Antsy Floats (21 page)

I GOT YOUR DRAMATIC CHIPMUNK RIGHT HERE

“Hello. My name is Anthony Bonano on the
Plethora of the Deep
. For a while, I've been seeing all this stuff about how poor they are in Mexico—not at the fancy hotels that got pools and Jacuzzis up the yin-yang—but like the real places that we usually don't wanna know about. When I found out I was going on the
Plethora
, I decided to do something about it. I got a bunch of fake passports in Jamaica, then connected online with some people in Cozumel, on accounta they got Internet everywhere. I even cracked the ship's security system so it would think the stowaways were passengers—pretty easy if you know anything about computers and passwords.

“Sorry, but there ain't a conspiracy like those moron ‘experts' think. It was just me. I did it because I wanted to see if I could—and you know what? It worked. Almost. Anyway, I just want to let everyone know that I'm sorry for the trouble that I caused. To be honest, I never actually believed I could get this far working alone.”

•  •  •

There's a reason it's called viral.

Smallpox, for instance, is a virus. People think the Europeans conquered the New World, but they didn't. Smallpox did it: a virus that wiped out entire civilizations in its path. One week a native village is there, the next week, it's gone.

Sure, when something goes viral on the Web, it doesn't exactly wipe out civilizations, but it does get the attention of a whole lot of people with too much time on their hands—and all that human focus is bound to alter some randomness somewhere.

The video we bleated was on TV within ten minutes, and a minute after that, it had fourteen thousand hits. Not “
like
fourteen thousand” but
actually
fourteen thousand, then a minute later fifty thousand, then one hundred thousand, and then after that, I stopped checking because numbers that big get scary real fast.

That's when the
Plethora of the Deep
conveniently lost its satellite signal and all communication in and out of the ship stopped. Passengers couldn't send out eyewitness accounts from their phones, and no TV signal could get in.

I was okay with that, though. It was weird watching myself on TV and listening to people who didn't even know me analyze me and pick apart my words like I was speaking in secret code or something. The video was sincere enough that people believed it, and the conspiracy theorists crawled back under their rocks where they belonged. Not all of it was about picking me to pieces.

See, they had already figured out that I was the same guy who dumped a pitcher of water over the head of an obnoxious blowhard senator at my dad's restaurant six months ago. I just did it because he was an idiot and he deserved it—but a picture of me dumping that water had made the news on account of everybody hated that senator and wished they coulda poured that water themselves. I hear they even made mugs with that picture now. So the media brainiacs connected the dots from the water-dumping incident to the stowaway incident, and suddenly they're painting me like I'm all political.

It was a good thing that the TV signal got cut off when it did, because sitting on a sandbar out in the Caribbean Sea, I could pretend that this wasn't any bigger than the ship—which was pretty big, but actually kind of small when you compare it to the whole freaking world.

And luckily the signal got cut before my parents got to see my video up on TV. Christina saw it, though, and she promised not to tell if I agreed to sign autographs for her to sell on eBay.

“I believe it may fund my college education,” she told me, because she knew the only way to get rich off of an Internet meme was through merchandising.

•  •  •

We stayed in our suites all night and half the next day, in total radio silence with the outside world. On deck and around the ship, bands were playing and food was being served and the cruise director came on the loudspeaker to announce various activities, in a weird pretense that everything was normal.

Then, right around noon, I was brought up to the bridge again. My father wanted to come but was told I had to come alone, which really ticked him off.

“You're a minor! They can't interrogate you without parental supervision!”

“Don't worry, it's okay,” I told him. “If they ask too many questions, I'll swallow the cyanide pill.”

He looked at me all worried for a second. “That's a joke, right?”

Two silent guards led me to the bridge, where the captain waited for me alone. Tilde wasn't there. She was still under house arrest in their quarters, so it was just me and the captain.

“Either you're very stupid or very smart,” the captain said to me. “I can't figure out which.”

“I know the answer,” I told him, “but I'm not sayin'.”

“Do you have any idea what's going on out there?”

I looked out over the bridge window. “Looks pretty calm to me,” I said.

He didn't dignify that with a response. “While communications are down on the rest of the ship, we do have a satellite connection here on the bridge. Would you like to see the commotion you've created over the past sixteen hours?”

“Not really,” I told him, a little troubled that he had actually measured the time since I bleated my video to the world.

