The Portable Veblen

15 I MELT WITH YOU

Little did Veblen know that Paul, in a fit of jealousy so painful it shocked him, in realizing how little he knew about the woman he loved and wished to marry, convinced that she was spending the night with someone in a motel somewhere, some monster stubborn and bulky and impassable trying to take away the only thing that had ever mattered to him, who wanted to suffocate him, who wanted to break his bones and crack his neck and leave him for dead, was about to do something he’d never considered doing to any living being, let alone Veblen. He dumped Shalev back at the parking lot at the VA (after ranting about Hutmacher’s flagrant misuse of the Animal Rule, then enduring Shalev’s lurid reprisal of the pharmaceutical murder in The Fugitive and how Paul had better look out), and drove to Veblen’s house, where he commenced to ransack her drawers, cabinets, closets, even pulling all the boxes from under her bed, looking for any scrap of betrayal.

He was panting, sweating, his heart on the gallop. In the melee he found old belts and ugly clothes stuffed in bags. He found old tangled telephones and a repulsive carving of turtles in a conga line. He found outdated samples of Paxil, Zoloft, and Prozac in the back of a drawer — what the hell? Was she on antidepressants? Why hadn’t she told him? In her underwear drawer he found a bar of soap he’d given her, and a pressed flower from the side of the road where they’d made love, wrapped in a small plastic sleeve.

In her bedside drawer were nail scissors, an inhaler, a pencil sharpener with a picture of an elephant on it, a pouch full of lavender, a stash of bookmarks from Kepler’s bookstore on El Camino, and a small brass bell.

Under the bed, in long flat boxes, he found folders with clips from the high school newspaper that Veblen had written. He found folders full of articles printed from the Web about Thorstein Veblen. He found folders stuffed full of random pictures clipped from old magazines — lots of animals, nature scenes, people with strange expressions on their faces. Everything he found made him love her more, but anger drove him to unearth something damning. He opened one notebook and saw “The Adventures of Hexi Pu, Chinese Girl Detective with a Shriveled Arm” typed on yellowed newsprint.

Hexi Pu liked to solve mysteries even though she had a shriveled arm. She thought that maybe the shriveled arm would attract attention, but it didn’t, so she was able to solve lots of crimes anyway. Sometimes having a shriveled arm allowed her to get sympathy and a way into people’s lives, better than if she had a normal arm. Also, being Chinese was a plus. People tended to think she was smart and shy, maybe a disciplined musician. They didn’t suspect she was a detective. Also it was hard to tell her age. She could still pass as a girl, even go into high schools under cover.

Hexi Pu liked asparagus and broccoli so much that she married an asparagus and broccoli farmer. His name was Dan. Dan also farmed other veggies but he increased production of asparagus and broccoli after marrying Hexi Pu. He liked her shriveled arm, it reminded him of a little kitten.

Paul shook his head and flipped through another notebook.

There is something that makes me feel like a wishbone.

Why did he want to marry a woman who wrote about shriveled arms and felt like a wishbone?

It was damp under the myrtle tree, and it was damp under Myrtle.

This made Paul strangely horny. She bewildered him. She put her energies into lost causes and scraps!

He pawed for love notes and confessions. He came upon manila envelopes stuffed with old correspondence from friends, from grandparents, and then, in a special folder, dozens of letters pressed in bundles tied with string. They had been written with a fountain pen by some guy named Luke, the pompous ass!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And were covered with sketches of machinery and buildings, as if little Lukey fancied himself a budding Leonardo.

I’m writing you from the Place Concorde, looking at the Eiffel Tower.

In Paris, one tends to be overwhelmed. The buildings are gorgeous and the boulevards wide and beautiful. Vienna was beautiful, but on a smaller scale. Vienna was only “whelming.”

What an asshole!!!!!!

He moved like there was cement in his joints, shoving the boxes back under the bed, closing the drawers, feeling like he’d raped her space and made himself all the more unworthy of her love.

A sampling of what’s on her bookshelves: Don Quixote; Leaves of Grass; Candide; The Vested Interests and the Common Man; Sult; Min kamp; Ut og stjæle hester; The Horse and His Boy; Absentee Ownership; The Tale of Benjamin Bunny; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; Achieving Our Country; The Story of George Washington Carver; Mrs. Dalloway; The Innocents at Cedro; Watership Down; U.S.A.; Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity; The Tale of Peter Rabbit; Our Master’s Voice; The Portable Veblen.

He paced around her cluttered little cottage, gasping for salvation. What had she been Googling lately? There was no stopping him, he was turning more despicable by the second. He flipped on her desktop. In her history he scrolled through World Heritage Sites, France, Roman ruins, Orange. This was good! This had to do with their honeymoon ideas, and he felt instantly cheered. Then he saw squirrels, cute squirrels, great squirrel migrations, and sciurophobia. Aha! She wanted to pin a phobia on him, pathologize him! Continuing down the history: are college degrees really important, irritability, families of disabled, psychologists Palo Alto. Goddamn it!

He’d resisted the impulse to analyze her gray matter, the way you never want to truly imagine eating human flesh or find the buttocks of a male friend sexy. You have the capacity to run any image through your mind, but some of them you pass up. Hypoxia set in, of the magnitude of the night terrors he’d experienced as a child, loathing infinity.

In the hallway he came face-to-face with the great Thorstein Veblen, Veblen’s god, the man she most admired, the grand inquisitor presiding over their lives. Who needed him? Who said he was welcome here? Fuck you, asshole! In what could only be called a hallucination, Paul suddenly felt a stout sense of presence, as if Thorstein Veblen were standing before him, confronting him over his bourgeois materialism, his peevish personality, and, most of all, his unsuitability for Veblen Amundsen-Hovda. Paul’s fist flew out and sent a spider web of cracks across the surface of the glass, and the picture fell off the wall. Droplets of blood rose on his knuckles.

