now is not the time to panic | kevin wilson
notes:
Maybe it was better to be ugly if the alternative was to be plain.
“Your mouth is bleeding,” I told him, but he didn’t seem to care. We both stared at the watermelon, which looked like a horror movie, so many half-moon marks digging into the green rind, that greasy, disgusting film all over it.
“Will you eat this with me?” he asked.
“You’re going to fucking eat that?” I asked.
“We’re going to eat it,” he said, smiling. And we did. We really did. It was so good.
My mom, who loved me so much and was so tired, gave up, let me have the house to myself, and at first I was happy for the silence, but soon it began to feel oppressive, like the walls knew I was the only person there and could shrink down to hold me in place.
we just sat on the sofa and watched horror movies on VHS, eating Pop-Tarts, which felt so far away from what I thought sex might be that it seemed safe.
He kind of looked at me for a few seconds, like he was trying to decide what he would and would not tell me. And this intrigued me, that his story required editing. I got up off the floor and sat next to him on the sofa.
But Zeke needed to know. You had to choose sides. And you always chose the person who didn’t fuck everything up. You chose the person who was stuck with you.
“I want to be an artist,” he told me, like we were both admitting that we weren’t human. We didn’t understand how normal this was, to be young, to believe that you were destined to make beautiful things.
“I think maybe art is supposed to make your family uncomfortable,” he offered.
There was this little voice in my head, and it was telling me what to write down. And I knew that this little voice, this tiny, insistent voice, was not God and it wasn’t some muse and it wasn’t anyone in the world except for me. This voice was my voice. This voice was my voice and no one else’s voice, and I could hear it so clearly. And it wasn’t finished.
He had something finished in his head, I knew, because his hand moved so deliberately, even though he couldn’t keep the tremors of excitement from threatening to mess it up.
Finally, he pushed away from the paper, almost like he’d unplugged himself from the image, and just stared at it.
And even then, in that very moment, I knew that this was important. I knew that I would trace my whole life back to this moment, my finger bleeding, this boy’s beautiful and messed-up mouth on mine, a work of art between us. I knew it would probably fuck me up. And that was fine.
We sat there, the words rolling on a loop, again and again, until they didn’t mean anything, again and again, until they meant something, again and again, until they meant everything.
And though I knew the divorce had messed her up, it had also seemed to relax her, like the bad thing had finally happened and she didn’t have to keep waiting for it.
The whole experience felt like what drugs must have felt like. It was the high of doing something weird, not knowing the outcome.
I thought that the saddest thing that could happen was that something inside your head worked so hard to make it into the world and then nothing happened. It just disappeared. Now that I’d put those words into the open air, I needed them to multiply, to reproduce, to cover the world.
It was strange, how his absence meant that I had to work hard to keep him out of my mind or else he took up too much space.
“No,” she said. “You just look happy.”
“Oh, okay.”
“I’m not used to seeing it, honestly,” she told me. “It makes you look the tiniest bit crazy.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“Will you see Zeke today?”
“Probably,” I said, but, yeah, duh, of course I would see him.
“And do what?” she asked.
At that moment, I could feel something opening up in me and I realized how hard it was to walk through the day when you had an obsession and you couldn’t say a word about it. I wanted to tell her that I was a fugitive, that it had happened so suddenly that I could scarcely believe it myself. I wanted to ask her if gold seekers were good or bad people. I wanted to ask her if she thought I was a gold seeker. I wanted to describe the feeling of pressing a single piece of paper against a brick wall, that little piece of duct tape trying to adhere to the rough surface, and how important it was for the tape to hold. I wanted to tell her that, maybe, if she made her own poster, and if she mailed it anonymously to my father, she would feel better. I wanted to tell her that I could breathe in time with the Xerox machine, that my insides felt like a copier. I wanted to ask if it was possible to have sex, to get it over with, without actually having sex. I wanted to ask her if my dad, when they first met, asked her to slice her finger and enact some weird blood oath. I wanted to show her my novel about the bad girl. I wanted to read it to her.
And I wanted her to say, “This is so good, Frankie.”
And I’d say, “I don’t feel like I belong here,” and she’d say, “You mean Coalfield?” and I’d say, “Anywhere.” My mouth was wide open. My mother had no idea what could come out of it.
“Hang out,” I finally said. “Just, like, hang out.”
“Well, there you go,” my mom said, satisfied. “Teenagers love Leo, so they probably started reading a bunch of Rimbaud.”
“That’s not what teenagers do, Mom,” Charlie said.
And the whole summer might have continued in this way. It’s so easy to imagine. We’d hang posters, and people would get tired of the mystery, and we’d settle into the heat. I’d have sex with Zeke, the most painless sex possible, under the covers in my little bed, using the condom my mother had said was nonnegotiable. His mom would finally realize either that she wanted to reconcile with her husband or that she needed a job now that she was a single mom, and they’d move back to Memphis. And I’d hold him in my mind, that one summer. We’d send each other our art, his drawings and my novel. We’d write occasional letters until real life intruded, college applications, new friends. Every other Thanksgiving, he’d come back to Coalfield to see his grandmother and we’d drive around town and maybe we’d even hang up a few of the posters, just to feel that thrill again. We’d make out in my car. We’d graduate from college and he’d end up on one side of the country and I’d be on the other. And I’d publish my novel, and at a bookstore in Denver, Colorado, he’d be in the audience. We’d get coffee and maybe have sex in my hotel room, even though he was married now. I’d write a book about that one summer. He’d leave his wife and seven children, and we’d get married in our late fifties, and we’d frame that first poster and hang it in our living room. But none of that happened, did it? And I still don’t know if that makes me happy or sad.
