The Really Hot Adventures of Guy by Norm Cowie
Dagwood would swoon with envy.
The caloric count alone could support the entire world’s population of people on the Atkins diet for a week. And I won’t even get into the overabundance of bad carbohydrates, which shouldn’t be confused with good carbohydrates, which I guess do their chores and wash their hands after going to the bathroom.
Somehow though, Knob’s metabolism takes it all in, and everything runs pretty smoothly. Well, except maybe for his brain. There’s definitely something not getting through there. Still though, he’s lanky and friendly, and a good friend to hang around with.
A fly buzzed through the room.
Our eyes followed it as it zigged through the room.
We followed it as it zagged through the room.
Something registered on its sensors, and it veered for the sandwich in Knob’s hand.
Knob, who while he has nothing against mosquitoes, at least female ones (we’ll get into that later), hates flies, so he tried to whap it, swinging the Cardiac Arrest like a racquetball racquet.
The sandwich missed the fly by about a foot, but, strangely, the fly stopped in mid-air, and fluttered to the ground.
We watched until it fell out of sight. Yeah, out of sight. We aren’t very good at housecleaning. The fly disappeared somewhere into the clutter that makes up our floor. Bits of paper with music notes scribbled on it, cardboard pizza containers, puzzles and games, stuff like that. Essential stuff. The stuff that makes our home, ah.., well, uh, …. a mess. Hey, I admitted it. It’s a mess. I told you we aren’t very good at housecleaning.
Something nibbled at my brain, reminding me that there had actually been an earlier thought that hadn’t been brought to satisfactory conclusion.
Oh, yeah.
The silence.
Dave Matthews was taking another break, so the quiet was even more oppressive.
“What’s that?” Knob asked, looking around. He crammed more sandwich into his mouth in hopes it would reduce inertia in his brain.
“I don’t know.”
“It’s weird, like maybe church or something.” Bits of sandwich flew through the air like errant meteors.
“Yeah.”
“Remember that time with the tornado?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, it’s like that,” he mumbled, cramming more into his mouth. Something that looked like an albino worm dangled from the corner of his mouth, before his tongue snaked out and swiped it away. Spaghetti, whew.
“Weird.”
“Yeah.”
Then it registered.
“What?” Knob asked.
“Do you hear that?”
“No, what?”
“Donkey Kong,” I said.
“No, I don’t hear any Donkey Kong,” he asserted.
“That’s just it, we should hear Donkey Kong.”
I ran out into the living room, my eyes searching out my little brother.
“Seth?” I skidded to a stop.
He wasn’t at the computer.
“Maybe he answered the phone,” Knob said.
“Why would he do something like that?”
“I dunno,” he shrugged.
“Okay, so where’s the phone?”
We looked at each other. We had no idea where it was. We never use the phone, not even for the pizza delivery guy. We didn’t need to, because our other roommate Thurman brings home free pizzas often enough to keep our marinara sauce levels from getting too low.
“I’ll check the bedrooms,” Knob volunteered.
I split off to go check out the basement.
Our house is located in what’s known as the college slums. A hundred year-old part of town that went to seed when all the old people died off. All the houses were thin and deep, with steep driveways and old brick. People in this neighborhood were born and lived here until they died. Then they watched their sons and daughters move away and never come back. After the old people died, college kids moved in, renting entire houses, four to eight or more per house.
So we had an entire house to ourselves, for just two hundred bucks a month per person. Pretty slick, especially with the graveyard in the backyard. How can you get any cooler than that?
But the basement. That’s another story. Dark, damp, scary, and home to our other roommate. In fact, that’s what Thurman likes about it. He’s into Goth. Secretly, I think it’s just so that he can wear black. The girls dig him in black, and he knows it.
He’s working the early shift, delivering pizzas between college classes, so I have to go down into the pit, and see if maybe the phone’s down there.
Whap! Whap! Whap!
“Bastard!”
Something upstairs. I bolted back up, and ran into the front bedroom.
“What’s the matter?!”
Knob was at the window, his shoe off, a disgusted look on his face.
The smell hit. “Ah, man, put that shoe back on.”
“I was after a mosquito,” he apologized.
“Well, don’t do that,” I told him angrily. My brother’s missing, and Knob’s out squishing mosquitoes and fostering foot odor.
“C’mon, we have to find Seth.”
I promised I’d tell you about Knob and mosquitoes. He once read that only female mosquitoes bite, because they need the blood for egg-laying. And when he learned that a male mosquito is about a bazillion times bigger than the female, Knob, with a heart as soft as his head, concluded that the big hairy male jumps on the female and has his way with her. Afterwards, he merrily buzzes off to play miniature golf with his buddies, leaving the female stuck with whole egg process. Knob didn’t think this was fair at all. So ever since, he eradicates any male mosquitoes that he can find, and wouldn’t harm a female if she was sucking corpuscles out of his nose.
“It was a Culex Pipiens,” he said defensively.
“Huh?”
“A Culex,” he said, slanting a look at me like I was a nit.
“C’mon, you weirdo,” I said angrily.