Shit. What was he doing? He had to blow this joint. He slammed the front door as if a good slam could help, and then he stomped angrily into Palo Alto as if an angry stomp could help. Now what? Now what! Cursing and nearly sobbing, he forgot where he was going and why, but then found himself slumped at a bar in a bistro, full of loud talk and the smells of olive oil and garlic, where he ordered himself a vodka straight up, and then another. He ordered some bruschetta from a gorgeous woman with pale skin and a piercing on her nose, a heart-shaped face, and a jade pendant shaped like a lily pad against her chest, with her hair up and little tendrils hanging down around her neck, the skin on her chest the texture of a neonate’s. Other women would have him, wouldn’t they? A doctor? He could have someone new in a week. A day. Right now! Somebody smart and beautiful… someone who bored and annoyed him… selfish and vain… no. There was only one woman for him in the world.

He imagined telling his parents the wedding was off, and receiving their undivided scorn for the rest of his life.

He managed to crunch the bruschetta with some delicacy, so that the woman behind the bar wouldn’t think he was a pig, all the while wishing he were alone so that he could crunch it like a pig, and crumbs and grease could fly. The woman looked his way, and smiled a few times. He probably looked troubled, an invitation to anyone who noticed.

It had not been a foregone conclusion that he would come as far as he had. And yet to look at him you would not know his achievements gave him much pleasure.

• • •

HONORS BIOLOGY, tenth grade. Sixteen years old, testicles hot and itching, pimples pressing up on his chest. Fascinated by the paradox of the digestive system, he wrote his first scientific inquiry, “Why the Stomach Doesn’t Digest Itself,” in the fall, and his teacher, old Mr. Gielow, with his funny two-tone glasses and his leprechaun-shaped head, told him it was the best damned student work he’d seen in all his years at South Humboldt High. He told Paul, who had been struggling to find his niche academically, that he was a natural scientist, and asked him what he planned to do for the science fair, where he could make a big splash.

“I’m thinking of assembling a bunch of snails to prove that they make sounds when under duress,” Paul said.

Gielow frowned. “Now, is this in contention? I don’t know much about this.”

“I don’t either,” Paul said. “I really want to find out.”

“What kind of duress?” Gielow wanted to know. “We need to follow the guidelines of the Animal Welfare Act.”

“Invertebrates aren’t covered by the Animal Welfare Act,” Paul said. “Anyway, it’s not like I’m going to feed them Sluggo. I’m putting them in a crowded bucket.”

“All right. And then?”

“So the project will be to observe and record them until I get my results.”

Because Gielow had never tried to cut him down or discourage him in any way, Paul told him the story behind it all, from when he was ten years old, peeling snails from the stumps and rocks in the garden, from the broadsides of kohlrabi leaves and rhubarb, across which they’d strewn their silvery trails. It was one of his chores to fill a pail with them and take them to the hen house. This one morning he had counted seventy-two, sliming and squirming, eyes extended on thick rubbery stems — and it had been faint at first, rising to a shrill pitch. He came charging with his bucket back to the house.

“The snails were screaming!”

“I’d scream too if you were feeding me to the chickens,” said Marion, who was flipping zucchini pancakes on a blackened griddle.

“It sounded like—” He dropped his jaw to strike the right pitch.

Justin sat at the table spooning up his daily bowl of mush. He said, “Like this, Paul?” and began to imitate Paul imitating snails in a most loud and lunkish manner, yodeling so cavernously Paul could see his fleshy uvula, hanging in his throat like a slug.

Paul began to gag. “Cut it out!”

Not Justin, no way.

“Shut up!” Paul heaved a few times, but Justin’s yodel only grew louder, and Paul went over and slugged him squarely in the chest.

“All right. Go to your room and calm down,” said Bill. “Do you hear me?”

“He wrecks everything!”

“Wrecking what?”

“Dad, I heard snails screaming!”

“You punched your brother for that? Go to your room and take a deep breath and pull yourself together!”

Gielow grasped it all. “So you want vindication.”

Paul nodded with gratitude. “Exactly.”

Gielow said, “My brother was a bastard too. No better motivation. I know you’ll do an excellent job.”

Later at the library, Paul’s friend Mrs. Brown helped him find two promising references, Invertebrates Around Us and Gastropoda Today. Zeroing in on Helix aspersa, the common garden variety, Paul searched for documentation. At home he set up his experimentation center, a stress-inducing bucket with a microphone affixed, and filled it with at least seventy robust snails. He took pictures of every step of the process, prepared the abstract, drew diagrams, and was well ahead of the deadline, giving himself plenty of leeway lest the circumstances that caused snails to scream be difficult to reproduce.

He learned there were more than thirty-five thousand species, making Gastropoda the second largest class of organisms on earth. He studied diagrams of the pulmonary vein, the pedal ganglia, the buccal mass, the dart sac, and dissected a number of hapless standbys in the process. A great deal was made in the literature over the fact that the internal structure of Helix aspersa was asymmetrical, but Paul found it much more interesting that snails were hermaphroditic, possessing the organs of both sexes.

Early on he had one unexpected result — snails seemed to enjoy escargot. Almost every night there were one or two fewer in the bucket, thin fragments of shell scattered on the bottom. Cannibals! Paul planned to make much of this repugnant discovery and found supporting text in Gastropoda Today, and maybe that should have been enough. Maybe he should have been satisfied with the unexpected, rather than insisting on a predetermined result. After all, many of the greatest discoveries of all time were purely accidental, falling under the heading of what scientist Max Delbruck named “The Principle of Limited Sloppiness.” Look at Sir Alexander Fleming and his moldy petri dish, which led to penicillin. Look at Pasteur trying to kill some chickens but vaccinating them instead. Roentgen playing around with vacuum tubes, nothing to do with seeing people through to the bones!

