Choke

Chapter 47

ONE MORNING THE SCHOOL BUS PULLED UP TO THE CURB, and while his foster mother stood waving, the stupid little boy got on. He was the only passenger, and the bus blew past the school at sixty miles per hour. The bus driver was the Mommy.

This was the last time that she came back to claim him.

Sitting behind the huge steering wheel and looking up at him in the visor mirror, she said, "You'd be amazed how easy it is to rent one of these."

She turned into an on-ramp for the freeway and said, "This gives us a good six hours head start before the bus company reports this crate stolen."

The bus rolled down onto the freeway, and the city rolled by outside, and after there wasn't a house every second, the Mommy told him to come sit up next to her. She took a red diary from a bag of stuff and took out a map, all folded.

With one hand, the Mommy shook the map open across the steering wheel, and with her other hand she unrolled her window. She worked the steering wheel with her knees. With just her eyes, she looked back and forth between the road and the map.

Then she crumpled the map and fed it out the window.

The whole time, the stupid boy just sat there.

She said to get the red diary.

When he tried to give it, she said, "No. Open it to the next page." She said to find a pen in the glove compartment and fast, because there was a river coming up.

The road cut through everything, all the houses and farms and trees, and in a moment they were on a bridge going across a river that went off forever on both sides of the bus.

"Quick," the Mommy said. "Draw the river."

As if he'd just discovered this river, as if he'd just discovered the whole world, she said to draw a new map, a map of the world just for himself. His own personal world.

"I don't want you to just accept the world as it's given," she said.

She said, "I want you to invent it. I want you to have that skill. To create your own reality. Your own set of laws. I want to try and teach you that."

The boy had a pen now, and she said to draw the river in the book. Draw the river, and draw the mountains up ahead. And name them, she said. Not with words he already knew, but to make up new words that didn't already mean a bunch of other stuff.

To create his own symbols.

The little boy thought with the pen in his mouth and the book open in his lap, and after a little, he drew it all.

And what's stupid is, the little boy forgot all this. It wasn't until years later that the police detectives found this map. That he remembered he did this. That he could do this. He had this power.

And the Mommy looked at his map in the rearview mirror and said, "Perfect." She looked at her watch, and her foot pressed down, and they went faster, and she said, "Now write it in the book. Draw the river on our new map. And get ready, there's lots more stuff that needs a name coming up."

She said, "Because the only frontier left is the world of intangibles, ideas, stories, music, art."

She said, 'Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it."

She said, "Because I won't always be around to nag you."

But the truth is, the kid didn't want to be responsible for himself, for his world. The truth is, the stupid little shit was already planning to make a scene in the next restaurant, to get the Mommy arrested and out of his life forever. Because he was tired of adventure, and he thought his precious, boring, stupid life would just go on and on forever.

He was already choosing between safety, security, contentment, and her.

Driving the bus with her knees, the Mommy reached over and squeezed his shoulder and said, "What do you want for lunch?"

And as if it was just an innocent answer, the little boy said, "Corn dogs."