100 Sideways Miles (18 page)

They are all paper figures—puppets. I have never seen anything like this before.

And there is nobody here at all, except for me.

The shadow-boy walks out through the open door and stands beneath the hanging moon. His legs move with gawky and mechanical articulations, knees bending while his hands hang at his sides. Every slender finger shows against the light. He is clearly
wearing shorts, and his bony legs seem almost skeletal while the smooth profile of his face conveys a detached and sad expression.

The boy turns his chin upward, as though he is observing the moon that hangs in the sky of the lighted screen. His hair is all cowlicks and disarranged spikes.

The boy is me.

He looks exactly like me.

Julia Bishop has made me into a shadow.

It is a ridiculous idea, but I remember how once, when I visited her house, I saw her holding paper and scissors, eyeing me against the blank rectangle, and I thought she'd been sizing me up, as if I were some kind of model.

Crazy.

I inhale, almost certain I will smell the sweetness that brought about my dissolution again, but there is nothing.

“Are you in there?” I whisper.

It is a stupid thing to do. I can hardly hear myself setting those words free into the night.

I am so foolishly self-conscious.

Beneath the moon, the boy pauses and looks down at his feet. He raises his hands to the front of his chest.

The earth travels twenty miles per second, and it pulls the moon along through space.

Twenty miles.

Twenty miles.

A larger figure jumps out across the screen. The suddenness of the motion startles me. The new shadow flares claws and teeth. It
is a tiger, with slashing lines cut through its body, flashing perfect stripes of light. The shadow-boy lowers himself defensively, like Laika does when she's been scolded.

The tiger-shadow transforms into a man, taller and thicker than the boy. He waves a pointing finger at the boy, as though he is accusing the boy of something, or maybe punishing him, telling him what he must do. When the boy raises his hands away from his chest, he lifts a crown over his head and places it down on top of his messy hair.

The shadow-man points up at the moon, and from the top of the screen, a large square—a book—flutters downward over the figure of the boy and his crown as though eating him between the flaps of its bindings. The boy disappears inside the book.

Then the light inside Julia's room shuts off, and everything is dark.

The screen is erased in blackness.

I push myself up, standing, and whisper, “Julia?”

The light flashes again. The window is entirely dark except for the outlines of block letters, shining, brilliant words that hang between myself and whatever is on the other side of the glass. The words say this:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, FINN EASTON. I LOVE YOU.

Click!

Darkness.

Show over.

So this was what Julia Bishop had intended to do for me in the first moments of my seventeenth birthday, and it was better than anything I'd imagined. I felt so stupid, disgusted with myself for making such idiotic assumptions about Julia, about the way things would be in the miles ahead of us.

I moved so close to her window, I could feel the coolness of the glass on my lips.

“Julia?” I whispered. “Thank you. That was the best present I ever got. I love you.”

Her window budged open, just an inch.

“You're welcome,” Julia said.

I couldn't see her at all. Her voice might just as well have been coming from outer space.

“I wish I could see you,” I said.

“We'll see each other at your party. I can't come out.”

“I suppose it would be stupid for me to try to come inside. I'll go home now.”

Then Julia Bishop said, “Wait.”

The window slid a few more inches, and Julia's face appeared in the opening.

“How does the boy—how do I get out of the book?” I asked.

Julia said, “I haven't seen that part of the story yet.”

I pressed my palm against the mesh screen on her window, and Julia's hand met mine. I could not begin to calculate the trillions of atoms separating us, but I had never felt closer to anyone in my life.

“I want to kiss you,” I said.

“Tomorrow.”

The window slid shut, and Julia disappeared.

• • •

Laika was a good dog. She stayed right beside my feet for the long walk home through the canyon's creekbed.

And on my way, I practiced telling Julia Bishop how sorry I was for thinking the wrong thing about her. Laika graciously accepted my apology on Julia's behalf. I could almost hear my dog saying that it was one thing to think incorrectly, but acting incorrectly was a completely different universe, and I hadn't gone there with Julia Bishop.

Dogs get really smart when they've traveled as far through space as Laika had.

“Thank you for not rolling in anything dead tonight,” I said.

Laika grinned her tightened rat-terrier grin.

And I thought, maybe everything in the universe is alive tonight, anyway. It felt that way to me.

So I said, “I am seventeen years old. That's almost eleven billion miles.”

Then I smelled the honeysuckle-sweet sick odor that told me it was time for Finn to go.

It was ridiculous.

It was unfair.

I howled into the nighttime sky.

“Fuck no! Not now!”

There were lights this way, lights that way, all drifting outward from the center, moving so far and fast as the knackery claimed the words from me and I emptied and emptied, falling, the Little Bitch, Caballito, on my hands with my mouth—what was that?—in the dirt while two little girls named
Marjorie and Mazie stood at the edge of the trees along this dried bank where they died together and sang,

One atom at a time,

One atom at a time.

It was trouble.

My little sister, Nadia, eager to pounce me into wakefulness on the morning of my seventeenth birthday, discovered my bed had not been slept in.

Her brother was missing.