So what else had factored into his discovery that distant morning? Paul recalled the old battle of the crack. He and Justin had shared a bedroom for years (until Paul seized the old laundry room as one of his first steps on the road to self-definition) and Justin’s things had always taken up a lot more space than his. Justin had a wheelchair for occasional use, a sleep apnea machine that roared, and big bulky clothes and shoes, and he wore braces on his legs then. But brothers shared rooms, Bill insisted. He’d always shared a room with his brother Richard. There was no reason Paul and Justin couldn’t. Paul’s bed was stuck behind the door, and one day he deliberately pushed it away from the wall about a foot. And every time he came back into the room, the bed had been pushed back. Diligently, he’d pull it out again. At night, as his parents whispered between themselves and came to Justin’s cries when he fell out of bed, Paul faced the wall and the crack between it and him and fostered an angry determination to hold on to the space no matter what. In the mornings, as they dressed for school, Justin always had to stub a toe on the protruding bed and, with an exaggerated bellow, try to squeeze Paul’s crack out of existence.

Were the screams of the snails something he’d fabricated to assert himself? To show he had a will? One afternoon, alone with the mute gastropods, Paul began to think the screaming-snail memory was, after all, a myth of his cheerless youth. Like the myth that peace signs and slogans such as War Is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things were ever going to change a fucked-up thing.

In kindergarten, did he really chase a girl all around the school who wouldn’t accept his Valentine?

• • •

1995. BY ALL ACCOUNTS, the van and the people pouring from it that day looked like they belonged in Clinton-era Humboldt. Many of them lived off the grid themselves, in parts of New Mexico, Oregon, as far as Saskatchewan. There was a man with blond dreadlocks, another man with brown dreadlocks, a Jamaican with black dreads streaming down his back, a woman wearing a sari tied around her waist, blond hair caught in it. Wiry weathered men jumped out, grabbed duffel bags and army surplus ammo cases, not for real ammo but to keep cameras and valuables dry on the river.

There were Marshall and Kip, with their cutoffs and bare feet, their Guatemalan calzoncillos, and their woven vests. There were Cool Breeze and Curtis and John. Cool Breeze wore a scarf around his head like a pirate. John kept aloft a Hacky Sack with the talent of his blackened feet. Curtis had straw-colored hair and a dirty mustache. There was his mother’s best friend, Caddie Fladeboe, who looked like Mama Cass, laden with turquoise stones.

Paul remembered the smell of them invading the house, the decibels reached by their voices in chorus, while he retreated to his bedroom to finish his project. Tomorrow was the fair. He had everything to perfection, except for one small detail. The inevitable pungent smell of burning pot invaded his room first, followed by the happier aroma of his mother’s cooking, which drew him out at last, a huge vat of lentil stew and whole-wheat flatbread and a salad full of nasturtium flowers, but the BO of the group and the way they all sat together in a pile, shirtless, raspberry nippled and muddy toed, made him return to his room as soon as he’d filled his plate, and he ate alone on the edge of his bed designing moats and drawbridges to surround the house he’d have someday to keep them all out. And after he practiced his presentation he climbed into bed, stuffed cotton balls in his ears, which made him feel all the more isolated, then drew a pillow over his head.

• • •

IN THE MORNING, he had to wake his dad for the keys to the Dodge truck, Betsy — and had to step over the guy with the blond dreadlocks and one of the women together in a sleeping bag in order to get out the door, with his display board tucked under one arm, and the bag containing the tape recording and the report in the other. Bill followed him out to say good-bye, despite having stayed up partying all night. “We picked up some crazy friends, didn’t we?”

“Yeah. They stink.”

“I’ll hose ’em down today, will that help?” Bill said.

“Probably not.”

“So you ready to go with your report?” Bill asked, almost as an afterthought.

“I got my results.”

His father nodded, but clearly couldn’t remember the details of Paul’s report at that hour.

“So you and Mom are coming, right?”

“Today?”

“Of course it’s today. You know it’s today!”

“Sorry, son. I’m feeling a little flat.”

Pressing this small advantage, Paul said, “I was wondering. Don’t get mad. Would it be okay, since people are here who can watch him, if you don’t bring Justin?”

“Why?” Bill looked pained.

“So you can look around without worrying about him.”

Bill scuffed the ground with his moccasins. “Justy loves your school events. He gets so much out of being part of your life. Come on. Think how little he has compared to you.”

“Dad, please? These people are going to be here, right? Can’t he stay with them?”

“We’ll see.”

His father said good-bye and good luck and Paul tore off. As he rammed Betsy up the dirt road, always hoping to destroy her so they could get a new car, he wished Justin had never been born. To wish someone had never been born required, per Paul’s method, an elaborate journey in a microscopic submarine up the progenitor’s urethra into the gonad, where missiles were deployed in all directions, mowing down sperm by the millions.

• • •

THAT DAY IN BIOLOGY, they shared their reports before setting up the displays in the gym. Paul’s turn came and he stood before the class and said:

“And finally, after twenty-seven hours of recording time, the proper conditions asserted themselves and the snails began to emit sound, which I will play for you now.”

He could barely look at Gielow, who beamed at him so paternally it was scary. The recorder was queued. As it began to play he could hear the sounds from last night’s party — the Grateful Dead riffing on “Truckin’,” pillars of laughter, loud and moronic — but looking up at his classmates, he realized these were the normal sounds of hearth and home in these parts.

It sounded cheesy, grating, the way he’d rubbed the mic along the box, and when the sound rose in pitch to a whistle from what was clearly a narrow opening, culminating in an explosive, slurpy sound, Paul cringed. Though it was very clear to him that these sounds could be produced by shoving a plastic straw through a Styrofoam block, he prayed it wasn’t clear to anybody else.

“Oh, my word,” said Gielow, after Paul let the tape run on. He gazed furtively around at his classmates for signs of mockery, but they were ready to believe. This alone was a startling discovery, worthy of a project someday. “Fantastic. Did you have doubts all those hours before? Was there a point at which you wanted to give up?”

