The Museum of Intangible Things (12 page)

While Zoe is pimping our vehicle with the mud flaps, I notice that Squirrely is gone. His log sits empty and abandoned in the hatchback, and his chestnut has rolled all the way into the back corner of the car.

“Where’s Squirrely?” I ask Zoe as we climb into the car.

“I set him free while you were asleep.”

“Where?”

“I just pulled up to some woods, put his log down on the ground, and let him hop away.”

“Zoe, he has no organs,” I say.

“Well, he didn’t need them. Hurry up, there’s a tornado watch near Toledo.” Zoe had apparently gotten a five-finger discount on an old transistor radio that reported the weather in a robot voice transmitted by local weather stations. It made scratchy static sounds as she turned the dial and held it up close to her ear. My dad always had one in the kitchen. He called it Charlie and found it more reliable than all the fancy Doppler radar computers at the TV station. He always listened to Charlie before he headed out to work.

“So we’re storm chasing now?”

“Unless you have something you want to see.”

“I would like to see you fall asleep. I’ll drive. You sleep,” I say, and I wonder what I would like to see on this trip. Maybe Mount Rushmore. Chicago? The Mall of America? The Grand Canyon?

School doesn’t teach geography or U.S. history anymore, so I learned most of it from American Girl doll catalogs. We could never afford to get an actual doll, but Zoe and I read the catalogs and the books from the library, and we would categorize the rich girls we met according to which doll we thought they might have. She’s a Molly. That one’s Samantha. The true iconoclasts had Kaya dolls, which is the one we both coveted the most. She came with a pet wolf.

What I really want to see right now is Danny Spinelli. I try to push that out of my mind. How I wanted to be absorbed into his body. And I think that’s probably not healthy.

“Is it healthy to want to be absorbed into his body?”

“That’s what an orgasm feels like.”

“WHAT?”

“Well, for a split second before it happens there’s this sense of nothingness. Like you and he have melded and become just light. Just energy. You become Nothing for a split second. Or maybe you die or become God. Because when everything comes rushing back, like a prolonged luxurious sneeze throughout your entire body, that’s what you say.”

“What?”

“Oh my god. That’s what most people say anyway. So maybe God is orgasm.”

“You could probably get arrested for saying that in this part of the country.”

“Churchy people know that. Why do you think they have so many kids? You’re the only one who doesn’t know that. Yet, anyway. Have you ever?”

“What?”

“Met God.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You would know if you did.”

“Then, no.”

“I want to make sure that you’ve got that in place before I go.”

“Where are you going?”

“Nowhere,” Zoe says distantly and then leans her head against the window looking toward the sky.

I take some woodsy roads through the flat subdivisions of Ohio. There’s only one thing I am extremely confident about, and that is my sense of direction. I can just feel where on the map I am and sense where on the map I want to go. I attribute it to my Lenni Lenape ancestors. I keep driving toward where I remember the sun setting and then making occasional rights to get us to the north.

I reach over and turn down the weather radio, which, despite its mechanical over-enunciated monotone, seems to get excited when it talks about the tornado.

“A toRnAdo is expeCted in LUcas county between sev-en
A.M.
and sev-en ThirTy.”

Its robot voice reminds me of Noah, but I do not bring up his name yet. He is my ace in the hole. The thing I mention when I know we really need to turn around. One allusion to Noah, and I know Zoe will be ready to head for home.

Zoe closes her eyes and rests her head on the headrest.

Finally
, I think. She is finally going to rest and get back to herself. I could sense some of her old self returning in our last conversation. She was speaking without feeling rushed by the hurried landslide of her thoughts. Her brain gets like that
I Love Lucy
episode where Lucy’s working in the chocolate factory and the conveyor belt gets ahead of her and the chocolates keep coming and coming and there’s nothing you can do but start swallowing them.

And now that she is quiet for a moment, I try to think for myself. Part of me knows we need to get back and fess up. Face the music. Apologize to Officer Franz. Atone for our sins. Move on. But I don’t want to do that until I know Zoe can make a case for herself. She needs to be calm and reasonable or this whole trip will have been for naught. They’ll just put her right back in the slammer. I’ll see how she seems when she wakes up, and then I’ll suggest turning around.

“I’m not asleep.”

“What?”

