Going Bovine

I don’t know if he means the pictures or me.

I pick up a copy of the Don Quixote Fake It! Notes and a bottle opener with a padded handle that reads SCREW ME just to piss Dad off. It’s a long bus ride out to our subdivision, so I thumb through the free weekly rag I picked up at Eubie’s.

Strange Fires Sighted in Several States. “The world is ending for sure,” says Reverend Iggy Norant.

Roadrunner Bus Company: Just Follow the Feather to Your Next Adventure.

Missing Scientist May be Time Traveler to Other Worlds.

Troubled Teens? For everlasting satisfaction, send them to our church.

Did you suffer adverse effects from Human Growth Hormone? If so, you could join our class action suit today.

Secret Super Collider Could be Breakthrough—or Swallow Our Planet in Black Hole!

X Marks the Spot, Says Top Disease Dr.: “I’ve cheated death, and so can you!”

Ragnarok On! Learn ancient Norse in the comfort of your own home: call now and get bonus rune pendant absolutely free!

Need a Job? Exciting opportunities exist with United Snow Globe Wholesalers: Freezing life behind glass. Call 1-800-555-1212.

I finish the paper. There are still a few miles to go, though, so I read the first few chapters of Don Quixote. The Fake It! Notes tell me that Cervantes is satirizing the culture of idealism. The only thing I know about Don Quixote is that he and his sidekick go off and have imaginary adventures, battling windmills disguised as giants and that sort of thing. No windmills outside the bus window. Just rows and rows of houses that all look pretty much the same. Sure, some are two stories; some are ranches. A few even have that big round turret for a garage like some kind of ridiculous suburban castle. But they’re the same house spaced out every five houses or so by other houses that have matches throughout the neighborhood. When I was a kid I was always afraid I’d wander into the wrong house and the wrong life by mistake. Now that sounds pretty good.

The sky’s amazing, though. Bright blue, like paint right out of the tube before you water it down. The clouds are bouncy little mattresses up there. Something flutters past my window, making me jump. It’s a flock of birds taking off for the cloud beds. They must have come a little too close to the bus for comfort. I watch them till they’re nothing but specks. And for a second, I see something else in the sky, a flutter of wings too big to be anything I can name.

CHAPTER FIVE

Wherein I Have a Very Strange Encounter While Stoned and Employ a Frying Pan in My Defense

There’s a note on the fridge: Cam, home by 10:00. Lasagna in freezer. If you use the toaster oven, unplug it afterward. It overheats. Mom. There’s a hastily added Love you squeezed in before her name in a different-color ink. It’s the personal touch that means so much.

Mom teaches English comp, single-celled organism level, at the community college. She could be teaching a challenging English lit class somewhere good, but she never finished her dissertation or whatever it is you need to become a bona fide PhD. Mom has trouble finishing stuff. The house is crowded with half-scribbled-in crossword puzzles, books with the bookmarks in the middle, bags of knitting, scarves she got halfway through and then abandoned.

The lasagna is totally freezer-burned, cold and inedible, so I dial up a pizza. True to their ad campaign, Happy Time Pizzeria delivers within thirty minutes—complete with bonus mega-ounce sodas and cinnamon-frosted-bread dessert product—and I’m camped in the recliner, scarfing down my slices in the middle of our large, empty family room.

I have a special relationship with the remote control. I like to think of it as my own personal divining rod, taking me safely past nighttime soap operas, used car commercials, televangelists, and medical trauma shows. It stops briefly on a repeat showing of Star Fighter, the cult metaphysical action movie all kids between the age of nine and thirteen have to see at least ten times before they can pass into puberty. No kidding—there are kids who can quote the whole damn thing.

I let the screen idle on the news while I roll a J. Quick pictures stretch out across our TV’s full forty-two inches: young guys in camouflage holding guns while guarding a desert. Bloody kids crying in the blown-up streets of some foreign city. A follow-up story on a store bombing last Christmas. A commercial with Parker Day’s suntanned face hawking Rad XL soda. Back to the grim report and a local story, a fire in a neighborhood across town. The flames make me think about my weird dream in Spanglish class today, and I get a funny feeling inside, like when you’re driving around a sharp curve on a one-lane road and you can’t see what’s coming. The reporter says something about similarities to another fire and the authorities’ fears that an arsonist is on the loose. And then they switch to a story about celebrity baby names and some starlet who named her bundle of joy Iphigenia.