Paul nodded fiercely, rationalizing that the facsimile of the noise was valid. To share what he’d heard had been his aim. To expose others to the awesome truth about snail sounds had been his purpose. To come in empty-handed would have left him nowhere, with nothing, though he vowed he’d never do anything like this again.

“Yeah. I had all the usual doubts when you have an unproven theory. I knew what I’d heard was real, though, so I was determined to wait.”

“Let that be a lesson to us all,” Gielow said.

People in the class asked decent questions. “Do you think they make noise only when stressed out?” “Did the other snails react to the scream?” “Do you think it’s communication, or just some kind of gas like a fart?” He handled the questions deftly. He had once heard the noise loud and clear and that’s what mattered most.

Later that afternoon, Paul stood beside his project in the assembly room, waiting to explain it to the roving judges. On one side of him was Millie Cuthbertson, the girl he’d liked since fourth grade, with her quiet and refined ways, her self-control, her friendly face. Her project concerned the heart rates of dogs when taken to the vet, who happened to be her mother. Her standard-sized thirty-six- by forty-eight-inch display board was covered with pictures of various breeds, pictures of the vet/mother, and neatly colored graphs that showed the names of the dogs and their usual heart rates and their rates at the vet, glued onto orange and green construction paper for accent. Paul secretly thought this could have been a third grader’s experiment, but since he liked Millie a lot, he said, “Nice. Did you use a certain protocol with the vet?”

“Like how?”

“I mean, was your mother exactly the same with every dog?”

“Sure. She’s very professional.”

“She doesn’t favor one breed over another?”

“We have a collie, so it’s possible she likes collies more than other dogs,” Millie considered. “But if you look at the statistics on the collie that wasn’t ours—” She searched endearingly on the chart, allowing him to look down the armpit of her blouse where he could see her bra, which was very plain and white. “Here, well, look, it’s one of the lower ratios. Let me see. It’s the second lowest, after the deaf fifteen-year-old Yorkie. That’s a good point, Paul.”

Paul nodded modestly. “I think of things like that.”

“Have you seen my project?” interrupted Hans Borg, on the other side of Millie. Hans had made schemata of Hagia Sofia in Constantinople from various angles and had analyzed the structure for weak spots in case of a great quake.

“That’s neat,” said Millie. “How did you think of it?”

“My family toured Europe last summer,” Hans said, rather smugly for someone so pale and pug-nosed. “Turkey was totally the most amazing.” Paul had never been to Europe, and at this point hated Hans, who frequently dropped hints about a rich grandmother in Los Angeles who wanted nothing more than to finance Hans in all future whims, great and small. Paul had seen Millie carrying around a copy of Atlas Shrugged lately, so while Hans Borg was being questioned by a judge, he asked Millie what she thought of Ayn Rand. Then he told her to check out Slaughterhouse-Five, and mentioned that Vonnegut’s uncle had been a brilliant scientist who invented the seeding of clouds, and that another relative of his coinvented the horizontal panic bar on public doors after nearly burning up in a theater fire. The brand name was Von Duprin and the “Von” was from Vonnegut. This Jeopardy! — quality trivia seemed to impress her, so the conversation continued to open up. He told her a story about how a dead, bloated cow in a field once exploded on his dad. She told him how her mother had found a two-pound brick of hashish in the stomach of a Labrador.

All the while, Paul’s head turned to the door for his mother and father, arriving late, breathless, apologetic.

He played his recording for the judges when his turn came. One was a long-haired man in a yellow sweatshirt, who said, “So you took the recorder like an interviewer and sat there?”

“No,” Paul said. “I had it mounted over the bucket. When I couldn’t be there I just let the tape run. Then I’d go back and listen.”

“And were you present when the recorder picked up these sounds?”

“Um, yes, I was,” Paul said, making sure to keep his story straight.

“You were there.”

“Yes.”

“And what did you see at the time?”

Paul stared into the middle distance, beholding a Saturnalia of snails. “They were crawling all over each other — it was chaos — I couldn’t tell which one was doing it. I mean, it’s not like one was standing up with its mouth open, like an opera singer.”

“I see,” said the man. He narrowed his eyes at Paul like an assassin. “May I hear that recording again, please?”

What a prick.

The other judges moved on, but this arbiter of pubescent efforts lingered and listened to the recording again. “One more time?” he said when the tape ended.

Was there some fatal flaw in the recording? Maybe the guy was a certified Foley artist and knew exactly how Styrofoam could scream.

“Very interesting,” said the man, and made some notes.

“I bet you’re going to win.”

“Me? Nah.”

“Yes! You’re in a league of your own.”

Millie’s parents came by next. Millie’s mother had a square, ruddy face, with platinum curls fitting tightly on her scalp like on a Roman bust. She wore a necklace of bulbous black pods, and the gold watch on her arm had dug a canal in the pattern of chain mail on her stout wrist. She had coral-colored lips that looked ready to lecture, and other parental units stopped to talk to her about their dogs and cats. Millie’s father was shorter than her mother, an affable-looking CPA with an air of inertia.

“Screaming snails!” he said. “That’s wild.”

Paul and Millie had been laughing and she said, “Mom? Has anyone ever taken a bug in to see you?”

Her mother ignored the question, preferring to continue her conversation about heartworm treatment with a sheltie owner.

“Mom?” Millie was laughing. “Mom!”

“What is it, Millie?”

“Has anyone every brought in a bug as a patient?”

“Don’t be silly. Reptiles. I had an elderly corn snake with pneumonia last month. Put her on antibiotics and she’s doing beautifully.”

Her mother began talking to another parent about a recovering boxer with a broken forearm.

“A snake’s not the same as a bug,” Paul said, sensing an opportunity to triangulate, which was his deeply ingrained habit in the presence of overwhelming favoritism for his brother.

“She’s so busy,” said Millie. “She works all day and gets calls all night.”

“My parents are supposed to be here,” Paul said.

