Logan: What venture?
Okay, cut, said Thebes. Logan, please work with me here.
It’s not TV, he said, it’s print. It’s a column. You don’t say “cut.” God.
Okay, said Thebes. The venture I’m talking about is this trip to find Cherkis. Okay?
Deborah Solomon doesn’t get all personal in her columns, said Logan.
Well, this time she is, okay? said Thebes. I’m going to start again.
Logan Troutman, she said. You’ve experienced a lot of failure in the past. What makes you think this venture will be a success?
Logan: I have a very positive mental attitude. Plus, it helps that I really don’t care.
Solomon: Well, which one is it? A positive mental attitude or you just don’t care?
Logan: I just don’t care.
He said he was done with the game and was going to lie down.
Any of those secrets you’d like to cash in on? Thebes said to me.
What are you talking about? I said.
Your certificate, she said.
Oh yeah! I said. Okay. Yes. You are the coolest, most beautiful kid on the planet. You’re my inspiration and my rock and the wind beneath my sails. You are the shit, T.T.
That’s not a secret, she said. And don’t be sarcastic. Tell me something about yourself that you haven’t told anybody.
I thought for a long time.
Okay, I said. I had sex with my swimming coach when I was sixteen and he was thirty-seven and then I blackmailed him and told him I was pregnant and needed five hundred dollars for an abortion or I’d tell his wife that he was a pervert and he gave me the money and I spent it all on acid and mushrooms and quit the swim team.
Thebes silently reached around to the back seat, dug out her hole puncher, took my certificate out of the glove compartment and ceremoniously punched a hole in the first box.
You can’t tell anybody, I said.
Ew, she said. As if. Besides, this seals it. She waved the certificate around.
I worried that I had chosen the wrong secret to share with an eleven-year-old. I apologized to her for being indiscreet.
Well, Hattie, she said, I’m on shaky ground here. It’s not my department. Just remember that not all your secrets have to be disgusting, all right? Like, were you a slut when you were young?
No! I said. I wanted to mention that I’d been lonely, vulnerable, pathetically enamoured with this guy’s twisted attention, probably conducting a misguided search for a father figure, periodically terrified of my sister, whom I loved and revered but never understood, definitely insecure about my body and my brain, wanting to be adored by somebody adorable, lousy at swimming, on the verge of an eating disorder and dangerously impulsive…but that would have dragged this thing out even further.
She let it go. She asked me if I remembered how Grandma used to brag about her ability to memorize fifty three-letter words a day.
I saw a gas station down the road and decided to stop and fill up. Thebes could buy a Tiger Beat or something and focus on teenage mishaps other than mine and we could drive in silence for a while, maybe. Logan was sprawled out in the back seat, asleep and oblivious to the bass that was still pumping out of his headphones loud enough that the guy filling the van with gas started nodding his head in time with the beat and said he loved that band.
I told Thebes to go check out the magazines and then darted around to the side of the gas station to use the pay phone. There was no answer at the hospital. Had it been evacuated? Firebombed? Were the inmates rioting, throwing mattresses out the windows and cutting off the phone lines? When doesn’t a hospital answer its phone?
I went back to the van and talked to the gas jockey.
That’s a kick-ass mohawk, I said. Can I…?
Sure, he said, and leaned over so I could graze it with my fingertips. You know you’re leaking oil, he said. Big time.
I know, I said, what do I do about it?
Well, you fix it, he said. It took him half an hour to get those four words out. I smiled.
Dude, how do I fix it? I said. He told me if it was a wonky seal or a busted gasket it would cost a lot, maybe five hundred bucks, and would take probably an entire day to fix. An oil leak is not good, he concluded, half a century later.
Do you think I can make it to Flagstaff? I said.
Yabsolutely, he said. He asked if he could come along. He had a girlfriend there whose head he wanted to break. I told him I wasn’t going to give him a ride if what he had in mind was domestic violence and he said no, no, he was only kidding. He just wanted to talk to her about her bad habits.
What about your job? I asked him.
I’m quitting right now, this second, he said.
Thebes came hopping over on one foot with an Archie comic and a new knife for Logan. She laid it across his throat for him to find if he ever woke up.
We got into the van and I started it up while he and Thebes were chatting. Logan slept through all of this. The guy’s name was Colt.
Colt, said Thebes. Like a baby, male horse?
I guess, said the guy, or a gun.
Well, which do you prefer? she said.
What do you mean? he asked.
Like, how do you prefer to think of yourself? As a baby, male horse?
No, he said, he didn’t really like to think of himself that way.
Well, then, as a gun? she said.
No, not really, he said. He preferred basically not to think of himself at all.
Isn’t that impossible? she said. How can you not think of yourself at all?
Well, he said, he just thought about other things.
Such as? said Thebes.
About his girlfriend, mostly, he said.
Yeah, she said, but not in relation to yourself? He didn’t think so. Anything else? said Thebes.
Well, I do think about life on other planets, he said.
Really? she said.
He said yeah, he thought a lot about this planet called Moralia.
C’mon, she said, there is no planet called Moralia.
This was good. I’d picked up a violent nutcase named after a gun who believed in a planet that didn’t exist.
Do you mind if I smoke? he asked.
Not at all…may I have one of those? I said.
Actually, we do mind, said Thebes.
Then she started relating to this guy by telling him how, when she was a little kid, she had this magazine and in it was an advertisement for this miniature fake town called Thomas Kinkade Lamplight Village. She wanted to live there so badly. She would lie in her bed gazing at this village, with its cute gabled houses and meandering, narrow pathways and smoking chimneys and thatched roofs and homey lanterns and warm, orange glow and cry her eyes out wishing she was in it.
Word, said Colt, I’m down. I wished I lived on Moralia. Thebes had found a soulmate in this homicidal cosmonaut. Impeccably, sombrely united in their mutual, impossible longing to live in places that weren’t real, they high-fived and punched and slapped and then gazed for a while out the window at the real world, the one they’d had it with.
Nice head, said Colt, finally. He pointed to the dash.
Yeah, I said. The guy sleeping next to you with the knife on his throat made it in Thebes’s art class.
Who’s Thebes? he said.
That one, I said, nodding my head in Thebes’s direction.
In Old English, said Thebes, colt means young ass or camel. She slammed her dictionary shut.
Hey, isn’t the Grand Canyon around here somewhere? she said.
Hey, another chunk of the world missing from our lives. Another giant hole in the surface of our universe. Let’s find it!
Yabsolutely, said Colt. Where are you guys from, anyway?
The True North strong and free, said Thebes.