The very first thing before breakfast the next morning saw me scrutinizing Charles suspiciously at the table, double-checking with surgical precision as to whether he was still the dad I was so used to seeing for the previous nine years of my life.

“Ow… Phil! What did you do that for?” Charles squeaked in a shrill voice when I tried to prick his forearm with my fork to see if his skin was still one-hundred percent genuine Charles skin.

Turns out the skin did look hairy and grubby and hence very much like the skin of a typical human male at his indolent forty-five years of age. But after full five minutes of subtle probation, scrupulous prodding, methodical experimenting, and some scientifically employed encouragement-induced temptations, I still wasn’t sure if the skin which I had my fork poking into was one-hundred percent legitimate Charles skin.

Finally I gave up entirely, slumped over my plate very worn-out and all, and asked, “So… what’s for breakfast?”

Charles was still conscientiously rubbing the red spot on his arm where a moment ago I had had my fork jabbing into. “Dunno,” he grumbled rather miserably, eyes glossing over at the sight of our empty fridge already ravaged from top to bottom by the sympathetic Mr. Sumpson. “Pizza’s gone… All gone…” He buried his face in his arms like all he’d wanted to do was just sit there and snivel aloud in wrenched grief over the short-lived lives and star-crossed deaths of his favorite type of breakfast.

“Hey there must be some pizzas left,” I consoled, trying very hard to be optimistic about things like I always did, “Remember the bottom compartment of the freezer? Where we did a magic trick in front of that kid Tob a month ago on your birthday party but instead hid the last two halves of our pepperoni pizza there while he was having both his eyes all closed?”

Charles just howled in agony as I went forth to the freezer and slid out the bottom compartment. Both two halves of pizza had gone green and furry, its small ickish tentacles wilting dead.

I shrieked and slammed the refrigerator door shut as I would to the gates of a haunted house full of green-oozing ghouls. “They’ve gone bad!” I remarked, outrageously aggrieved with the abominable terms of things.

Charles had a bedraggled look on his face that enlarged itself tenfold when catching sight of the monster-green pizzas. “Witches turned pepperoni pizzas into lettuce pizzas last night! Ohhh…” He moaned aloud like an old, wavery glass window sputtering in the cold and fainted right then and there.

I turned on him sharp. “What?!” I was strapped from head to toes with uttermost disbelief. “I thought they’ve just gone spoiled! Not…”

“Well, sure does taste like lettuce pizza to me,” Mr. Sumpson smacked his lips out loud and rolled his eyes savoringly, having already risen out of his Sunday lie-in without our noticing and was now two steps ahead of us in sucking into his horrific stomach both slices of sickly green pizzas in a jiffy. He licked his lips again, “Mmmm… not as bad as I thought actually.”

I didn’t give a damn to any pizzas whatsoever and was trying my very best to arouse Charles from his deplorable black-out so I could pick his brains on whatever it was that he could still remember from the night before. But when he finally came around after a full fretful hour of eager anticipation, any of the happenings from the night before had all but seemed to have escaped from his mind.

Later that same morning, Nathe dropped by our place.

“Phil Phil Phil Phil Phil!” that voice was all it needed to make my day as he crashed headlong onto my bedroom floor from outside the window, his whole windblown face alit with sunny songs, all flushed and ruddy and breathless for having groped his way up our building by the fire escape.

He’d had the whole day’s journey meticulously mapped out for us. We were to go to the city hall park together. And the thing we were to do there was to dig tunnels. A hell lot of tunnels that, according to him, would wound around the earth from beneath the ground for roughly three-hundred and sixty-five times altogether and would somehow strangely and unaccountably transport people to anywhere they would like to set their feet upon in the world.

Or at least, according to Nathe.

“We could go to the Mediterranean and watch the sunrise like peeled eggs, and go to Mount Everest and see the cold burning stars, and, and send our math teachers to outer-rim Bermuda!” he was shining like a new silvery penny from head to toes, utterly intoxicated with his own vision of grandeur, “Oh I know I know! We could just snuggle inside the tunnel nice and comfy and it’d be just a matter of seconds before we appear at the other end of it, z-ooooooooooooom! like this, and pop into existence in the brilliant north pole and eat sweet cream with the polar bears!” He soared to his feet and bowed magnificently like a proud little circus magician, “Whaddaya say ‘bout that Phil?!”

Obviously I didn’t quite follow his thread of logic.