“You live the other side of Wilson’s?”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe they had a flat tire.”

“Figures.”

He abandoned his display at one point for the pay phone, dialed home, and left an irritable message on the crusty, seed-covered home machine.

Back inside, the awards ceremony was starting, but watching the door for his parents distracted him. Third place went to a guy in eleventh grade with “Tractor Factor,” measuring the rust on farm equipment. Second place went to “Birds of a Feather” and a twelfth-grade girl who did a biodiversity study in a nearby valley. Millie looked at him expectantly and Paul cleared his throat, and then they announced the winner — Hans Borg, for “Will the Walls Come Tumbling Down?”

Millie leaned over and whispered, like a geranium in his ear, “You were robbed.”

He left swiftly. Just as well his parents weren’t there. His ideas about going to medical school, recently nurtured by Mr. Gielow, were fragile within him, and anything that pointed to him being inept in the sciences he tried to keep strictly under wraps. This included car trouble. A man of science ought to be able to fix a simple car, but here was Betsy inert, the ignition switch coughing like an old bag saying her tea was cold. Cough. Cough. Goddamn it!

Yet surely the mighty of the earth experienced humiliation too. Probably even more, because they were always out there pushing on the front line! The mighty ignored it or kicked it squarely in the jaw. That’s what he had to learn. Not to cower like a scolded pup under a newspaper, but to bark, to back the master into a corner flashing his fangs!

From the driver’s seat, he saw Millie crossing with her father. They lived just across from the school.

“Guess what, my car won’t start,” he yelled out the window.

“Come use the phone at our house,” called Millie.

“Okay,” called Paul.

He ran to them gratefully.

Millie’s house confirmed everything he had believed about her — nice and pretty and neat. Containing nothing to be ashamed of. No equipment for the handicapped. No Zig-Zag packages on the end tables. No grotesque lamp stands forged in the backyard. He phoned home and still there was no answer, and he left another message, saying the fair was over and the car was dead and would they call him at Millie’s.

Millie’s mom had gone back to the pet hospital. Millie’s dad, who worked from home, said, “We can drive you home, Paul.”

“Thanks, I’ll wait,” Paul said. “It’s a long way out there.”

“I’ll drive him!” said Millie, and the arrector pili in the area of his groin contracted mightily. “Please, Dad?”

Millie’s father had a faraway look in his eyes, as if judging this to be a meaningful rite of passage in his daughter’s life. He nodded, but then, as if remembering fatherly protocol, said, “But you know there are a lot of crazy people out there. You’ve got your illegals who do the picking, you’ve got your cartel members coming to make deals, you’ve got crazy nuts defending their property with AK-47s, you know the drill.”

“We won’t pick up anybody hitchhiking,” Millie said, as if that solved the problem.

“And maybe you could call me when you get there, before you turn around? So I know where you’re at?”

“Sure, Dad. Thanks!”

“Paul, how’s that road? Do you see a lot of crazies out there?”

Paul said, “I’ve never seen any guys with guns. I avoid the hitchhikers. They usually wait at this one spot, so I just go by and it’s fine.”

“All right, then. Have fun, you kids.” He started to root around in his pile of tapes next to his desk. “Listen to this if you want. It’s really good.”

Suddenly Paul saw the cosmic trade-off. Hans Borg got the science fair, but he got time with Millie. The world stayed in balance. They climbed into her parents’ Jeep Wagoneer and drove off.

“Thanks,” Paul said. “Your dad’s nice.”

“Compared to my mom.”

Paul was shocked to learn there was a crack in the perfect surface of Millie’s life. “She doesn’t seem that bad.”

“You have no idea,” Millie said, emboldened. “Remember when she said ‘Don’t be silly’ when we asked about bugs? That’s her campaign against the world. Don’t be silly. She just wants to stifle everything.”

“I hate that,” Paul said.

“Me too.”

They drove up through the forested hills, along a creek lined with ferns. Paul rolled down his window and let the air go through his fingers. He realized the less he cared about the science fair, the less his failure tainted him. “I’m glad you see through Hans Borg,” Paul said. “He’s so full of himself.”

“You know who likes him?” said Millie. “Christine.” Christine was a chubby girl at school who drew on her hands and was the sister of younger twins who excluded her.

“Good,” Paul said. “I’m sure they’ll be very happy together.”

“Christine used to like you,” said Millie.

Paul pulled on his collar. “Really? What made her stop?”

“Oh, she knew someone else liked you.”

His cheeks burned, and he crumpled up a dollar in his pocket.

Millie said, “I love this song!” and turned it up, “I’ll stop the world and melt with you,” and they had all the windows down, drawing in the smells of the forests and the damp ground, and birdsong flitted in the windows as they passed. Paul felt as if he were in a film about a teenager who was about to lose his virginity.

“Want to hear a weird dream I had?” Millie said. “I was a dog. A Border collie, I think. And since I was a dog I was happy because I knew my mother was going to take care of me.”

“Whoa. Really symbolic!”

“I know. It almost sounds like I made it up, but I really dreamed it.”

“I dreamed once my brother was stabbing me, right in our living room, and that my parents just kept shellacking some cabinet they bought at a flea market.”

“Whoa! Your brother has MS, right?”

“No, it’s some kind of brain damage.”

“I’ve seen him in town and he looks nice.”

“He’s not that nice.”

“Once I dreamed that Gielow was showing us his formaldehyde jars and specimens and he said one of them was his nose but it actually looked like a penis. And he had a nose when he said it, so in the dream I knew he was lying.”

Paul laughed, aroused by her willingness to say the word penis.

“He liked yours much better than Hans’s,” she said.

“You think?”

“Definitely. When Hans did his in class, he was taking roll.”

“Mine could’ve been better,” Paul said.

“It was so original and risky. It was based on something undocumented.”

“True,” Paul said, feeling better about himself. A willingness to risk and be caught up short, that’s what he had, as nothing great was ever accomplished without mistakes and humiliation first.

