The Museum of Intangible Things (17 page)

“It’s closed, Zoe,” I say.

“This place,” she says, pointing again emphatically to the ground, “this place never closes.”

She uses her long silver legs to climb over a railing in a single bound and then splashes into the water. She begins wading toward the gondolas.

“Zoeee!” I whisper-yell. “Zoe, get out of there.”

“See,” Zoe is saying. “Iss not closed. Iss just self-service after midnight.”

“Danny,” I say, looking desperately in his direction, and he vaults the railing, wades out to Zoe, and sweeps her into his arms in one fell swoop. Zoe kicks her feet a little, but she doesn’t put up too much of a fight as he carries her back to land.

We dry her off with Danny’s barn jacket and drag her to the front desk. A kind, short-haired man named Amand awaits. You can tell he was taught to be patient with folks like us at his hospitality college.

“Good morning, folks. How can I help you?” he says as Zoe slams the jackelope down on the front desk and pets it on top of the head.

“We need a room for the night,” Danny answers.

“Sure thing. Can I interest you in our Romance Package? For just fifty dollars extra, you get two gondola rides and two tickets to the wax museum.”

Zoe is leaning with one elbow on the front desk and says, “We need three.” She points clumsily at all three of us. “She loves him, and I love her, so we want three tickets in the Romance Package.”

“Um, it comes with two,” the polite man says.

“But there are all kinds of love, and you can’t diszcriminate. Three tickets.”

Danny says, “It’s okay, Zoe. You can have my ticket to the museum.”

“No, Danny. It’z the prinziple. They shouldn’t put our love”—again she drunkenly points to the three of us—“in a box.”

The clerk points at me. “Is your love for her romantic?” he asks.

Zoe takes a moment to consider this. “No,” she says. “But that doesn’t matter. I love her. So I should get a ticket too.”

“It’s called the ‘Romance’ Package.”

“Well, what kind of package do you have for our kind of relationship? If you don’t have one that suits us, then you are discriminating against our love.”

“Sir, I’m sorry,” I say. “Zoe, just let him do his job.”

“I’ll just give you three tickets,” the clerk says. “It’s okay.”

“See,” Zoe says. “The squeaky wheel . . .” She turns around and leans on the desk with her shoulder blades while she examines her fingernails, and the clerk hands us our keys.

Our hotel room is a standard one with two beds and stripey polyester maroon bedspreads. The cheaply framed prints on the wall depict abstract ink drawings of gondoliers. Zoe flops on the bed face first and spread-eagle while Danny jumps in the shower.

Her face is buried in the nasty Las Vegas hotel comforter, and I begin to slide it out from under her so at least she is plastered into a clean sheet.

“You are protecting me from the spermatozoa,” she says into the bed.

“Among other things,” I say.

“Stop protecting me.”

“It’s what I do. I like protecting you.”

She rolls over and looks at the spiky spackled ceiling as if she’s finding shapes in the clouds. So I lie perpendicular to her, with my head resting on her stomach.

“I see a mermaid,” I say.

“Where?”

“There. See the tail?”

Zoe snaps a picture of it with her Polaroid that she had placed on the nightstand. “Remember when you thought you saw a sea monster in the lake?” she asks.

“I could have sworn . . . But I guess it was just a piece of driftwood.”

“And you set up video cameras at the end of the dock. You were so determined.”

“Part of me still thinks it was a sea monster . . . Remember when you lived for twenty-four hours inside that squirrel hole in the big tree?”

“I didn’t want them to cut it down.”

“I think I do know what I want, Zo. From life. I’m afraid if I tell you, though, it will jinx the whole thing.”

“Then keep it to yourself. But write it down somewhere. Make it real in some small way.”

“Okay,” I say, and I draw a little heart on the inside of her wrist with the pen I found next to the Gideon Bible in the nightstand.

At noon the next day, Zoe is much better, and we eat the breakfast included in our Romance Package for three. Then we head downstairs to the casino. Zoe doesn’t want the jackelope to suffocate, so she carries him in a plastic laundry bag with his head sticking out of it. The convenient shopping mall in our hotel has allowed us to find her some more-appropriate travel clothes: some black leggings and a big
LAS VEGAS
sweatshirt. I am still wearing my ensemble from the Walmart in Ohio but have sprung for some clean underwear, and I wear them out of the dressing room at Victoria’s Secret and hand the tag to the cashier.

Apparently I am not the first person to have done this, because she is completely unfazed and tells me to have a nice day.