“Sounds… plausible…” I was strangely troubled by the feeling that I could’ve heard a parallel theory somewhere before, probably during phys-ed at school when there’d always been such fiend-like fanfare from the kids that you scarce could hear much of anything from the teacher. She could’ve told you all sorts of things about polar bears. “But you know, I don’t think the security there would be really happy about it,” I told him pensively, after putting quite a bit of thought into the subject, “coz all this tunnel-digging might just stand in the way of all their park facilities and everything—”

“Course it will not!” Nathe contended jumping up and down, his firecracker mind red and gold and sputtering flames excitably, “Syd told me they’ll let us! Why don’t you go ask him right now! Right downstairs! He’d give you a good deal of talk to turn your mind around… What?... Yes of course Syd’s downstairs and of course he’s coming with us to the city hall park! …What on earth were you thinking for him not to come…?”

I stared at him hard and square in the eye and fought for myself to count to ten so as not to get too overly teed off in front of my future boyfriend. It worked marvelously. I calmed down. Mellowed out. Unwound myself. And then I looked at Nathe with this new-gotten inner peace of mine and technically shrieked into his head until every cell in his brain would wince and tremble and cower in their earmuffs. Finally, I thought I’d go blind from all that screaming and collapsed onto the floor and screeched, shakily, for the last of all times, “WHO’S COMING WITH US?! WHO’S coming with us?! Who’s—coming with us?! Who’s…ahh… coming…” My voice was now weak and flabby and sounded like cheeseflowers.

“Syd!” Nathe reported happily, standing over my sprawled-out body lying floppily on the floor. All that I could frustratedly see while yelling and kicking my bedpost and futilely lashing out dirty looks was the reversed image of him breaking into a large wide howdy-do grin that showed all of his brilliant teeth. “Now c’mon let’s go to the city hall park! Syd’ll get grumpy like hell if we keep him waiting like this all day long!” He did a cartwheel, landed on his head with his smiley-sticker face, and looked to me expectantly.

I rolled my eyes and exhaled like a heavy, stranded whale. “Oh I’m sure he’ll be grumpy awright…” I muttered, suddenly incredibly exhausted with the general terms of things.

Nathe had to drag me all the way down the fire escape like how I’d toted him back to his house the other day we first met. Sure enough downstairs there was Syd, stooping all haggard-like over his old beat-up Mercury car. And boy was that one sad little Mercury of his, having been painted within and out a rusting, homeless gray, its tires flat and despondent, its windshield a shattered dream, all carrying about a sort of gnarled nakedness of one being chewed up, digested, and spewed out raw by the pains and miseries of a lousy life.

And what looked even worse than the car was Syd, who wasn’t even leaning against the car but was falling apart all over it, his sleepless eyes tearing up appallingly at the sight of us.

“Get in,” he said gruffly, slamming the brakes like a loaded power rifle. We had to scramble on before he’d roar off with the engine without even glancing back. He probably wouldn’t have cared or even noticed if any of us had gotten suckered out of the car window like paper dolls.

I was ready to murder him again for what he had done to Charles the night before and at first was really worried that he’d recognize me in the rearview mirror, which of course would’ve foiled my whole assassination attempt in conceivably the most preposterous way.

But Syd wasn’t looking at me. He wasn’t looking into the rearview mirror. He wasn’t even looking at anything, just drooping loosely over the steering wheel in a sort of delicious morning snooze, his eyelids hanging baggily, his head lolling down, dipping back and forth alongside the roll and rhythm of the car.

And yet he was also driving. His standard manual Mercury car was steadily in motion, warming to us with its balanced, unhurrying cordiality, turning at just the right corner, stopping at just the right places, moving on, and never once in a tizzy. And Syd never looked up, so soundly asleep was he that he wouldn’t have shown any sign of life even if a blitzkrieg air raid were atop.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Meanwhile, Nathe was gushing and telling me all about what he would do with his new round-world tunnel once we were through, of how we could go to Egypt and mine succulent lumps of goat cheese from the pyramids and then to the Amazon rainforest and scavenge for treasure chests bursting with hot cocoa. Gradually the subject turned to rockets and pirates and Easter bunnies and then to Nathe’s family.

“I don’t have parents,” Nathe replied defensively when asked of the whereabouts of his mom and dad. The look he bore on his face was somewhat of serious pride and dignity. “And I don’t need ‘em. I’ve got Syd and Diem. They adopted me, are wonderful big brothers to have, and more than enough than any of the parents I’ve known in the world!” He did a thrilling wallop in his seat to prove his point and almost sent his seatbelts flying across the car like comet tails.