“Well, that answers my first question,” he said. “I was wondering if you were doing this for attention. I can see now that you're not. Why, then, did you send out that video and take the blame if it wasn't for the attention? Clearly there's nothing in it for you.”

So I told him the truth. “I did it because the worst that could happen to me is nothing compared to what could happen to you and Tilde.”

He shook his head, looking at me with this weird combination of being both disgusted and impressed. Kind of like I must have looked when I ate snails the other night. Then he turned on the TV and made me watch the fallout from my little nuclear video.

First off, I couldn't believe how many pictures they found of me online to slap up behind newscasters. A “digital footprint,” they call it. There were school pics with plastered hair that made me look saintly and other ones that made me look like the devil's spawn, depending on the point they were trying to make. There were polls. Forty-five percent of those people polled liked me, forty-five percent hated me, and ten percent were undecided.

“You're not a person anymore,” the captain told me. “You're an idea.”

“When do I get to be a person again?” I asked, but he had no answer.

Meanwhile on the news, they had somehow dug up everyone who ever knew me and were getting quotes from them, like the quotes they get from a serial killer's neighbors that say he's friendly, quiet, and has no friends except the people in the freezer.

“He was always an excitable boy,” said my fourth-grade teacher. I still don't know whether that's a good or a bad thing.

“Bonano's a psycho with a capital
S
,” Wendell Tiggor said.

“He peeks in my room,” said Ann-Marie Delmonico.

“One thing you can say about Antsy, he's got guts, right?” said Hamid.

But the best quote came from my aunt Mona, who I couldn't stand until the moment she said this:

“Antsy's got a combination of street smarts, conscience, and confidence that could make the world his oyster if he had half a brain. Most of the time you want to strangle him, until you step back and realize that the irritating grain of sand has become the pearl.”

So thanks to that, I don't hate Aunt Mona anymore. Except for the way she smells.

As for the stowaways, the media was calling them “the Caribbean Nine.” I suppose, like me, they were “ideas” now, too.

“It only gets worse,” said the captain, flipping stations. As it turns out, the ship was stuck fairly close to Cuba, and since Guantanamo Bay was the closest bit of US territory, some bozo in Washington announced that the ship would be sent there once it got off the sandbar, for “debriefing.” The idea that the Caribbean Nine were going straight to Gitmo was met with public outrage, and people were rallying in major cities, holding huge protests.

All this in the course of sixteen hours. I guess the captain was right when he said if there's going to be a storm, it's best to be at sea, where you can outrun it. But this storm was gonna catch up with me no matter what I did.

I grabbed the remote and turned off the TV. “I don't feel so good,” I said.

“I'm not surprised,” said the captain. Then the bridge phone rang and he picked it up. “Yes,” he said into the phone. “Yes, I understand.”

I was still grappling with my rolling stomach, which could not be seasick since we weren't moving, and then the captain shoved the phone into my hand.

“It's for you.”

I took the phone, figuring it was my parents calling me from the suite. But the voice on the other end wasn't anyone I recognized.

“Is this Anthony Bonano?” said an official-sounding woman on the other end.

“Yeah?”

“Good,” she said. “Please hold for the president.”

“HELLO?”

“Hello, Anthony. Do you know who this is?”

“Yeah,” I said, my voice all shaky. “Although you sound different on the phone than you do on TV.”

He cleared his throat. “This is Kyle Ericsson, president of Caribbean Viking cruise line.”

“What?”

“I said this is Kyle . . .”

“I heard what you said.” I sucked in a deep breath, realizing that for the longest time I hadn't been breathing. “You don't go telling people to hold for the president and then get on the phone and say ‘hello this is Kyle Freaking Ericsson'; you could give a person a coronary!”

“I'm sorry if my assistant was unclear.”

“And not only aren't you the president, you don't even sound Norwegian!”

“My father was from Norway— I was born in Miami. And you are in no position to be talking back to me, young man.”

“Actually, I am,” I told him. “Because things couldn't possibly get any worse for me, so I can say anything I want and it won't make a difference.” Then I realized the whole “Please hold for the president” thing had triggered my fight-or-flight response, and there was so much sudden adrenaline shooting through my veins I probably could have lifted this ship off the sandbar myself while doing a one-handed push-up.