“Okay, time to go, folks,” I say, swinging my dirty underwear back and forth in my pink VS shopping bag. “Let’s get back to the East Coast.”

The two of them stop in their tracks and stare at me like I’m insane.

“What?”

“What do you mean, ‘what’? We’re in Vegas.”

They’re both practically panting at me like they’re two little pugs and I’m holding a pork chop.

“Two hours,” I say. I need to get Zoe strapped into a seat belt in Samuel Rodriguez’s pickup before she takes off again.

The two of them practically jump up and down and head to the casino.

I thought I was going to have a seizure from the noise and the lights, but somehow all the clinking and clanging begins to morph into white noise, and you stop noticing it after a while.

Danny climbs behind me on my stool in front of a slot machine. He is straddled behind me, and I feel the heat of him penetrating my body in electric waves. I help him make his bets and push the buttons while Zoe works the machine next to us. When we win, he kisses me on the neck. We gamble away the $157 in coins that Zoe brought with her from Yellowstone. It is amazing how quickly we go through it and how energized we are from the extra oxygen they pump into the room to keep you awake.

When we get to our last token, Danny holds it up, we all kiss it, and . . .

We win the jackpot!

Lights, sirens, bells, and whistles go off as the quarters keep clanking into the metal tray in front of us. A heavy, glorious, silver rain.

“I told you you were lucky,” Danny whispers in my ear, kissing it.

We win $650.

“Just enough for tattoos,” Zoe says. “To symbolize and memorialize our good fortune!”

“No, Zo. I thought you let go of that idea.”

“Nope. We get tattoos, or you two get married. Because we’re in Vegas, and we should do something wild. What have I taught you about audacity and saying yes?”

Maybe it’s the extra oxygen in the air, but I do say yes, on the condition that she agrees to come home with us as soon as the ink is dry.

• • •

It doesn’t hurt as much as I thought it would. You just have to get used to the perpetual scratching sensation.

We get tiny lucky horseshoe tattoos on the back of our right upper hips. So we can hide them if we want or show them with some low-rise jeans or in a bathing suit. “It’s good to have options,” Zeke, our ink master, tells us. He has no options left, it seems, because his entire body is covered. He even has a goddess on the back of his arm who gets pregnant when he bends his elbow.

The horseshoes are cute, and Danny likes it too. It will remind me of our journey west, stealing horses and making friends with cowboys.

Zoe snaps some photos of my ink. I’m actually happy we did it, although it felt a little like deciding to get pregnant. Like, once the needle touched my skin, there was no turning back. There are very few irreversible decisions in this life, and getting a tattoo is one of them. Semi-irreversible, anyway. And that was the eeriest part about it.

Danny opts out of getting inked himself, which I’m happy about. I like him just the way he is. We go to Madame Tussaud’s then, and aside from the faux celebrities’ flat, matte complexions, the likenesses are astounding. We show our tattoos to wax Leonardo DiCaprio, wax Will Smith, wax Zac Efron, and wax Michael Jackson.

“Blue Man Group?” Zoe asks when we’re done. “They’re playing in this hotel.”

“I don’t like art for the sake of art,” Danny says, and I’m surprised and thrilled that he has opinions about art at all. “Art should say something, or move people or at least demonstrate some kind of special skill of the artist. That show is just guys in blue makeup spitting bananas at the audience.”

“Well, maybe some people are moved by spit bananas,” Zoe says.

“Maybe. I’m not going, though.” Danny takes his share of the jackpot to try to win some more in the casino while Zoe and I sit in the replica of San Marco Piazza.

“The real one has pigeons,” I tell Zoe.

“It’s probably unsanitary to do that here.”

“But I think that’s the coolest thing about the Piazza. The pigeons and how you can feed them. And how they land on your head. Without pigeons, it’s just a big flat space.”

We realize we are both leaning to the left to avoid sitting on the now-sore tattooed side of our butts, and we crack up. We move the left sides of our chairs together so we can lean into each other and have a conversation.

“Why did you do that to yourself last night?” I ask her.

“I was trying to forget.”

“Forget what?”

“That you don’t believe me. And that I have nothing to go home to. I don’t even have a home anymore.”

“You do, Zo. You have your mom and Noah. They love you. They need you, Zoe.”

“But don’t you get it? You are my home, Hannah. And if I don’t have you, I have nowhere to go.”

“You have me.”

“No I don’t.”

“You do. What do you mean? I’m right here, leaning next to you on my left butt cheek.”

“I was abducted by aliens, and they want to travel through the lightning and take me with them.”

