Going Bovine (24 page)

“What are you doing?” I shout, running toward them.

Daniel grabs a gun from the commando’s holster, points it at me. “Happiness. By any means necessary.”

He lifts the gun by the nose and brings the butt down hard on my head, and the room slips away.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

In Which Some People’s Happiness Gets Its Butt Kicked and Gonzo and I Make Our Escape

Blacking out isn’t so bad, really. All in all, it’s a lot more pleasant than, say, celebrating a family birthday at a medieval theme restaurant or pretending you care about your GPA. Unconscious, I float out into a black universe where stars are winking electric Christmas candles, past the Buddha Cow raising one hoof in a Zen salute. It’s like I’m on some cool ride, chugging past automated exhibits: Mom and Dad are sitting in the hospital cafeteria, not talking over cups of lukewarm coffee. They look like shit, like a couple of toothpaste tubes that have been grabbed in the middle one too many times till whatever’s left is too hard to get out. Raina walks through the doors. She doesn’t look like shit. She looks fresh and alive and full of promise. Dad sees her and stands up, gives a little smile. Mom watches him like he’s a stranger she’s seeing for the first time. Raina hands Dad some papers and says “I’m sorry” and “If there’s anything I can do,” and Dad answers, “You’re doing so much already, Raina.” In the way she blushes and tucks her hair behind her ear, in the way Dad pays attention to that one small gesture, Mom’s face changes. She knows.

The ride loops around. To my right, the roadrunner keeps pace with me. It zips into a cave, and when it comes out, it’s the Wizard of Reckoning, the fire giants burning a giant black hole into the sky behind him. He reaches out, but the ride drops, making my stomach tingle. It creeps up the invisible mechanical hill toward a brightly lit room, where Glory’s taking the empty bag off the IV pole. “Just need to switch you out, honey.” She hooks the new fat pouch on the pole. The ride slows till I’m even with her. Her face is like one of those carved totems I saw once in a book about Easter Island—dark, beautiful, forever.

She strokes my cheek, and I swear I can feel the warmth of her skin. Her big brown eyes look into mine. “Cameron, child, are you awake in there?”

“I said, are you awake?”

My aching eyes open to see Daniel sitting across from me in a chair with his arms crossed. He looks like his happiness is more than hurt; it’s pissed and coming out swinging. I’m tied to my chair and Library Girl is nowhere to be seen. At least the gun’s gone. The bright lights of the Snackateria are little needles of pain slipping into my head.

“Yo! Cameron.”

“Yeah,” I croak. “Where’s Library Girl?”

“Who?” Ruth asks.

“Never mind,” I say. “Where’s Gonzo?”

Daniel sneers. “The midget freak? Maybe you can tell us. We haven’t found him yet.”

I’d like to beat the crap out of him for calling Gonzo a midget freak, but I’m tied to a chair and the lizard part of my brain has been activated and is now occupied with survival. Daniel gets right in my face. “So, tell us: how long have you and your spies been planning this little attack?”

“Me? I couldn’t even plan dinner. I didn’t have anything to do with this—”

Ruth cracks me on the knuckles with the anthology.

“Ow!” I screech.

“That’s for reading this depressing, hard stuff over the loudspeakers.”

“Wait, it wasn’t me. I—”

She cracks my knuckles a second time.

“And that’s for breaking the smoothie machine! They say it might take twenty-four hours to fix it. Twenty-four hours! That’s like a lifetime!”

Daniel paces the room. He’s a little scary. In fact, I’d give him just about anything that would increase his happiness right now before he goes commando on me. “We saw the security camera footage—she kissed you! And you handed her the backpack. We know you’re in this together. All the order stations have been hacked into so when you try to order a CESSNAB product you get rerouted to a book called My Happiness Wants Your Happiness to Go to Hell with quotes like ‘Read a damn book already. It won’t kill you.’ ‘People screw up all the time. Deal with it.’ ‘Not everybody gets to be famous.’ ‘If you’re so special, why am I so annoyed?’”

“Read that really bad one, Daniel!” Ruth says.

Daniel flips on a screen and reads the word flashing there. “No.”

“I want a smoothie,” Ruth says quietly.

Daniel’s face is so close to mine I can see the acne cream on his chin. “You’ve hurt a lot of people today, Cameron. And now you’re going to have to pay.”

“What if that hurts my happiness?”

“Little late for that. Friend.”

