially a year of nothing? What do you say? Is it right to immediately start with the horror you've felt, the fear and the loneliness? Seeing him, it was the only thing I could think of.
"Do you play that I.O.?" I asked him, “My dad plays it.”
“Instant Overload?” he said, “Not as much. I’m getting into the new products.”
“That’s a pretty stupid name,” I said.
He put a hand to his waist. “There’s never been a more perfect naming of anything in history, in anyone’s history,” he said.
“I haven’t played it yet,” I said.
“You will,” he said placing his clipboard onto the table.
There was an explosion from the crowd. A firework shot up from the mob. On its climb, the people roared like thunder. Doug held up his hand to shield the sun and then he put his other on my shoulder and said, "Look. We won."
The mortar made a lazy climbed into the sky and exploded in a flash of purple streaks. It blew too early, as I saw it, I thought the crowd would get burned. I shielded my face from what I thought would be a shower of sizzling sparks. Something ricocheted of my head and sputtered onto the hot asphalt.
"That’s also new," Doug said.
I bent down to pick up the objects. It was half the size of a loaf of bread and looked to be a jagged hunk of some kind of translucent purple mineral . It sparked a bit as the last of the magnesium burned, but the objects itself was misty cold. It was ice.
“What is it?” I said. I look at Doug and he smiled at me.
All around the crowd was picking up their own hunks off the hot ground and bringing the pieces to their mouths. They lapped up the cold, dripping condensation, and laughed, and held each other by the shoulders. Mine was meting in my hands and the sticky nectar ran between my fingers. I brought it to my lips and tasted. Grape.
By Andrew
