Slob - Ellen Potter [60]
Okay, I can’t take it anymore. I’m trying to set the scene for you and make this very literary, but really there is something I’m dying to show you. I’m going to skip over all the literary stuff, if you don’t mind. I’ll just let you know that Mom and I went shopping at Macy’s and bought some new clothes for me. I had stuck to a diet, and although it was torture at first, it became easier as the weeks went on. Now I was swimming in my old clothes. That’s not the thing I’m dying to show you, but I thought you should know that. Jeremy was out at the ice-skating rink with Izzy. Good luck renting a pair of skates in size 13, I thought, but he’d squeeze into a size 10 just to get a chance to flop all over the ice with Jeremy by his side. They’re just friends, good friends, but I wouldn’t be sorry if they dated one day. You know, when Jeremy was eighteen or so.
After Mom and I went shopping, I told her there was something I wanted to show her. We took the bus back uptown and got off by the Museum of Natural History. In January it’s not usually all that crowded outside the museum, but it was today. Good weather and all. There was a big crowd gathered off to the left side of the steps and that was where I led Mom now.
“What?” she said, smiling at me. “What is it?”
“Just wait,” I said.
Some of the people in the crowd were clearly in a line formation, but others were standing around watching something. We joined them. I grabbed Mom’s hand and inched us through the crowd to get a better look.
The momo cart was festooned with its usual flags, and Nima was smiling his usual good-natured pirate smile. What wasn’t usual was a loud clicking-tonk-tonk-slapping noise. Nima saw me almost right away. His smile spread even wider, and he waved me over. I pulled Mom with me.
“This man here, my friend Owen Birnbaum,” Nima announced to the crowd as he put his arm around me, “this the man that built she!”
His arms spread wide toward the contraption that was clicking-tonk-tonk-slapping on his cart.
My satellite dish was now a momo Ferris wheel, painted with a bright yellow sun in the center and red and blue rays coming off the sun, like the design on the Tibetan flag (Jeremy had helped me with the painting part). Around its edges I had attached little metal brackets that served as tiny seats for momos. As fast as Nima could make the momos, a pivoting metal arm made of scrap pipe with a pair of food tongs soldered to the end snapped them up and placed them on the Ferris wheel, which spun slowly, turned by a bicycle chain and a washing machine motor attached to the back. The little momos traveled up, up, up. Then as they started their downward ride, the little bracket seats made a fast flipping motion. The momos flew into the air, one after another, like tiny circus performers, and landed in Nima’s large steam pot.
Do you know what the crowd did? They applauded.
It wasn’t the Nobel Prize, but it was still pretty nice.
Mom applauded too, after looking a little stunned. Nima gave us a heaping plate of momos and we sat down on the steps of the museum.
“Owen, you’re a genius,” she said.
“Not quite. I’m one point short.”
It was one of those perfect days. I love those days. But they also make me nervous because I know that lurking behind every perfect day are a few less-than-perfect bits and pieces. One of those pieces was underneath my desk drawer. I hadn’t known what to do with it after I destroyed Nemesis. I couldn’t throw it away, yet I couldn’t look at it either.
But because today was a perfect day, I opened the drawer up and took out the little green paper with SLOB written on it.
When people die, all the things they’ve ever touched or have ever belonged to them should be buried with them. Like the Egyptians used to do. It doesn’t seem fair that a person’s writing should still exist on this planet while the actual person