“You just said, ‘I’ll see how she seems when she wakes up,’ and I’m not asleep.”

“I didn’t
say
that out loud, Zoe. I was thinking it.”

“No, you said it.”

“No, Zoe. I swear I didn’t.” I am looking in her eyes, instead of the winding road, when I feel a terrible thump beneath the steering wheel and then beneath the back wheels.

“What was that?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” Zoe says. “Pull over.”

I ease the LeMans over to the side of the road and get out. In the middle of the yellow center line lies a throw-pillow-sized lump of black fur.

“Oh my god, I hit that!” I say sadly. “What is it?”

Zoe walks to the center of the road, and I look both ways before following her. She squats down and reaches toward it, a raccoon. His pointy snout points to the south.

“Don’t touch it, Zoe,” I say. “It could be sick.” But it’s too late. She strokes her hand down its coarse wild animal fur. And then she cries a little. A single tear. Which is rare. I very rarely see her cry. And I’m surprised it’s over a dead raccoon.

“Really, you’re crying about this,” I start to say, when the square of fur starts to shake back and forth a little. There is a soft clicking, purring sound. Zoe puts a hand on either side of the animal and bends down to listen for a heartbeat. Then she lifts it and stands it upright. The raccoon opens its eyes, finds its footing, and waddles creepily back into the woods.

“It was just stunned,” Zoe says, a little spacey, as if the whole experience took something out of her.

“Um, what just happened?” I ask her.

“I told you. I have newfound abilities,” she says in an eerie monotone.

“Two words for you: hand sanitizer,” I say.

When we get back to the car, I squirt copious amounts of it into her hands, and she sits back down and stares straight ahead.

The wind is beginning to pick up. A gust of it almost knocks us off the shoulder and into the ditch that leads to a little creek below us.

“Tornado, please,” Zoe requests. And I continue heading northwest. My father is a weatherman, which is different from being a meteorologist, so I don’t know much, but I do know that tornadoes usually happen in the spring, not the fall, and they like big wide-open spaces. Like Kansas. Ohio is mostly flat, but we’re in a slightly hilly part of it, and I seek lower ground in order to find a flat place with a break in the trees.

Both the sunrise and the wind are behind us now. The wind almost lifts our tiny car off the ground as we speed along a flat two-lane highway. Everyone else, it seems, is heeding the tornado warning and staying off the road.

Above us, the heavens collect in a dense city of condensation. Clouds are building on top of one another. Some of them seem to be dipping to the ground, opening up their bottoms toward the earth like steam shovels. The wind starts to blow one of them into a black spiral about the diameter of a football stadium, and it starts to sink and spin, whipping haphazardly toward the ground.

“I need to be there!” Zoe points. “Where it’s touching.”

“We can’t be there. We are here, which is amazing enough. Take a picture.”

Bright flashes of light crackle inside the storm because it has collected and snapped up power grids. Natural lightning starts to zap around it.

“Closer!” Zoe begs at the edge of her seat. She snaps a picture through the windshield and turns the cranky dial to get ready for another shot.

I take a left and drive toward the storm. But the wind is so strong I can barely accelerate.

“Let’s get out,” Zoe says when we get to where she thinks it’s close enough. “Here, you should wear a helmet,” she says and she plonks the drinking helmet from the truck stop onto my head. She dons the bright orange hunting cap with the earflaps, and we both get out the passenger side and stay between the car and the open door.

The spiral is headed straight for us. But at the last minute it takes a hard right. It sounds like a seventeen-car pileup. Screeching and wailing and whistling. A roaring freight train.

Hail the size of softballs starts to thud into the wet earth around us. I pick up a piece and show it to Zoe, incredulous. The storm moves to the east, slapping against our down coats, whipping our hair against our faces, slamming us against the car. My drinking helmet flies up and away to the land of Oz. We hold each other down. My ears pop. I can’t hear a thing, but I can feel Zoe lifting toward the sky.

I grab her ankle and use all of my strength to pull her back to the ground, and then I lie on top of her in a starfish formation until everything is suddenly quiet.

For three full minutes we hear nothing. There is nothingness.

Then a bird starts to chirp, checking if the coast is clear, a car drives by, and the sun picks itself up above a flat purple cloud.

