Going Nowhere Faster (12 page)

1. Death ray

2. Apocalypse

3. Nuclear wipeout

4. Crushed under steamroller

5. Lied to. And betrayed.

“Wow,” I said quietly, suddenly clinging to a buoy in the middle of the frozen Atlantic. Icebergs bobbed and stars glittered and I was a thousand miles from the closest ship, a Liberian freighter that couldn’t see me, and wouldn’t have rescued me even if it could.

Ellen pushed Miles, making space to reach out. “Stan!” And then it was a blur. Miles’s mouth, wide open, in an almost comical
O.
Someone coming down the hall. A waiter with plates and me pushing him. Everything falling. Breaking glass and rivulets of beer. Buffy closing on my flank like a sheepdog. Someone yelling “STAN!” their voice rising and farther away at the same time.

I ran through the parking lot and alongside the highway, down over the gravel edge. I clambered through a gully, mud and plants and trash, and then up the other side, over the guardrail and across three lanes, a swerving truck and a blaring horn. I didn’t care. I didn’t flinch. There was a screech and a howl and I held my breath, frozen in time.

Something would or wouldn’t happen.

It always doesn’t or does.

Treatment for the feature-length film titled

GOING NOWHERE FASTER
^©

Written by Stan “Tied to the Whipping Post” Smith

A modern satire! This is a story about a model named Thistle. An incredibly thin model who is world-famous, her picture on billboards and buses, magazines and commercials. Her ability to turn sideways and practically disappear nearly puts Siegfried and Roy out of business.

Suddenly, in a bizarre twist, Thistle will appear in public extremely fat. She will have completely let go, pushing two hundred and fifty pounds. There will be a public outcry. In an episode of Oprah, Thistle will sit in a chair, gorging on bacon while audience members and callers revile her. She doesn’t care. She gives an impassioned speech outlining the pleasures of fatness and repudiating patriarchal notions of body image. Despite the outcries of the attorney general and various religious leaders, young girls around the globe begin to embrace fatness. It becomes the hip thing to do. Fatness takes over fashion, and millions of obese girls start Web sites, found clubs, meet at malls and stuff themselves with multiple Cinnabons. Someone (my dad) invents a device called The Equalizer, endorsed by Thistle, which is a tube with a motorized pump, built in accordance with foie gras manufacturing techniques, that forces a mixture of lard and chocolate down the throat of girls while they sleep. It is astonishingly effective and sales skyrocket.

The film examines societal hypocrisy and the nature of perfection. It veers toward feminist rhetoric, but never close enough to scare away possible readers of Details. In the end, we realize how culpable we all are, but respect the screenwriter for not rubbing our noses in it. Negative body image is a bad thing and many young girls are scarred. We will be forced to acknowledge that there is a true beauty in all body types, just as there is a saleable script in all plots. And an excuse for all Ellens. Or not.

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE BLUE but very talkative and lane-switching and horn-beeping ANGEL

A powder blue Datsun screeched to a halt in the breakdown lane, burning rubber for fifty feet. A woman stepped out of the driver’s side. She wore a cowboy hat and had frizzy blond hair. Cars whizzed past. A couple tooted their horns,
bee-meep,
as she clacked toward me.

“OHMYGOD, hon . . . are you okay?”

I shrugged. “Okay?” It was a many-tiered question. There was such nuance. I was breathing, sure. On the other hand, I was Stan. On the side of the highway. Was that okay? Not really, no. Ellen. Miles. Lips. Spit. None of those things were okay. Still, my feet were warm and I wasn’t hungry. So it was a toss-up. Depended how metaphysical you wanted to get. Did Shiva or Allah have an opinion? One of those eight-armed monkey gods? I wasn’t sure what to tell her. Or if I could tell her anything. My body was fine, though, and that’s what she meant.

“Not really,” I said anyhow.

“You’re hurt? Where? Show me. ” She grabbed my arm and lifted it. She spun me around, looking up and down. “You don’t look hurt.”

“Looks can be deceiving,” I said. “Like, for instance, one minute someone can be your best friend. And then you see them leaning over by the stacked chairs and suddenly they’re not anymore.”

“Did you hit your head?” She frowned. “You sound like maybe you took one to the noggin.” She felt around through my hair. “Nothing soft. Nothing wet. No bumps.”

“The bumps are all on the inside,” I said. I knew it sounded ridiculous, but I couldn’t help it.