As part of his campaign to help the female mosquito, he’d done considerable research. This research is conducted with liberal amounts of beer, so his facts sometimes got a little scattered.
We headed back to the basement, after having concluded the upstairs was Seth-free.
“Did you know that the Culex doesn’t usually prefer humans?” he asked as we strode through the kitchen towards the basement stairs.
I ignored him.
“And it’s known as the common house mosquito?”
I ignored him harder, and started down the stairs.
“In fact, what they actually prefer are birds.”
“Shhh!” I hissed. There was something in the dark.
He lowered his voice, “And, did you know that mosquitoes actually don’t eat blood? They eat stuff like nectar and …”His voice trailed off as he saw what I was looking at.
“What’s he doing?” he asked.
“Shhh!”
It was Seth.
Then again, it wasn’t.
Chapter 2
My brother was sitting at Thurman’s desk, the phone receiver at his ear. But he wasn’t listening to it. He wasn’t listening to anything. He had a blank look on his face, his mouth open, eyes glassy.
“Seth?” I stage-whispered at him. “Are you alright?”
He didn’t respond. He just sat, like a zombie or a typical geometry student when given a surprise quiz.
“What’s wrong with him?” Knob asked, mosquitoes momentarily forgotten.
“I don’t know,” I managed over my pounding heart.
This was my brother, a fourteen year-old kid with borderline Attention-Deficit Disorder. It was eerie to see him when he wasn’t a blur. The hair on my neck was raised, and I could feel goose pimples.
Now I could just pick up a weird sound, coming from the phone receiver in Seth’s stone hands.
Now I had ostrich pimples, and
“Call an ambulance,” I whispered back to Knob.
“With what?” he asked.
“The, er…”
The phone that was in Seth’s hands? The same phone that may have been some kind of instrument of horror?
“Uh, go to a neighbor’s or something,” I said, walking warily towards Seth. He ignored me. This was a bad sign, because it was usually the other way around.
“Which one?”
“Huh?”
“Which neighbor?” Knob asked maddeningly.
I gritted my teeth, “Either one.”
“Okay, I’ll go see the chicks across the street.”
“Fine! Get out of here!”
“You don’t have to get rude, dude.”
The stairs shook as he thumped upstairs.
“Seth? You okay?”
He showed no signs of comprehension, no recognition, nothing.
Up close, I recognized the sound coming from the phone receiver. It was the sound that you get when the call is terminated, but you don’t hang up. A nasty, rude, beeping sound.
I pried the phone receiver out of his hands. They were cold and lifeless. The hands, not the phone. The phone had more like a plasticky kind of feel. You’re probably familiar with it. Not me, though. I told you that I don’t use phones.
I gently shook his shoulders, marveling at how his thin his frame felt under the shirt. It occurred to me that we don’t usually exchange any kind of physical exchanges anymore. A feeling of sadness washed through me. The last time I gave him a big hug, he still had that toddler softness to him. Now, he’s more of an angular teen. I was so busy ignoring him, I hadn’t even noticed.
A clatter on the steps jolted me out of my reverie.
“They’re coming,” Knob whisper-shouted in my ear.
I gently slapped Seth’s face, “Wake up, buddy. C’mon, wake up.”
It was like slapping a rubber statue.
Knob stared wonderingly at Seth, “I know what this is, Dude.”
“Huh?”
“They got him.”
“They? What are you talking about?”
“Those guys who’ve been stalking us all this time. That’s why you’re never supposed to answer the phone.”
“What?!? We don’t answer because of telemarketers.”
“That’s who I’m talking about. They got him.”
“Who?! Telemarketers?! You’re crazy!” I shouted.
Seth ignored the whole exchange.
“Yeah, telemarketers. They call and suck your brains out right through the receiver. That’s why you have to hang up on them. They call during dinner, while you’re mentally at your weakest.”
“You’re nuts! Telemarketers are just people, like you and me.”
“Oh, yeah? Then how come they can keep arguing with you, even when you tell them no way?”
“They’re persistent. That doesn’t make them monsters.”
“Then why do they keep calling, even after you slam the phone on them?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t bug them so much.”
“Who doesn’t get bugged when someone hangs up the phone on them? If someone hung up on you, wouldn’t you want to call them back and tell them what for?”
“Well, …”
“And you know they don’t eat dinner, because they are always on the phone then.”
“Um…”
“That’s because they don’t eat regular food. They hibernate all day, and come out at dusk and dinnertime, and suck people’s brains out through the phone.”
“Uh..”
“They’re like, you know, big brain-sucking mosquitoes or something.”
“Mosquitoes..?”
“Look at him!” He pointed at Seth, who was still ignoring the whole exchange. “Tell me they don’t have his brain! It’s gone. His head is empty.”
The black pot pointing at the kettle.
A second person galumphed down the stairs, shaking the foundations of the old house.
“What’s up, guys?”
Thurman had a pizza box in his arms, the aroma of pineapple and pepperoni wafting towards me. My stomach was still in clench mode, but relaxed just a bit to grumble out a greeting to its Italian friend.
Thurman stopped when he noticed Seth, “Whoa, I’ve felt like that before.”