“Okay. I’ll leave. You know? I’ll just leave and never come back.”

Ruth hits me with the book again so hard I swear Beowulf is lodged in my cheek. “Ow! Quit it!”

“No, Cameron,” Daniel says, stepping back. “Your lack of complete happiness is a threat to our happiness. It’s like a cancer. And you know what you have to do with a cancer?”

“Hope it goes away?”

Ruth drifts closer and I flinch, but five hundred years of the world’s least exciting literature does not come near my flesh.

“No. We have to cut it out so the good cells can continue to grow.” Daniel turns to the commandos. “Get him on his feet and meet me in the church. We’re going bowling.”

Ten minutes later, with two CESSNAB camo’d goons on either side of me, I’m half dragged into the packed Church of Everlasting Satisfaction and Snack ’N’ Bowl to face my doom. The church band is plugged in; they’re playing an uptempo tune with a vaguely rock-pop beat. My head still hurts from where Daniel smacked me with the gun, but I think the words say something about happiness only belonging to the right kind of people.

Daniel cuts a path through the throng and the band fades into a little feedback and then nothing. He stands in Lane #7, right under the big-screen TV that shows the dancing pins when you make a strike. The pins usually say things like Wow, you’re awesome and The universe loves a winner, so the universe must really love you! The screen’s off today. I imagine the pins have heard all about me and Library Girl and the supposed revolution and they’re scowling and flipping me the bird and gathering implements of torture.

Daniel holds out his hands like a preacher. “Friends, I want you to know that the smoothie machine is being fixed.”

The walls of the church shake with the sound of applause, wolf whistles, and whoo-hoos.

“I also want you to know that even though Cameron has hurt our happiness, he’s really hurt his own happiness more. This is what happens when people don’t embrace the positive. But are we going to let Cameron disappoint himself?”

“No!” the CESSNABers shout.

“That’s right. Cameron is part of our specialness, and we’re going to prove that our way is the right way, the only way. The universe wants Cameron to be happy, and all he has to do to be forgiven is to bowl.”

Daniel flicks the switch, and the ball machine thunks and rolls into action. My favorite, the purple one with a really high shine, shimmies up to my hand and waits.

“Daniel …,” I start, but he forces my hand onto the ball, his smile like a rictus grin. “Pick it up, Cameron. Crusaders, let’s give our troubled friend a little inspiration.”

The band kicks in. Ruth’s shaking a tambourine, and I don’t mean to brag, but my tambourine solo totally kicks hers to the curb. For half a second, I consider staying. Maybe I could find that bliss state again. Maybe I could stay here, follow all the rules, be safe always. But as soon as the thought enters my mind, another one swims in and eats the first one like a shark. Fuck that, it burps.

“Here goes nothing.” My fingers sink into the holes of that purple beauty; I pull back and throw the ball into the lane, where it sails down the slick middle like it’s always done, heading for a perfect strike. But the ball veers off course. It drifts toward the gutter like it has every time I’ve ever bowled here, but instead of popping back out, it slinks into the loser trough with a loud rumble and disappears. Not a single pin falls. There is complete shock and silence.

“That can’t happen,” Daniel says, eyes wide. “Everybody’s a winner here.”

“Do it again!” someone challenges.

“Great idea,” Daniel agrees, but his face is a little pale. “Come on, Cameron. Embrace the positive.”

I shrug. “Your funeral.”

Once again, the ball wobbles off course. It manages to knock off one measly pin before vanishing.

“Let me try it.” Daniel pushes me out of the way. “Embrace. The. Positive!” he shouts, letting the ball fly, then watching in horror as his ball slips sideways, taking out only two pins at the far end. “But … I’m special.”

“Holy shit,” a kid named Luke shouts. “No way!” He races for a ball at the same time his friend John does.

“Dude, I’m so going first,” Luke says.

“The hell you are,” John protests. They run out to the lanes, where Luke knocks down six pins to John’s three.

“Ha! I beat you by three pins! In your face!”

Ruth climbs on top of the Snackateria’s Holy Cheese Fry machine. “Luke, we’re not competitive here. Everybody’s a winner. Everybody is part of the team.”

John doesn’t hear her. He’s too busy lining up his next shot. “Think you can do it again, shithead?”

Luke breaks into a grin. “Dude, I will totally smoke your ass.”

Daniel’s practically screaming now. He’s running across the lanes, dodging balls as they fly. “Guys, we’re all part of the specialness. Don’t forget that.”