• • •

When my atoms trickled back together, the first thing I became aware of was this:
I have dirt in my mouth
.

Everything that slowly congealed into
me
burned like acid from the bites of red ants.

If I had lain there for a few million miles more than I did, the knackery of the ant nest would have disassembled Finn Easton and turned him into all sorts of useful ant products.

It took me thousands of miles to figure out what the burning was. Then I realized my eye had been focused on the jaws of one of the little monsters as it bit into the bridge of my nose.

And I hadn't pissed myself—Dad's little boy was growing up!—because if I had, those goddamned ants wouldn't have
wanted to get inside my underwear. As it was, although I could not move, I felt the needled mandibles of each individual ant biting the insides of my thighs, my balls, and my penis.

Where were my arms?

Words crawled back to my head: canyon, morning, Laika, dirt, birthday, and
why is everything on fire
?

My fingers opened and closed.

Laika's ears shot up when I balanced myself shakily over my hands and knees. My head was a vacuum to all the diffused fragments of my universe I'd scattered into the dark on the way home from Julia Bishop's house. Time for Finn to suck it all back in.

I spit sandy mud.

Words filled the space inside me that wasn't already crowded by rage.

The ants were everywhere.

I must have looked insane—tearing at my clothes, stripping them off my body and flailing them like flags of surrender in the cool morning air until I was completely naked, swatting and brushing at my skin, a pale cloud of atoms twitching a pathetic war dance in the bottom of a canyon that was no stranger to crazy ghosts.

Laika ran around in circles, excited and amused by whatever game she thought I must have been playing.

Hurry! Hurry! Step right up and see the naked epileptic boy throwing a fit as he slaps himself silly!

A car drove by on the canyon road.

Anyone could have seen my freak show there in the clear light of morning.

It was ridiculous.

Lowering myself, hunched over like one of those not-quite-bipedal wild boys who'd been raised by wolves or monkeys, I gathered up my discarded clothes. Then I hid inside a cover of cottonwood saplings and made certain every last ant was gone before I put them on again.

I had no idea of the time, the miles I'd traveled since leaving Julia Bishop's window and the shadow play. When I looked around, I could see that I'd ended up halfway between Julia's house and my own.

As was always the case after blanking out, I could not decide which way I was supposed to go.

• • •

I went home.

There was nothing I could do. I couldn't run away on my birthday. Dad and Mom would have thrown a fit. And when I showed up at our front door, dirty and stinging with injury, I had no choice but to tell them the entire truth about what had happened to me and how I'd spent my night facedown on a nest of red ants.

The ant bites made me sick. The stinging grew worse with every step on my walk home. So I was nearly hysterical with pain when I told my parents and sister about blanking out, and what I'd been doing in the canyon after midnight.

I went to see a puppet show. They thought I was delirious.

Mom, the nurse—Snow White—told me to take everything off and sit in the bathtub while she ran it full of cool water.

Of course it was embarrassing, but I was in no condition to argue the treatment. Enduring the punishment of sitting naked
in a bathtub on my seventeenth birthday in front of my parents was better than having them take me to a hospital, which was the first thing Mom had suggested.

Mom and Dad were angry.

Me? I wanted to drive my fists through the tiled walls in our perfect California bathroom.

• • •

I ruined my birthday.

Things could not have been much worse if we'd invited Blake Grunwald over so he could do a German dance, then get drunk, start a fistfight, and puke his guts out all over my bed.

Mom gave me some antihistamine pills after I got out of the bath. The medicine made me feel drunk and dizzy. I couldn't put on clothes; it hurt too much. I went to bed and rolled over between the cool sheets with my face turned toward the wall so I could make everything invisible.

At that moment, I wanted to die. I became a swirling cosmic storm of anger and depression. I wanted to tell Mom to go away, to leave me alone, but I pretended to be a good kid instead, the way Dad would have written it.

I knew there were a hundred kind and loving reasons why Mom sat in my bedroom and watched me as I lay there, not sleeping, pretending to sleep, wishing so hard that everything would go away, that I could roll the fucking planet back all those miles to yesterday and try to do things better.

Finally, I went to sleep.

Perhaps it was an effect of the pills Mom had given me, but in my sleep I dreamed about riding a flying horse with Marjorie and Mazie Curtis, of fighting bulls in a dusty Mexican arena, of black shadows on the screen in Julia Bishop's bedroom window.

• • •

In the evening, Dad came to my room and woke me up.

“Are you going to sleep through your entire birthday?” he asked.

He kept the light turned off. I was grateful for that.

“Apparently not,” I said.

I was never very polite after one of those episodes, and that day—my birthday—I felt particularly toxic for the humiliation of having been given a bath by my stepmother.

Look: Here's another thing about my father's book,
The Lazarus Door
: Some of the aliens became epileptics after they'd removed their wings.

Imagine that.

There was almost nothing about me that wasn't in his book, that didn't trap me into being something invented by someone else.

Dad put his elbows on the mattress of the top bunk. I kept my face to the wall, my eyes glued shut.

He said, “Are you feeling better?”

“I haven't felt this good in at least two million miles,” I said.