They didn’t even hesitate in the telling, however it might incriminate them, because my mom knew all this and worse about her sons, but she also knew that they were the most invincible children in the entire state.
Hobart replied, starting to get some traction in the face of skepticism, which is how almost every bad idea gets worse.
But we made it, right? We made the poster. So we can still control it, I think.”
“I don’t think that’s how art works,” he said, unsure of himself,
“I like this,” I said. “This is new.”
“Thank you. This is a really good first line,” he said.
“Thank you.” And we lay like that, absorbing the thing that mattered to the other person.
“but, like, I kind of wanted other people to not understand it in ways that they assumed a really cool artist had made it. I didn’t want them to not understand it in a way that they think we’re devil worshippers who abduct kids.”
I’d written fifty pages of the novel in a week; I could not stop. I needed a story that I could control, that wouldn’t keep going when I stopped writing it.
And so I almost never told anyone what I liked because I was terrified that they would tell me how stupid it was.
It was like we got the kissing out of the way, decided that was probably as good as it got before things got gross and weird and sad, and we just talked, nonstop, and enjoyed the fact that the other person was listening.
So much of my happiness of that summer was the smell of Zeke, kind of sweaty and a little like mothballs, and the sound of his pencils and pens scraping so softly against the paper. There were times when he didn’t even feel real, exactly, like his body wasn’t tangible to me, but there were these smells and sounds that reassured me that he was near, and I believed in them so much more than in his skin and bones, wrapped up in extra-large T-shirts and ragged, stone-washed jeans. I don’t know if that’s love, to need the sensations produced by the body more than the body itself. Not the kiss, but the taste of celery that came after. Not his hands, but the sound of his hands making art. Not the fact that he was here for only this summer, but the fact that I might find reminders of him in surprising places for the rest of my life.
“Here’s the thing, sweetie. If you love something, you can’t think too much about what went into making it or the circumstances around it. You just have to, I don’t know, love the thing as it is. And then it’s just for you, right?”
“That’s really philosophical,” I offered. I don’t know why I said this all the time, that things that were just slightly confusing were philosophical.
To be a teenager, it takes very little to think that someone else might actually know who you are, even as you spend all your time thinking that no one understands you. It’s such a lovely feeling.
And even then, sixteen years old, I knew that I would hate every person in my life who loved me, who took care of me, who helped me find a way to whatever life I would have, because I could never tell them who I was, what I’d done.
“Oh, lovely. Frankie, you are the first person in this town who has surprised me. In the span of about two minutes, you have done the two most surprising things I have ever seen in Coalfield.” What a strange thing to say to a teenager who had almost died, either by accident or on purpose, but it filled me with such gratitude.
“You are going to have such an amazing life, Frankie,” he told me. “If this is how it starts? It’s almost breathtaking how good your life will be.”
“I think I’m a bad person,” I said.
“No,” he said, and I thought he might say more, but then the paramedics were running up to my car, shouting things, and Mr. Avery vanished from sight. And I never spoke to him again. But sometimes, when I think, for the millionth time, that I’m a bad person, I can still hear his voice, that single word, No, and even if I don’t entirely believe him, it’s saved me so many times.
She started to choke up, her eyes welling with tears. “I just . . . you are the most beautiful and wonderful and strangest person I have ever met. You are the most amazing person in the world. And you just have to live long enough to make the rest of the world understand that, okay? You have to stay alive.”
My brothers were tentative around me, kind even. I think they were a little shocked that I had survived something worse than anything they’d lived through. They had not realized that I was also invincible, I guess, and it made them wary of my power, of what I could do to them.
I thought for a split second about telling him that I made the poster, but I knew I wouldn’t. But the fact that I considered it made me realize that he could marry my mom and I’d be happy about it.
And if I protected the person who hurt me, who had broken me, then I was stronger than he was and I was stronger than anyone who might try to hurt us more.
She showed it to Hobart, who also loved it, and it made me feel, for the first time, that maybe it was dumb to be embarrassed about weird things if you were really good at them. Or not good. If they made you happy.
“So,” Mazzy said, interrupting the weird stuff going on in my head,
I made a weird sound, like I was testing to see if I was still breathing. I was.
“Is there more?” he asked.
“More what?” I made the sound again.
The chaos of our daughter, so lovely and beautiful, I would always be grateful for it, how she required us to keep living, to keep moving forward, just so she didn’t leave us in her dust.
“It’s been a really long time since I last saw you,” I said, and I wondered how it was possible for every single thing you said to sound so dumb, so weightless. I wanted to say, “I missed you,” but it wasn’t really true, I was now realizing. I missed teenage Zeke. This guy was a stranger. He was the person I had to talk to in order to get Zeke back.
“I ink a lot for Marvel. I used to ink for DC. I’m not, like, quite what they would want for art, but mostly I realized that I’m really good with lines, you know? I’m good at going over someone’s work and making it better. And it’s good for me, to kind of have something already there for me to work with so I don’t get too carried away.”
He talked about the squirrels in the park near his house, how he could get them to climb into his lap and sit with him.
janet change 