I handed the phone to the captain. “Talk to him for a second. I gotta go find my brain.” I sat down and put my head between my legs like they tell you to do when you feel like fainting. Finally I found my brain lodged way up my butt. I sat up, took a few deep breaths, and asked for the phone back. Instead, the captain just put it on speaker, so Kyle Not-Exactly-the-President Ericsson boomed out like the voice of God.

“Can we try this again?” he said.

“Yeah, yeah, sure. I'm good now.”

“Captain Pajramovic has explained to me the entire situation. And when I say entire, I do mean entire. We know about his daughter's involvement in all this.”

“Got it.”

“I want to make sure you understand the consequences of taking full responsibility.”

I swallowed hard. “I'm not going to Gitmo, am I?”

He actually laughed. “I doubt that.”

I looked at the captain, who showed me no readable response, and I thought of Frankie's advice again. “I'm not saying anything else until I speak to a lawyer.”

“Of course,” said Ericsson, way too calmly. “We have plenty for you to choose from.”

“Excuse me?”

Ericsson sighed. “I still don't think you understand the position you're in.” He spoke slowly as if to an imbecile. “By taking full responsibility for smuggling these people on board, you've cast the blame off Caribbean Viking cruise line and its employees. Thanks to you, the worst we can be accused of is a vulnerable security computer—and if we spin you as a computer genius, that would be even better.”

I was silent. In my mind, I tried to spin myself as a computer genius and got hurled off the ride.

“So . . . I'm not in trouble?”

“Oh, you're in a world of trouble,” he said. “But it's in the cruise line's best interest to help you out of it. After all, we are a family-friendly company. If we paint you like a saint, offer you our forgiveness, and provide you with legal counsel, our clientele will eat it up.”

Suddenly this whole thing was like the grand buffet. It was coming at me too fast to swallow. “Don't most saints gotta be burned at the stake first?”

“Well,” he said, “that's what's happening right now, isn't it?”

I guess it was. I knew the media was having a field day with all of this.

“The fact that our illustrious captain got our flagship stuck on a sandbar could have been the worst negative publicity we've had in years,” Ericsson said, and the captain shifted uncomfortably, “but thanks to you, no one's even talking about the sandbar anymore.”

Then he told the captain to call for my parents.

“Do we have to do that?” I asked.

“I'm afraid so.”

“Will you at least repeat that part about me being a saint? Because then my mother might not disown me.”

“Of course.”

“Oh, and by the way, I saw your father's Viking ship. I think it's really cool.”

A pause on the other end. “I don't know what you're talking about,” Ericsson said in a cold, flat voice. “There is no Viking ship hidden within the
Plethora of the Deep
. To even suggest such a thing would be a violation of my father's last wishes.”

“My mistake,” I said. “I never saw a thing. Nice Viking ship, though.”

•  •  •

My parents were already shell-shocked by all of this, so hearing news of the world and of my freshly trending meme was like pouring salt in a wound that was already brain dead. They just kinda “dealt.” They talked calmly on the phone to the cruise lawyers and spin doctors, giving brief little sound bites about me that could be used to my benefit and would make the cruise line look good, too. They did decline to do a satellite interview with Vanderbilt Hooper, though.

“I'm far too sunburned to be on TV,” my mother said, although I knew the real reason was that it was simply too much to take. Now she kept looking at me like she had never seen me before—and sometimes she simply couldn't look at me at all.

“I honestly don't know whether to be proud or ashamed of you, Antsy,” she told me, a little teary-eyed.

“Maybe you could be part of the ten percent undecided,” I told her.

My father just stared at the news coverage there on the bridge, trying to wrap his head around it. I was worried on account of I didn't want to give him another heart attack, but this time it seemed more likely he'd have a stroke. I'm not sure which is worse.

“Can you believe this?” he said. “There are people out there calling you a criminal and saying you should forfeit your citizenship. I oughta give them a piece of my mind!”

“Do you think I'll lose my citizenship?” I asked my father.

He shook his head. “People like to talk out of their behinds,” he said. “They'll say anything if it gets them in the spotlight, too.”

“Are you mad at me?” I asked, and immediately regretted asking. “Stupid question. Of course you're mad at me.”

But he didn't answer right away. He thought about it, and then he said, “Remember that time Frankie got drunk and drove his new car into the duck pond?”

“Yeah?”

“Well,” he said, gesturing out to the Caribbean Sea, “this is your duck pond.”