by Mike Young
When the Sun Hits My Face It Will Be Time To Get Up (detail)
Kevin Clarke
On Thursday, during lunch in the math teacher’s room, Burk showed us the progress of his nub. It was growing on top of his hand. Filmy and slightly inflamed, it seemed covered in pork silk. Sure, it looked bigger and rounder. The lights inside it, tiny pinpoints, looked brighter. Even whirring a little, maybe.
We first saw it two weeks ago. I guess we all noticed it, but Ty was the first to say something. Ty plays trumpet in the school band and brags about drinking beer with his uncle. “What the fuck is that?” he asked. Burk wouldn’t say how he got it, but he claimed the nub hooked him into the internet. Fuzzy web pages popped straight into his brain. He said he aced his last physics test by Googling the answers. After Burk showed us his test, Ty snorted. “If I brought home a fucking physics test like that,” he said, “my parents would fork over the dough.” Burk squeezed his nub and nodded.
At lunch, Ty shrugged. “Scary shit. But whatever.” He shotgunned a bottle of Cherry Coke then reached into his bag for the next one. We all backed away from Burk, mulling above our chairs before sitting—disappointed spectators post-spectacle. Burk sagged and folded his hands in his lap. He watched us and chortled, a glugging sort of sound.
Burk plays tuba, usually tries to hide behind it, but you can’t miss him. His thighs are Christmas hams. People call him Jabba the Hutt, and he’s aware of this. He wears only two or three stretched and torn T-shirts, all of them navy school shirts. Sometimes he wears his P.E. shirt, which is pathetic. But when you don’t have the money for a lousy Metallica t-shirt, what do you do? At home, they say, he goes shirtless. That’s something I don’t think about.
Ty is thick and puffy, but not so hippoesque as Burk. He can carry himself out of that band room with a clipped strut, something the rest of us can’t manage. I mean, he still plays Magic—greasy face, never gets laid—but he owns this heat. Say two of us band kids are at our stands, mumbling back and forth, and Ty sits between us. He’ll snap open his trumpet case and we’ll turn to face the front. He might get to play trumpet onstage as a Roman in the spring musical, that one about the forum.
I know the Romans or the Greeks or something used to take baths with little boys, but I don’t know if they had trumpets or tubas. Burk plays his tuba in the back by the instrument lockers. He could tell me about the Romans, hit up the ol’ Wikipedia. We talk to him more since the nub. We didn’t talk to him much before, and he would eat grilled cheese sandwiches by himself. One time a choirgirl turned to him and said, “I’ve never seen you without a grilled cheese sandwich.” After she said this, his eyes went small. I remember that his pupils looked like tiny sailboats, those boats you can barely see from the beach.
* * *
On Thursday, we had lunch. Lunch meant playing cards and arguing about the differences in D&D and Japanese-style RPGs, listening without admitting it for the polo shirts and miniskirts to laugh down the hall, back from the fast food places. After lunch, some of us trudged over to Advanced Band. It was hot, and Burk seemed to sweat more than usual. I mean, I wasn’t measuring it in a test tube or anything, but he was having trouble, missing notes, and I kept glancing back at him. He was struggling. Shifting his hands all the time, like maybe the nub was bothering him. Ty shimmied as he played, grooved like a dork, but hey, that’s Ty. As usual, he was a little sharp on everything. Our conductor, Mr. Slocum—who has bald eyebrows and Snowman Slocum for a nickname—kept pinching his nose and whining about both of them. We were in a sour mood when the bell rang.
Ty’s not normally a violent dude, just sort of a smart-ass, so when he slapped Burk in the head, that was weird. We were in physics, and Mr. Hogan asked about some constant. Ty started rifling through the book, but Burk said the whole damn thing in a split second. Ten digits long and he spat it out. Then he sat back, wearing this sly little grin, really tickled. To be honest, I don’t see Burk smile much. Then Ty had to hit him and call attention to our whole corner. I mean, I felt bad for Burk, but I felt bad for the clan. Us band geeks. Decked out in button-down shirts with dragons or black Pac-Man T-shirts, gangly and slouching, hoarding the dignity of silence. Then Ty has to go break all that because he’s pissed. To be honest, you won’t see any of us smile much.
After school, I walked to the dirt lot behind the gym where most kids parked. The ones without the cute Volkswagens and waxed Jeeps, anyway. I walked with Ty, who was still fuming. I caught my reflection in his windshield. Four new pimples. I grimaced and leaned in closer. “What, you want to steal my car?” Ty asked.
