Calvin (6 page)

We talked to pass the time. Or at least I talked. About important stuff.

Me: What would it be like to be a bottom-dwelling fish?

Susie: Why do you ask questions like that?

Me: I mean, you would spend your whole existence in the cold and dark. Born in the cold and dark and always in the cold and dark, and when you died, it couldn't get any colder or darker than that, so you wouldn't even know that you had died—

Susie: Bonus.

Me: Did you know that you're probably the only one at school who wouldn't be freaked out by me, a person with schizophrenia?

Susie: That's not true. I am freaked out by you.

Me: I know why. I remind you that reality is just this game people play together, something their brain decides on, and the minute their brain gets iffy about reality, they realize everything they know about the world is just their own made-up version of it, and that would mean everyone is walking around in their own made-up world, all alone, and reality is just something we invent together to make us feel not so alone. It scares people when some of us check out of the game.

Susie: What makes you think you know what people think?

Me: Because brains are amazing. They can guess about each other. Think about it, Susie. The brain is the only part of your body that knows it exists. Huh? Huh? It knows! Your hand, it does what your brain tells it to. Your stomach, your lungs, your heart—your brain doesn't even ask your permission. It says, don't trouble yourself about breathing and digestion and blood and whatnot. Let me take caaaare of it for you … C'mon, what is scarier than that? The brain is a monster! Your feet don't know they exist. Your pancreas doesn't. They just do their good ol' job and die when the brain tells them to. But the brain, it says, try and figure me out, but you can only know as much as I'll tell you. Are you following me, Susie? The brain can ask bigger questions than you can answer.

Susie:

Me: Well?

Susie: I think I lost you back there somewhere.

Me: I see a town.

Susie: Of course there is no town out in the middle of the lake. You're hallucinating.

Me: You're right. Sorry.

Susie: There's a town in the middle of the lake!

*   *   *

Turns out it was an ice-fishing village, Bill. Just a bunch of little boxy shanties sitting on the ice—a few the size of big porta-potties, some as big as Dumpsters, a couple the size of sheds. One was painted up to look like a doghouse. One was painted with palm trees and flowers and a hula dancer. The village came complete with a chapel shanty and a theater shanty, and between all the shanties were little roads made of snowmobile tracks.

It was cool, like the lake had surprises.

A man came out of one shanty and stopped to look at us. He was carrying a fishing pole. He was six and a half feet, probably close to three hundred pounds.

Hobbes: I'm hungry.

Me: Catching anything?

Fisherman (suspicious): Just a cold.

Me: Interesting place.

Fisherman: 'Tis. Quiet. Nobody minds your business. Fishin'?

Me: No.

Fisherman: Whatcha doin' out here if it isn't fishin'?

Me: We're hiking across.

Fisherman: You're hiking across the lake? You're nuts.

Me: That's the point.

Fisherman (stroking his beard): What are your names?

Me: Calvin and Susie.

Hobbes: And Hobbes.

The fisherman stopped stroking his beard.

Fisherman: Calvin and Susie, huh.

He said our names like he didn't believe us.

Fisherman: No way should you be doing this.

Me: I have to.

Susie: He has to.

Me: She doesn't have to. Can you give her a ride back to shore?

Susie: He doesn't tell me what to do.

Fisherman: Okay, I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to contact the authorities.

Me: Cell phones don't work out here.

Fisherman: I have a ham radio.

Me: Please. We're on a trek to prove our devotion to the creator—

Fisherman: Creator? Are you some kind of religious nut?

Me: The creator of
Calvin and Hobbes
.

Fisherman:

Me: Well, we'll be going now.

Fisherman: You're doing this for … for Bill Watterson?

Me: Yes.

Susie: We're doing this to raise awareness for schizophrenia.

Me: We're doing this to show how much we want Mr. Watterson to draw one more Calvin comic. He might even be waiting for us on the other side of the lake.

Fisherman: I love him. I have every book.

Me: Yeah. Me, too.

Fisherman: When Watterson stopped, I felt like somebody I loved died. I mean, I cried.

Me: I understand.

Fisherman: You're serious about this.