“Oh my god!” Zoe shouts. “That was exactly like sex. Well, the reverse order. The rushing and roaring came first and then the nothingness and then the gentle awakening. But you get the idea. Now you have met God.”

“I thought it would be better than that,” I mumble.

I am still lying on top of her because I can’t connect the messages in my brain to the muscles that are supposed to move my limbs. “You need to let me go,” Zoe says. “You are holding on to me.”

“Dude. So you wouldn’t blow away.”

“When you are ready, you will let me go,” she says dreamily and looks again to the sky.

We drive northwest for an hour to Michigan. Michigan is much like rural New Jersey, except it’s flattened out and well planned and pristine. Michigan would
be
New Jersey if you ran over it with a steamroller, excavated everything, and then put it back in neat rows with lots of space for everyone to move around in. It is practical and pretty, and it’s a place where nothing spontaneous happens. This is a place where nothing happens unless people sit around and have a meeting about it first. The people are mostly white, which is weird, and the squirrels are sometimes black, also weird.

To distract ourselves, I am trying to find the license plates of all fifty states, while Zoe gets enraged by bumper stickers. We follow a truck whose bumper reads
GUN CONTROL MEANS BEING ABLE TO HIT YOUR TARGET.
Zoe is driving behind him, tailgating, her fury building.

Finally she pulls to his left and makes me duck. She asks me to roll down my window and motions for the other driver to do the same. She screams out the window at him, “Are you part of a well-regulated militia?”

“What?” the guy says. He’s fat and balding and has prickly short gray hair growing from all parts of his body.

“Leave him alone,” I insist from the seat well I was ordered to crouch into.

The guy, incredibly, thinks Zoe is coming on to him. He smirks and winks his fat eyelid. She screams at him again. “Hey, asshole, I said, ARE YOU PART OF A WELL-REGULATED MILITIA?”

He just holds up his hands because he can’t hear her.

Zoe continues racing to stay at his side and then holds up Tasery and aims it toward him through the window. “You,” she says. “You are my target!” and then she pulls the trigger, and a tiny bolt of lightning zaps between the rods at the end of the Taser. The bald man gets on his cell phone. He’s too wrapped up in being a man’s man to take her seriously, so he laughs, dismissing her, which infuriates Zoe even more. She hates to be dismissed.

“Roll up the window,” Zoe says to me. And then she somehow coaxes ninety mph out of the poor LeMans to pull ahead and away.

“Um. That was quite a display,” I say, trying to unfurl myself from under-the-seat asana.

She’s still riled up and red faced with rage.

“Take a breath,” I tell her. “Wild guess, but this might be the kind of outburst that people mistake for mental illness,” I try.

“Mental illness? I’m expressing myself. What do you want me to do, write a well-crafted letter to the editor? That’s not me. I’m a guerrilla fighting for what I believe in on the highways of America. I’m Neal Cassady, and you’re Sal Paradise. And you love me. I am your muse,” she says, taking her eyes off the road to look at me.

“The only people for you ‘are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars,’” she quotes from
On the Road
. “You’re living through me, Hannah Banana. I need to teach you how to live on your own. And burn like a Roman candle.” She leans forward and looks to the sky. “And there’s not much time.” A pinkish, iridescent cloud that looks like the inside of an enormous oyster shell whirlpools above us and seems to follow us like the moon. “They’re getting closer. I can hear the frequency of them. It’s like static on the radio, but more organized and symphonic. I think they’re inside that cloud. And they’re waiting for me to ditch you, probably. But I have some more to teach you. Do you ever see their shadows? In your peripheral vision? They move around us all the time. And they know our names, too. Sometimes they whisper my name in my ear to wake me in the morning. Do you ever hear them?”

“Um. No,” I venture, starting to freak out. When she’s talked about “them” before, they always sounded innocent, like imaginary friends. This latest report sounds so clinical. Less like a fantasy and more like a “symptom.” A scary adult disease. “So where are we headed?” I ask, exhaling.

“I have a cousin in Ann Arbor,” she says, keeping an eye on the cloud in the rearview.

“Does your cousin have a bathtub?” I ask.

“Let’s hope so.”

“Zoe, you’re a smart person.”

“Yes.”

“So you know we’re on the run because something happened to change your mood. There was a trigger. A stimulus. And then a response.”

“That sounds very logical, Hannah, but there are parts of this you don’t understand. There are different systems of logic that exist in dimensions you can’t see.”

