100 Sideways Miles (25 page)

But as I lay there, something remarkable happened. I heard the sound of Cade Hernandez actually opening a book, thumbing through pages. Despite the heavy musk of cigarettes, sweat, cleanser, and beer in our room, I could actually
smell
the sweet paper scent of a book.

I fought the impulse to look at him, telling myself,
Do not open your eyes and look at what Cade Hernandez is reading. You know it's going to be porn or something awful and embarrassing.

But it was too much for me to take. I had to look.

When I sat up and peered over our wall, I said, “You have got to be fucking kidding me, Cade.”

Cade Hernandez was reading—in the middle of—
The Lazarus Door
by Easton Michaels, my dad.

It was awful and embarrassing.

“Yeah, I know. Ridiculous, huh? Am I the only person in the world who hasn't read this thing yet?”

“Uh.”

“I started it a couple days ago, after you quit talking to everyone.”

Cade took a swig of beer and continued. “When you think about it, it's kind of pathetic—I realized I don't have any real friends except for you and Julia and Monica Fassbinder, and I got so bored
'cause there was nobody to talk to and no one for me to hang out with this week, so I decided to actually
read a fucking book
.”

He turned the page. “So don't bother me. And if you're going to stay up and stare at me while I read a book, you should be quiet and have another beer, Little Bitch.”

“Okay, Cinco Dólares.”

My head was spinning.

Cade reached down into the ice chest he'd wedged between his side of the bed and the wall. He pulled up a dripping brown bottle of beer.

“Here,” he said.

I sat cross-legged in West Berlin and drank.

“Dude,” Cade said, “you're in this book.”

“I know.”

“Do you eat anyone?”

“No.”

“Do you get killed?”

“It's not really me,” I said. “My dad just named the kid Finn.”

“And the incomers just happen to have different-colored eyes and that same thing on their backs as you.”

Cade peered over the top of the Berlin Wall. Unblinking. Staring at the heterochromatic alien boy in the bed next to him, craning his neck to see my naked back.

“If I wake up in the middle of the night and you're chewing on my thigh, I'm going to be pissed.”

“Don't fuck with me, Cade.”

I turned on my light.

“There's a hell of a lot of sex in this book.”

“I know. I've read it. You're only halfway through. Just wait.”

“It's kind of creepy—thinking about your dad thinking about sex.”

“Then don't think about it.”

“You got to wonder about a guy who thinks up a story about angels who eat people after they have sex with them, and then puts his
own kid
in the book.”

“It's not me, dumbshit. It's just a story. Fiction.”

Cade said, “But I never knew your dad thinks up shit like this. He is seriously fucked up.”

I sighed. “Everyone says that to me. It's just a book, okay. He's a writer; he makes shit up. People take it way too serious. There've even been some wackos who said they wanted to kill him for writing that book.”

“I thought about killing the fucker who wrote our calculus book.”

I nodded. “Yeah. So did I.”

“That asshole probably never thinks about sex.”

“Calculus is as effective a deterrent to sex as castration.”

Cade nodded thoughtfully. “You got an A in it. Virgin.”

“Uh. So did you, Cade.”

Cade took another drink and shrugged. “Still, if I was all into the Bible and going to church and shit, I'd probably be pissed off at your dad too. He's got balls to fuck around with making fun of angels and God and shit. People go to war over that shit.”

“Whatever.”

I lay down and stared up at the smoke stains on the cottage-cheese ceiling.

“Well, I can't wait to see what happens to you in the book.”

“It's not me.”

“Do you at least get
laid 
?”

“Shut up.”

“Did you ever get pissed off at him for putting shit about you in the book?”

Twenty miles.

Twenty miles.

I said, “Yes.”

In a motel room east of Gallup, New Mexico, as we lay separated by the Berlin Wall that cut lengthwise down our king-size bed, I told Cade Hernandez the story of
The Boy in the Book
—the shadow play Julia Bishop imagined for me on the night of my seventeenth birthday. Despite all his assumptions about what may have gone on sexually between Julia and me that night, it was the first time I'd ever said anything about it to my best friend.

Cade said, “Your dad was the monster.”

“I think it was a tiger.”

“Dude. She's, like, magic or something, for knowing that shit about you.”

“I know.”

• • •

In the morning, I used the cord-and-dial telephone in our motel room to call my father. I felt awkward and guilty about avoiding him, as though every sorrow in my universe had spilled out of his pen, and that he was to blame for everything.
But it was Saturday, after all—our usual morning to have coffee together—and I knew I'd have to get it over with and talk to Dad sooner rather than later.

Cade Hernandez, accomplished sleeper that he was, snored throughout the entire conversation, his face buried beneath a portion of the wall, a somnambulist's unfinished escape tunnel out of the Soviet sector on our king-size bed.

I told Dad I'd lost my phone in Arizona; that it must have fallen out of my pocket. The story was so close to actually being the truth that I did not feel like a liar for saying it. Still, Dad sounded especially doubtful when I added that Cade had forgotten his phone back home in Burnt Mill Creek.

So there was no way for Dad to get hold of us.

Teenagers without cell phones: Imagine that.

I had to promise I would call home later that night from wherever Cade and I got a room. We had a nine-hour drive ahead of us to northern Oklahoma and Dunston University. The school's enrollment fair was set to open the next day, on Sunday.

When I hung up, I leaned across the Berlin Wall to see if Cade was still asleep. I considered phoning Julia, but only until Cade Hernandez's muffled voice rose like hot sewer gas from beneath a sofa cushion: “Get the fuck away from me.”