“I was counting how many bugs you kill,” I said.
“Your mom’s a bug,” Ty said.
I squinted at the sun and thought of the afternoon ahead: bouncing between television and message boards, shoveling Doritos.
“Can I get a ride?” I asked.
“I’m late for something,” Ty said, and climbed in before I could ask what he was late for. But I knew the answer as he drove off, slow because it was his grandma’s car. You’d think with all his sharp notes and scowls he’d be roaring off somewhere, maybe getting a blowjob while he drove. But his answer was nothing. He was late for nothing. I enjoyed this until it made me feel dumb.
Then I started walking. After a couple blocks, I saw Burk. He walks home across the street from me. Turns left into the parking lot of these old yellow apartments, and I keep going. Sometimes we nod.
But this time Burk stopped and sat on the curb. So I crossed the street. When I reached him, I lagged, looking down, scratching my ear. I glanced over at the nub. Burk heaved himself up and we shuffled in step.
“It smells like the back of a Taco Bell,” I said.
“You know how they do that?” Burk said. “They point their kitchen fans at the street. So you smell it.”
I shrugged. “It’s hot as hell.”
We walked in silence, side-by-side, until he hit his turnoff. He headed into the parking lot, so I tossed him a nod and began to walk away. At the crosswalk, I heard him calling my name. I turned around. He was running to catch up, waddling really, and I had to put my fist over my mouth to keep from snorting because he looked like one of those strong men who drag airplanes with their shoulders.
He panted a second. “You want to hang? I mean, it’s fine if you don’t. It’s just kind of hot, you know? My aunt’s here. She has a car. Maybe she can give you a ride home?”
I would’ve said no, but his eyes started to shrink and bob around, and I remembered the sailboats. So I blew a breath and gave in, mumbling, “Sure, cool, whatever.”
I followed him into his parking lot. His apartment complex was short and squat, yellow as fake cheese. Doors and windows spaced in uniform. It looked like a row of cubbyholes, the pattern only broken by things beside the doors: someone’s pink stroller, a black trash bag.
Inside, it stank. As soon as it hit me, I tried not to notice. Actually, first I tried not to breathe, and then I tried not to notice. Old carpet, sweat, and roach spray all congealed into this weird, moist odor. Sure enough, Burk tossed his backpack and swiped off his shirt. He chucked it into a pile of similar shirts beside a television. His gut jiggled as he walked down a hallway. My imagination crossed its arms and nodded: yep, Jabba the Hut. I felt like a bastard.
I followed him. No one seemed to be there. I saw a kitchen of stains and dirty dishes, and I kicked a GI Joe out of my way.
“Where’s your aunt?” I asked.
“Oh,” Burk said. “I thought she was here.” He turned into his room.
His room was chaos like the rest of the house—balled up socks and empty soda bottles. I was a little disappointed in his desk, though. Band geeks should have dignity in silence and dignity in beautiful desks. But his computer looked dusty, his monitor all small and dim. Game boxes and old joysticks were cluttered around his keyboard, really old joysticks. To be honest, I didn’t see anything newer than the joysticks.
“You can sit down on the bed,” he said. He booted up his computer and I watched him dial and squeal onto the internet. Dial-up. No shit.
“You still use it?” I asked. “Your computer, I mean. Even with the nub and everything?”
“Yeah. The nub still has a ways to go. It’s kind of dim still.”
“That sucks. Are you on a plan? Do you get like a pamphlet?”
“It doesn’t work that way. It’s from Japan. You get this—well, I can’t really say. There’s this non-disclosure thing. You put it in with this needle. I’m not a big fan of needles.” He pointed at his bed. “I laid down, right? My aunt sort of did it for me. You have to rinse it too. Have you ever had your ears cleaned out?”
Yes, by a very tall Asian medical student. The wax drill felt like a frozen jackhammer. I blubbered like hell and they gave me a Tootsie-Roll.
“Nope,” I said. “Can’t say I have.”
“Well,” Burk said, and he scratched his neck. “My aunt used to do the home kit. Little blue squirter thing. Like hydrogen peroxide? For swimmers. It was for swimmer’s ear. But I’m not a big swimmer.” He smiled for some reason.
“Sure,” I mumbled.
“So my aunt did this too,” he said, patting the nub. “I live with her,” he added. “Duh, right?” Silence. He tapped his knee. “Yep.”
