Then she crumpled the map and fed it out the window.
The whole time, the stupid boy just sat there.
She said to get the red diary.
When he tried to give it, she said, "No. Open it to the next page." She said to find a pen in the glove compartment and fast, because there was a river coming up.
The road cut through everything, all the houses and farms and trees, and in a moment they were on a bridge going across a river that went off forever on both sides of the bus.
"Quick," the Mommy said. "Draw the river."
As if he'd just discovered this river, as if he'd just discovered the whole world, she said to draw a new map, a map of the world just for himself. His own personal world.
"I don't want you to just accept the world as it's given," she said.
She said, "I want you to invent it. I want you to have that skill. To create your own reality. Your own set of laws. I want to try and teach you that."
The boy had a pen now, and she said to draw the river in the book. Draw the river, and draw the mountains up ahead. And name them, she said. Not with words he already knew, but to make up new words that didn't already mean a bunch of other stuff.
To create his own symbols.
The little boy thought with the pen in his mouth and the book open in his lap, and after a little, he drew it all.
And what's stupid is, the little boy forgot all this. It wasn't until years later that the police detectives found this map. That he remembered he did this. That he could do this. He had this power.
And the Mommy looked at his map in the rearview mirror and said, "Perfect." She looked at her watch, and her foot pressed down, and they went faster, and she said, "Now write it in the book. Draw the river on our new map. And get ready, there's lots more stuff that needs a name coming up."
She said, "Because the only frontier left is the world of intangibles, ideas, stories, music, art."
She said, 'Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it."
She said, "Because I won't always be around to nag you."
But the truth is, the kid didn't want to be responsible for himself, for his world. The truth is, the stupid little shit was already planning to make a scene in the next restaurant, to get the Mommy arrested and out of his life forever. Because he was tired of adventure, and he thought his precious, boring, stupid life would just go on and on forever.
He was already choosing between safety, security, contentment, and her.
Driving the bus with her knees, the Mommy reached over and squeezed his shoulder and said, "What do you want for lunch?"
And as if it was just an innocent answer, the little boy said, "Corn dogs."
Chapter 48
IN ANOTHER MINUTE, THE ARMS COME AROUND ME from behind. Some police detective is hugging me tight, double-fisting me under the rib cage, breathing into my ear, "Breathe! Breathe, damn it!"
Breathing into my ear, "You're okay."
Two arms hug me, lift me off my feet, and a stranger whispers, "You're going to be fine."
Periabdominal pressure.
Somebody pounds me on the back the way a doctor pounds a newborn baby, and I let fly with the bottle cap. My bowels burst loose down my pant leg with the two rubber balls and all the shit piled up behind them.
My entire private life made public.
Nothing left to hide.
The monkey and the chestnuts.
In the next second, I'm collapsed on the floor. I'm sobbing while someone tells me how everything is all right. I'm alive. They saved me. I almost died. They hold my head to their chest and rock me, saying, "Just relax."
They put a glass of water to my lips and say, "Hush."
They say it's all over.
Chapter 49
MOBBED AROUND DENNY'S CASTLE are a thousand people I can't remember, but who will never forget me.
It's almost midnight. Stinking and orphaned and unemployed and unloved, I pick my way through the crowd until I get to Denny, standing in the middle, and I say, "Dude."
And Denny goes, "Dude." Watching the mob of people holding rocks.
He says, "You should definitely not be here right now."
After we were on TV, all day Denny says, all these smiling people keep turning up with rocks. Beautiful rocks. Rocks like you won't believe. Quarried granite and ashlar basalt. Dressed blocks of sandstone and limestone. They come one by one, bringing mortar and shovels and trowels.
They all ask, each of them, "Where's Victor?"
This is so many people they filled the block so nobody could get any work done. They all wanted to give me their stone in person. All these men and women, they've all been asking Denny and Beth if I'm doing okay.
They say I looked really terrible on television.
All it will take is one person to brag about being a hero. Being a savior, and how he'd saved Victor's life in a restaurant.
Saved my life.
The term "powder keg" pretty much nails it.
Out on the edge of things, some hero's got everybody talking. Even in the dark, you can see the revelation ripple through the crowd. It's the invisible line between the people still smiling and the people not.
Between everybody who's still a hero and the people who know the truth.
And everybody stripped of their proudest moment, they start looking around. All these people reduced from saviors to fools in an instant, they're going a little nuts.
"You need to scram, dude," Denny says.
The crowd is so thick you can't see Denny's work, the columns and walls, the statues and stairways. And somebody shouts, "Where's Victor?"
And someone else shouts, "Give us Victor Mancini!"
And for sure, I deserve this. A firing squad. My whole overextended family.
Someone turns on the headlights of some car, and I'm spotlighted against a wall.
My shadow looming horrible over all of us.
Me, the deluded little rube who thought you could ever earn enough, know enough, own enough, run fast enough, hide well enough. Fuck enough.
Between me and the headlights are the outlines of a thousand faceless people. All the people who thought they loved me. Who thought they'd given me back my life. The legend of their lives, evaporated. Then one hand comes up with a rock, and I close my eyes.
From not breathing, the veins in my neck swell. My face gets red, gets hot.
Something thuds at my feet. A rock. Another rock thuds. A dozen more. A hundred more thuds. Rocks crash and the ground shakes. Rocks crumble together around me and everyone's shouting.
It's the martyrdom of Saint Me.
My eyes closed and watering, the headlights shine red through my eyelids, through my own flesh and blood. My eye juice.
More thuds against the ground. The ground quakes and people scream with effort. More shaking and crashing. More swearing. And then everything gets quiet.
To Denny I say, "Dude."
Still with my eyes closed, I sniff and say, "Tell me what's happening."
And something soft and cotton and not very clean-smelling closes around my nose, and Denny says, "Blow, dude."
And then everybody's gone. Almost everybody.
Denny's castle, the walls are pulled down, the rocks busted and rolled away from how hard they fell. The columns are toppled. The colonnades. The pedestals thrown over. The statues, smashed. Busted rock and mortar, rubble fills the courtyards, fills the fountains. Even the trees are splintered and flattened down under the fallen rock. The battered stairways lead to nowhere.
Beth sits on a rock, looking at a busted statue that Denny made of her. Not how she looked for real, but how she looked to him. As beautiful as he thinks. Perfect. Busted, now.
I ask, earthquake?
And Denny says, "You're close, but this was some other kind of act of God."