I wasn’t at all satisfied by the answer. “What I mean— what I mean to ask is,” I racked my brains for the most nuanced and implicit thing to say for Nathe to realize, without going crackers at the matter all over again, that his evil brothers’ intentions for him were far from pure, “the two of them can’t just adopt you and, and raise you up as family without having any good reason for it, I mean, everyone…”

I cut off short and yelped dangerously as the car took a sudden, death-defying turn around the corner, crashing into the sidewalk curbing with a momentum that could’ve busted stars and rearranged every sturdy atom and molecule of the world.

“Syd!” Nathe complained, tugging at his brother’s seatbelt from behind with protest. He’d knocked his nose into the back of the front seat and was now rubbing it with a sort of frantic ferocity that could’ve started a blistering forest fire. “Where on earth were you driving at?” He groaned again.

But Syd didn’t reply, didn’t even seem to have noticed us. The Mercury pulled slowly, noiselessly back onto the roadway as if everything was all quite normal and in control. Inside the car Nathe’s nose was still a mist of blood and uncertainty. My forehead was getting blue and stinging from a friendly abrasion with the door handle. And Syd, unscathed, unperturbed, was asleep as usual like a dead man long ago buried since the very beginning of time and space.

The conversation went on. Nathe was frothing with life and energy all over again as he commenced going into mind-blowing details about his elaborate round-the-world adventures that had never happened. By and by, in the way all his other conversations tended to go, the subject turned to aliens and outlaws and X-wings and tooth fairies and then again to Nathe’s family.

“What I mean to ask is,” I pursued, promising scathingly under oath to this time finally enlighten Nathe to the closest truths of his evil guardians, “What I mean to ask, is how come I seldom ever see your other brother around the house?” Saying this I took a sly, stowaway glance at Syd, whom, to my relief, didn’t seem to have noticed anything.

“Oh, you mean… Diem?” It was Nathe’s turn to look discomfited. He shifted momentarily in his seat this way and that. “Oh… he’s… he’s always around,” he took in a shallow breath. “He’s always around awright… Really… he’s very nice, once you get to know him, I mean… But…” then he, too, stole a quick look at Syd as if imploring for some urgent means of rescue. “But…”

“But…” I prompted deliberately, feeling spiced and numbed and pickled all over with the thrill of exhilaration for this final, final piece of revelation for both him and me and the overall welfare of the future world.

Nathe opened his mouth and looked as if he was about to say something, when the Mercury swerved precariously around, swelling with headlights, and screaming, burst itself head-on into a lamp post with the kinetic and potential energy that could’ve blinked out all the stars and planets into miserable black holes.

Nathe’s nose was broken a second time. My forehead was blue like Papa Smurf’s from having being crumpled time and again by the front seat. And Syd, Syd was unharmed, undisturbed, sleeping like a mummified corpse of a younger world as the car returned to its normal, docile self and pulled back into the lane, rolling and humming along with possibly the friendliest travel speed ever.

It went on like that for the full length of our trip to the park. Every time I started asking or even mentioning anything about Nathe’s family, the chummy little Mercury would suddenly go wild and hectic and commit unwarranted suicide, killing along with itself the two helpless passengers flimsily scraping along in its hazardous stomach.

But lucky for us, before we could throw ourselves out of the fastmoving car so as to end our lives in perhaps a milder and less violent approach, the Mercury came upon a mile-long traffic jam and took its standstill in the middle of the road. It was stuck in space. It never moved. Like a pause in time. We were all very relieved, even Syd, who didn’t seem as grumpy as hell anymore and was now slowly, idly adjusting to a more comfortable napping position.

Suddenly, the horns started blaring.

“God damn!” Syd, fully awakened by the ceaseless honking of the neighboring cars and, yelling to the wind, struck down our car window like snow crash, “Talk about a tranquil morning snooze to you humdrum, loudmouthed, stuffy-headed busybodies!” He spat a mouthful of Niagara Falls at one of the honking cars to politely make his point.

But the other cars just didn’t budge. They kept tooting louder.

You could not begin to tell what kind of a hellish mask of horribleness did Syd’s face look right then. Before we could even scream out loud our last will and testament, there was a crackle of gears and a rasp of jarring collision as the Mercury screeched, bullet-shrill, and thrashed uncompromisingly into the car in front, building up to an apocalyptic shock of impact to shred mankind down into zero-dimensional smithereens. Nathe shrieked like a guinea pig to the slaughterer. I watched traumatized behind my fingers, not bringing myself to simply stoically witness what is certainly the crack of doom for the whole of human race.