She gave me a smirk. “Ain’t it the truth? C’mon.”

I followed, wiping my eyes as we reached the circle of light coming from the pickup’s cab. A little bell pinged to let me know the door was open. I suddenly completely hated that little bell.

“Get in, get in!” she said. “Are you in? Good.” Her hair billowed in the wake of another truck as she closed the door. “
Ohmygod,
for a sec there? You scared me to, like, to
death.
”

I liked her Southern accent. I liked her tight jeans. She seemed really, really concerned. About me. A stranger concerned about me. It was weird. I apologized for making her stop.

“That’s okay. Look, hon, where’m I taking you?”

SIX PLACES A STRANGE WOMAN WAS TAKING ME:

1. For a ride

2. To the cleaners

3. The distance

4. Baby, one more time

5. For a fool

6. As it comes

“Home, I guess.”

“Right,” she said, as we pulled back into traffic. She reached over and turned down the music, Dolly Parton busy being all peaches and cream.

“Where’s home?”

“Kansas City.”

“Ha!” She laughed, and punched me lightly on the arm. “No, but really.”

“Millville,” I said.

“Check.” She swerved into the fast lane and gunned the little truck. “So whatcha doin’ in the middle of the highway, anyhow?”

“Looking for arrowheads.”

“Ohmygod!”
she said, smacking herself on the forehead. “Are you running away? Yes? No? It’s all right, you don’t have to tell me. I did it once myself, though. Had a stepdad and couldn’t stand him. My name’s Daphne. What’s your name? It’s okay, you don’t have to tell me.”

“Stan?”

“You don’t seem so sure about it, hon.”

“Ain’t it the truth?” I said, in a really bad cowboy accent. It was fun. I wanted to talk that way the rest of my life, conceivably a short one, given the way she was driving. Daphne leaned over to shake my hand. Hers was tiny and covered with silver and turquoise rings. She wore a powder blue T-shirt that said Way To Go! in sparkly cursive. There were fast-food wrappers and Big Gulp containers and magazines all over the floor.

“Your truck needs a wash,” I said.

“Yeah, well.” She laughed, all teeth. “My truck needs a lot of things.
I
need a lot of things. Wanting ’em isn’t the same as having ’em, though, is it?”

“You have no idea.”

She shook her head and made a little hooting sound. “’Fraid I do, hon.”

FIVE ROLES DAPHNE SHOULD BE PAID MILLIONS TO PLAY:

1. The nice, perky nurse on some hospital show

2. The nice, perky clerk on some lawyer show

3. Mary Ann’s perkier sister on Gilligan’s Island

4. The big-haired chick who rescues Stan on Charlie’s Angels

5. The nice woman who gives Stan poison at the end of Staneo and Ellenette

Dolly boomed and I looked out the window for a while and then for some reason went ahead and told Daphne everything. About Miles and Berkeley and Ellen at the lake and the farm and Prarash, and finally about The Kiss. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. She nodded and pulled on her lip and didn’t say a word until I was done.

“Oh, I’m sorry. Oh, man, really! Some girls, I swear. But some guys, too! Oh, man is
that
the truth, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been sitting where you are.”

I looked down. “Knee-deep in wrappers in the passenger seat of a strange woman’s truck?”

“Ha! No, not that, hon. You’re funny, you know it? Did anyone ever tell you that? But, no, I meant luck with men.
My
kind of luck? Whew. Still, I bet that girl has no idea what a mistake she made. But some girls are like that, you know? Grass is always greener, boy is always greener, from one to another like a bumblebee. But eventually she realizes what she’s missing out on, and then it’s back to the hive.”

“Missing out on?” She might be missing out on Miles and all the talents he could display for anyone else’s girlfriend behind a cigarette machine. But me? No.

Daphne steered the truck suddenly to the right, and we roared off the Millville exit. It was the middle of summer, all the plants bursting with life. They smelled like corn and perfume and just plain green. Why couldn’t I be a plant? Just grow and be happy to reach a little higher every day. Take the sun or the rain as it comes. Let my roots go a little deeper and eat my chlorophyll and stop worrying all the time. At least until fall.

“Sure she is, Stan. I can tell already. Can I tell? You bet I can. You’re a catch. Maybe not so smart for walking in the middle of the highway, and a touch on the smart-alecky side, but still.”