“What’s the worst thing you’d do if you could be invisible?” he asked.

“Probably go into a bakery and take bites out of everything.”

“That’s all?”

“I don’t think I’d rob a bank or anything. It wouldn’t be satisfying to get rich that way.”

“I’d probably get on a plane and go somewhere as far from here as possible,” he said, starting to laugh. But she stuck out her lower lip in a flirtatious pout.

“For what?”

“Well, to start my clinic.”

“So it would be altruistic?”

“Yeah, ultimately.”

“My mom pretends she’s altruistic, but it’s an act. She’s so phony it makes me sick.”

He enjoyed Millie’s complaints about her mother, and felt a keen bond.

“Turn left,” Paul said when they reached a fork in the road.

“Turn up there at the big tree,” he said a little later.

“Is this your property now?”

“Yeah,” Paul said. “Just go around that grove, and we’re there.”

He went on high alert as they rolled past the trees into the clearing. He didn’t want her to linger and see Justin or the hippies. The van was still parked off to the side, as was his parents’ other car. Had they simply forgotten? He burned.

“Well,” said Millie.

“Thanks,” said Paul, starting to climb out. “I gotta get going so thanks and see you and—”

“But remember what my dad said, about calling?” Millie asked as she turned off the engine. “Besides, I want to see your snails.”

“Oh, yeah,” Paul said, wondering if that was a euphemism. “Sure.” He looked around, assessing the risks. “Okay.” He paused. “Some freaky friends of my parents are visiting, so don’t hold it against me.”

“God, around here?” said Millie. “I don’t care.”

Just then he heard a sound from the forest, and Hacky Sack John ran across the meadow, naked except for a Peruvian knit cap with llama silhouettes woven into it.

“I hate these people,” Paul muttered, and Millie laughed.

Walking up to the house, they encountered a circle of the guests lying on blankets, arms spread, staring up at the sky. “It’s a beak,” someone said.

“I see it,” said another.

“Quick, inside,” he whispered to Millie, but a voice harpooned him right through the neck.

“Pope Paul!” It was Cool Breeze, lifting his head and squinting.

“Yeah, hi,” said Paul, and he and Millie ran up the steps. Inside, he encountered a strong mix of odors: a stinking bong must’ve tipped, spreading its foul water into the carpet. In the kitchen, flies had lit on a feast around the sink, bowls with cookie dough clinging to the edges, cracked eggshells on the floor, a baking sheet sitting on the open door of the oven with one melted chocolate chip left on the edge. There were carrot tops, brown lettuce leaves, and a partly chopped onion, all over the counter, and the big vat of lentil soup from the night before was now encrusted on the outside as well as in, and the ladle lay across the stovetop, crustiest of all. Three large flies threw their bodies at the window over the sink, as if hoping to break through the glass. The wall clock ticked loudly.

“This is gross. It’s not like this normally,” he insisted.

“Can I have something to drink?”

Paul tried to find clean glasses, but had to wash them, filling them with soapsuds, nearly scalding himself to make sure hers was sanitary enough. “Water? Juice?”

“Juice.”

Cider sat in a brown jug on the counter, the kind his parents made in the fall from their own apples. At least the lid had been screwed on.

“I want to see your room,” said Millie, taking a gulp.

“Don’t you need to call your father?”

“I’m not his flunky,” Millie said, licking the juice off her lips.

The cider was sweet and flavorful, and Paul could at least feel proud of their cider-making abilities. “Stay here. I want to see if my parents are upstairs.”

The farmhouse was a hundred years old, drafty and full of squeaks. He ran up the narrow wooden steps, but his parents’ room was vacant. Justin’s room was empty too. He stopped in the bathroom quickly, squirted some toothpaste into his mouth and spat it out, then brushed his hair and looked at himself in the mirror. Something about his eyes looked funny, kind of velvety and deep, his pupils black as trampolines. He wondered if Millie thought he was handsome, and approached the mirror with his face as if to deliver a kiss. This was a bad idea. He backed away and ran downstairs.

Millie stood at his bedroom door, peering in. Coming up behind her he was greeted by the sight of entwined naked bodies on his bed, then overpowered by the smell of sweat and the sound of slapping skin.

“Shhh,” she whispered. Her eyes looked black and velvety too.

“Shit!”

He tore out the back door, where he knocked over a broom, which clattered down the back steps. The broom on the ground in the dirt looked pitiful. He sat with it, and thought about the broom’s existence for the first time in his life. It was the same broom they’d had all his life. A red-handled broom, with blue and orange stitching through the broomcorn. Paint peeling all along the handle. He remembered riding the broom when he was little and pretending it was a donkey named Freedy.

How could he have taken so much for granted? Why did it stay, year after year, to sweep for them?

He looked up in time to see Millie descending the back steps with her blouse unbuttoned, the small mounds of her breasts exposed. Her nipples were small and tender in appearance, and came closer until only inches from his face. She rubbed a bud on his nose. He had planned to tell her about the broom but it was the first nipple of a girl his own age he’d ever seen. Millie kissed him. It was the first kiss he’d had on the lips with his mouth open. Her mouth tasted like root beer.

Then came a fermata, how long they sat on the ground at the bottom of the back steps wrapped up kissing and touching. She kept laughing and tossing her hair. “I’m hot,” she said often, with glassy eyes. “I feel so hot.”

His head felt open at the top, like a chimney that she could pour something into.

“Put your hand here,” he said. She touched his hair. “Is it open?”

She nodded. “Wide open.”

“I think we’re on drugs,” said Paul.

“I’m hot. I feel hot.”

From his father’s forge he heard the maddening drone of “Scarlet Begonias.”

“Everybody’s happy,” said Millie. “I feel like going into the woods.”

“Let’s go into the woods,” said Paul.

“Let’s take a blanket.”

