Thanks for the Trouble - Tommy Wallach Page 0,64

boxers and junkies wear their scars where people can see them.

“Parker and I went to see a Seurat exhibit yesterday,” she finally said. “You know him?”

“The dots guy,” Steven said.

“Exactly. The dots guy. I’ve always thought getting older was a bit like looking at those paintings. You’re born, and that’s when you’re standing right up next to the canvas. Nothing makes any sense. There’s just a lot of light and color. But as you get older, you begin to back away, and that’s when the image starts to cohere. All those little spots of color turn into flowers, or people, or dogs. You gain perspective. But when you live forever . . . that is, if you were to live forever, you would have to keep backing away, and pretty soon the painting would just be a square of brightness way off in the distance. You could still remember what it looked like when you were closer, but you wouldn’t really be seeing it anymore. And then you’d keep moving away from it, until you couldn’t even make out color anymore, until the painting was just this single point of light. And then it would be swallowed up in the darkness around it, like a star winking out. The grief would be so huge, don’t you think? Not just because you’d lose the people you love—we all have to do that—but because you’d have so much perspective. You’d see the terrible sweep of history, repeating its tragedies over and over again. You’d sink under all that time like a scuttled ship.”

After Zelda finished speaking, the only sound in the restaurant was the cheesy Italian music piped through the speakers.

“Fuck me,” Tom eventually said. “I think I’d just kill myself.”

I stood up from the table. We should go, I signed.

“Already?” Danny said. “We were going to go back to the computer lab for some more Call of Duty.”

Zelda and I have somewhere to be.

I didn’t bother saying more than that, just took hold of Zelda’s hand and helped her out of her seat.

“It was a pleasure meeting all of you,” she said. “Have wonderful lives.”

“You too,” Danny said, confused.

Outside, a light rain was falling, and the sky looked like an enormous gray balloon that would drench the whole city if you could get at it with a pin. Zelda’s eyes were far away, just like they’d been when I’d first seen her in the Palace Hotel, as still and sorrowful as an old statue in an empty square.

S-o-r-r-y, I finger spelled.

“Why? It’s just the truth.”

I shook my head.

“It is, though.”

I shook my head again, more emphatically this time, and I hated that shaking my head was all I had. Why couldn’t I scream “No!” at the top of my lungs, like a normal person?

“Yes it is, Parker! I know it and you know it and even your friends know it.”

I opened up my journal again and filled up a whole page with that one word—No—but it was just a word on a piece of paper, silent as a gravestone. I turned to the next page. I’m still going to prove to you that life is worth living. Just tell me what you want. I’ll do anything.

Zelda made a little scream of exasperation. “What about you? What do you want, Parker?”

I want to make you happy.

For some reason, this answer made Zelda even angrier. She knocked the journal out of my hands. One of my expensive new pens clattered onto the pavement and rolled into a storm drain.

“You say you want to convince me that life is worth living? Then you’ll have to tell me what it is that makes you want to live. Because as far as I can see, it’s nothing.” She spat this last word out. “All these young people I’ve met in the past couple of days, the ones who ought to be your friends—they’re meeting you the same way they’re meeting me. But they’ve known you for years. So where have you been, Parker? How have you managed to hide out right in the middle of your own life?”

I could only shrug.

“There it is again. You shrug.” She shoved me. “Who knows?” She shoved me again. “Who cares?” She shoved me again, so that I stumbled off the curb and ended up in the middle of the road. “Why don’t you stay right there? Pretty soon a car’ll come along and finish the job for you.” I took a step in Zelda’s direction, and she put out