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.To see if maybe he’d heard from her.From the Mommy.If maybe he knew where she was hiding.About this same time, several hundred very angry customers flooded into a fur salon with fifty-percent-discount coupons they got in the mail.About this time, a thousand very scared people arrived at the county sexually transmitted disease clinic, demanding to be tested after they received letters on the county letterhead warning them that some former sex partner had been diagnosed with an infectious disease.The police detectives took the little stooge downtown in a plain car and then upstairs in a plain building and sat with him and his foster mother, asking, has Ida Mancini attempted to contact you?Have you any idea from where she’s receiving funds?Why do you think she’s doing these awful things?And the little boy just waited.Help would come soon enough.The Mommy, she used to tell him she was sorry.People had been working for so many years to make the world a safe, organized place.Nobody realized how boring it would become.With the whole world property-lined and speed-limited and zoned and taxed and regulated, with everyone tested and registered and addressed and recorded.Nobody had left much room for adventure, except maybe the kind you could buy.On a roller coaster.At a movie.Still, it would always be that kind of faux excitement.You know the dinosaurs aren’t going to eat the kids.The test audiences have outvoted any chance of even a major faux disaster.And because there’s no possibility of real disaster, real risk, we’re left with no chance for real salvation.Real elation.Real excitement.Joy.Discovery.Invention.The laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom.Without access to true chaos, we’ll never have true peace.Unless everything can get worse, it won’t get any better.This is all stuff the Mommy used to tell him.She used to say, “The only frontier you have left is the world of intangibles.Everything else is sewn up too tight.”Caged inside too many laws.By intangibles, she meant the Internet, movies, music, stories, art, rumors, computer programs, anything that isn’t real.Virtual realities.Make-believe stuff.The culture.The unreal is more powerful than the real.Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.Because it’s only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last.Stone crumbles.Wood rots.People, well, they die.But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.If you can change the way people think, she said.The way they see themselves.The way they see the world.If you do that, you can change the way people live their lives.And that’s the only lasting thing you can create.Besides, at some point, the Mommy used to say, your memories, your stories and adventures, will be the only things you’ll have left.At her last trial, before this last time she went to jail, the Mommy had sat up next to the judge and said, “My goal is to be an engine of excitement in people’s lives.”She’d stared straight into the stupid little boy’s eyes and said, “My purpose is to give people glorious stories to tell.”Before the guards took her into the back wearing handcuffs, she’d shouted, “Convicting me would be redundant.Our bureaucracy and our laws have turned the world into a clean, safe work camp.”She shouted, “We are raising a generation of slaves.”And it was back to prison for Ida Mancini.“Incorrigible” isn’t the right word, but it’s the first word that comes to mind.The unidentified woman, the one who ran down the aisle during the ballet, she was screaming, “We are teaching our children to be helpless.”Running down the aisle and out a fire exit, she’d yelled, “We’re so structured and micromanaged, this isn’t a world anymore, it’s a damn cruise ship.”Sitting, waiting with the police detectives, the stupid little shitface troublemaker asked if maybe the defense lawyer Fred Hastings could be there, too.And one detective said a filthy word under his breath.And right then, the fire alarm bell went off.And even with the bell ringing, the detectives still asked:“DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW TO GET IN TOUCH WITH YOUR MOTHER?”Screaming against the bell, they asked:“CAN YOU AT LEAST TELL US WHO SHE MIGHT TARGET NEXT?”Shouting against the alarm, the foster mother asked:“DON’T YOU WANT TO HELP US HELP HER?”And the alarm stopped.A lady stuck her head in the door and said, “Don’t panic, guys.It looks like another false alarm.”A fire alarm is never about a fire, not anymore.And this dumb-fuck little boy says, “May I use your bathroom?”Chapter 26The half-moon looks up at us, reflected in a silver pie tin of beer.Denny and me kneel in somebody’s backyard, and Denny kicks away the snails and slugs with little kicks of his index finger.Denny lifts the pie tin, full to the brim, bringing his reflection and his real face closer and closer until his fake lips meet his own lips.Denny drinks about half the beer and says, “This is how they drink beer in Europe, dude.”Out of slug traps?“No, dude,” Denny says.He hands me the pie tin and says, “Flat and warm.”I kiss my own reflection and drink, the moon watching over my shoulder.On the sidewalk waiting for us is a baby stroller with its wheels splayed out wider at the bottom than the top.The bottom of the stroller drags against the ground, and wrapped in the pink baby blanket is a boulder of sandstone too big for Denny or me to lift.A pink rubber baby head is balanced inside the top edge of the blanket [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]