Going Bovine

I imagine all sorts of things this time: Mom and Dad and Jenna back at the hospital. Kids too poor to have Christmas. Beloved pets being put to sleep. Losing all my Great Tremolo CDs. Pep rallies. Still I hit strike after strike after strike. I couldn’t lose if I tried, and I am definitely trying.

“Not so fun anymore, is it? Now for the rest of our experiment …” Library Girl pulls a magnet from her pocket and does something to the console with it. Then she uses the magnet on the other lanes. “This time, do what they say: embrace the positive.”

I close my eyes and say my mantra: You can do it if you think you can. You deserve to win.

When I launch the ball, it rolls down the center and drifts off to the side, sliding into the gutter and out of sight without knocking down a single pin. “Whoa. What just happened?”

Library Girl holds up her magnet. “They’re magnetized. There’s a little magnet in the ball and another in the gutters. They repel the ball. Like I said, you can’t lose. You achieve every time.”

“But it’s not an achievement if the game’s rigged.”

Library Girl holds up two fingers on each hand, making quote marks in the air. “Failure doesn’t increase your happiness.”

I give it six, seven more tries, and the best I can do is take out four pins. “Maybe you made the game too hard now,” I say.

“Or maybe you’re just not that awesome, special, and perfect all the time.”

“That’s harsh,” I say, even though my gut says she’s right; I’ve sort of gotten used to hearing only the good stuff. “But what about what they say here, that competition hurts your happiness. We have to get rid of our bad feelings to be happy.”

She rolls her eyes and lets out a growl. “You can’t ‘get rid’ of any of your feelings! We’re human beings! When some jerk pisses me off, I have the urge to kick the living shit out of him. But I can’t, because if we went around kicking people all the time, we’d never be able to buy groceries or take the dog for a walk or eat out. It would be complete chaos. That’s why we have civilization. And table manners.”

“Exactly! But that’s why this church exists. To make us better people. And to be better people, we have to get rid of all our negative feelings.”

“No. We have to learn to live with them. What if those so-called negative feelings are useful?” Library Girl spins the shiny pink ball that’s sitting on the metal grid waiting for a game. It wobbles like the Earth on its axis. “I mean, suppose you take your anger and you channel it into a painting. Pretty soon, you don’t care about getting back at that idiot who pissed you off anymore because you’re totally into your painting. And then maybe that painting hangs in a gallery someday and it inspires other people to find their thing, whatever it is. You’ve influenced the world not because you wanted to hug it and cuddle it and call it sweet thing but because one day you wanted to beat the crap out of somebody but you didn’t. You made a painting instead. And you couldn’t have made that painting without that feeling, without something to push off against. We human beings can’t evolve without the pain.”

“What do you mean?”

“Bad stuff happens.” She flicks out a switchblade and cuts through one of the commando ropes that’s been left hanging after an earlier sadness incident and wraps the length around her wrist. “People fail. They get dumped. They bomb tests. They lose the big game or screw up in a hundred small ways or get rejected or have to start over. They feel confused and scared. Or sometimes they just don’t feel like they fit in. They’re part of some kind of primal, universal loneliness and that’s just the way it is and you have to learn to deal and a big vanilla smoothie is not the answer, you know?”

“But what if we didn’t have to feel that?”

“But we do! It’s what makes us human.”

“So you don’t think human beings can be made happy.”

“I didn’t say that,” she says, fashioning the rope into a sort of double bracelet with a sliding knot. “I just don’t think happiness is a sustainable state. You can’t have it all the time. That much happiness makes people unhappy. And then they start looking for trouble. They start looking for the next thing that’s going to make them happy—a happiness fix.”

I feel like a balloon slowly settling to earth, slightly deflated but kind of glad the trip is over. It’s weird, but it’s sort of a relief not to have to be happy all the time.