I’ve got an image of Gonzo sitting in his room alone feeling f**ked up and sad and I hate it, because now I feel responsible for him in a way I didn’t want to.
“You’re not going to say something cheesy like ‘people are like onions; they have lots of layers,’ are you?”
“Just trying to have a conversation. Forget it, dude. Whatever. Just play.”
He discards a two and I pick it up. I’ve got a pair of twos and that’s it. My cards suck.
“So, what’s your type?” Gonzo asks a few minutes later.
“Wow, let me think. Um, anyone who would have me.” I put another card on the pile. What is my type? A brief image of Dulcie with her armor and pink hair comes unbidden to mind. I push it away. “You know Staci Johnson?”
“Staci Johnson!” Gonzo snarls. “Say it ain’t so, dude! Staci Johnson is the devil’s spawn!”
“I know, I know. She has no working brain cells, a subpar personality, and nothing interesting to say ever, unless you’re into what happened last night on YA! TV. But once you make it past that, she’s seriously fine. Yo, I discarded.”
He ignores my card and draws from the stack. “Staci Johnson. Dude. I feel like I need to shave my insides when you say that.” Gonzo organizes his cards, moving one from the end to the center of his hand. “Well, maybe when you get back from Florida, you know? You’ll have that whole road-trip mystique working for you. Plus you will have saved the world. That’s gotta count.”
“And a tan,” I add, glancing at my flounder-belly-white arms.
“Tan works.”
“Also, I won’t be dying. Hopefully.”
“Always helpful.” He fans his cards out on the table. “Royal flush, Señor Pajero. You owe me four bags of chips.”
We’ve been on the road for six hours when my right leg starts to twitch uncontrollably. The E-ticket’s lost a little more color; Adventureland’s totally gone, and the second line, Frontierland, is a hazy green. I cross my left leg over my right and put my backpack on top, hoping no one will notice, hoping the twitching will pass soon. The tremor travels. My right arm goes tight. I can’t lift the sucker; it’s like lead. Please don’t let me have a seizure here. Please. Just let me make it to Florida. Out on the dark horizon, little bursts of flame pop up. They look just like the fire balls on top of the refineries. I even try to convince myself that that’s what they are. But my gut says it’s the fire giants out there. Getting stronger. Bigger. Waiting for me. My eyes get heavy watching them. The rhythm of the road lulls me to sleep.
“Cameron? I thought I’d read some more of Don Quixote to you.” Mom’s sitting beside me in my hospital bed, bathed in a pool of light. The curtains have been drawn sealing us into a little drapery cocoon. “Would you like that?”
Her voice wraps around me like a dryer-fresh blanket, and I drift in and out of the crazy knight’s amusing adventures with Sancho Panza. “‘Take my advice and live for a long, long time,’” Mom reads. “‘Because the maddest thing a man can do in this life is to let himself die.’”
After a while, Mom closes the book and strokes my hair. “It’s kind of nice, reading to you again,” she says. “Do you remember when you were a kid and in the summers we would go to the library? I’d let you pick out five books, and you could never wait till we got home. We’d have to find a corner and sit and read them all before we left the library.”
Why don’t I remember that? How could my mom and I have shared the same experience but I don’t remember it?
“Why did we stop doing that?” Mom wonders aloud. “We just stopped going. You didn’t want to, I think. And I was afraid of pushing you. I was always afraid of saying the wrong thing, so I stopped talking.”
Mom’s crying a little bit, quietly, the way she always does. She never utters a sound even when she’s crying, and that makes me a little sad. Doesn’t seem right. When you cry, people should hear you. The world should stop. I squeeze Mom’s hand and she squeezes back. I don’t say anything, but at least she knows I’ve heard her.
People drift in and out in my dream like actors in a play. Eubie comes to visit. He slips headphones on my ears so I can hear “Cypress Grove Blues,” and I want to tell him that I’ve been to New Orleans, that I’ve seen Junior Webster, that I played bass for him, but it’s a dream, and the words won’t come. At one point, Dad sits on my bed, reading to me from a physics paper he’s grading that’s about supercolliders.
