by Miriam Toews
I heard the universe answering back in the form of the wind and the sun and the earth’s orbit and the ocean’s tide and the world’s wild rivers and the nomadic peoples of Outer Mongolia…Things move, Hattie. Perpetual motion. Dig it or die…You’ve got a crumb on your lip.
Actually, that was Marc I was hearing on our last day in Paris as he explained to me exactly why he really needed to morph from a tangible boyfriend into a painful memory.
But couldn’t I move with you? I also enjoy the sensations of motion, I told him. I flapped my arms around and did a little dance in my petite wrought-iron chair. Do not ever return to this café, I told myself.
Marc said it was important for us to detach, to stand alone, to experience ourselves, to answer to our inner something, to recognize the divinity that resides within each of us.
But what if our in-house divinities are telling us exactly the same thing? I asked him. Like, how many ideas are out there, anyway? Ours may match.
Hattie, said Marc, be well. Find your centre. Be happy. Stand alone for a while and see what it’s like.
I asked him if I could get away with lying down alone for a while instead, like maybe on a desolate stretch of railroad. He smiled and hugged me. Love is the answer, he said.
To what? I asked him.
Everything! he said.
Cool, cool, I said.
He asked me if I could maybe get the cheque because he’d already changed all his euros into rupees.
You have to phone my school, said Logan. He was sitting on the floor surrounded by a mountain range of CDs that he was organizing for the trip.
Why? I asked him. You’re expelled. What’s to say?
They want to know that you know, said Logan.
Let me! said Thebes. I’m good at being Min. Logan slid the phone across the floor.
Yes, she said, my name is Min Troutman and I’m—Min Troutman. Yeah. T-R-O-U-T-M-A-N. And I’m—Min. Yeah, Min. M-I-N.
I’m his mother.
Yeah, totally! Full-time job, eh?
That’s not how Min talks, I whispered to Logan.
He shrugged.
Thebes, I said, give me the phone. She turned her back to me and kept on talking.
What? said Thebes. Oh. Logan. Troutman…T-R-O U-T-M-A-N…What?…Yo! Logan! He goes to that school! Don’t you know his name? Logan!…L-O-G-A-N!
Thebes, I said. Give me the phone right now.
It’s a big school? said Thebes. Well, then, you’ll be happy to be rid of one, eh?
Logan and I were trying not to laugh. I held out my hand for the phone.
I know it’s serious, right! said Thebes. This kid is driving me crazy, trust me. We’re taking him to a, like a, like an al-Qaeda training camp, but not really. It’s one of those boot camps for—
I grabbed the phone out of her hand and said hello. There was silence on the other end. Whoever Thebes had been talking to had hung up. Should I call back? I asked Logan.
No, don’t bother, he said, it won’t make any difference. They’ll figure it out.
I called Thebes’s school and told the secretary that we were going on a road trip so Thebes wouldn’t be there for a week or so. The woman said Thebes was a great student and it wouldn’t make any difference.
Is this Min? asked the woman.
No, I said. This is Min’s sister.
Oh, said the woman, is everything okay at home?
Mostly, I said. More or less. The woman said she hoped we had a great time. Well, thank you! I said.
Yeah, um…, she said.
Is there a problem? I asked her.
No, no, no, she said, there’s not a problem. It’s just that Thebes, you know…well, she regrets being born.
What? I said. What do you mean?
She said it again, today, said the woman.
Today? I thought. After her hyper, jazzed-up start in the morning?
She doesn’t want anybody to know, said the woman. Particularly her mother. She doesn’t want to worry her.
Yeah, I said.
The woman asked me if I knew that Thebes had written something on the girls’ bathroom wall in indelible ink.
No, I said, I didn’t know that. I looked at Thebes. She was stuffing coloured construction paper into a backpack. What did she write? I whispered.
The woman said Thebes had written, Wanna do a walk-around in dreamtime, gonna seek my old bush soul.
That’s what she wrote on the bathroom wall?
