It’s so beautiful, Min said when they found her under that tree. She said she’d seen an airplane explode in the air and crash. The cops said later that she’d almost frozen to death but not quite. She’d been out there for two and a half hours. One of them said she was shaking hands with God.
So she had to go to the hospital for a few weeks.
When she came home she thought her fingers would have to be cut off and then her hands and then even her arms, right above the elbow. She said she wouldn’t even be able to wipe her own ass. Nothing we could say would convince her that she was fine, that nothing would be amputated, and then one day she started doing it herself, cutting deep rivets into her wrists, getting it over with, and she had to go back to the hospital for quite a long time.
When she got home, our mother slept with her at night, in Min’s bed, and sometimes I’d curl up at their feet or on the floor in front of her door so she wouldn’t run away. When she was well enough to leave the house I’d follow her. She’d walk for miles sometimes, never stopping at a friend’s place or a store or a park or anything at all, just walking, quickly, and staring at her feet or off into the middle distance. One evening I had convinced her not to go for a walk. I begged her to stay at home and play gin rummy with me and she agreed to, and she made us milk-shakes and popcorn and she told me that she had known that I’d been following her and that she wasn’t angry about it but that I didn’t have to do it any more.
Are you afraid I’ll do something stupid? she asked me, and I said yeah, I was, and she promised me she wouldn’t, although she really couldn’t understand why I would care, and I told her because I loved her, and she smiled and shook her head like I was a complete fool.
Logan had carved Don’t take this the wrong way into the dashboard.
Don’t take what the wrong way? I asked him.
Just, you know what, he said. Try not to be so literal.
Thebes popped up from the back. Where’s North America again? she asked.
Oh my god, said Logan. He shrank into his hoodie.
nine
SO, WE WERE WHISTLING SOUTH ALONG THE I-25 and Logan was looking at the map. I want to go to Moab, he said. Moab, Utah.
Why? I asked.
I don’t know.
What is that again? I said. Moab.
He shrugged. No clue, he said.
I think it’s from the Bible, I said. It’s a people. Moabites or…
Mother of All Bombs, said Logan.
No, I said. Well, yeah, but…Or it’s a place…in Jordan? Egypt? Moab. Hmmm.
Moab, said Thebes. Bastard son of Lot. Moab, said Thebes. An ancient region by the Dead Sea, or its people. Etymology of Moab, she said. A corruption of “seed of a father” or as a participial form from “to desire,” thus connoting “the desirable land.”
Thanks, Thebes, I said.
The Holy Rashi in Humash, said Thebes, explains the word Moav to mean “from the father” since “av” in Hebrew means “father.”
Great, Thebes, thanks, I said.
Fritz Hommel, said Thebes, regards Moab as an abbreviation of “Immo-ab,” which means “his mother is his father.”
Thebes, thank you.
Just helping a brother out, she said, and slammed her dictionary shut.
So, yeah, let’s go there, said Logan.
Thebes, I said, do you want to?
I’m down, she said. Where is it?
Logan was still studying the map. Hey, he said, if we went to Moab we could check out Mexican Hat and Tuba City. They’re kind of on the way to the Painted Desert.
Are they towns? asked Thebes.
Yeah, he said. I guess so. Concept towns or something.
When Logan was a baby Min would tie him up in a bike seat with an old scarf and then they’d ride all over the city. Sometimes he’d fall asleep, and wearing this huge kid’s bike helmet he looked like an extraterrestrial, and it would thump against her back and she’d have to reach around and prop it up and hold it there, his giant, oversized head, while she rode around with one hand. She put him to sleep under tables in cafés, on friends’ couches, in fields at rock concerts. She took him everywhere. When he was four he’d get up really early in the morning and make calls to people he knew, like me, to see how we were doing and to tell us about his morning.
Hey, I said, remember how much Min hated your kindergarten teacher?
Yeah, he said. His kindergarten teacher had called Min up and told her that he was concerned that Logan didn’t know how to stand on one foot and that he didn’t know his colours.
That was crap, Min had said. He’d been hopping on one foot since he was a year old and knew his colours at two. She asked the teacher if maybe Logan was just being funny in a five-year-old way when he said blue was red or whatever, or maybe he just didn’t feel like hopping around on one foot, why should he? Then the teacher told Min that he’d send Logan, this tiny kid who had just barely started school, to the principal’s office if he didn’t cooperate with the testing thing. So Min had said okay, as soon as he did that he should call her because she’d have his ass fired at the very same time.
And then Logan told me this story about how one day, long after he was out of kindergarten, like when he was eleven or twelve, he and Min had seen that teacher waiting at a bus stop when they were walking home from the grocery store and Min started hopping around him on one foot and saying all kinds of goofy things like oh, look, it’s very important to be able to do this. Can you do this? Because if you are not able to hop on one foot you may as well kill yourself. Nobody will hire you. Nobody will marry you. Nobody will want to be your friend. She went on and on.
I had to beg her to stop, said Logan.
She was still pissed after all those years, eh? I said.
That’s a long time to be mad, said Logan.
Then I told Logan about something else he’d done when he was four or five. Min had asked me to take him to his Orff class at the conservatory. It was the first one and the teacher had gone around the room asking their names. Logan said his name was Logan “I don’t wanna be here” Troutman.
Yeah, he said, he vaguely remembered that. He hadn’t felt like doing that Orff stuff either.
So, yeah, I said, while the other kids were dinging the triangle or knocking some pieces of wood together, you were lying on the floor doing this seal act, rocking on your chest with your arms behind your back going orf, orf, orf.
I used to be cute, he said. Adoptable.
Oh, c’mon, I said. You’re still adoptable. It was supposed to be a joke, but it was a stupid one given the circumstances.
Thebes popped up. See, she said, Logan did funny, clever things and all I liked to do was lie in the sandbox and have a nice, long crap in my diaper and then fall asleep in the sun. Min said it was my favourite thing. Like I was some rat or wino or something.
You were a contented kid, I said.
Not that ambitious, said Logan.
But really, he said, who adopts fifteen-year-old boys?
Well, I said, I guess, yeah…not many people.