“I know that’s what you believe.”

“But if you don’t believe it, that means you think I’m crazy. And I can’t live with that.”

“Zo.
Crazy
is the wrong word. What if you just tried the lithium? Just to see how it made you feel? To see if it evened you out.”

“I can’t believe you don’t believe me.”

“Can’t you see, though, that you’re asking a lot?”

“It’s not supposed to matter how much I ask. We took an oath.”

“But I think maybe in the fine print, it says that I can try to get you help if you need it.”

“I don’t need it. It’s not my fault that they chose me. They liked the museum I made for Noah, I think. It helped them understand things about us. Or it was just my luck. Sometimes luck can be bad, you know. That’s my lesson about luck.”

“You’re preaching to the choir on that one, sister.”

And she’s right, because just then Danny comes to get us and tell us that a bunch of cops have surrounded Samuel Rodriguez’s pickup truck.

“Maybe we should just turn ourselves in,” I say.

“Have you learned nothing on this trip? I don’t think I’ve been teaching about giving up,” says Zoe.

“It actually will look better if we go home on our own recognizance,” Danny says to me.

“That’s good, the recognizance thing. You can do that after I make one more stop,” Zoe says. She points to a television screen across the Piazza, because a person can’t possibly sit in a piazza without watching some TV, I guess. It’s tuned to the Weather Channel and the weatherperson points to a swirling red storm in a giant paisley shape hovering over the Grand Canyon. “You want to see the Grand Canyon, don’t you, Hans?”

The storm Zoe was chasing had apparently bypassed Vegas and is headed straight for Flagstaff.

“Why would I take you there, Zo? What are you going to do?”

“I just want to show you the truth. You can see for yourself.”

“Let’s just go home, Zoe. Enough is enough. I got the tattoo.” It was still sore, and in spite of the antibiotic ointment and Band-Aids I covered it with, it keeps rubbing against the waistband of my jeans, and it’s driving me crazy. “It’s time to go back and face the music. It’ll be good. We can start over. Clean slate,” I say.

“They’re just going to put me back in the hospital,” Zoe mumbles.

“Maybe not,” I say.

“I’m starting to feel bad.”

“About what?”

“Amy Winehouse. Janis Joplin. Jimi Hendrix. Jim Morrison. Babies with cancer. Dying young. Drowning polar bears. Fundamentalists. Sex slaves. Orphans. Boy soldiers. Lonely middle-aged bachelors who live with their moms. Our pathetic parents. Especially Amy Winehouse. Why didn’t anyone save her?”

“That is sad,” Danny says.

I pull my finger across my throat, indicating for him to stay out of it.

“If we go to the Grand Canyon, I will stop feeling bad. We can run away from the badness.”

“No, we have to face the badness.”

“After the Grand Canyon.”

“Now, Zo.”

And before I can tell Danny to grab her, she takes off. She runs, with the jackelope under her arm, through the mall of the Venetian and out the back door of the food court. She dodges a bunch of Dumpsters, gets to the Strip, and takes a left. Danny takes long strides behind her, but she ducks into a casino, and we lose her in the cacophony of the crowd.

“Shit,” he says. “She’s a slippery little minx.”

“This way,” I say. I remember seeing a runaway camp under the highway a few blocks away. And knowing Zoe, she has probably made friends with a bunch of other runaways. Not that we’re runaways ourselves. We’re just on vacation, I remind myself.

We find them under a bypass. Their camp consists of some cardboard boxes, a couple of dirty old hotel bedspreads, and two fuzzy chairs shaped like leopard-print, high-heeled pumps.

The runaways are pierced and greasy and smoking and feeding Dumpster pad Thai to their pet stray dog, who is tied to a rope.

“Have you seen our friend Zoe?” I ask the one who seems like the leader. She has pink hair and combat boots and looks significantly unwashed.

“She the Silvery Jersey Girl?”

“Yes.”

“Right on.”

Danny hates it when people say “right on.” It’s so Orange County. “Have you seen her?” he insists.

“Not today.”

“What would she do if she were trying to get to the Grand Canyon?”

“She could pawn something to get bus fare, stop at the Homeless Youth Center, or join a hotel tour. That would take some research, though, to find out which ones are leaving when. And they probably stop at the Hoover Dam first, which would be a waste of time. She have anything to pawn?”

“A jackelope?” I say tentatively.

“That might catch a fair price. People love their kitsch around here, if you haven’t noticed,” she says, pointing to the shoe chairs.

