I really wanted to horse around with Nathe more the next day somewhere by the dock, with its slurping waves and seagulls yapping everywhere, but one of Charles’s fellow witch hunters and his daughter dropped by our place and just generously, benevolently decided they’d stick around our apartment a little longer for a few weeks or so.
“Don’t be shy,” offered Mr. Sumpson hospitably, as he made himself comfortable in Charles’s TV couch and compassionately stuck his beefy fingers into our refrigerator and lapped up all of my carton of chocolate milk, “just make yourselves at home…”
“But it is our home!” I tried arguing with him for the hundredth time.
Charles was of no help at all. He’d been hiding and cringing behind me the moment he saw Mr. Sumpson’s bloated sausage fingers suffusing his prized collection of pizza reserves in the freezer and was now squeamishly nibbling away at his own fingernails in bereavement over the ensuing loss of his beloved TV couch.
“Exactly!” Mr. Sumpson beamed as he slowly drew out yet another slice of our red, crusty, syrupy macaroni pizza so we could watch it disappear into his abyssal mouth already quivering with substance. “No need to feel uncomfortable just because you’re accommodating me and Lil as genially-invited, cordially-welcomed, superbly well-mannered guests of honor!”
Even his daughter hated him vehemently.
“I love my old man,” Lil admonished slowly, quietly every time I started complaining about her old man. “Phillida, you’re just too young and unworldly to appreciate that.” Lil was crazy. And she drove me crazier still every time she insisted in calling me my disgusting name and told me that I was just too young and unworldly to appreciate it.
And then one day she suddenly took up this random fanaticism of taking pictures of everything, including herself, and sensationally succeeded in the seemingly impossible feat of driving me crazier still. Lil simply loved taking pictures of herself. When we were in the restroom waiting in line, she’d be taking selfies. When we were having our soda pops and chocolate fudge sundaes, she’d be taking selfies. Even when we were in Mr. Sumpson’s car as he drove us to my dead brother’s grave because it was his commemoration day, she would still be taking selfies. You should’ve seen her. It was a phenomenon.
“You won’t understand,” she sighed melodramatically and put down her camera when asked of how come she was still happily taking pictures of herself on her ex-boyfriend’s commemoration day. Lil had been my brother’s girlfriend before he landed with a plane crash in Philadelphia along with my mom. “You’re just too young and unworldly to appreciate the resonantly cathartic art of photography.”
That bugged me like hell. That and the big words. And so I started plotting a revenge on her.
On our way back from the cemetery, after the flowers were properly laid on the graves and more selfies were fantastically taken, I finally saw my chance. “I think you were just making up stories about my brother,” I told her. “You told me yesterday that he wanted to be a pilot. How come he still wants to be a pilot if he’s killed in a plane crash? How’s that?” I went on, real pleased with my unequivocally ingenious logic, “I bet I care about him ten times more than you do,” even though truth be told I can’t even remember a darned thing about him.
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“You won’t understand,” this time Lil gave a more lugubrious sigh as if the whole of the Pacific had been sapped and wizened and nothing left to do about it, and even by that time I would still be too young and unworldly to appreciate anything because I wouldn’t even know where the Pacific was.
“Of course I know where the Pacific is!” I exclaimed, lurching my seatbelt back and forth so affronted was I by this ignoble accusation, “It’s in the North Pole!”
“Ah yes! The North Pole…” despite all my best efforts to put her out this way or that she was now free-falling into that realm of obsessive oblivion where everyone would enter when given a clean black thwack between the eyes. “I used to want to be a stewardess and your brother a pilot. He wanted to haul an empty aircraft over the earth in slow motion like an old 60s country movie and land in the brilliant Arctic and eat sweet cream with the polar bears.”
“Then who would he be flying the aircraft for, if it’s all empty?” I pointed out.
“Me and the aurora borealis smiling in the far north.”
“And who would you be stewarding for, if there ain’t no passengers in it?”
“Him.”
“What about the aurora borealis smiling in the far north?”
“No, just him— Just—Him—”
She had on that fervent faraway look in her eyes, “So he said.”
Boy was she crazy, was what I settled on finally and definitely.
“But that’s just idle talk,” Lil laughed suddenly and took another selfie of herself laughing, “Idle talk of children! And some idle talk they were… that you could almost believe in them once upon a time and still pretend to cling onto believing in them now and somehow wonder at how you started believing in them in the first place.”
There was a sudden humming silence within the car as Mr. Sumpson turned off the radio at the driver’s seat.
“And suddenly your brother’s gone, the idle talk gone, the dreams gone, and all that song and dance and moonshine gone, and all sorts of people deranged over all that gone-ness…”
A funny thought struck me that when she said deranged she put a lot more emphasis on the word than usually necessary and was in truth deliberately settling her gaze on Charles, who up to this point had been noisily embarking on the pressing obligation of doing away with a raucous sack of potatoes chips at the front seat.
Immediately I knew what she was implying. “Hey you take that back!” I went crook. “Charles is not deranged! And definitely not deranged over somebody I don’t even remember!”
“Yeah that’s the spirit!” With his radio turned off Mr. Sumpson was free to butt into our conversation as much as he would like while still driving the car, “Charles ain’t never freaked out with grief over anything! He was just jinxed out of his mind by some evil witches lurking in the dark out there somewhere! A curse on the nerve! An iniquitous spell! An abracadabra! yes sireeee! now ain’t that right Charles buddy?” He wrapped his arms around the shoulders of a gulping Charles in a playful, neighborly way and then took a whole handful of Charles’s potato chips as his own before any squealing complaints could be heard.
“Charles was... jinxed by a witch?” I repeated more than dubiously, incredulous both at this piece of newfound insight and at the freshly exhibited fact that Mr. Sumpson could swallow not twelve pieces of chips all at once but twenty-three. It was all too novel.
“Now that’s the spirit!” Mr. Sumpson replied reassuringly, his eyes gleaming like all that barbecue sauce he’d shamelessly plundered back at our house, “Next time, next time oh ho I guarantee you- I’ll tweak those sonuvabitches’ head off!” He gave Charles a cheerful, comradely punch in the shoulder and this time, more than charitably, took the whole sack of potato chips from him and dumped them all down his bottomless gorge.
Charles looked like he wanted to grab one of my plush teddy bears, wrench out all of its stuffings, and at the same time weep into it afresh with inhuman abandonment. I felt very sorry for him at that point and took out the wad of gum that I’d been chewing for a while in the car now and had presently attained a sort of savorless, papery texture, and offered it to him. He popped it into his mouth without a second thought.