We were to meet him in one of Nathe’s favorite restaurants. It was a nice little restaurant with warm and fuzzy food, a door full of afterglow, ambling acoustics, and an old granny at the front counter who would ask a nine-year-old whether the other nine-year-old she’d taken with her was her boyfriend. Nathe spat out his tongue, disgusted, which made me like that granny even more.
“What do you and your friend here like to have for today, Nathan?” the Granny asked nice and slow and toothlessly, “We have your favorite chocolate chip monsters; I know how you love chocolate chip monsters that you could send roller-coasting across the table! Ooh and we have our special sausage doggies today, feel like playing see-saw with them now?”
Nathe shook his head. “Uh-uh, we’re waiting for my brother,” he replied wide-eyed and firm, “We aren’t ordering anything if he ain’t here.”
“Such a sweet little boy you are, Nathan.” Nathe grinned like a painted Christmas cherub whose top priority right now was to rush to the restroom, slam the door shut, and keenly, wisely rethink his life as a Christmas cherub. “Your brother must be very proud of you. Now come on, let’s find you two a seat.”
So we sat down and waited for Syd.
It was our first time out dining and Nathe didn’t even so much as look at me. Man was he considerate. He kept looking out the window, standing on tiptoes, rocking in his seat restlessly like a fidgety kid in his malfunctioning bumper car. Once he suddenly sprang to his feet like a popcorn, toppled our table, and then absently sagged down again, completely unaware of the capsized table who’d been lying on the ground crying for the first half minute. Finally I was so teed off I couldn’t take it any longer. So I showed him what I was about to do.
“Hey Nathe! Nathe! Gee! You see this?”
He looked up, his eyes clouded and opaque like milkshake over-frozen, “Huh?”
“This!”
“A… a Medichlorian mushroom?”
“No! Jesus it’s a paper pin!”
“Oh. So you can’t eat it.”
I slapped my forehead. “Okay okay okay okay okay okay…” Deep breath, Phil, deep breath, no use getting all steamed up in front of your future boyfriend. “You know what they say about paper pins?” I asked, real patient, “they say that when you try to prick a witch with a pin, it ain’t gonna hurt them! So you know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna put a pin on your brother’s chair…” and I bent down and did exactly that, “… and then if he really is…”
“Yes!” Nathe leapt to his feet like a Jack in the Box, finally, finally conceding the righteousness of my point after all my strenuous exertion and my eloquently worded persuasion, and I crossed my fingers thanking God thanking Charles thanking even Tob and Isaac Newton and my suddenly beautiful math teacher that it was all along the universe’s immutable, predestined, inalienable maxim that hard work always pays off when… “Phil, Syd’s here! Syd! Syd Syd Syd Syd Syd Syd Syd!” He scrambled up the table, bounced around, flailing his arms about like a lunatic shipwrecked seaman seeing both his death in Sahara and the Millennium Falcon.
“Nathe just sit down for chrissake!” I shouted, because there was technically no one at the front steps of the restaurant, “Nobody’s here! Everyone’s gonna be looking at us! Jesus everyone is looking at us!”
And suddenly I stopped yelling.
There was the voice of the old granny at the counter. She was greeting someone, a customer, maybe. “…Now dear, that look of yours! Won’t you just spruce yourself up a little!” She was saying, “you look like you’ve been sloughing through a downpour for three days now without decent nourishment…”
“Yeah yeah and without any decent sleep at that, either,” came a slurring voice which yawned and willfully stretched itself with each of its sprawling syllables.
There was a shrill hamster shriek from Nathe as he threw himself from his seat, bolted across the restaurant, shinnied his way up the new comer’s back, and just squatted there on his brother’s shoulders and buried his face into his hair like the hair was his favorite brand of watermelon smoothie or something. The shrieking still didn’t stop.
I blinked. And blinked again.
Syd carried his kid brother over to his seat and plunked him down like some kind of wearying luggage he had to dispose of immediately, without saying anything.
“Syd,” now back in his conked-out bumper car, Nathe seemed increasingly dissatisfied with the restaurant’s shoddy recreational facilities and so turned his face up to his brother, eyes wide and ashine and this time really beginning to look like an ornamental Christmas cherub, “I wanna sit with YOU.”
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Syd looked like he’d rather throw himself back into his room upstairs and sack out there soundly and peaceably for another hundred years until a princess charming on a white stallion would hop around the corner carrying with her the hearteningly upbeat news of his kid brother’s instant death. But when he looked down, saw the radiantly beaming eyes of a plastic Christmas cherub, and knew that the sterile contradiction of reality had once and for all starkly registered itself, he told Nathe, “Shut up you’ll just piss in my lap.”
I was really afraid that Nathe would do something even more conspicuously abashing that would get the three of us kicked out of the restaurant altogether (hey it was a fancy enough restaurant) when a waitress dropped by and literally saved my life and the world. Phew.
But it wasn’t over.
Nathe wanted cheeseburgers, chicken nuggets, a large order of curly fries, and a double-thick chocolate shake with a cloudy shower of M&M’s and freeze-dried pellets of ice-cream.
