The Museum of Intangible Things (13 page)

This makes Zoe look up from the microscope she was peering into. “Hey. Pied Piper. What are you doing?”

“Nothing,” I say. “It’s just one. It’s not his fault we get cancer. He doesn’t deserve this.”

“You’re right. It’s not their fault. Let’s do another one.”

Zoe reaches into the cage and grabs a white mouse with red eyes. “Aw. She’s pretty.”

“Right?”

“Go, little lady.” Zoe puts her down, and she skitters across the sterile tile to a hole around the radiator and disappears.

Jimmy is too distracted by the music and the cages on the other side of the room to realize what we’re doing.

“One more?” I ask, giggling. I hadn’t laughed in a while. Days, it seemed. Weeks? So my laugh inspires a smile to work its way across Zoe’s face.

The laugh breaks a seal and unleashes a passionate fury of emancipation. We open cage after cage and hold each mouse first, acknowledging their tiny noses and whiskers and tiny little claws that tickled across our hands. With each freed mouse a tiny mouse-sized weight lifts from my chest. We release about a dozen mice, and Zoe starts singing, before Jimmy finally turns around.

“Dudes,
what
are you doing?” he says, while Zoe slowly finishes her verse and then looks up at him with a sheepish grin. He watches a mouse scurry in a zigzag formation and run between his feet before heading for a radiator pipe and disappearing into the floor. “Do you know how hard it is to get these work-study jobs?”

Zoe and I put our heads down in shame.

“Sorry,” I mumble.

“This is
science
,” Jimmy says. His voice cracks a little. He really believes in science, the way some people believe in the Constitution, or the Bible, or the Chicago Bears.

“No,” I say, suddenly finding my voice. “This is mousicide. And for what? To confirm that people should eat food? If everyone just ate
food
and not corn syrup and guar gum and carrageenan and Splenda, we wouldn’t even get cancer. No one gets cancer in Sweden.”

“Says the girl who sells hot dogs,” Zoe says.

“My hot dogs are all-natural.”

Zoe triumphantly holds out a mouse. “He deserves a better life!” Then she puts him down onto the floor.

“That’s the last one. Stop,” Jimmy says through his mask. His hands fall to his sides; his shoulders slump a little as he stares at us with the visible eye.

“Okay,” we say, giggling. “Sorry.”

We help him then, so he can finish faster and give us a tour of the campus. We do some window-shopping around the outskirts and then turn in to the grassy, tree-filled area of the center of campus called the Diag.

The campus is like a palace. The buildings are gray and Gothic and beautiful. The ground is flat, so flat that I can distinguish a slight curve to the Earth as if we’re taking big steps on top of the world. I can’t believe someone built this place for the sole purpose of advancing the minds of young people. Sometimes it seems like no one cares about that anymore. It’s holy.

We sit in a tree in the middle of the Diag and just watch how the setting sun changes the color of the glass and heavy stone bricks from gray to yellow and pink and purple.

“Do you believe in God?” I ask Jimmy.

“I believe that everything happens for a reason. Is that believing in God?”

“You are lucky to be able to come here,” I say.

“You will end up someplace like this too,” he says.

“How do you know?”

“Because you deserve it,” he says, swinging his boots back and forth. “It’s the law of karma. You do everything right, and good things will come your way. It’s science. Equilibrium. Homeostasis.”

“How do you know I do everything right?” I ask.

“She does,” Zoe pipes up, swinging down from a higher branch and hanging from her knees. Her silver hair hangs straight down in front of us like tinsel.

“You deserve it,” Jimmy says again. His one exposed eye shyly looks up and finds one of mine.

And for some reason that comment is painful to me. It cuts into me like a knife and brings tears to my eyes. “Everything happens for a reason,” I mumble. And that was my reason for knowing him. To think I might deserve things.

I might deserve science labs and titrating pipettes and a dorm room and libraries and professors and the time to figure things out.

I also apparently deserve to kiss Jimmy, because when we get back to his apartment, Zoe disappears on purpose to allow this to happen. We sit up on the edge of his mattress on the floor, neither of us comfortable enough to lie down with the other. And it’s nice, the kissing. If only to provide me with a baseline of hotness with which to compare my kissing with Danny. With Danny, it’s explosive and immediate and intense. This kissing was just comfortable and tepid and something to do to fill the time. We decide to talk instead, holding hands, looping our fingers around each other’s but not letting them stray beneath any garments. And he listens. He finally asks me what we’re doing on the road, and I tell him about Zoe “needing some space.”