Luke and John stop and stand there, looking at their feet. Luke takes a ball from the carousel and hands it to John, which makes Daniel smile.

“Ten bucks says I win.”

“You’re on.”

The balls clatter into action. People start taking sides, cheering on either Luke or John. John makes a strike, a real one, and Luke yells, “You suck!” and they both start laughing.

The doors fly open. I can’t see Gonzo in the crowd but I can hear him saying, “Excuse me, excuse me, could you get out of the way you smoothie-loving happy freaks?”

“Gonz!” I say, picking his little man body up for a full-on hug.

“Can we go now?” he says. “’Cause after five days in this joint, I need to eat a bag of Cheesy Puff Fingers and listen to some hardcore face-melting music to get my synapses back to normal. If I never see a smoothie again, it’ll be too soon.”

A huge brawl breaks out in the bowling alley—people trying to best each other, idiots throwing balls into each other’s lanes, arm-wrestling matches, a few choir members playing air guitar—while other CESSNAB Crusaders try to drown them out with happiness songs and chase them down for group hugs. They’re so busy going crazy, they don’t see Gonzo and me slip away. Even Peter and Matthew aren’t at their stations in the parking lot. Just as we turn onto the road, I think I see Library Girl standing in a patch of trees, two streaks of white behind her back, but then she’s gone, and I’m pretty sure I imagined the whole thing.

We walk the five miles to the nearest town, and just to torture me, Gonzo starts making up his own CESSNAB song about making your happiness cry uncle and feeding happiness to your dog so he has wicked happiness gas, and we laugh. It’s a pretty long walk, but my body’s cooperating and the Wizard of Reckoning feels a long way off, so far off he’s not even a sound you can pick up with the sonar of your soul. And it’s only when we get close to the highway and the constant hum of cars taking people to and away from places that could be home or a new start or nowhere in particular, just a spot on the endless road, that I see the Buddha Cows floating gently to earth like a surreal snow.

But it doesn’t seem worth mentioning, so I don’t.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Wherein We Crash at the Mister Motel and I Learn Some Stuff About the Ayatollah of Harsh

We take a crappy room in an even shittier motel, the Mister Motel right off the interstate. The blinking neon sign shows a winking guy tipping his hat, the Mister of Mister Motel fame, I assume. He looks like he should have a speech balloon coming out of his mouth: Rent rooms by the hour, real cheap. The room we get is a dark hole that looks like it hasn’t been changed in at least thirty years. Butt-ugly brown bedspreads and yellow paint on the walls. Dark, fake wood headboards. Threadbare carpet in a color that’s best described as “indiscriminately green”—great at hiding stains. The only new addition, for some crazy reason, is a bright orange balloon tied to a chair. The balloon advertises a used car lot, Arthur Limbaud’s Resale Beauties.

Gonzo, of course, is freaked about hygiene issues.

“Do you suppose they use bleach on the sheets?” he says, sitting tentatively on the bed and hugging his backpack to his chest. “I mean, really, you have to use bleach and the hot cycle to kill all the dust mites. And anything else.”

I don’t ask what “anything else” means and I don’t intend to. I’m tired. I want to go to sleep and not wake up till morning, when I’ll have to figure out how we get back on the road to Florida with no bus tickets and about three dollars to our names.

“I’m just gonna call my mom,” Gonzo says. He uses a tissue to pick up the receiver of the Mister Motel phone, which looks as ancient as everything else.

“What are you doing?” I say, putting my finger over the clicker to disconnect him.

“I told you, calling my mom. My cell’s dead and I don’t have the charger.”

“We can’t afford a phone call to your mom.”

“I don’t like this place, man.” Gonzo starts to wheeze.

“Calm down, Gonz. You’re okay. It’ll all be fine, I promise. Just breathe, okay?” I say, talking to him like I would if I were his mom. If I can keep him from panicking, he’ll be okay. I’m not even sure he has asthma. I think he just has Freak Out lungs. Gonzo’s not having any of my Zen master shit. He’s tearing through his bag frantically, like a squirrel desperate for its nut.

“My inhaler. Dude, it’s gone! Oh my God!” His face is really pale, and even I’m getting a little wigged about him.

“Be cool, be cool. Don’t freak on me. It’s here, okay?”

Gonzo’s nodding, but he’s saying “Shit, shit, shit” under his breath. I’m grabbing around in the bag, but I don’t feel the inhaler.