Mmmm, yeah, said the woman. She had to paint over it because the custodian couldn’t get it off with soap.
Okay, I said, well, thanks for letting me know. Thebes had finished filling her backpack with paper and was drawing something on her foot. I hung up and told Thebes that everything was cool at her school. They’ll miss you, though, I said.
Oh, they don’t care, Thebes said. We don’t do anything in June anyway except clean up and have talking circles and go on lame field trips to the mint and I always have to be partners with Rajbeer because he’s new and shy and my teacher pretends that he needs me instead of admitting the truth, which is that nobody else wants to be my partner. I don’t even think Rajbeer wants to be my partner but he’s forced to be. He doesn’t even think I’m a person.
Logan put his arm around Thebes. It’s not easy being a girl, he said. Like you, he added.
True dat, my brotha, said Thebes. She stopped drawing on her foot and wrapped her arms around his skinny waist.
But, Thebie, he said, just remember you’re a little white kid. He rubbed her matted purple head. She snapped the elastic waistband of his boxers, which were foaming out around the top of his XXX pants. You don’t always have to talk like Chuck D, or whatever. In fact, I really wish you wouldn’t, especially on the road, like, in America. ’Cause that’ll be really embarrassing.
Dawg, said Thebes, I gotta—
Seriously, Thebie. You have to stop doing that.
Oh, fine, said Thebes. She looked tired, a little deflated.
I sat at the dining room table and drew a map of the universe as I knew it at that precise moment. The planet of Min, the planet of Cherkis, the stars of Thebes and Logan, vast and perilous milky distances in between. Enemy space stations in the form of foster homes and me as a UFO. Min didn’t want to see her kids. Min didn’t want to see me. Her kids wanted nothing more than to be with her. I wanted my sister back. Cherkis had wanted to be with his kids but Min had sent him packing. Min says she’ll kill herself if Cherkis takes the kids but now she seems to want to die anyway.
The phone rang. Thebie answered it. Bonjourno! she said. Oh yeah, hang on. It’s for you, loser, she said. She slid the phone along the floor to Logan.
Oh hey, he said, all tender. He tried to lower his voice. How’s it going? Oh yeah, sorry about that, I was gonna but uh…what? I know. Yeah, he said into the phone, I’m really sorry. I was going to, but…what? Thebie threw an empty Coke can at Logan. Yeah, he said. Did you get that colour you wanted? Logan threw the can back at Thebie and missed. Yeah? I bet it looks good. Yeah? That’s nice.
It’s a girl, Thebie told me. She pretended she was kissing someone and then she started hugging herself and moving around like she was dancing. Logan turned his back on her.
How many washes before it comes out? he asked. Yeah? Oh, nice. Yeah, I will. I promise. Okay. Take it easy. He hung up.
Thebes, you’re a fucking retard, he said.
Who was that? I asked. Deborah Solomon?
Yeah, he said.
It was this girl who wears a Batman sheet as a dress and rides an old-lady bike, said Thebes. Min says she’s besotted with Logan. Sounds like a bedwetter. She’s emo.
Shut up, said Logan.
You didn’t tell her you were going to be gone for a while? I said.
Nah, it was too hard to explain, he said. Plus, we’re supposed to be in a cooling-off period.
We loaded all our stuff into the van and left. On the way out of town we dropped the invisible plecostomas off at one
of Thebes’s friends. I had no idea what Thebes had packed but her suitcase was bulging and she had various backpacks filled with other stuff and a big cardboard box of art supplies.
Should we stop at the hospital and say goodbye to Min? asked Thebes.
No, I said. She’ll be okay. She’s getting better. We’ll call her from the road. I couldn’t guarantee that Min would answer the call, probably not, considering she’d just said she didn’t want to see or talk to us. Thebes seemed satisfied.
Word, she said. Logan looked at her. What? she said.
Logan would have the front seat for the first hour and then it would be Thebes’s turn. We’d take turns playing our CDs and Logan would keep track of whose turn it was. He was not allowed to drive. We were heading south towards the border, and then we’d stop and figure things out from there.