“Do you think she’s okay?” I ask him, before we finally lie down to fall asleep, “or do you think we should go home and get her help?”

“Zoe always lands on her feet,” he says. “She’s a cool cat. Don’t worry about Zoe.”

• • •

Easy for him to say. He doesn’t have to endure her sticking her wet finger in his ear at six in the morning I open my eyes and turn my head. Her eyes are six inches away from me on my pillow. They are bright and mad and urgent.

“Time to go,” she says.

(THERE IS PROBABLY A FRENCH WORD FOR IT)

We lose a day on the road. Just hauling across Illinois and Iowa. Spinning wheels. “There’s no reason to stop here,” Zoe says, leaning forward against the steering wheel as if this will make the car go faster. She’s obsessively hitting the scan button trying to find a tolerable song on the radio. We haven’t heard about the AMBER Alert since Ohio, and I think maybe people have forgotten about us.

I collect thirty-eight states on my license plate list, which does not really impress her at all. I even got Hawaii.

“Where are we going?” I ask.

“Where do you want to go?”

“I don’t know.” It’s the Saturday after Thanksgiving. I was going to suggest perhaps we head for home. Part of me is holding out a tiny bit of hope that we can be home on Monday for school. But that would mean we’d have to turn around today. And it would mean facing Danny, and I don’t know if I’m ready for that. “Home?” I venture.

“Home on the range?” she asks. “Where the buffalo roam? Where the deer and the antelope play?” Zoe says hopefully. “Whereseldomisheardadiscouragingword?” she sneaks in before I can interrupt.

“Home as in New Jersey,” I say. “Home, home on the lake.”

“Not yet,” she says, getting serious. “Come on. We have the whole frontier laid out in front of us. It’s manifest destiny. We can go wherever we want. You just need to know what you want. You can’t
get
what you want until you know what it is. That’s your next lesson. You need to know what you want.”

“Is there a word for that?”

“Um, there’s probably a French word for it. We’ll start simply. Do you like chocolate or vanilla?”

“I don’t know.”

“Cats or dogs?”

“Both.”

“What’s your favorite band?”

“I just like music.”

“Hannah. Seriously. You need to form some opinions. Where do you want to go? In the entire United States?”

“I really don’t know,” I say. I’ve only had time to respond to things. My job has been putting out fires. Not steering my fate. I take a deep breath and close my eyes and try to visualize something.
I deserve this
, I think. All I see at first are the lane lines of the highway bombarding me like bullets to the center of my forehead. Then I see the oily slick of black tar far on the horizon that disappears as we get close to it. Then when I finally relax, I see fur. White shaggy beardy fur with the light of the sun behind it. A face slowly materializes in the middle of it. It’s a buffalo. But it’s white.

“Fine. It would be interesting to see a buffalo,” I say. “Roaming. Not in captivity.” The ones in the cave paintings, I think. The ones the Plains Indians killed with spears. It would feel like we stepped back in time to see a buffalo.

The sky gets bigger as, by evening, we head west across South Dakota. There is corn, corn, and more corn at first. And there is that sky. It feels as if we can drive right up into it. We are now entirely at its mercy. Entirely overexposed in our tiny black bug of a car.

I look in some brochures we took from a rest stop, and notice that we’re blowing past all the good things to see: the Corn Palace, Wall Drug, Mount Rushmore, the Badlands. We’re just trying to get to Wyoming, where we believe we might spot some buffalo.

“You don’t want to see the Laura Ingalls Wilder Homestead?” Zoe asks when she sees it advertised on a road sign.

“No interest.”

“That’s blasphemous. An affront to girlhood. Un-American.”

“You did
not
read those books.”

“Uh-huh.”

“No you didn’t. I tried to read book one, and there were seven chapters about building the front door.”

“They get better. You sure? No Laura Ingallsy . . . ? Please.”

“Nope. I know what I want.”

“Fair enough.”

We do stop at one touristy place called Indian City, because Zoe loves places called “city” even more than she loves places called “world.” She wanted me to name my hot dog cart Hot Dog City, but it didn’t make the cut.

Indian City is terribly depressing. It is at the edge of the rez, and they sell some cheap turquoise jewelry and some blankets along with some Indian City bumper stickers, which Zoe buys, and other random plastic crap like mini drums, plastic pinto horses, and rubbery toy tomahawks. They have also forced some woman dressed in traditional garb to sit in the window, as if she were in a diorama at a museum, so you can watch her make a beaded purse.