His legs felt like wheels, and they rolled him right into the smithy, where his father’s hearth stood cold. All the tools out on the table. The forge had another room where his father had his office and kept his stock. He saw the back of Justin’s head rolling against the desk.

“Justy?” Paul said. But Justin didn’t hear him, and then Paul saw the bobbing crown of Caddie Fladeboe, who was mouthing the head of Justin’s penis, slipping her lips over a bulb the size of a beet.

“Hey!” screamed Paul.

“Hey!” cried Caddie Fladeboe, lifting her damp, rosy face.

“What the fuck! Get out of here!”

“Leave us alone! We’re joyous beings!” Caddie declared.

“You little shit!” he yelled at Justin. “You can’t do anything but you can do this?”

“Don’t tell Mom and Dad,” Justin cried.

“Ha! We’ll see about that!”

“No! No! No!” keened Justin. “No, no, no!”

Paul grabbed a blanket off his dad’s chair and Millie followed right behind. He didn’t say another word until he’d taken her back to the house and handed her the telephone.

“Call your father and go home,” he said.

“What’s wrong?”

“My brother’s a pervert! And now you know it!”

“I didn’t even see. I’m cool with it.”

“He thinks he can do whatever he wants!”

Millie said, “You can do whatever you want too,” and brought his hands to her hips.

• • •

“CHAINSAWS,” MILLIE WAS saying to her dad on the phone, holding Paul’s hand.

“Someone’s using a chainsaw?”

“I saw some chainsaws,” Millie said again.

“Honey, you okay? Are you heading back?”

“I could but I started to feel dizzy on the drive. I think I need to lie down.”

“Sure, honey. Take forty winks.”

“Okay, Dad.”

“Call me later, okay?”

“Okay, Dad. Dad, I think I should stay here tonight.”

“Stay there? Hmm. Can I talk to Paul’s parents?”

“We’ll have fun,” she said, smiling at Paul.

“Honey, let me talk to the mother or father. I want to make sure it’s okay.”

“Daddy? There’s a tree outside covered with flags.”

“What kind of flags?”

“Red and white and blue flags. American flags.”

“Really? That’s good. They have a guest room out there for you?”

“Yes. They’re cooking.”

“Barbecue. All right. I’ll tell your mother. It’s probably better than driving that road home alone.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

“Give me the number out there.”

She gave him the number.

“Call us before you leave in the morning, all right?”

“I will.”

“Hey, great job at the fair today. I was so proud.”

“Was Mom proud?”

“Mom was proud too.”

Millie hung up the phone and led Paul down the steps, into the forest, where she took the blanket from him and spread it on the ground like an expert. Then she kissed him. She ran her tongue over his teeth and his lips. She sucked on his mouth and kissed him harder, and placed his hands in her blouse and then she was pushing herself against him, feeling the solid feeling in his pants right by his zipper, and something was there behind those barriers that was hard and powerful and she pushed against it all, this package she wanted to spring open and unwrap under a tree on a soft bed of duff, and she was pushing him down and trying to open his package, and that heavy belt came first, that impossible bolt and rivet, that zipper with rusted teeth that wouldn’t budge, and there it was, there it was. A silky-skinned penis so much larger than a dog’s, and so much more colorful! It was purple on one side, with green stripes and red stripes and small black paisleys around the base, and shiny, and shapely, like a tall ride at Tomorrowland.

“Millie?” said Paul. “Should we?”

“Yes.”

“I love you,” said Paul, positioning himself over her.

“I love you too,” said Millie, with a hungry, yearning feeling between her legs.

He pressed but it was a bone and she moved him to a softer spot. “More,” she said, when he felt a slight give.

“There?”

“More!”

Paul had been a virgin until a few seconds ago, so was not exactly sure how to manage more. But he tried.

“More,” she cried. She began to giggle, and he felt the vestigial remains of his baby fat in her hands, and saw himself as a master Tillamook Cheddar log, Millie as a pliant grater beneath, a Cheddar who wanted to be grated, a grater who wanted to be Cheddared, and even still he managed it, until he was melting all over her as Cheddar will do, and his eyes were blurry and confused and then he saw in a flash exactly how many heartbeats he had left in this world, and it wasn’t so many really, and Millie thought so too because they cried and said they wished they were one person, and for a while, they really did feel like they were one being fused in flesh.

• • •

NIGHT FELL, and the sounds in the woods frightened them, and drove them back to the house. Bill and Marion were making a tall vat of curry in the kitchen.

“Paul!” roared Bill. “Where you been?”

Marion dropped her spoon and came over to them and began to pull dried redwood needles from Paul’s hair, and Millie’s too, and then she hugged them as if they were innocent children. “We’re so sorry,” she said to Paul. “We missed it. We took a little detour today, if you get what I mean.”

Bill came over and whispered, “They laced the cider with Mr. Natural. We were on Planet X. We went all the way past Wilson’s to the waterfall. Didn’t remember a thing about real life until we got back.”

“We are so sorry, Paul,” said Marion, back to stirring the spicy yellow curry. “Tell us about the fair.”

“Where’s Justin?” Paul asked.

“In bed,” said Marion.

Paul said, “What’s with Caddie, anyway?”

“What do you mean?” said Bill, who always defended people from Paul’s attacks. “She has a great way with all kinds of people.”

“Yeah, she’s great, all right.”

Millie giggled.

“The fair, Paul, tell us what happened,” asked Marion.

“His was the most creative and interesting of anything there,” said Millie. “Doesn’t matter he didn’t win.”

Paul blushed.

Bill and Marion and Millie got into a conversation about Millie’s project, and everybody was getting along, because that was his parents’ gift, they became a loveseat and made everybody in the world feel warm and welcome except him.

