by Miriam Toews
Logan was writing or drawing something. Is that a sketchbook? I asked him.
No, he said. It was a black, hardcover notebook with blank, unlined pages. Some of the pages had sketches on them. It looks exactly like a sketchbook, I said.
Mmm, he said.
It is a sketchbook, said Thebes. He doesn’t want people to know about it though.
You mean like your song lyrics? I asked her.
Shut up! she said, and dropped back.
Logan read something out loud, something his art teacher had written about one of his sketches. Logan, she’d written, this is an assignment tailor-made for your particular strengths…weird but fascinating creatures/shapes…very dreamlike.
On the outside of his notebook he had a bunch of strange drawings and odd numbers. He read those to me too.
380 off the dribble
220 off the dribble
80 2 dribble
80 crossover
200 free throws
Ideal: 30 ft., 300 off the dribble, 500 3s, 150 mid-range
Ball handling
Weight, running, jumping
20 wind sprints over 90 minutes
BALL MOVEMENT
Take it to the cup
Fuck the People
Darkleaf
What was that last part? I asked him.
My music, he said.
They say we should wear goggles, said Thebes. The wind is that strong today. She was reading the newspaper. Then she was quiet for a minute. What do you guys think about setting yourself on fire as a means of protest? she asked. Quiet for another minute. We didn’t bother to answer.
Okay, Hattie, she said, you’re a Gemini and that’s an air sign, which means you live more in your head than in your heart and you should try to remember and understand that all of humanity is interconnected and you should also try to be at one with the world and know that if you hurt somebody you’re also hurting yourself.
Got it, I said, although I thought it would be easier to light myself on fire.
I pulled into a gas station and told the guy behind the counter that I’d hit a deer about ten miles back and it was lying dead on the side of the road and asked if he could call someone to have it taken away. He said yeah and asked me if there was any damage to the vehicle and I said yeah, but just a big dent, and the ignition fell out.
The ignition fell out? he said.
Yeah, but I can start it with a screwdriver, I said.
He said well, okay, fine, but if the impact had loosened up the ignition so it fell out then maybe other things would start falling off too, and I said, okay, thanks, we’ll watch out for them, and we left.
So, we’re in a boat, said Logan. This was a dream he had had a few nights ago. And, yeah, he said, we’re just in it floating around in the ocean, and then Grandpa comes up and he’s smiling, this big, huge smile, and, you know, we’re all hauling him into the boat and he says, Man, am I happy to see you guys! He had a moustache, said Logan.
No, he didn’t have a moustache, I said. Logan hadn’t ever actually seen his grandpa.
Well, in my dream he did, he said.
I wanted Logan to keep talking about his dreams and his sketchbook or anything else at all.
Read me this, I said. I handed him his CD case. I wanted to hear his voice so I could remember its exact tone and timbre when I was back in Paris hunting down my boyfriend. So I’d be able to hear Logan saying to me, Jesus, Hat, give it up, man, fuck. But then when he actually did talk it was a question that took me by surprise.
Hey, he said, were you around when Mom first went off the deep end?
No, I said.
No? he said. Well, where were you?
Well, I mean, yeah, I said. I mean, I guess so.
And? he said.
She’d gone out late one evening in February to have a nap under a tree in the field behind the giant Discount Everything store a few blocks from our house. It was so cold our pipes froze that night. It was my job to thaw them out. I had to wrap them up in blankets and then sit on the floor using a hair dryer to blow hot air on them. A barrel fuse blew that night too, and I had to rummage around in the dark with a flashlight.
I remember peering over the fuse box saying, stove, fridge, dryer, stove, fridge, dryer, over and over, trying to figure it out. It was a record cold night, minus fifty-something with a deadly wind chill. Our house was shaking, none of our doors would close, and empty pizza boxes were flying past our windows. It was the kind of night where if you froze to death they’d have had to set up a tent around your body with giant industrial heaters in it, just to be able to peel you off the ground. Even the cool kids were walking backwards down the street to keep the wind from killing them. It was snowing horizontally and the streets all over the city were buckling and collapsing and swallowing up traffic.
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.”
&
nbsp; 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.
They go into group homes, said Logan.
Or foster homes, I said. But only until they’re eighteen.
And then? asked Logan.
Well, I said, they go wherever. They do their thing. They’re adults then.
Hey, said Thebes. She punched Logan in the arm. Remember when you burst that blood vessel in your eye from vomiting so hard when you got drunk with your basketball team?
I still have it, he said. He opened his left eye wide and looked at Thebes.
Dude! she said. You should wear a patch. I’ll make you one.
They went on like that for a while. I was happy they were talking. Remembering. Reminiscing about their childhood, like it hadn’t all been one long march to the frozen Gulag.