“I see that,” I say. “My name’s Hannah, and this is Danny.”

“I’m Joan,” she says, but her real name is probably Madison or something. I think briefly about the parents of a girl named Madison who has turned into this person named Joan. All the good intentions gone awry. I wonder what they did to her to make her want to leave and live here beneath the highway. It must have been something terrible. No one is that much of an ingrate. No one would leave a comfortable home and live here unless something bad was happening. That’s why they’re called runaways. Because there’s something they needed to get away from.

“Well, thanks for the info,” I say.

“Pawnshop is on Fremont.”

When we finally find it, we know Zoe’s gone because the jackelope is already in the front window wearing a Rudolph nose and a tiny Santa hat. The pawnbroker is blaring “Silver Bells,” my father’s favorite Christmas carol, and I can’t think of a more spiritless place to cultivate the Christmas spirit: a pawnshop in Vegas in the middle of a desert without even a hint of a chill in the air. The song makes me want to go home. I tear up a little. I feel like I want my mom. Which is a primal feeling, but one that I’ve trained myself to stop feeling since I turned fourteen and she got so depressed.

“I want to go home,” I say to Danny, and I let him hug me while I cry. I even want to see my dad, I think. As fucked up as they are, I never once doubted that they loved me. They wanted me. And that is worth something. That may be worth trying to fix. “I really want to go home.” I wipe my nose on my sleeve. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I cry sometimes when I’m tired.”

“So let’s go. Let’s get out of here.”

“I can’t go home without her, Danny.”

“Okay.” He sighs. “I saw a Greyhound station on Main Street. Let’s do this thing.”

The thought of a Greyhound bus—the nauseating rocking sway, the sickly sweet smell of the commode chemicals sloshing around in the back, the ultra-cool blast of the air conditioning—makes my stomach turn.

“What about the airport?”

“We couldn’t get through security.”

“Oh yeah.”

“How much trouble are we going to be in for stealing that car?”

“Teenagers, first offense, joyride, no intention of keeping it. We might get off with community service. But this is the culture of the car. And they punish you severely for screwing with someone’s vehicle. I think it may be worse than assault and battery.”

The reality of our situation is sinking in, and I feel hopeless and shaky for a moment. Like I’ve had seven cups of coffee. I breathe in. And breathe out. And try to think of a plan. It’s easy to choose, though, because we have no choice. We have to get to the Grand Canyon.

It’s a six-hour bus ride with two bathroom breaks and a break for a meal. Zoe is not here at the bus station, though, and there was no earlier bus. I have no idea how she’s going to get there, but I know she’s going to get there, so we buy our tickets in time for the 5:00
P.M.
departure.

Danny buys some pretzels, cheese crackers, and a Coke. “Whatever you want, my lady. It’s on me,” he says with a grand gesture toward the row of vending machines along the back wall of the station. He still has ice cream man money left, and he won a little more at the slots while I was talking to Zoe in the Piazza.

I choose some trail mix and popcorn and some Fig Newtons for dessert.

“Nice, that has, like, all the food groups. You got some protein and fruit and carbs and fiber.”

“I try,” I say. “Nutrition is interesting to me. Even in the most challenging of circumstances.”

“Is that what you want to study?”

“I never thought about it, but that might be a good option.”

“People need help with that. You could make a change.”

And, then, since we’re in Vegas, one of MJ’s favorite towns, we start singing “Man in the Mirror.”

“My mom liked Michael Jackson,” Danny admits.

“But you didn’t?”

“Well. He may be a guilty pleasure. What’s yours?”

“I like romantic comedies.”

“All girls like romantic comedies. That’s not embarrassing.”

“Yeah, but I feel guilty about it. They’re so predictable. They always end with proclamations of love made in the fake rain. Why do they always do the rain thing?”

“I don’t know. It’s a symbol, I guess. Of how love conquers all. Even the weather.”

“Do you believe that?”

“I refuse to answer on the grounds it may incriminate me.”

“No. It’s okay,” I say. “How can anyone grow up with
parents
and still believe that love conquers all? What teenager on the planet has parents who are still in love?”

“My grandparents are still in love.”

“Really?”

“Yup, and they’re eighty-three. They got married when they were our age, and they’re still together. He still goes on about how beautiful she is to him. And how he remembers the day he first saw her.”

“Are they in the
Guinness Book of World Records
?”

“No”—he laughs—“but maybe it’s still possible. For love to conquer all. Maybe love ebbs and flows and just goes through a deep trough when your kids are teenagers. You either stick it out or you don’t.”

