By the time we finally extricated ourselves from the tangled mess that was the car, I decided that I was a more shellshocked and exasperated victim than the extinct dinosaurs.

“Jesus I am so sick—!” I looked at Nathe unflinchingly in the eye and chucked at his head the entire ice-cream cone that I had bought deliberately from the vendors to show him just how enough is enough, “—so sick of you worshipping your lazy-boned, wishy-washy, sterile-minded, can’t-half-drive, witchy brother of yours!” I was having my chance while Syd was taking a leak in the restroom to grab my future boyfriend aside to fix things out and put them straight once and for all. “He’s evil, wicked, diabolical, and subversive, and I bet that the witch is working right now alongside your other brother Diem to one day destroy the earth under direct orders from the Devil, all three of whom, I tell you, are altogether insanely evil because… because… because I’m so mad I cannot think of a proper reason right now so I’m telling you that they are just very evil and that’s that!” I thought my soul would go thin and vaporize from having made such a dynamic and motivating speech. I could’ve moved the entire UNICEF committee to tears so happy they’d be for having raised funds for children as brilliant at making fine, logical speeches as me.

But obviously, Nathe still doesn’t qualify as a UNICEF committee member. “You know what, Phil?” he picked slowly and haphazardly through the dirt at his feet, and looking up, gave me that cool look in his eyes that was both unemotionally matter-of-fact and insufferably infuriating, “I guess I’ve just had enough of you and your crazy conspiracy theories about my brothers.” And from that sentence onwards, he just tenaciously refused to say anything more to me, which of course drove me plumb to distraction.

When Syd had finally gotten out of the restroom, his whole face matted with dusty age and sleepless blues, it was all Nathe could do not to tear the sun from the sky to use as party lights out of sheer enthusiasm.

“Syd! Syd!” We were walking around the whole park when Nathe started badgering his brother with the smallest thing possible, all the while grinning so impossibly wide that I was afraid any minute from now I was going to hear the sickening crack that was his broken chin. “What sort of tree is that over there?! Look it’s got all sorts of branches and stuffs and…!”

“Looks just like a plain old tree to me,” I pointed out rather dubiously. But Nathe just ignored me and kept on looking up to his brother with such a disarmingly hopeful smile that even Syd felt compelled to actually say something.

“That tree,” Syd grunted ambiguously, then immediately regretted having even bothered to move his lips, spat out loud with blood-curdling distaste, “is a fucking watermelon tree.”

It wasn’t even at all that funny, but Nathe laughed so hard until his throat was smothered cold and his eyes went fluttering on and off with silvery unreality.

“Syd! Syd! Look at that… that…” Nathe continued, desperately casting around for some little things worthwhile to make a big fuss about in front of his brother. He had finally found it. “That…that magnificent wall over there hanging with twigs and vines and stuffs…! Just… just look at it!”

“Looks just like any other boring old wall to me,” I proclaimed, suddenly more than a bit suspicious that Nathe was purposely trying to irritate me for all I’ve just said about his brother. And sure enough, he ignored me again and kept on tugging at his brother’s shirt sleeve with a frightening persistence that could’ve scared Death from his wetted bed screaming for mommy.

But Syd, having already found a cozy napping spot in the grass, made it quite clear that he wouldn’t move an inch unless a truckful of bricks had kindly run over him. “That wall,” he replied offputtingly, stretching himself and comfortably succumbing to an ancient lethargy that was far greater and older than he was, “is your mother.”

Again, I watched, eyes narrowing, as Nathe burst into one of his loudest, merriest, and most eye-openingly infuriating little laugh while continuing to ignore me.

“Syd! Syd!” he started again when he’d finally finished laughing, his trademark buy-one-get-one-free smile flashing splendidly like the shine and rustle of endlessly churned-out commercials, “Oh Jesus just look at that—”

That was when I knew I couldn’t take it any longer. I started screaming. Screamed into his ears with enough vibration of sound to turn his head into an electric juicer and his brains into cheesy lemonade. Screamed with enough volume of sound to send his teeth crushing like paper cups. Screamed till I was out of breath and sagged like a McDonald’s takeout bag and knew that by this point Nathe just simply could not begin to ignore me.