But, said Logan, a fifteen-year-old could technically live on his own, right?
Okay, bad times are gonna roll, I thought. Logan is planning to run away before we find Cherkis.
No, a fifteen-year-old cannot live on his own, I said.
Pippi Longstocking wasn’t even fifteen, said Thebes, and she—
Yeah, but she was a character in a book, I said.
And she was Swedish, said Logan.
So there would have been a solid safety net of social programs to help keep her afloat, I said. It doesn’t work here.
Yeah, but the point of Pippi was that she didn’t need anybody or any social programs to help her, said Logan. She was that strong.
Yeah, I said, but unhumanly so. She could lift a horse. Can you?
Well, I don’t know, said Logan. A small one, maybe, but that’s not my point. There was more to her strength than that. It was—
You could so not lift a horse, said Thebes.
Yeah, I probably could, said Logan.
No, you couldn’t, she said. But I could probably flip a horse.
I could eat a horse, said Logan.
Oh, the things they could do to horses. They pingponged back and forth for a long time about horses and tough Swedish girls while I looked for a gas station and/or grocery store.
Min was married briefly to a grip a few years ago, long after Cherkis had hit the road. The grip’s name was Darius. They met on a movie set. Min was working as a driver, or maybe as a caterer. I wasn’t sure. When the shooting was finished, they drove down to Vegas to spend Min’s wages on blackjack. The plan was that if she and Darius made enough money from blackjack they would get married at the Elvis chapel, for the hell of it.
Logan didn’t care what they did. Min told me that he spent the entire time in Vegas in front of the cracked bathroom mirror of the hotel room perfecting his Robert De Niro impersonation and trying to get the family thrown out of as many casinos as he could.
Min and Darius chose package B, which included a limo to pick them up and drop them off, a medley of Elvis tunes by the impersonator, some flowers, a videotape of the wedding, and a guy named Juan to be the minister. Is it real or what? Darius asked Min. Of course it’s real, she told him. Not that she really cared. She didn’t care about being married to anyone, she just wanted to be loved. But she didn’t want to be taken care of. Or she did. She told me that Thebes had taken her hand and crammed it into Darius’s. She wore a dress that was red on the top and then gradually faded into light orange at the very bottom.
When they got home Darius lived with them for a while, but then decided that what he really needed for his personal growth was to get rid of his possessions and take a very long, indefinite trip to the North Pole. That’s great, Min said. She was tired of having all that self-esteem anyway. Blech. Feeling good was lousy for her art.
They said goodbye to Darius. He told Min she shouldn’t take it personally, that she had taught him so much about love, and he told Thebes he’d send her a Christmas present straight from Santa’s workshop. Right, right. He and Logan had nothing to say to each other.
Denver was coming up any minute but we decided to bypass it and veer off west on the I-70 towards the mountains, and the desirable land of Moab. Logan was reading a new Q magazine he’d bought at the last gas station. Thebes was reading over his shoul
der.
Hattie, she said, your boyfriend, Ryan Adams, is two-timing you with Winona Ryder.
I just said I liked his music, sort of, I said.
She told me her last assignment in school, before she was sprung, had been to research the life of an important individual in musical history.
Who did you do? I asked her.
Beyoncé Knowles, she said, from Destiny’s Child.
What do you think the odds are of me ever achieving knighthood? said Logan.
Oh, I said, sixteen to one, around there.
What do you have to do to be knighted? asked Thebes.
I don’t know, said Logan, something great.
Okay, here we go, I said. I pulled into a gas station and up to the pump.
Thebes wanted to pump the gas. She jumped out of the van with a karate kick and almost smashed into the other guy pumping gas. He looked at her like he was about to be assaulted by Happy the dwarf.
I don’t know, said Logan, but I think Thebes is starting to smell bad. I told him it was very considerate of him not to have mentioned it when she was around. I asked him if it was my job to get her to shower or bathe and he said he had no idea. He thought yeah, probably, and that she would need aggressive encouragement because it wasn’t really her thing. He got out of the van and suddenly there were about six Japanese teenagers standing around him. They pointed at his headphones and smiled. He smiled back at them.
Rock ’n’ roll? one of them said.
Yeah, said Logan. Rock ’n’ roll.
Rock ’n’ roll! said the guy.
Yes! said Logan. Rock ’n’ roll.
They were all smiling and feeling groovy. I told Logan I wanted to use the pay phone to call Min and he said he wanted to talk to her too.
The hospital said Min wasn’t available. Oh, I said, what exactly does that mean? They asked if they could phone me back later in the day, after rounds. No, see, I said, the thing is I’m at a pay phone. Can I phone you later?