Just then our bus pulls up. The dreaded bus. I look around at our fellow travelers. Just some old guy wearing an Indian-blanket poncho, carrying an Incan pipe flute and a suitcase full of his CDs to sell to the tourists at the Grand Canyon. We heard him playing in San Marco Piazza, his haunting, ancient tune evoking the mysteries of his steep, thin-aired Peruvian homeland. We also heard him, or one of his brothers, in Chicago . . . and Yellowstone, now that I think of it. His eerie whistle has become the ubiquitous soundtrack for this adventure.

It starts to rain then; the storm we’ve been promised has finally broken. It rains hard and sudden. We can learn a lot from the desert. How it patiently waits to be nourished. And then doesn’t waste what it’s been given. It’s a grateful little ecosystem that’s conservative with its resources.

It hardly ever rains in the desert, though, so when it does, it deserves some ceremony. We honor the rain by enacting our own final scene from a romantic comedy. I wait in front of the bus holding a newspaper over my head while Danny pounds on the window of the bus station. “Wait!” he mouths. “Don’t go!” and then he runs out and picks me up and spins me around. I act surprised when he kisses me, and we get soaking wet together in the teeming rain as we’re standing in front of the Greyhound bus to Flagstaff.

“Tickets, please,” the driver says. He was not amused by our performance. We hand him our tickets and take a seat near the front so I won’t have to smell the bathroom.

• • •

It’s a long ride through more crazy moon-like landscapes, and because our driver is a madman hauling the bus at ninety miles an hour, we stay just ahead of the storm, which is following behind us like a big black blanket, threatening to tuck us in for the night.

We stop in two little towns where the houses all look like Taco Bells, and I wonder what it would be like to live out here in a little Taco Bell house in the “dry” heat so far away from a big body of water. It makes my freshwater self panic a little. What do people do without the city or the lake or the ocean to go to? It’s just land, land, and more land.

They play golf, I guess, and tennis, and they go to the mall or do “basketball choreography” like the happy kids from
High School Musical
who also dance on the tables of their outdoor cafeterias. This makes me laugh.

“What?” Danny asks.

“I think I have another guilty pleasure. I think I like musical theater.”

“Ouch,” Danny says. “We’ll have to work on that one.” He takes my hand, and I feel his touch throughout my entire body. I lean over and kiss him, and he asks me for an eight-letter word for
truth
. He bought a book of crosswords at the bus station, and he’s determined to finish this puzzle before kissing me for real.

“Veracity,” I say.

“Ooh, you’re good.”

“There’s not much else it could be. Not a lot of words for
truth
. Because there is only one. Truth.”

“I think there could be different versions of truth,” he says. “You choose your truth, and then you build your life around it.”

“Give me an example.”

“So, Rebecca Forman.”

“Yeah?”

“Objectively, empirically, she is not pretty. She has a big nose. Her eyes are too close together. Objectively. But stick with me for a second. Someone was good about telling her she was beautiful when she was a kid. So she believed it. It became her truth. And so other people believe it too. I believed it for a little while. All the cheerleaders who follow her around believe it. No one even questions it.”

“I did, secretly.”

“Maybe you were jealous.” He smiles.

“Whatever. But Rebecca Forman’s ‘truth’ was just her perception.”

“Right. But perception becomes truth if you can get people to see it your way. Truth is a much more fluid concept than you choose to believe it is.”

“Do you know Zoe’s truth? Have I even told you why she’s running to the Grand Canyon?”

“No.”

“She thinks she was abducted by aliens, and she thinks if she runs into the lightning, she can get back to them. That is her truth. Her reality. You can’t tell me that if she can convince enough people, that will become true. Zoe can believe it till the cows come home, but there are no aliens traveling through lightning to take her back to their exoplanet.”

“Till the cows come home?”

“It must be my new tattoo talking.”

“How do you know? That there are no aliens?”

“There has to be something that we can know for sure. I know for sure that Zoe is disappointed in the way things are turning out. I know for sure that your friend Ethan did something to upset her. And that she didn’t get into the schools she wanted to get into. She is stuck and embarrassed, so she created this story in her mind. She can’t stand admitting that she might just be a regular schmo like the rest of us.”

“Ethan is not my friend, number one, and none of us, you especially, is a regular schmo.”

“The world seems to think we are regular schmos. Only regular schmos go to County College.”

“So go somewhere else. You didn’t even try, and now you’re blaming the rest of the world for your schmohood.”