“Nothing happened with Ethan, then?”

Zoe looks at me for a second, disappointed. She shakes her head, says nothing, and continues driving, still preoccupied with the cloud that’s now directly in front of us.

As promised, Ann Arbor is arboreal. The eponymous trees are neat and beautiful and fit into the plan. They are tame and innocuous and often stand happily alone. So unlike the tangled mess of trees in the Jersey woods I’m used to. In Jersey, you can’t see the light for them. The trees. The tangled deep mess of everything can choke you in New Jersey. These trees have room to breathe and grow and become happy independent thinkers. I am suddenly jealous of them.

“I’m jealous of the trees.”

“I’m angry at the bees,” Zoe says, laughing. “What are you talking about?”

“Nothing.”

Cousin Jimmy lives on campus at the University of Michigan in an apartment above a lazy, dingy, loungy hippie café with mismatched chairs and velvety brass and copper-colored couches from the twenties. It’s called Muffin Top in homage to the college girls who wear their jeans slung too low across their pillowy, beer-fed hips.

We have to walk through the café kitchen and into its broom closet that smells like moldy mop to get to Jimmy’s staircase. He’s in a wide-open red plaid robe and light blue boxer shorts when he opens the door for us. He is slender and beautiful, and his shiny, slack, black hair hangs in front of one eye. The other eye takes us in.

“Cuz,” he says. He is completely unperturbed. I don’t think anything could “plus” him at all. He lets us in and then walks himself back to bed—a mattress on the floor in the room at the end of the hall.

According to Zoe, he couldn’t afford to come home for Thanksgiving so he took a job caring for the mice in the science labs for four days. Aside from him, and some students from faraway places like Saudi Arabia or something, the campus is empty.

“I didn’t know you had a cousin,” I say to Zoe.

“I do.”

“A hot cousin.”

“Since he’s, like, my cousin, I don’t notice his hotness. You think he’s hot?”

“Smoking,” I say.

“You should definitely leave the
g
off when you say that,” Zoe says, cringing.

The apartment is empty except for a scratchy plaid couch and a coffee table made out of a couple of suitcases piled on top of one another. There is a TV on top of a milk crate, and that’s about it.

Luckily there is a bathtub, and I have never in my life been so happy to see one. It’s a college bathtub, though, and it hasn’t been cleaned since Jimmy moved in, so there is brown grime around the edges. I try not to think about it as I turn up the hot water and stand in the shower for ten minutes before even reaching for the soap. I wash my hair with my special shampoo, and then Zoe throws a tube of conditioner at me. “You must use that. Your hair is already the color of straw.”

Zoe washes her face in the sink and brushes her teeth with my toothbrush, which, because it is Zoe, does not bother me as much as you think it would.

She preens a little in the mirror. She is the kind of person who never looks bad. Even with platinum hair that she cut by herself at Walmart, even after getting hit by a tornado, she looks beautiful. I am the kind of person who has some really good days and some really bad days in the looks department. I have an erratic kind of beauty. I didn’t even glance at myself before climbing into the shower, in the hopes that when I’m at least clean, I can do something to avoid looking like a scarecrow in my new straw-colored hair and flannel shirt.

When I get out, Zoe steps gracefully into the shower and uses the same towel I used, so as not to be an imposition. She gets dressed and then finds a blow dryer and a round brush and gets to work making me look a little cuter than I did when I got here. She puts some makeup on my eyes to make them pop and tries a little bronzer to change the color of my wan complexion.

“Cute, but you should still wear the hat,” she says.

“What are we getting ready for?”

“I don’t know, but it’s good to be ready.”

Zoe sits open legged on cousin Jimmy’s dirty living room floor and pulls out her atlas. She turns on the Weather Channel and starts using a sharp compass-type instrument to measure out some kind of angles and vectors on the maps.

I try to nap on the scratchy couch but I can’t stop thinking about things. Like the entire biosphere of microorganisms that must be living between the cushions.

“What are you doing?” I say.

“Figuring out how much time I have,” she says without looking up. The symbols she’s writing on the map are foreign. Not the Greek of calculus. Swirls and squiggles. Weird sharp angles. Pentagons. It’s pentagonal, this language. Nothing I’ve ever seen.

“What’s with the pentagons?”