But there was no crash. There was no doomsday. The human race did not actually end, it turned out. The horns just kept on blaring as usual like maniac. Syd kept on cursing every object that had had the deuce to get into his way. And the Mercury itself, miraculously and unexplainedly, kept on coasting through the traffic congestion at a speed of light while all the other cars remained exactly where they were, jealously immobile. It soared over cars like roller coaster. It leapt under them as if bungee jumping. It rushed into stunning uprears and downthrusts like fairground pirate ships, even distorting, deforming, reshaping itself, squeezing in between cars and cracks and extra spaces, unfolding before our eyes a dazzling vision of fun-house mirrors. All the while Syd was astonishingly awake, wresting and jerking and snatching the wheel soberly left and right, dropping esoteric profanities, spurring forward, building power, the world outside whooshing past at a burst of blossoming speed as we pressed our eyes eagerly against the window, faces all agog.

“Did you know! Did you know Phil!” Now that we were back on track on our seemingly endless journey to digging holes, Nathe was once again admirably overdosed with unquenchable energy and liveliness. “Did you ever, ever, truly know— that Syd is the best race car driver ever alive since Anakin Skywalker?!”

I was still having my face pressed hard against the window and hearing this, groaned offhandedly at where I knew this conversation would be heading towards.

“In fact,” Nathe succeeded, so lavishly thriving on his own incorrigible state of admiration that he cast my grumblings easily aside with abandoning delirium, “Syd doesn’t just know how to drive cars, he can drive just about anything!” His eyes had taken on that milky, dreamy, outer-space expression which every time would make me want to punch him out cold, “Give him a bike, and he’ll drive it to explosion! Give him a train, and he’ll drive it out to sea! Give him a churchyard and he’ll drive it back to life! And… and…” He looked as if he was running out of flowery comparisons to bake up, before a stroke of genius seized him by the shoulder so that he added quickly and resolutely, “Give him the whole wide world, and he’ll be sure to drive it to both heaven and hell!”

“Why don’t you give me a screwdriver instead so I can drive out your hyperactive tongue as a bloody little pre-Christmas present?” Syd looked as if he would bang the whole car on Nathe’s head if he hadn’t been so busy staying awake and speed driving at the same time. There was a devilish crunch of frizzling bad words before he gunned sharp on the engine again with traumatic force and spirited our old, rundown jalopy right through a Cadillac.

“But do you know! Do you know Phil!” Nathe continued with passionate eagerness while I watched in amazement as the Cadillac receded fast into the distance without a scratch. “Do you know what Syd’s been most avidly, most devotedly, most single-mindedly wanting to drive—?”

“Nathe!” Syd veered the car around in a horrid U-turn that landed us a fiery fifteen-feet above ground, “you will shut that scrapheap of a mouth of yours or I’ll make your happy meals cry like baby food!” His cramped face was a fuzz-up of soreness and flushing red.

“—A plane!” Nathe obviously did not take into account his brother’s death threats, his two happy eyes hip-hopping brightly all the way round his head, “Did you know that back in third grade Syd just would not go to any of his friend’s slumber parties without wearing his toy flying goggles to bed?” His teeth danced and rattled delightfully like the fizz of a thousand soda pops, “Did you know that he would never sit still back then when doing homework coz the whole time he’d be imagining his pencils as steering wheels and his chairs as pilot seats?”

“Nathe!” Syd was now revving up the engine so vindictively that the world outside was a complication of stars and spangles and scowls of light. “If you say that p-word again you’ll be sorry to know how your Christmas presents would smell like when I burn them to tears in their stockings!” The air was grossly heavy and smoked with the menace of unspoken knowledge.

But Nathe being Nathe, was bright enough never to get the cue. “Yes! Syd loves p-words, and p-words for planes!” His eyes were stoked with spinning starbursts and sunspots that pranced in and out of the world, “Did you know that Syd’s been wanting to drive a plane ever since he was five? That even when his dad would just not let him drive a plane, he just kept on wanting to own a plane? Oh oh and another thing: back in first grade, he would wear absolutely no underwear at all unless they had little blue planes printed over the bottom like this…”

“NATHE!” Traffic lights fluttered red, green, blue, and red again like startled birds, wheels slashed through flummoxed cars barely past notice, and leaden in Syd’s voice like a cutthroat was anger and the torridity of mortification.

But Nathe, freely and effortlessly immune to everything else except for what is going on in his head, rambled on ecstatically before I could even squeal out loud in full alert and desperation, “And did you know! Of course I know you don’t Phil but can’t you imagine that before he even knew who I was Syd could have risked everything to just save my life from a plane—"

The last thing I heard before screaming and yelling till there were blacks in my eyes was the howling of engines as the Mercury made a break for eternal death and fearfully careening, gunned full speed into the clanking gates of city hall park.