But Syd disagreed. “Just give him vegetable soup,” he told the waitress gruffly with an expression and temper one would have after being persistently aroused from his midday slumber.
“Syd!” Nathe protested, “You know I don’t like vegetable soup!”
“Who said anything about you liking it?” boy did Syd look like he would fall flat on his face and drop dead asleep, “I said I order it and you eat it.”
The waitress looked like she was in a real catch-22. I felt really sorry for her. She finally made up her mind, sided with Syd, and jotted down vegetable soup in her pad. That bitch.
“And what would you like for your order, sir?” She asked Syd.
You could tell Syd was more than a bit miffed to have to answer another person’s question again. “I would very much like some wholesome sleep and quietude—” he said with such a degree of politeness that it would suffice to murder old Mr. Abe Lincoln in his sleep, “—without a certain waiter nosing into other people’s privacy of what they’d like to have for their dinner thank you very much for being so considerate Miss.”
Finally after taking my order as well, the waiter left, looking profoundly confused.
“Hey that’s not vegetable soup!” Nathe cried aloud defiantly minutes later when his soup was being served at our table. “Syd! This not…”
“This’ just plain old vegetable soup to me,” I said.
“No, it’s not!” said Nathe, suddenly altogether failing to remember that he was supposed to hate vegetable soup, “Syd! They gave us the wrong dish! This ain’t vegetable soup, it’s solar planet soup!”
Syd had just stirred awake from where he’d been slouching and most probably even dozed off, and was reasonably crankier and more aggravated when being time and again woken up. “Do you know,” he said slowly, deliberately, “how many considerable calories are gone into simply calling those waiters over here to change your bloody soup?”
Somehow this seemed to have made Nathe inexplicably happier. “Actually, it’s fine,” he replied reassuringly. “I like my solar system soup better. Look! My cute little planets are all floating and jiggling around in the sun’s bubbling red radiation!”
“That’s just ketchup in the soup,” I reasoned.
“And I found Mars,” oohed Nathe mysteriously, protective over his newly unearthed domain.
“But that’s just baby carrot!”
“Ooh, Syd, Syd! I found Saturn!” He was technically all bated breath as he fished out a chunk of wrinkled, over-boiled potato with reverent care and expectancy, “It’s the most beautiful of all planets. Syd, you wanna have it? For me? Pretty please with a delicious Saturn on top…?”
“Eat it yourself,” Syd looked like a wound-up doomsday host to a party of belated guests. “That planet's got a ring that tastes like straggling shoelaces you don’t even know how to tie.”
“But you haven’t eaten anything since yesterday! Coz you’re asleep all day!” Nathe was flabbergasted.
“Just… find a planet earth and I’ll eat it probably,” Syd consoled with pointedly unfeeling dullness.
“Why so prejudiced? Other planets are also very tasty!” Nathe objected to the political incorrectness of it.
“Because it’s such a bloody planet to be on,” Syd yawned with the scrumptious residue of an afternoon sleep. For a moment nobody knew how to say anything.
“When I grow up, I’m gonna be an astronaut,” we were all carefully picking away at our dinner when Nathe suddenly said to himself. He sounded really convinced. “You’ll see, I’ll be an astronaut one day and surround myself with these cute, shiny little planets in space.”
“Hey yesterday you said you wanted to be a motorbike racer!” I protested.
“I can be both a motorbike racer and an astronaut!” Nathe said defiantly, “I’m gonna be in my super amazing space suit and helmet and ride a motorbike through asteroid belts and race with shooting stars! Break-neck fast!”
“You’ll just tumble down from space and hit your head and realize you’re subconsciously afraid of the heights. What the hell. Eat your vegetable soup.” Boy did that fuddy-duddy party pooper know how to hype up an interesting conversation.
And all of a sudden, just as our conversation was building up to its culmination of epic brilliance and interestingness all thanks to Syd, Nathe went neurasthenic with scare. “Ahh, ahhh, ahhhh, ahhhhh, ahhhhhh!” He was so terrified as hell and such a stuffed animal of hiccupping screams that you would’ve thought that he’d seen a naked, bulging, sodden-faced Frankenstein in his soup.
“What now…?” Syd didn’t even bother to look up. He was already one with his seat having been dozed off so affluently.
Nathe looked frightfully at his soup, then back at us. “Le… lettuce!” He whispered, and then shut up solemnly like a clam.
Syd’s eyes flew open as if suddenly electrified. First he looked at me, as if he’d just noticed me there. Then he looked at Nathe. Then at the poor, innocent, gratuitously antagonized piece of little lettuce sticking out of the remnants of Nathe’s half-cold vegetable soup.
“I’ll eat it.”
He said with finality.
And that was that.
Nothing much really happened for the rest of the meal. The conversation continued to be highly interesting, and Syd never looked up from where he was sleeping any more than Oompa Loompas started falling from the clear skies.
But frazzled as he was he did look up once, just once, when he lifted his head, suddenly locked eyes with me, and stolidly, noiselessly placed my paper pin back on the table, and flopped back to sleep again.