“The telemarketers got him,” Knob said knowingly.
“Telemarketers aren’t monsters,” I said, a little angry that Knob had almost sucked me into his conspiracy theory.
“That’s why you can’t answer the phone,” Knob added.
“Telemarketers. Yeah, I’ve heard stuff about them,” Thurman said thoughtfully.
“We have to get him back ourselves,” Knob said. “So I didn’t really call an ambulance.”
“You mean, go into the telemarketer’s Lair of Evil?” Thurman’s eyes were big.
“What are you guys talking about?! We have to get him to the hospital!”
“No way, a hospital can’t help him.”
“He’s right,” Thurman agreed. “A hospital can’t help him. They’ll just send him to a nuthouse.”
“Yeah, that’s what happens. Pills and stuff don’t help all those people in nuthouses. Their brains have been sucked up by telemarketers. The medical profession just doesn’t understand the truth.”
“We have to go and get him ourselves!” Thurman exclaimed.
“A Quest!” Knob said, his eyes shining with excitement.
“Yes, a Quest!” Thurman agreed.
“Are you guys crazy?! We’re not going on any Quest!” I shouted.
“We have to,” Knob said.
“Yeah, don’t you want your brother back?”
Before I could answer, a buzzing sound cut through the discussion, and we all stopped as a big, fat, black fly flew between us, low and slow like a Warthog fighter plane.
We watched, mesmerized, as it swooped down low and cut a pattern around the room, and buzzed back upstairs before Knob could recover and try to kill it.
Thurman had a narrowed look in his eyes, “I’ve got a theory about flies, you know.”
“Of course you do, Knob and his mosquitoes, you and flies.”
“We gotta hurry and pack,” Knob exclaimed.
“Yeah, this could take awhile.”
“Going to the gates of Hell.”
“This is going to be awesome!”
“Yeah, Dungeons and Dragons stuff.”
“Forget it,” I interjected, “we’re not going on any nutso Quest.”
“Look, Man,” Knob said, “would it hurt to try it our way? For awhile, at least?”
“Yeah,” Thurman added, “he’s not going anywhere.” He gestured at the statue of my brother.
“And if we don’t get anywhere, we’ll take him in like you want,” Knob said.
“Where they’ll just shut him up in a cage, and pump him full of noxious chemicals, and stuff.”
“And he’ll just rot away.”
“Because the doctors have no real clue as to what’s really going on.”
“Enough!” I shouted. “Okay, okay, we’ll do it your way. Anything it takes to shut you up.”
“All right! The Quest is on!” Knob gushed.
“Hey, we’ll need a warrior,” Thurman said knowingly.
“Yeah, a warrior is essential.”
“Let’s get our stuff.”
“My dice, I need my dice.”
They clattered upstairs, leaving me with the husk of my brother. I could hear excited thumps upstairs.
Chapter 3
I looked at my little brother, my only sibling. Except for my older sister. But she didn’t count. Because sisters never count, especially older sisters. Except when they have their friends over. Then you notice them. The friends, not your sister. Especially at pajama parties.
But with a brother, th
Mom! What am I going to tell Mom?
I pictured her face, and what she would say when she saw her little Zombie-son. “Guy, you know you’re supposed to protect your little brother,” she would accuse me.
“But, Mom. I couldn’t do anything. The telemarketers got his brain!”
“That doesn’t matter. You’re his big brother.”
“But, Mom…”
“I said,” she interrupted, “‘you’re his big brother, and you have to watch out for him.”
I decided not to tell Mom… for now, at least.
Thurman thumped back down the stairs, “I forgot, all my stuff’s down here.”
He dove into his closet and started rummaging around, his black-jean clad butt sticking out.
I took my brother by the hand and he followed me blankly upstairs.
Chapter 4
Later on, we were sitting at the dining room table. I chewed mechanically at a slice of pizza as Knob and Thurman discussed travel plans. Seth sat across from me, oblivious to their excited chatter. A fly kept bumping up against the kitchen screen, trying frantically to get in.
“Where are we going to start?” Knob wondered.
“Well, they use the phone to get around, so I think we have to start with the phone company,” Thurman offered.
“Yeah, that makes sense,” Knob agreed.
“We could go to the place where we make payments,” Thurman said.
Since we’re almost always running on a very tight budget, we usually pay in person at a local office, usually just before the deadline where our phone gets turned off. Sometimes I wonder that we even bother, since we never use the phone anyway. Maybe some harbinger of responsibility to come, from when we mature and take on responsibilities like kids and mortgages and 401k’s and stuff like that.
“Who do we get as a warrior?” Thurman asked.
“I know just the person,” Knob said.
I wasn’t participating in the conversation.
Neither was Seth.
“So, first we pick up the warrior, and then we go to the phone company?”
The fly stopped bouncing against the screen, and settled down to listen.
“Okay, that sounds like a plan. How do we get there?”
“The Hog’s gassed up, and ready to rumble,” Knob said, referring to the old Dodge Caravan he’d picked up for five hundred bucks, payable at thirty percent interest, so that by the time he was done paying for it, he will have paid three times the price of the van.