100 Sideways Miles: Part 3

When it gets stimulated, there is no difference between actually hearing language and only imagining you’re hearing it, which is why so many starry-eyed religious human beings believed the fallen angel-cannibal aliens were actually messengers from God, as opposed to hungry freeloaders.

I mean, what if messengers from God actually did want to eat you? Most people would be okay with that; I mean, those famished angels being sent from God and all.

When Julia went home to Chicago, I stopped trying to fool people with my pretense of being okay.

It felt like I’d been holding in twelve billion gallons behind the sutures of my Lazarus Door scar.

I was a teenager, stubborn, and I wasn’t about to give in and blubber my apologies to them, especially not in front of Cade Hernandez.

If I didn’t check in soon, I was certain Dad would be notifying the FBI or Homeland Security, or whatever agency is actually in charge of apprehending interstate fugitive epileptic kids who probably came from some other planet.

As I put the final touches on the East-West blockade, Cade thumped his way through the door bracing a heavy, sloshing cooler against his knees, and said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

Cade Hernandez, accomplished sleeper that he was, snored throughout the entire conversation, his face buried beneath a portion of the wall, a somnambulist’s unfinished escape tunnel out of the Soviet sector on our king-size bed.

Cade Hernandez squinted and leered at me from the corner of his eye.

That afternoon, Cade Hernandez and I traversed the desolate panhandle of Texas and crossed over the line into Oklahoma.

That afternoon, Cade Hernandez and I traversed the desolate panhandle of Texas and crossed over the line into Oklahoma.

Eighty miles away from Dunston—four seconds in Earth time—the first bullet-gray, thumb-size drops of rain plunked down all over the blacktop and Cade’s truck, pelting us with a staccato machine-gun peppering—thak! thak! thak!

The highway transformed into a slate-colored river, spiked and prickled by relentless fat globules of rain.

All around, everything else blended into an indistinguishable, borderless cascade of blurring gray streaks.

But when the truck passed the next car ahead of us, covering it with spray, the two little red lights we followed veered sharply to the right and then vanished—winked out—completely.

Cade Hernandez and I wore improbable outfits for rescuers in hurricanes: mesh basketball shorts, sneakers, and baseball raglans—the blue-sleeved undershirts from our Pioneers uniforms—all of which sponged up the rainwater and plastered against our bodies, slogging and sloshing, weighing us down and slowing our pace, as though everything danced hypnotically in an underwater dream.

Ahead of us, something black and skeletal seemed to loom up from the middle of the road.

The river clenched me in its fist, gritty and brown, much colder than I thought it would be.

As soon as I came up to the surface, spitting and gulping air, I spun around to orient myself: There was the van, turning toward me so slowly near the bank, a flashing glimpse of a face and a flattened palm behind the rear window, tilted up in the pyramidal air pocket at the tail of the cabin.

I caught a glimpse of midair Cade, a gangly pale missile diving headfirst through the rain, hands stretched toward the center of the muddy river.

The basketball shorts I had on dragged like sails, slowing me down, coaxing me away from the van.

The sisters’ bodies were kept about ten miles from the dam in a makeshift morgue for victims.

The muddy river distorted and widened, kept us helpless in the groove of its central channel, pulling and pulling.

I could not say how far we’d gone, but at a widening bend of the river, I felt us slow in the eddying current along the other shore.

To be honest, I had no idea what any of it was—the words were so stubborn about finding their way back to the epileptic’s drained lexicon.

It was some time, thousands and thousands of miles, before all this and all that congealed into something definable: I was lying there naked and covered with a blanket atop a cold examination table at a veterinarian’s clinic.

And I imagined here I was poised at the perfect doorway to break out of the prison of my father’s book.

I guess people in Oklahoma are more reliable and compliant than people from Southern California.

One thing that did not happen at the end of my father’s book was this: Finn did not find himself naked and driving his best friend’s pickup truck while being pursued by some type of emergency vehicle with agonizingly bright headlamps and a flashing red beacon that pulsed so vividly across the flat Oklahoma landscape, the spectacle nearly induced the smell of flowers and another epileptic seizure.

Ahead of me, the bank around the bridge was all awash in hot white spotlights.

And just before we both shut up and fell asleep, Cade reached over and poked his index finger into my sternum and said, “A centipede with ninety-six amputations.”

At first, Cade Hernandez tried to goad me into sneaking out and finding Julia’s bedroom, but I was so tired, I only had to listen to his words of encouragement about three times before I evaporated into sleep.

That night, I dreamed of falling horses and bullfights and floods and a girl whose atoms must have been issued from the same calamities as mine, who appeared out of nowhere one sweltering morning and arrived in front of me at Burnt Mill Creek.

The good-bye I said to Julia was not nearly as devastating as the first time I’d said it, because I knew the miles between us had been rendered inconsequential.

Because this is what we saw: In the dark, walking along the gravel shoulder of a highway somewhere outside a place called Rolla, Missouri, was a man wearing a robe that glinted and shimmered in all the reflected light cast down onto the road bed by stars and moon, the knackery of the universe.