“We should free her,” Zoe says.

“Maybe she wants to be here. This is her job. She’s not being held here against her will.”

“We can at least buy her dinner.”

Zoe approaches the woman, who is in a bad mood, probably from having to be ogled by tourists as if she were an animal in a cage. “Hello,” Zoe says. “My friend and I would like to buy you some dinner. Do you get a dinner break?”

The woman ignores her and keeps stringing beads onto her needle. She has long gray braids with a feather braided into a small piece in the front.

“Do you use a fish-bone needle or what?” Zoe asks.

“Take a look around, Einstein,” the woman finally says, adjusting the blanket she has over one shoulder. “Where would I find a fish?”

“There must be a river or something. The great Nebraska river.”

“That what they teach in those big-city schools?”

Zoe inspects the woman’s design.

“Wow, it’s more floral and intricate than I would have imagined. I thought it would be more geometrical.”

“Because we’re primitive?”

“No,” Zoe says, looking over the old woman’s shoulder. “Oh. I see. You use two needles. Cool.” Zoe is fascinated with the design and the needlework. “You could also do it like this,” she says, and she takes the woman’s purse and does some kind of nimble manipulation with the waxed thread that is textured to mimic the buffalo sinew that they used to use.

The woman is shocked for a second but then captivated by what Zoe has done to her design. She takes it back and tests it dubiously, pulling at the beads to see if Zoe’s method actually secured them, and then nods.

“I have an appreciation for the needle arts.”

“I see that,” the woman says, standing up. “My name is Rosemarie.”

“What’s your Indian name?” Zoe asks her.

“We stopped doing that in, like, 1864. We buy our clothes at the mall and work stupid desk jobs, just like you, Einstein.”

“But if you did have one. What would it be?”

“My father called me Little Cornflower.”

The design on the little pouch was, in fact, a cornflower, expertly created in a purplish slate blue.

“You kind of outgrew that, though. And Big Cornflower just doesn’t sound good.”

“Right.”

“I’ll just call you Rosemarie.”

“Which is my name.”

“Rosemarie, can we buy you a hot dog?”

Indian City sells hot dogs warmed over on one of those roller things they use at 7-Eleven. The hot dogs are shiny with grease, smoky-smelling, and red, and they are severely, incredibly processed with things a body doesn’t recognize as food. You could tell by the smell of them.

“I don’t eat those things.”

“Good for you,” I tell her.

“Come in the back. I’ll make you some fry bread.”

“The back” is what you would expect it to be. A soulless room behind the Employees Only door that houses a card table, a coffee machine, and a hot plate next to a rusty old sink. Crass graffiti is Sharpied to the back of the door in an intricate overlapping pattern like lace.

Fry bread is like funnel cake from Pennsylvania but without sugar. Rosemarie drops some dough into a skillet filled with oil and sizzles us up a snack. She explains that Native Americans developed fry bread when they were given handouts of white flour and shortening by the government and then told to start walking across the country to some new wasteland reservation with designated boundaries. It was easy to make and carry with them when they were forced from where they were to wherever the government wanted them to end up.

“So it’s like matzo,” I say.

“Now, this one here is a genius, Einstein.” Rosemarie points at me. “You should stick with her. Yes. It’s like Native American matzo, except we were being forced into captivity, not fleeing from it like the Jews from Egypt. But we, too, eat it as a symbol of our survival.”

“But it’s disgusting.”

“Not when you get used to it,” she says. She stretches her bubbly skillet-shaped piece of bread until a piece rips off and she folds it into her mouth.

“Hey, Rosemarie. My friend and I were discussing something. Do you know what you want?”

“Fry bread,” she says, licking some grease off her fingers.

“No. Do you know what you want out of life? Is it well defined?”

“I used to want a man.”

“A specific man?”

“Yes.”

“What happened?”

“I got him.”

“Oh,” Zoe says.

“Yeah.
Oh.
You need to be careful when you get what you want. My advice is to lower your expectations.”

“See,” I tell Zoe.

“See, nothing. The trick is to want more than just a man, right, Rosemarie?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the trick is not to want.”

But that doesn’t seem right even to me. It will give me something to think about, though, as we finish driving across this enormous state just to get to a buffalo.