I sat on his bed, the site of untold ear canal excavations and one supposed amateur implantation. New smells. I had to pace my breathing. I didn’t want to think about him asleep, taking off more of his clothes.
I looked right at Burk and shook my head. “Dude,” I said. “Nobody believes you.”
Saying it like that, after he’d begged me into his home, it sounded totally cruel. But there I was, stuck in Jabba’s lair. It made sense, somehow. Like his apartment insulted him, so I was free to continue the trend. Who wants to think of somebody that sad loaded with something awesome like an internet nub? I’m not a mean guy. It’s not like I toss puppies over fences or anything. But I couldn’t stand it.
“No,” Burk said. “I never tell people about the earwax thing. Ha ha.” He grinned again like, Stop, stop, dude, come on, just stop.
But it was out there, so I kept going. “Nobody believes that you can actually see the internet in your head. With that nub. Even though it lights up or whatever.”
He sighed. “It’s weird.”
“How’d you get it anyway? How did you get it from Japan?”
“Off the internet. The real internet.”
“Where in Japan? Some gerbil scientist? One of those stem cell dudes?”
He didn’t say anything, but faced his computer and began to click around, which annoyed me. “Because nobody fucking believes you,” I said.
“Well, everybody looks.”
“But that’s because it’s so weird,” I said. “It glows.”
Silence. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s say it works. What does it really look like? In your head, the internet? I mean, you say fuzzy, but shit.” I leaned forward. “What does it really look like? You know, what do boobs look like?”
He swiveled in his desk chair, staring down. “It looks sort of like a dream. You know how you stick things in your head, like you tell yourself to think of boobs and they’re kind of shadowy? It’s like that, but crisper. You tell yourself, get Google. Then all the buttons and icons sort of burn into your mind. Like sunspots, you know?”
“You Google boobs and they’re sunspots? Is that what you’re telling me? Can you play any games or go on YouTube or anything?”
He shook his head. “It sort of blurs out if I go somewhere too heavy. Too intense.”
I laughed. “No MySpace then.”
He laughed too. “MySpace works great, actually. I have these friends. From England and Japan and Belgium and stuff. I have this one friend from Belgium who sends me comments about waffles. It’s kind of this joke we have. I love waffles. I could eat like a bucket of waffles and then just fall asleep. I could eat that stuff for days.”
I didn’t know Burk had a MySpace. “Waffles are good,” I said. “You sit there in class and go on MySpace in your head?”
“Kind of. Google has this game. Where you tag their pictures with this anonymous partner? It helps the search engine label stuff. Sometimes I’ll just sit there and play the picture tagging game. Lots of cars and graphs and stuff, but sometimes, um.” His voice lowered. “Sometimes it’s totally awesome.”
Burk yanked himself up and walked to his closet. He opened the door and pointed to a tiny world map, scotch-taped to the top of a full-length mirror. A little paper map, maybe ripped from a geography book.
“New Zealand,” Burk said. “Where they filmed Lord of the Rings. Who doesn’t want to go to New Zealand, right?”
New Zealand sat on the map, though I couldn’t see it. There was the map on the mirror, Burk in the mirror, nub in the mirror, Burk in the flesh, Burk with his gut, nub in the flesh, nub all red yet somehow shimmering—then me in the mirror, me sweating from the heat and the smell and now from something else, me turning red like the nub, looking at Burk’s mirror.
“That’s good,” I said. “Maybe when you’re old. Maybe you can buy a plane or something. So you have enough seats.”
See, I was thinking of how they make you buy two seats if you’re too—yeah. Why can’t you forget these things? Why did I have to look at him? I’d almost forgotten, drifting away, imagining his fantasies all hyped on digital goodness. Why are the real things always quiet and always there?
I stammered, “Because you’re gonna score off the nub thing. You’re gonna kick ass.”
He stared at me, eyebrows going up and down. “It’s just to play around. I don’t even like computers. It’s not—they’re okay.”
“I know, I know, I’m sorry.”
“You know, you have to do a lot of things you don’t like. I don’t even like the fucking tuba.” Burk doesn’t usually cuss. He glared out the window. “I don’t care if people believe me.”
“Yeah, that’s cool. You shouldn’t.” But I couldn’t sound sincere. Because if it was me, I know I’d care. If I had to be Burk and sleep my fat ass under his flannel sheets, I would care until the care grew in me like a hot shout, like a bloody mess.
Out the window, I saw a green van pull in. “There’s my aunt,” Burk said. “There’s a few sodas in the fridge, if you want.” He sat at his computer. Sweat dribbled from his back fat.
