Now Is Not the Time to Panic

by Kevin Wilson

“Mazzy sounds like an imaginary friend,” Junie said. “Maybe she is,” I told her. “I’m not entirely sure that she’s real.”

It was over, I kept thinking. It was all over. And it was beginning. It was just beginning.

And then I felt somebody touch my elbow, which for some reason felt really intimate and weird, someone’s fingers on my rough, bony elbow.

But I was sixteen. I lived inside of myself way more than I lived inside of this town.

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.

Right now, with the sun so high in the sky, we walked side by side. We’d make art later. There was, I thought, so much time.

But there were too many of them, and they spilled out onto the floor, slowly opening like flowers, my brothers’ bright white asses.

“Can you make art with a copy machine?” I asked him. He smiled. “Maybe,” he replied. “Why not?”

We were teenagers in the middle of nowhere in Tennessee. We didn’t know about Xerox art or Andy Warhol or anything like that. We thought we’d made it up. And I guess, for us, we had.

“Weird,” I said, like it was a magic word, like all I had to do was say it out loud and my world would change.

We were sixteen. How did you prevent your life from turning into something so boring that no one wanted to know about it? How did you make yourself special?

I thought about the sun, how bright it was outside, how hot the world was getting, how pretty soon the world would overheat and we’d all die.

The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us.

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.

I wondered if this was a sign that, whatever happened this summer, I’d be the one with a scar.

Why, I wondered, was true art so hard to make? Why did it never turn out quite the way that you envisioned it? Why were Zeke and I doomed to live the life of an artist? But we’d fix it, I decided. We’d go to Wal-Mart. Nothing would stop us.

I still wasn’t asleep. So I said it again, and again, until the world turned fuzzy, nothing mattered, and I was gone.

The entire time, we touched the copier like we were laying hands on it, like it needed us for the miracle to happen.

I didn’t hate them. I didn’t want to be them. But I had always been curious about how you could live a life where you never worried about repercussions, never considered that the thing you did rippled out into the world.

“I think that, maybe, everywhere we are is the edge,”

I felt like maybe I wouldn’t be able to sleep until the whole map was a single constellation.

where my mom was eating yogurt at the counter, humming along to Tracy Chapman’s “Give Me One Reason” and, like, really putting her hips into it.

“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.”

“I want to make stuff forever, for as long as I live.

But none of that happened, did it? And I still don’t know if that makes me happy or sad.

And that hour in the room, the two of us almost touching, the thing we made beginning to fully assemble itself, to spread out into the world, was the happiest I have maybe ever been in my entire life.

“Now is not the time to panic,

The only way to keep ourselves safe, I would tell him, was to make more of them.

A HEAT WAVE HAD ROLLED IN, AND I WAS SWEATING CONSTANTLY, from, well, obviously, the actual heat, but also from the wild feeling that things were quickly moving beyond my control.

I was sixteen, you know? Everything about me was in constant flux, nothing had settled, and I felt so strange inside my body. But I was capable of guilt.

And either way, whatever you did, it kept going, for as long as it wanted. And I hoped it would be forever.

“I think I’m just trying to figure out how I could have made this thing and still be a good person. Like, my intentions were good, right?”

And I know, in that moment, that my life is real, because there’s a line from this moment all the way back to that summer, when I was sixteen, when the whole world opened up and I walked through it.

“You’re growing up so fast.” “It doesn’t feel like that fast to me,” I replied. “It goes slow and fast at the same time,” she told me.

“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?”

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.

I said it again. And again. The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us. I’m saying it right now. I’ve never stopped saying it.

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.

And I knew right then that I’d never see Zeke again. This was the end of something that had mattered so much to me, for such an intensely short amount of time, and it was ending, and I was going to be all alone when whatever was next finally came for me.

But I waved to his grandmother, whom I had never spoken to in my life, and she waved back. And then I left.

and the world really did go black, the most perfect blackness that I have ever seen.

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.

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.” “I’ll try, Mom,” I said, and I started crying again.

“Well, you’ll remember it,” she said, “but it won’t be as important as it seems right now.”

I CAME HOME AND MY ARM HEALED. 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.

But I also think it’s not so bad if you never quite feel right in this world. It’s still worth hanging around. You just have to look harder to find the things you love.”

But the fact that I considered it made me realize that he could marry my mom and I’d be happy about it.

She was a fugitive, goddammit, and the law was so skinny with hunger for her.

We were still fugitives. And I would live the rest of my life certain of this. And I cannot tell you how happy it made me.