On the way out of town we saw this guy standing by the side of the highway holding up a sign that said There are Three Eternal Destinies. And beneath it was a web address. Logan wondered if the guy was real. Let’s see if he moves, he said. He pretended to grab the steering wheel and I yelled at him not to do that and he apologized and then I apologized for yelling and he said it was okay, Min never yelled any more and it kind of made him feel more normal to be yelled at every once in a while.
Let’s remember that website, said Thebes. I want to find out which of those three eternal destinies is mine. She crawled into the back seat to get some of her art supplies. She was back there for a while. I thought maybe she’d fallen asleep. But then she popped her head up and passed me a piece of paper with some writing on it. It said:
In Scrabble you’ve got a certain amount of time to make sense of your randomly picked letters, to make words, not necessarily to know what they mean, but to score points, to bluff, to bingo, to win.
What is this? I asked her.
Grandma’s last words, she said. I write them down at least once a week so I don’t forget them.
I wasn’t sure that those were, in fact, my mother’s last words. I’d been with her when she died, and just before she slipped into unconsciousness she held my hand and told me that whatever happened, I was not responsible for saving Min. But did she mean it or was dying similar to Scrabble in that you had a finite amount of time to bluff. My mother was an eternal optimist when it came to Min. Every few months she’d come up with some new diagnosis, one she’d make on her own with help from library books, and new hope for Min’s recovery. Our own family doctor had given up on Min. He said there was nothing wrong with her that a little maturity wouldn’t straighten out. She needed to grow up, basically, was his theory.
We talked for a while about Grandma, how she’d once been rescued at sea and dragged onto some Jamaican beach by a group of fishermen. She had taken Thebes to Jamaica for a short holiday after her brain surgery and they’d gone banana boating. My mother fell off and was laughing so hard she couldn’t climb back onto the boat.
She was also really fat, said Thebes.
So a bunch of guys saw her laughing and bobbing way out in the sea and swam out to rescue her.
One guy on each extremity, said Thebes. Grandma looked like a starfish, a laughing starfish. Even though salt water was splashing into her mouth, she couldn’t stop laughing, said Thebes.
Yeah, I said, remember when she was almost trampled to death by that herd of elephants?
Yeah, said Thebes. At the last second some Kenyan shepherd yanked her out of the way.
Hmm, I said, she liked to travel around the world getting into trouble and being rescued. In that way she was a little like Min. In that way she was a little like all of us. Once, I mentioned off-handedly to her that I was sometimes afraid of Min, that I wished I didn’t have to share a room with her because I was tired of staying up late, night after night, waiting for Min to fall asleep first so I wouldn’t have to worry about her stabbing me in my sleep. I’d kind of been kidding, but I’d wanted my mother to know that although I was young, and although I loved my sister, and although I usually trusted her, I didn’t always trust her. My mother scooped me up in her arms and laughed and said I didn’t have to worry, really, Min was only a danger, and a slight danger at that, to herself. I hadn’t known exactly how that was supposed to be reassuring. I put bubble wrap on the floor around my bed, just in case, so I’d be able to hear it popping if she walked towards me late at night with a butcher knife in her hand. Nothing that crazy ever did happen.
We were zipping along the highway towards the U.S. border. Not a single cloud in the sky, just a jet stream that resembled arthritic vertebrae and a few bossy crows swooping around up high, plotting some sort of attack. We were quiet now, for about six seconds, staring out the windows of the van in three different directions.
Then Thebes said, Min told me a story about you.
Yeah? I said.
About you guys renting scooters in Corfu and riding on a road that circled and circled and rose and rose until you were finally at the highest peak of the island, said Thebes. Nothing but blue sky, rock and sea. Kids threw pomegranates at you and old men laughed. On the way back down you took a turn too sharply and wiped out and scraped layers of skin off your legs.
We had such a hard time getting off that island, I said. Our parents had paid for that trip after one of Min’s melt-downs. Logan was just a baby and Cherkis took care of him while we were gone. Cherkis brought us to the airport and waved to us from the observation deck with Logan all curled up against his chest in a Snugli.