My plan worked heavenly well.

Nathe perked up immediately, rubbing his forehead as if recovering from the repercussions of my earsplitting shrieks. Then he turned to his brother, eyes wide and unyielding with solemn bewilderment. “Syd,” for someone ungrateful enough to look right through his future girlfriend as if she wasn’t even there, Nathe sounded miraculously genuine. “Did you hear anybody scream?”

“You’re that anybody,” Syd replied as if in a trance, resting every one of his famished nerves upon that mighty pillow of mellowing sunlight, “Coz I hate anybody.”

Nathe started laughing until he was gargling and rasping and making little animal noises in his throat, so happy he was as if everything that had happened between him and me had never before existed.

I felt like crying. I folded myself up like a vengeful, pitiable little birthday present whom nobody wanted to open and hugged snug to my knees and sat myself in one cold, damp corner of the turf, watching the two maddening brothers with a mix of extreme hurt, hatred, jealousy, and sinful longing.

All day long with his mind dashing about like kite strings in a hurricane, it took some time for Nathe to finally call to mind why he was there in the park in the first place. Upon remembering his mission, he let out a squeal of joyous enlightenment and started digging holes in the turf with such impregnable zest and willpower that I started getting afraid that he’d bury himself alive when he was done just to do away with all that over-burst of unspent energy and liveliness.

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And he was taking all that hole-digging business with so much seriousness it was almost formidable. The way he was wielding that spade of his, you’d think that he was handling the higher purpose of his life and world in two bare hands. Every loosening of the earth was a revolution. Every shovel was history. He even dealt with every speck of dust and dirt like a freshly-christened Adam and Eve of his own universe.

It was impossible to watch him work without getting awe-struck and tongue-tied at the same time. I almost forgot I was supposed to be mad with him. It was all too good and normal. A boy’s silhouette working a spade through the cakey earth, the heat swimming with a low radio hum, the late morning sun thawing into infinity…

“Hey, kid, you can’t dig holes around here.”

It was a sullen-faced security officer who’d just gone by, and looming over Nathe’s newly-dug holes, bore a look on his face that was as easy-going as jail bars.

Nathe looked up. “Hi mister!” He replied jubilantly, brandishing his spade to call for the undivided attention of his project’s new supporter and enthusiast. The unfaltering grin on his face was as sunshine and summerlike as ever. “That’s right sir! I’m digging holes!” he guaranteed reassuringly, eyes beaming like one of those ‘90s sit-com shows in which everybody ended up making friends with everybody else, even the psychopathic serial murderer who had wanted to take over the world. “To get to Antarctica, of course! To eat sweet cream with the polar bears! Surely you know what I’m talking about, sir, a wise, understanding grown-up guy like you, sir!”

The officer looked as wise and understanding as an asylum attendant.

Nathe, of course, was elated. He was elated whenever people can understand what he was talking about, and was even more elated whenever people could not tease the slimmest bit of sense out of the mind-bogglingly arbitrary workings of his brain, because that way, he got to explain everything to them, which was exactly what he was doing right now to the new surly-looking devotee of his great grand project. He explained everything, from digging holes to the round-world tunnels to the North Pole the hot cocoa the Bermuda and everything else to which he devoted his most divine fealty. “… And then with the tunnel we can get to the Sahara where we can lie ourselves down in the hot sand and get turned into sirloin steaks or to Japan where there’s this big white upside-down ice-cream cone shaped like a volcano so we can stuff ourselves till we’re full to the gills with enough subzero sweetness to turn our stomachs!”

He made another apparently unnecessary but still jazzy enough flourish with his spade to give some more boost to the already incomprehensible point he was making.

The officer looked at the holes Nathe had been digging in.

Then he looked at Nathe.

Then at the holes.

Then back at Nathe.

And he started laughing.

He was laughing so hard, so audaciously, so quaveringly that the prison bar that was his face became warped and twisted, dismembering itself, and so had gotten me into worrying quite reasonably that the nasty criminals locked up behind those bars would inadvisably turn loose.