Me (nodding):

Fisherman: Okay. I'm going to give you the shortest lesson on ice I can. You listen up. It's probably safe, given that we've had a month below freezing. But if you see logs, stumps, rocks, anything sticking up out of the ice, you stay away. They pick up heat from the sun in the day and make weak moats of ice around them. If the ice looks gray and pebbly, that's rotten ice. It forms in a snowstorm and all those trapped air bubbles are bad news. Another thing—you see water on top of ice, you beware. Water is heavier than ice and it creates fractures called honeycombs. Honeycomb ice is deadly. Discolored snow might mean slush: avoid. If the snow is even and you see a sudden depression? Avoid. If you see a straight open crack, not to worry—they can freeze over. But if two or more cracks meet, avoid. You got all that?

Me: Yes, sir.

Susie: Got it. Logs, gray and pebbly ice, water on ice, discolored snow, depressions, and more than one crack.

Fisherman: This lake, she's a bit o' ocean, left over from a dinosaur ocean, and she has suffered. She has had to swallow boats. There's a Civil War tugboat down there, preserved in the cold water. In 1841 the steamship
Erie
burned, killin' 250 people, and they say you can still see it burnin' sometimes out on the water. In 1923 Chevy made a coupe with engines that used copper cooling fins and suffice to say they were a fire hazard. So GM recalled them all—498 of them—and dumped them in Lake Erie. And then the people on the bottom, of course. She doesn't like it. The lake, she looks pretty, but people forget she's a force to be reckoned with. She's a sea, and she doesn't like any human garbage. You remember that. Don't make her suffer any more than she already has.

Me (nodding):

Susie (nodding):

Fisherman: Lake Erie has her monsters, too. Jenny Greenteeth, she's a monster that can see up through the ice. Then there's the Black Dog of Lake Erie. He appears on ships before they go down to the bottom. And of course there's South Bay Bessie, the sea monster.

I'd heard of South Bay Bessie, the forty-foot serpent that was sighted every so often in Lake Erie. Even the Seneca Indians knew about her.

Fisherman: So now I've told you about the lake, do you really mean to do this thing?

Susie:

Me: Yes.

He opened our duffel bag and dug around in our gear.

Fisherman: Seems like you got what you need.

He rubbed his beard a moment, considering us, and then he shoved his hands in his coat pockets.

Fisherman: Tell him about me. Bill Watterson, I mean. When you see him, tell him about me.

Me: I will.

Fisherman: Tell him my name. Orvil Watts.

Me: Orvil Watts.

Orvil: Wait…!

He slipped back into his shanty and came out with a bag.

Orvil: Cookies.

Hobbes: Cookies!

Orvil Watts put the cookies in the duffel bag.

Me: Thank you. You're not going to make that call, though, right?

Orvil: No. I get it now. Walk on.

Susie and I walked on, pulling the sled. I looked back once, but Orvil was gone.

*   *   *

Trudge, trudge.

That was the language of boots.

They only said one thing now—trudge, trudge—but it was possible that boots had a sophisticated poetry that only they could hear with their rubber ears and speak with their rubber tongues.

Susie: Well, this is exciting.

Trudge, trudge.

Susie: Yes, everybody's going to be über-impressed with this.

Trudge, trudge.

Susie: Yup, here we are, out on the bald, boring, frozen lake …

Me: It doesn't have to be exciting. It just has to be a pilgrimage. That's all Bill cares about.

She stopped.

She was still a moment. She bent down and picked up a wad of snow and threw it at me.

Thwap
.

Right in the face.

She always was a good shot.

Hobbes laughed.

I started making a snowball and she ran away.

Me (running after her): Bill will understand. I'm Calvin, remember? I was always doing stuff he didn't like or agree with.

Hobbes: The embodiment of human stupidity.

Susie turned back toward me. I chucked the snowball, but it didn't connect.

Susie: Calvin, just think about it. If Bill pays the slightest attention to this, just imagine the crazies that would come out!

We looked at each other and laughed until we had to sit down.

Susie's face changed when she was laughing. It went all soft and relaxed, and stayed that way for a while after she stopped.