Why? Weren’t there boats? asked Thebes.
Well, yeah, I said, but the one we wanted to take left every morning at six and we could never get up on time. That went on for days.
Well, did you have an alarm clock, like a tiny travel one? she asked.
No, we didn’t have anything at all, I said. We were counting on the sun.
That’s flaky. What about a rooster? Did you have any roosters?
No. Just the sun. If we’d had a rooster, we’d have eaten it.
Well, why didn’t you stay up all night? she asked.
We tried that, I said.
And?
And it didn’t work either, I said. We couldn’t stay up past three or four.
Why not?
I don’t know. We were so baked from the sun and probably dehydrated and malnourished.
Oh, said Thebes.
Logan’s chin clunked onto his chest and then snapped back up, then down again. He was out.
Hey, let’s draw on him, said Thebes. She was waving around a Sharpie.
No, don’t, I said.
I’ll put 666 on his forehead.
No, don’t, I said again.
But eventually you got off the island, she said.
Yeah, I said, so then finally, there was this guy, his name was Pantilas, I think, something like that, and he hated us, so he told us he’d make sure to get us to the boat on time.
Why did he hate you?
Because we were terrible olive pickers, I said. We tried to work for him.
Nothing you guys did worked out! she said.
I adjusted my rear-view mirror and considered my current plan. Min had told me that at one point Cherkis was the curator of an art gallery in the middle of a field somewhere outside Murdo, South Dakota. It was an old, abandoned farmhouse. Cherkis had crammed all his art onto the main floor and was living in the second storey and the attic. He had taken a lot of blurry photographs. Min had once told me that Cherkis’s life’s work had been, maybe still was, to create the perfect level of pixel breakdown without compromising the essence of the image. He didn’t feel right about charging admission and hated the idea of advertising, plus nobody really showed up anyway, where the hell is Murdo, let alone a field outside of it, let alone a dilapidated farmhouse/gallery, so eventually, actually really quickly, he went broke. But that’s where we were going. Point A.
So, Murdo, eh? said Thebes.
Yeah, I said. He won’t be there, but maybe there’ll be someone who knows where he went.<
br />
He used to balance me on his face when I was a baby, and he tie-dyed all my onesies, said Thebes. Min told me.
Logan remembered smashing into a tree while trying to show off his flashing runners and Cherkis carrying him eight or nine blocks all the way to the hospital. They were both covered in Logan’s blood. Cherkis held him down while the Emergency staff stitched up Logan’s head, then he returned his kid intact to Min, and, with streaks of blood still on his face, left town in a silver rental car loaded with options.
five
I’ D FORGOTTEN ABOUT THE BORDER. Logan had dozed off again. I yanked on his hoodie and told him to wake up.
What the F, he said. Where are we?
Checkpoint Charlie, said Thebes. Act natural. We cruised past the wanky little “tuck stand,” as Logan called our Canada Customs building. Nobody was coming into Canada, the guy inside the cracked booth looked like he was busy counting his ribs or something, and we pulled up to the shiny space-station Star Wars thing on the American side.
Don’t say anything, Thebie, I mean it, I said to her.
Geez Louise! she said. Bust a cap in my—
Seriously, keep your mouth shut. Please? I’ll give you a dollar.
I will too, said Logan.
Thebes dropped out of sight and hit the floor of the van.
No, no, I said, don’t lie on the floor, Thebie, they’ll think we’re kidnapping you. She popped up again, sat there in this ridiculously erect position, and mimed zipping up her lips and throwing away the key.
Hello, I said to the guy. How are you?
He ignored the question and asked me where we were from, where we were headed (family reunion in Minneapolis) and how long we’d be gone (forty-eight hours). These your kids? he asked.
No, they’re my niece and nephew. They wanted to ride with me, uh, but their parents are going too. Flying. I stuck my arms out and made a whooshing sound that I’ll regret all my life.