“You told me to wake you up at six. It's six thirty. That's, like, thirty-six thousand miles past six.”

“Stop it,” Cade moaned. “I fucking hate math. I fucking hate everything when I'm hungover. Please get me some water, dude. Please. I stayed up too late finishing that goddamned book.”

Apparently, my dad's novel was not the only thing Cade Hernandez finished after I fell asleep. Empty beer bottles lay scattered all over East Berlin.

I went to the bathroom and ran cold water into a motel glass I unwrapped from a crinkled wax-paper bag.

“Here.”

Cade, hair crazy and eyes glazed, sat up from behind the Wall and gulped all the water, spilling at least a third of it down his chest and onto his lap.

I took the glass and refilled it.

Cade said, “And how the hell could he end it like that? He can't just leave you there—alone—and with all those fucking doors opening everywhere. It gave me fucking nightmares. I need to know what's going to happen next.”

“Look: two things. First, it is
not me
. Second, you're supposed to figure it out for yourself.”

“Horseshit. Make him write another book.”

“I can't. He won't. So deal with it.”

“When we go back home, I'm going to give him an aneurysm for fucking with my head like that.”

“Uh.”

Cade combed his fingers through his wild hair. “Okay. I'll tell him if he writes another book, I'll let him put me in it. He can even kill me if he wants.”

“That's bound to work, Cade.”

I made a third trip to the bathroom sink to get my friend more water.

• • •

The First words of my father's novel are these:

My dear child: When these immigrants arrive, they do not come as passengers carried in the bellies of mechanical whales.

There are no lights, no music of thunder.

One of the first arrivals lands in the calm center of an eye on a black Oregon lingcod lying curled, an orphaned parenthesis atop a pillow of crushed ice at a stall rented by a fishmonger named Mr. Otani.

The place smells of lemon and damp unfinished wood.

• • •

Everything served for breakfast at La Posada Restaurant came with a choice of hash browns or grits.

“What's
grits
?” Cade asked.

After we checked out of the E-Z Rest, Cade and I stopped for breakfast before settling in to the final leg of our long drive.

“They're made from hominy,” I explained.

“What's that?”

“It's kind of—I don't really know. Gigantic white corn or something.”

“Does it taste like corn?”

“Not really.”

Cade Hernandez squinted and leered at me from the corner of his eye.

“How come you know so much about grits and hominy and shit like that?”

“Grits taste exactly like human meat.”

Cade nodded. “I thought that must be it.”

We both ate our first-ever grits with breakfast at La Posada. Our waitress, a short woman with ample breasts whose name was Florencia, according to the bright sombrero-shaped badge pinned to her pink apron, told us the way her husband preferred to eat his grits was with salt, butter, and a few drops of hot sauce.

The grits tasted very good.

Cade said, “If this is what human meat tastes like, it's no wonder you fuckers all came through those doors after us.”

“Told you so.”

“Can you do that thing?”

“What thing?”

“You know—like the incomers do in the book—stimulate the Wiener area in my brain so I hear you telling me something you want me to do.”

“I think your entire brain is a Wiener area.”

“That kind of gives me a boner.”

“Can you hear me telling you to shut the fuck up?”

Cade Hernandez smiled and nodded. “Yep.”

• • •

Look: It can be proved by observing the motion of objects in the universe that wherever you are is the precise center.

No matter how fast you move, you will never get anywhere if that's the case.

That afternoon, Cade Hernandez and I traversed the desolate panhandle of Texas and crossed over the line into Oklahoma.

It felt so distant from San Francisquito Canyon and home. And this was nothing—a moment of motion through space—but I wondered at all that distance above and below me, how big this universe might actually be; how fast it all moved.

Eighty miles away from Dunston—four seconds in Earth time—the first bullet-gray, thumb-size drops of rain plunked down all over the blacktop and Cade's truck, pelting us with a staccato machine-gun peppering—
thak! thak! thak!

Within a few minutes, the curtains of rain became so heavy and dark, we could not see more than ten feet ahead of us on the highway.

“It's a fucking flood,” Cade said.

To be more accurate, Cade Hernandez practically shouted. The roar of the rain was deafening.

I did not know whether it was an actual flood, but I had never seen rain as heavy as what fell on us in Oklahoma that day. Comparing the rainstorms I'd seen in California with what we drove through that August afternoon was like comparing a parakeet's birdbath with the twelve-billion-gallon St. Francis Reservoir.

The highway transformed into a slate-colored river, spiked and prickled by relentless fat globules of rain. Cade slowed the truck, or perhaps, I thought, the rain pushed so hard against us that surface gravity doubled on the planet of humans and dogs.

“This is ridiculous,” I said.

“I should pull over, but I can't tell where
over
is.”

In fact, the road and all markings on it had been swallowed up beneath the rising black waters. Cade navigated by aiming his steering wheel toward two pinpoints of red—the taillights on
whatever car was driving ahead of us. All around, everything else blended into an indistinguishable, borderless cascade of blurring gray streaks.

“Holy shit!” Cade swerved and braked.

An eighteen-wheel tractor-trailer rig—a whale in the rain—passed on our left, going more than double our speed. It sprayed a blinding sheet of rainwater that washed over Cade's windshield and nearly swept us from the road.

“Maybe we should stop and wait it out,” I said.

But when the truck passed the next car ahead of us, covering it with spray, the two little red lights we followed veered sharply to the right and then vanished—winked out—completely.