“Hey,” I said. “Peter Jackson might make the Hobbit movie too. You think he’ll make it in New Zealand?”
“How should I know?” he said.
“You want to look it up? I mean, you want to use—”
His nub hand cradled the mouse. “It’s charging.”
* * *
On Friday, the nub looked awful. The glow was gone and a gray-yellow ball of pus sat below the skin. Beet red all around, and my own hand throbbed to look.
We had a special morning recital in the gym, so Snowman Slocum gave Burk some gauze. It was a concert for parents and relatives, a warm-up before the town’s annual May parade and a chance to pry some donations from our loved ones. After they’ve shelled for uniforms and reeds and four years of trips to Canada, they’ll usually give us twenty bucks out of muscle memory. Slocum says that many people find patronizing the arts “vitally essential.” He likes to repeat this phrase, usually to school boards.
I thought about this as I fiddled with my clarinet’s mouthpiece and watched Burk wheeze back and forth between the stage and the bathroom, dabbing his hand with paper towels. If the nub had come from Japan, where did he get the money? He didn’t have a job that I knew of. Some national charity helps him with his band stuff. He puts their stickers on his sheet music folders. Indie installation techniques or not, there was no way he could afford even a black-market Japanese nub. I know the Japanese do some weird shit, and I know they like to test it on American teenagers, but there was no way. Before we started I gave Burk a little thumbs up, but he lofted his tuba in front of his face.
The thing went okay. Burk’s tuba fell behind the beat a couple times. Ty had a few nasty squeaks. Me? I played my clarinet like a warship on fire. People flung their babies at me. Thank you very much for asking.
At the orange juice and sugar cookie reception, I met Ty’s family. His dad was at work, I guess, but he introduced his mother and his uncle. His mother was a hefty lady, crashing around in this purple muumuu and laughing like she was screaming. “I said it already, but you sounded great! Did they record this? I want to go out and buy the recording right now. Where is it? Did somebody record this?” She hugged Ty, lifting him a little, and ran off. The uncle, of beer-giving infamy, wore sunglasses and sniffed his fingers. He would lean down and whisper things into Ty’s ear, and they would snicker. I stood there, grinning like the loser I am, wishing to be someone who felt comfortable enough to punch my buddy in the arm.
“Nice notes, squeaky,” I said.
“I am Cat Anderson’s fucking spirit child,” Ty said. “I play that thing like a goddamn piped piper.”
His uncle snorted. “Kid, you play like shit.” He turned to me. “And you should hear him when he practices,” he said. “Lousiest shit I ever heard.”
Then he did this weird thing where he sniffed at Ty, like smelled him, and then he laughed and clapped Ty on the neck. Ty stared at the floor. “You can’t even hear the trumpet,” he mumbled. “I have to go the bathroom.”
After Ty left, it was just me and his uncle. “Let’s say there are six kinds of fucking people in this world,” he said.
“What?”
“They aren’t, but let’s say there are.” He drew from his flask, in the middle of parents and students and League Champion basketball pennants. “Let’s say there are six types of people on this Earth. I don’t know where I’m going with this. Let’s say your sister is a loony for the ages, let’s say that her kid sits around listening to nigger music and playing a nigger on his little car stealing game or playing his little queer sword games with his faggot little friends. Let’s say that he fights with his goddamn grandma, even when she lets him drive her car.” He drank from the flask and stared at the rafters. “Who the fuck fights with his grandma? Man, I love that kid! Don’t you know it.”
Snowman Slocum walked up, fluttering his hands. “That is completely and utterly inappropriate,” he whispered. “Please put that away.”
Ty’s uncle dropped the flask on the floor, placed one finger on his left nostril, and blew his nose. “There are five other kinds of people,” he said. “But there ain’t a one of ‘em knows what to do about it.”
“Do you know this man?” Slocum asked me.
I shook my head.
Ty’s uncle turned to Slocum. “Listen,” he said. “I’m gonna buy this whole band six pizzas. Save one for the tubby dude with the broken finger or whatever. And this one needs to eat.” He swept his hand toward me, sniffled, and nodded several times. “That’s what I was trying to say. Six pizzas.”
He took a bunch of twenties out of his front pocket and handed them to Slocum, who believes that patrons of the arts are vitally essential. Slocum and Ty’s uncle went outside the gym. Then they came back and asked us our favorite toppings.