Susie: I haven't laughed like that in—

Me: In a year?

She frowned and stood up.

Susie: We'd better get going.

 

We weren't making near the time I'd thought. It was slower going when you were walking on snow and around chunks and ridges of ice. But it felt good to be in the dimension of nothing. Close to four o'clock now, the sun was lower on the horizon, a whiter hole in a white sky. It didn't shine. It looked like a dead sun, a ghost sun, as if the heat had all burned out of it. You could look right at it. We had maybe two hours before dark, so we had to make good time.

I couldn't hear anything but my own breath and my boots and Susie's boots like an echo after mine. The sled felt like it was loaded up with lead. I could hear Hobbes snoring, so I figured he was taking a ride.

Spaceman Spiff had been disconnected from the spaceship and was just drifting, drifting, drifting away into the vacuum. Earth kept getting smaller until it was a blue basketball and then a blue baseball and then a blue marble, and he stared and stared until it was a blue dot. His air ran out and his body died, but weirdly he didn't decay in the vacuum of space, and one day an alien garbage man picked him up and Spiff's eyeballs were wide open and filled with shiny blue atoms—

Susie stopped. For a second I'd forgotten how to stop, and then I remembered.

Susie: Listen.

She was staring into the sky, staring like a blind person would stare—unseeing, listening with her whole body.

Me: What?

Susie: What do you hear?

Me: My breathing.

Susie: No, Calvin. Listen. Just listen.

So I listened.

When you've lived all your life with the sound of Life in General, you don't even hear it anymore. You don't hear the noise of cars, trucks, trains, airplanes, refrigerators, air conditioners, furnaces, and you don't feel radio and television waves shooting through you, and you don't hear telephones, animals, birds, floors creaking, doors opening, the voices of six billion people all talking and laughing and crying, and over a billion cows mooing and nineteen billion chickens clucking and a million species of bugs buzzing, and you don't realize that it all adds up to this low hum of Life in General.

Life in General doesn't live in the middle of the lake.

Me: It's quiet.

Susie had closed her eyes. She didn't answer me.

My ears started straining for something, like they had this need to hear something, anything, like that little eardrum needed something to beat its bongos. After a long moment, I did.

Me: It's the sound a planet makes when it travels a hundred thousand kilometers an hour through space.

Susie: It's a truck.

Me: Huh?

Susie: That sounds like a truck!

Hobbes: A planet spinning through space sounds like a truck?

Susie (turning): Calvin—

We turned around.

A truck was coming.

A gray truck.

Coming straight at us.

Me: It's a truck.

Susie:

Me: On the lake—driving on the lake—

Susie:

Me: Tell me you see that.

Susie: I see it.

The truck slowed down as it pulled up beside us. It had no doors or roof, but it was a truck.

A man wearing a plaid hat with earflaps nodded to us, as if he met people walking on the lake all the time.

Plaid-hat guy: Have you seen Fred?

Me:

Susie: We … we don't know a Fred.

Plaid-hat guy: Okay. Thanks.

Me: Bit chilly without the doors and roof of your truck?

Plaid-hat guy: We take 'em off. If the ice breaks, we can jump out.

Me: Oh.

Susie stared down at the ice.

Plaid-hat guy pulled away.

Me: Okay, a truck just drove up to us on the ice and asked for Fred. Sometimes the world is crazier than me.

Susie (staring after the truck): Stuff like that only happens when I'm with you.

She looked doubtfully at the ice and started walking.

 

You know how if you stare at clouds long enough you start to see shapes? The same thing happens with snow. You don't just see snow anymore. It has textures and colors and shapes: snow like silk, like a wedding dress; snow like slabs of cement, like the lake was an abandoned construction site for ice palaces; snow like crunchy cookie crumbs; snow stretched and blown and fine as desert dunes. And maybe, Bill, the same thing happens with people if you spend enough time with them or think about them enough.

That's what was happening to me, walking beside Susie hour after hour. Here on the lake she was tough and gutsy. Growing up with her I just took her for granted. She was just this kid who was always there when I wanted to hang out with someone or bug someone. And now she was like this woman, this strong woman who was doing this thing with me.