“Five is special to them. Like four is to us. Probably because they experience an extra dimension.”

Jimmy shuffles out of his room, opens the refrigerator, grabs a jug of orange juice, and guzzles deeply with his whole body as if he is swimming in it. Then he wipes his mouth and goes back to bed.

“You still think he’s hot?” Zoe asks.

“Uh-huh,” I say, and I sneak away down the hall, looking for a landline.

I’m feeling a little in over my head in the middle of the country with Zoe seemingly losing her mind. More talk of “them,” studying the weather, the ancient hieroglyphics she’s drawing on the map. I just need to make a connection with home. Talk to one person so I’m not so alone in this.

I actually am starting to miss my mom, believe it or not, but instead I dial Danny, whose number I have committed to memory.

“Hello,” he says. “Michigan? Hannah, is that you?”

I’m so relieved to hear his voice I almost cry. I’m about to say, “Danny?” when I hear her again. Rebecca. “Who is it?” she whines. And I hang up immediately. I don’t know why I was trying the same thing and expecting different results. I think that’s the actual definition of a fool.

Zoe is still watching the Weather Channel when I get back to the living room.

The Weather Channel should make me think of my father, but the best thing about this trip is that it’s helped me stop thinking about him. Not thinking about him for the first time in my life has been liberating. For the first time in my life, I’m not worried about whether he’s lonely, or eating right, or alive, basically, and not spiraling into a depression that will lead to his suicide.

I suddenly realize this: Never really knowing what to expect from the person who’s in charge of you—who might at any minute lose control, or beg you for forgiveness, or insult you, or kill himself, or accidentally drive off a cliff—takes a lot out of a person.

Walking on eggshells, so as not to provoke this person’s fiery raging outbursts, is exhausting. It is like this old seventies kids’ show I found on TV Land once where a family accidentally traveled back into prehistoric times and couldn’t get back to the present. They had to live in a cave and worry constantly about getting attacked by the Tyrannosaurus rex. Stuff like that can mess up your fight-or-flight response and leave it stuck forever in overdrive.

It’s been nice to let all that go. And I obviously have nothing to get back to in the Danny department.

I breathe and sink into cousin Jimmy’s dirty couch. I let myself fall asleep, and I dream about storms clearing, some grass growing, and me standing on my knees building a white picket fence around a square of it. Inside the square, a tree grows by itself.

When I wake Jimmy is dressed.

He’s got Zoe’s skinny legs and her fashion sense. In fact, he might be wearing Zoe’s clothes. Tight black jeans, combat boots, a black T-shirt, and a cropped plaid swing shirt.

He and Zoe are sitting on the floor drinking tea.

“You ready, sleepyhead?” Zoe asks.

“For what?”

“We’re going to feed the rats.”

• • •

The rats live in the basement of the science building. It is concrete and bunkerish and plunged deep into the earth. We scramble across campus into the bunker and down the stairs and find the walls and walls of cages across from the laboratories.

Jimmy puts on a medical mask while he cranks the stereo. And he gets to work.

“We’re not going to find any weird mutated rats, are we? Like ones with human ears growing on their backs?” I saw a picture of that in
National Geographic
once, and I couldn’t burn it from my memory. “They don’t have, like, ebola or anything, do they?”

“No. This is very basic research. Cancer research, mostly,” Zoe says. Since his one-word greeting, I have yet to hear Jimmy’s voice. He’s shy. Another of my favorite qualities in a boy.

He goes about his business, grabbing the food and cage shavings from a supply closet. He works to the rhythm of the music without seeming too dancey—he pulls open the bottoms of the cages, and shakes them into a rolling garbage can. Then he refills the cages with fresh paper.

“These aren’t rats,” I say. “They’re mice.”

“Same thing,” says Zoe.

“No. These guys are cute,” I say. “Can I hold one?”

“Control group,” Jimmy says without looking up, and he points to a row of cages with red tags hanging off them. These are the normal mice who haven’t been force-fed obscene quantities of Splenda.

I reach in and let a brown one crawl onto my hand. He stands up on two feet, looks me in the eye, and blinks a couple of times. I use the pad of my index finger to pet him on his soft head, and then I lower my hand to the floor so he can run away. He looks at me for a second, unsure of himself. “Go! Be free,” I whisper insistently.