• • •

MILLIE AND PAUL enjoyed the status of being boyfriend and girlfriend for two months and four days. And for years Paul would hold the memory guarded and close, sure that no love could ever surpass it. How they got along! How he loved the fuzz on her arms and her hip bones and the root-beery taste of her lips, and how they could fester in their parents’ faults for hours, and plan lives without them. They took long walks every day after school, went to movies and used bookstores in Arcata, ran on the beach, played video games at an arcade and had ice cream cones and, best of all, he kept a blanket in the back of the car for finding special spots in the redwoods, one in particular at the center of a grove of six giants, which reminded them of Stonehenge because they saw how the sunlight created shafts through the trees, which moved a few centimeters every day, and they began to record it on a piece of paper until one day Millie turned to him in the street after school and said, “I think I’m pregnant.”

It stopped him short, and not because he was unhappy about it.

In a mere second he was able to see down a road that had never been open to him before, and from which he now wished to travel and never look back. On that road, all his hopes and dreams and ambitions were left behind like the piles of garbage his parents’ friends had strewn in front of their house, and a new life as a young father with Millie as his wife and their simple hopes and dreams and those of their child flashed before him, infinitely more inviting. He nearly gasped at the beauty of his vision, and took Millie’s hands.

“That’s great!” he cried.

“No,” she said. “My parents will never speak to me again.”

“No, it’s not true,” said Paul, and he took her backpack off her shoulders, and they sat together on the curb in front of her house. “They’ll be happy after they get used to it.”

“Don’t you want me to get rid of it?”

“I mean, it’s up to you, but if you want to have a baby, I’ll do it. We can get married,” he said, flushed with love.

She looked puzzled by the idea, and he blushed more.

“That’s so, so sweet,” she said, kicking a rock into the road.

“I mean it.”

“Really?”

“More than anything.”

• • •

THERE THEY WERE, standing before her parents, proclaiming their innocent desire to marry and have a child.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” said Millie’s mother, who was looking at Paul with something like disgust, but worse.

“No, Mother, I’m very serious.”

“You’re sixteen years old. You’re going to college. You’re nowhere near ready to marry and raise a child, and even if you were—” Her thin upper lip retracted all the way to her gums, and she gazed at Paul with utter loathing.

“Mr. and Mrs. Cuthbertson, I’m planning to do premed in college and—”

“You think you’re going to be a doctor?” said Millie’s mother. “Doing projects about screaming snails? Do you know what the judges were saying about your project?”

“Jill, come on,” said Ron.

“Your results were a crock, weren’t they?”

“I resent that remark!” Paul said firmly.

Millie said, “Paul wouldn’t cheat. You wouldn’t cheat, Paul, I know you wouldn’t.”

“Chuck Gielow swore on his mother’s grave for him,” said Mrs. Cuthbertson. “It was pathetic.”

“With all due respect,” Paul said, his voice rising to a squeak, “I plan to become a psychiatrist or a neurologist, and I plan to go to the best schools.”

“Where are the best schools, Paul?”

“Mom, Paul is totally smart and dedicated! Stop talking that way!”

“Millie, the friends you want to make are the friends you make in college. I can’t wait for you to get out of this hellhole of drug dealers and potheads, and I would never approve a marriage to someone whose parents make their living illegally.”

“Mrs. Cuthbertson—”

“Dr. Cuthbertson!”

“I beg your pardon, my mother is a county nurse and—”

“I know all about them,” said Millie’s mother. “If I’d been home my daughter would never have gone out there that night.”

“Don’t start that again, Jill,” said Millie’s father.

“You live in your ledgers. I actually go out and see the kind of things going on around here!”

Paul blinked and wished to push her off a cliff, at the bottom of which lay finely sharpened spikes.

“Mom, I love Paul.”

“You’re not having a baby, you’re not marrying this cheat, over my dead body!” screamed her mother.

“He wouldn’t cheat! I know he wouldn’t cheat!”

Millie began to cry, and when Paul put his arms around her, her mother grabbed her, pulling her out of reach, out of the room.

“Ron, I expect him to be on his way,” Millie’s mother said. “He’s going to pay for the procedure, and he won’t come near Millie, or we’ll send the police to pay a visit to his house. Out! Out! Out!”

“Mom!” cried Millie, and Paul tried to go to her, but Millie’s dad put an iron grip on his arm.

Under his breath, Millie’s father said, “I don’t entirely agree with her, but there’s nothing I can do about it.”

Paul said, “Don’t you have a say? What about me? Don’t I?”

Ron said, “I don’t think so. Not with an underage girl.”

“Underage?” He was five months younger than Millie.

“Now go,” said Ron Cuthbertson.

“But—”

Ron put his hand on Paul’s back, and pushed him to the door.

Then out the door.

The door closed behind him.

Outside he took one look at their prim mailbox with the squirrel on it and punched it with his fist. It hurt more than he expected. Fists were built for punching, weren’t they? Why were his so soft? The mailbox popped open and he grabbed it like a pumpkin and twisted it from its mount and threw it on the ground and stomped on it. The buckling metal tore a hole in his sock at the ankle, and he bled. He looked back at the house but no one was bothering to watch. He bit his lips and got back into his car and screeched away. He and Millie would work it out. They’d run away! He went around the block in the Dodge, so fast he had to swerve around some kids on bikes, until the car was fishtailing on the greasy wet road, and his brain went to the fishtail file and heard: Go in the direction of the skid, and then he heard, No, go in the opposite direction of the skid, and they both sounded right so he chose the wrong one and the truck spun and collided with a fire hydrant, then flipped and rolled upside down right in front of the house where the sheriff lived.

“The rejections I’ve received have been, by no means, definitive,” he mumbled to himself, hanging upside down, lulled by the rhythm of the declaration. “The rejections I’ve received have been, by no means, definitive.”

Millie was abruptly taken out of South Humboldt High and sent to a private girls’ school in Tacoma, Washington. Paul sent many letters but received no reply. And to this day, the word cheat had the power to undo him. He even tremored at any word that sounded remotely like it, such as cheetah and Chee-tos. He never heard a word of what happened to her, until the information was digitized.