“What’s so funny about it?” Nathe demanded innocently. Something was wrong, and he’d noticed. Noticed for the first time. And it made him scared. “What’s so funny about it?” he demanded again, fiercely and uncomfortably adjusting to his own body as if it had suddenly become a stranger. There was something in his eyes that was unmistakably un-Nathe-like that had made him speak.

“To the… to the North Pole!” the officer was laughing and wheezing so hard that it was almost painful to look at. “You can’t… you can’t… get to the North Pole by digging… by digging… holes!” This last word had sent so much current through his body that his whole blurry image had become an electric shock of high-voltage laughter.

“What do you mean?” Nathe, too, looked as if he’d been put to the electric chair. He had plonked his prized spade to the ground without even noticing, that sunburned halo of happy-go-luckiness gone from his face.

“Holes… holes for… for chrissake!” the way he was laughing the officer was an unintelligible broadcast of dancing static. “It would… it would take tens, hundreds, thousands of years for you boys to dig a tunnel to Antarctica! And how are you gonna troubleshoot all that could’ve happened below ground? There’s bedrocks and roots and mines and stuffs as far as I’m concerned. Thousands of years! You’d be dead by then, son!”

Nathe opened his mouth. No sound came out.

“Besides, the government all around the world wouldn’t be happy with you kids messing around with their underground facilities, would they?” the officer was so much throttled by his own laughter that he had to stop, and so he just decided to be nice for a change and started ruffling with Nathe’s hair in an affectionate and fatherly manner.

Nathe didn’t say anything and just let the officer muss up his hair.

“Off to home, off to home now, son!” the officer patted Nathe’s shoulders lovingly and chuckled, “Better do more at school than make such a big fuss about nonexistent things. Digging holes!” He let out another howl of gut-busting laughter before he left and was out of sight.

There was a stir in the wind.

Nathe started crying.

It was a terrible, terrible thing to behold because I’d never seen him cry before. His sadness was every bit as lasting as his craze-eyed excitedness for life and ten times as infectious. I had completely forgotten how mad with him I was supposed to be and how he’d fallen all about the place laughing at Syd’s corny jokes just to give me the cold shoulder. I had even forgotten how absurd his entire hole-digging project had seemed to me and was resonantly beginning to empathize with him because he just seemed so sad and lonesome and eerily quiet just standing there before me and crying, as if he was in some sort of deep ocean where all time stood still, gurgling of something great and horrible and immensely inescapable that had consumed him.

An arm had had him by the shoulder.

Before I could even realize what was happening, Nathe had buried his head in Syd’s heaving chest, crying a monstrous, flooding wetland in his brother’s shirt front, while Syd, glassy-eyed, pokerfaced Syd, did not say anything in the least to console him. He wasn’t even looking at Nathe. He wasn’t even looking at all at anything, but at the crinkled, fading little blue dot that was the uniformed security officer, his two empty eyes rabid and bloodied like the evil-red tail lights of a runaway manslaughter machine.

Then the machine lowered his head, coughing and rippling out of ear shot with pungent whispers of engine exhaust so that the bad chemicals irritated the respiratory system of a crying Nathe and made him sneeze out loud with a huge cold bite of epiphanous air.

It was as if someone had sobered him up with a wild punch in the nose.

Nathe blinked. Then rubbed his eyes. Then he snapped his head up at his brother and grinned as big and wide as an enticing slice of slobber-worthy cheesecake. “You’re right, Syd!” he screamed, although I couldn’t possibly imagine what could his brother have told him to pep him up like that this fast. And then, “You’re right, you’re right, you’re right!” The grayness of sniveling tears was all gone from his face like a whirlwind. “I don’t have to just dig holes, do I?! Sticking to the ground is plain old-people boredom!” He buzzed around with a powerful swelling of good mood, eyes glinting with a delight that’s almost godlike in size. “I can be a pilot! And fly a plane! Yessss! Just like what you’ve always wanted, Syd! Just like you! P-word, Syd! P-word! P-word! P-WORD!”

With a flare of haste and color and a ripening buzz of confusion, he turned to his brother, whose face was still a murky soup of unidentified sulk, and kissed him smack on the lips.

RIGHT.

In.

My.

FACE.

I thought I would run a truck full of explosives right over their faces.