* * *
We all changed and took the free pizzas over to the math teacher’s room. As per the code of nerd silence, we mentioned neither Ty’s tweaked-out uncle nor Burk’s unwrapped and ghastly nub. But we looked so hard and often at the nub that we didn’t eat much of the pizza. Ty, who didn’t touch one pepperoni, finally groaned. He got up, grabbed an entire pizza box, and chucked it in the trash. He walked over to Burk and stood above him. “Alright,” he said. “What the holy fucking fuck?”
“What?” Burk said. He was on his fifth slice of sausage and mushroom.
Ty started counting on his fingers. “It’s not a fucking magic nub. It’s not some weird Neuromancer brain implant. I mean, look at it.” He shuddered, did it extra hard because we were all watching. “You can’t honestly tell us that thing isn’t a tumor or cancer or something. It doesn’t even light up anymore! You can’t honestly tell me you’re still seeing the fucking internet in your head.”
“Actually,” Burk mumbled. “I see it better than ever.” He closed his eyes, but his voice rose. “You know what I’m doing right now? I’m multitasking. I have Everquest in one window and I’m watching YouTube. I’m watching this Swedish dance group.”
We went wide-eyed. “Bullshit,” Ty whispered.
“You can believe me if you want,” Burk said.
“It hurts, right?” I said. “It hurts.”
“If you want,” Burk said.
“I call bullshit,” Ty said. “That is so much bullshit.”
“What does the dance look like?” I said.
“You want me to dance?” Burk said. “No thanks. I can see it just fine.”
And he smiled, that wisp of a smile from physics class. A wee little grin, thin as lipstick on a hippo. We all stared.
Except Ty. He jolted away and ran over to the math teacher’s desk. The teacher was out somewhere, but he trusted us because we all liked math and being quiet. Ty rifled through the desk and yanked out a protractor.
We watched—tired from the recital, creeped out—as Ty darted to where Burk sat. Then, in one of those moments when noise drops away to your own thudding and wheezing, he stabbed Burk’s hand. One clean thrust.
Burk’s eyes flashed open. But then they closed and his face went white. You could almost see the scream grow, see it rise from the middle of his stomach and end all around us. He toppled, his tiny plastic chair flying from under him, like he’d lost to a bulls-eye in one of those fairground dunk tanks. Squished, tangled among chair legs, he just lay there and panted.
For a minute, nothing moved. Sound came only from the outside, a low static of catcalls, laughter, cussing. Ty heaved these big jagged breaths that were almost funny. Then he reached down and touched something. When he rose, he held out his finger. Red goo. “From his hand,” he whispered. “From his fucking nub. It’s just blood.”
We shuffled our eyes. Ty had pimples and pale arms. But we said nothing. I remembered Burk’s messy desk and his earwax bed and thought about how disgusting people can be. How do poor people get fat? How many kinds of people are there, really? Why can’t we just see things in our head whenever we want? Especially when there’s nothing else for us. But I didn’t say anything. Geek-geek hurrah: dignity in clean computer desks, dignity in silence and ignorance and the trudge forever through the blush.
* * *
Burk was absent from school for a week. When he came back, his hand was wrapped in gray athletic tape. We didn’t talk to him. Snowman Slocum made Ty lead trumpet, and we got a new travel bus with TVs above every seat. Burk must have said it was an accident, or maybe everybody else knew the nub was just a weird cyst and figured it had popped of its own accord. Ty did play in the musical, but we stopped hanging out. I deleted all my computer games, even the SNES emulation ROMs, and started reading about ancient civilizations. Turns out the Greeks and the Romans did all sorts of stuff besides sleep with little boys.
But that’s not even funny to me now. Pretty much every time I make a joke it makes me sad, which I guess is attractive or something because I’m going to go drinking next weekend with a bunch of emo chicks. We’re going to sneak into a movie. Maybe climb the railroad bridge and drink some Hot Damn.
Now, every time I walk home, I see Burk. Maybe he’s always been there. I never say anything. Maybe I should buy a bike so I won’t even have to look. But last week I happened to glance over, saw him waddling into his parking lot. And I felt like shit, so I nodded.
When I tell this story, I talk about the stabbing, but I don’t say what I saw. Just before he fell. Some say they saw nothing and some aren’t sure. But me? I saw buttons and icons. Windows and links. Right there in his eyes, bright as sunspots. Show me all the blood you want, but I saw what I saw.
“Burk’s Nub” first appeared in Backwards City Review.