“Are you hitting on me?” I asked. “You’re not, are you?”

“Ha! I don’t think I’m quite your speed, hon.”

“That’s good,” I said. “I wasn’t sure I’d be able to let you down easy.”

She smiled. I wiped my eyes with my T-shirt as Daphne pulled up in front of my parents’ house.

“Weird,” she said. “Is this your house? Is this
a
house?”

“Yeah, my dad built it.”

“With what?” Daphne asked.

“Umm . . . wood?” I guessed.

“
Ohmygod,
that was so
rude,”
she said. “I am so sorry.”

“So am I,” I said. “Anyway, I really appreciate the ride.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out a crumpled dollar. “Here’s for gas.”

Daphne shooed the bill away. “You keep that, honey. You’ll give someone else a good turn. It all equals out somewhere along the line. And don’t you worry about that girl. The world’s full of girls. Am I right? You bet I am.”

Daphne waved and pulled away with a squeal.

It was dark and hot.

I crunched up gravel toward the house, as dark and scary and crickety as ever. The shadows had shadows and the grass was wet and humid and there was a sinister hum in the air. My heart pounded as I felt my way around back, past the hut and the gooseberry furrows and the rusting tractor. An old pitchfork lay in the dirt, practically frowning. I picked it up and leaned it against the porch. Since the porch leaned too, it slid and fell again. There was something seriously wrong with the world. Like someone went back in time to check out the dinosaurs and stepped on a butterfly by mistake and that dead butterfly started a chain reaction where fifty million years later we all had tails. Or kissed our best friend’s girlfriends. Bradbury could go screw, too.

I climbed the steps two at a time, but slowly, adjusting for the lean.
Two, four, six, eight, ten.
It felt good to count. Counting was comforting.
Twelve, fourteen,
door.

Safe.

Except for the thing that was waiting on the top step. In the corner. From a shadow, one eye peered.

“Hello?” I said, like a moron.

No answer.

I stepped closer.

“Chopper?”

No answer. I held my breath and leaned over.

It was one of Olivia’s dolls.

“Oh, man,” I said, exhaling with relief. Until I noticed it was painted red.

Bright red.

All over, from toes to hair.

Even the pupils.

Plus, across the forehead, written in black, was a name. My name. STAN. I dropped the doll. I almost screamed. And then I did.

All the house lights were off. I was seeing double, sweat in my eyes. I slammed the door behind me and ran up the stairs, not even feeling the cracks against my shins. I found my room and crawled into bed and climbed under the covers, pulling them tight and trying really, really hard not to scream again.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE bedridden and not worthy of it SHAWSHANK and foot-stank REDEMPTION

MONDAY: “Stan? Honey? Are you getting up?”

I wasn’t. I decided, first thing after opening my eyes, I was permanently on strike from life. All I needed was a bullhorn and a placard. I could walk in front of the house and yell slogans and blow whistles and pretend to be upset about animal rights. Or Stan’s rights. “WHAT DO WE WANT? SLEEP! WHEN DO WE WANT IT? NOW!” No, that’s not enough. Not nearly enough scope. It had to be the rights of Stans
around the world
to never get out of bed! We were all in it together. Me and my fellow misnamed. We could have demands:

1. Anyone named Miles immediately chopped up and bagged and shipped halfway across the planet to be used as mulch in someone’s garden.

2. All four Beatles kidnapped or revived and forced to go into the studio to record a new song called “Eleanor Pigby.”

3.

So, I guess we only needed two demands.

I was enjoying the possibilities when the doorknob ratcheted back and forth. It pushed and pulled. “Stan? Stanley?”

I pulled the covers over my head and the sheet over my head and the pillow over my head. It was warm and quiet despite the muffles and the ratcheting. Then, just before falling asleep, I heard my father say, “Leave him alone.”

Good ol’ Dad.

TUESDAY: “STAN! Keith is on the phone? Aren’t you going to work? Stan?”

I wasn’t. I hadn’t eaten in twenty-four hours and it felt good. It felt ascetic, like a monk or a yogi. It hurt a little, but in the right way. I was paying my dues. I was cleansing and purifying. I was lying under my covers and rubbing my feet together, the time-worn method of holy sufferers everywhere, quietly reminding ourselves of our mortality. And our lack of socks. Maybe, when the time came, not eating was something I could talk Keith into.

KEITH’S NEW MENU OPTIONS: