100 Sideways Miles

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  For my mother and father, whose atoms are scattering

  PART 1

  THE PERIGEE MOON

  THE QUIT MISSION

  Look: I do not know where I actually came from. I wonder, I suspect, but I do not know.

  I am not the only one who sometimes thinks I came from the pages of a book my father wrote. Maybe it’s like that for all boys of a certain—or uncertain—age: We feel as though there are no choices we’d made through all those miles and miles behind us that hadn’t been scripted by our fathers, and that our futures are only a matter of flipping the next page that was written ahead of us.

  I am not the only one who’s ever been trapped inside a book.

  • • •

  A story involving alien visitors from outer space, an epileptic kid who doesn’t really know where he came from, knackeries and dead horses falling a hundred sideways miles, abandoned prisons, a shadow play, moons and stars, and jumping from a bridge into a flood should probably begin with a big explosion in the sky about fourteen billion years ago. After all, the whole story is rather biblical, isn’t it?

  Poof!

  But it doesn’t.

  It begins at a high school in Burnt Mill Creek, California. It begins before the summer Cade Hernandez and I went on a fact-finding expedition to visit a college in Oklahoma.

  We didn’t quite make it to the college. I’m not sure if we found any facts, either.

  • • •

  Mr. Nossik hung motivational posters on the walls of his classroom—things about perseverance, integrity, and shit like that.

  One of them said this:

  OPPORTUNITY: WHEN ONE DOOR CLOSES,

  ANOTHER ONE OPENS.

  The first time we saw that one, Cade Hernandez, my best friend, said, “Sounds like he lives in a fucking haunted house.”

  I suppose it was a year for opening doors in more ways than I ever imagined.

  • • •

  At Burnt Mill Creek High School, the people in charge were constantly on some kind of pointless mission to get us kids to quit doing shit. All schools everywhere are like that, I think. Quit Chewing Gum flopped in ninth grade. Quit Using Cell Phones was dead before it started. And, now, during the second semester of our junior year, the quit mission involved “fuck.”

  Not doing it, saying it.

  It was destined to fail.

  More than a century of public education that aimed its pedagogical crosshairs at getting teenagers to quit having sex, quit drinking, quit driving so fast, quit taking drugs, never had the slightest behavior-altering effect on kids.

  Not that I did any of those things. Well, some of them.

  Now we were caught up in the Burnt Mill Creek High School mission to make us quit saying “fuck,” which is more or less a comma—a punctuation mark—to most teenagers when they speak.

  The teachers and administrators at Burnt Mill Creek High School might just as well have focused their energies on getting tectonic plates to quit making so many fucking earthquakes.

  The brains behind the Quit Saying “Fuck” mission was our history teacher, Mr. Nossik. He and the staff at the school painted signs with slogans that said things like NO F-BOMBS, PLEASE! (the kids called them “fuck posters”), and teachers even wore specially printed WATCH YOUR LANGUAGE, O PIONEERS! T-shirts. The kids called them “fuck shirts.”

  The campaign only made things worse.

  By May, Mr. Nossik was about to explode.

  • • •

  We were all about to witness a Nazi having a stroke.

  Here is what happened: Our teacher, Mr. Nossik, believed in making history “come alive.” So, naturally, on May 7, which was the anniversary of the German surrender in World War II, Mr. Nossik dressed himself up as a Gestapo kommissar.

  Naturally.

  What a nice scene: a Nazi at the front of a public-school classroom filled with sixteen-year-old boys and girls.

  You can’t make history come alive. History is deader than Laika the space dog.

  And I’ll admit it—nobody in my class ever learned anything from Mr. Nossik’s living displays. Are you kidding me? This was eleventh grade. Shit like that stopped working on our brains around the same time the training wheels came off our bicycles.

  Besides, Mr. Nossik’s so-called “living history” often pushed things a little too far. One time last March, he dressed up as a battered drowning victim to commemorate the catastrophic failure of the St. Francis Dam.

  History lives, it dies, and it comes alive again as the soaking-wet, mangled, and bloodied corpse of a Mexican ranch hand.

  My mother was a Jew, which technically makes me a Jew. Only a few people know that about me because on the surface I am an atheist; and with a name like Finn Easton, who would guess I’d feel a bit edgy around a forty-five-year-old freak who liked to role-play genocidal war criminals?

  I am named after the Mark Twain character, by the way.

  I am not named after the Finn in my father’s book; I swear.

  So: My best friend, Cade Hernandez, who always sat next to me unless Mr. Nossik kicked him out of class or assigned him a back-row desk facing away from the lectern (just because Mr. Nossik frequently couldn’t stand looking at Cade), raised his hand and asked our Nazi leader this: “Mr. Nossik, why do I always get a boner in this class, at exactly eight-fifteen, every morning? This is ridiculous!”

  Kids laughed.

  I laughed.

  Who wouldn’t laugh at a boy who asked a Nazi a question about getting an erection?

  Besides, Cade Hernandez was our de facto commander in the Stop Trying to Make Us Stop revolution, our act of defiance against the quit missions. Cade Hernandez ran the school. He could get anyone to do anything he wanted. Cade Hernandez was magic or something.

  Mr. Nossik’s face reddened, which, in the aesthetic arrangement of things, matched the color scheme of his outfit perfectly.

  Let me tell you something else about Cade Hernandez: As the school’s de facto commander in the Stop Trying to Make Us Stop revolution, he was an expert button pusher. The moment any authority figure challenged Cade’s control over things, the game was on.

  Mr. Nossik despised Cade Hernandez as deeply as anyone could ever hate another person.

  It was only a matter of time until Mr. Nossik came up with some type of Quit Being Cade Hernandez mission.

  To be honest, all us kids in the class loved to see the two of them square off. Cade routinely won. At least once a week, Mr. Nossik would tell Cade that he couldn’t stand looking at him anymore, so he’d order Cade to the back of the room, as far away from Mr. Nossik’s desk as possible.

  And Cade frequently wasn’t doing anything to justify his banishment.

  But Cade Hernandez did have a way of just staring and staring—without blinking—calmly showing the faintest trace of a smile on his face as though he were saying, Come on, fucker, let’s see who wins today.

  That was it.

  Cade stared and stared and smiled and smiled.

  And that was how he looked at Mr. Nossik on May 7, Nazi Day, when Cade Hernandez, in as straightforward and sincere a voice as you could ever imagine, asked our Gestapo kommissar teacher why he got a boner during history class at the same time every morning.

  This was Cade Hernandez, a kid whose lower-body blood flow apparently had ti
dal predictability.

  Mr. Nossik, his voice quavering as though he’d just swallowed a fistful of feathers and sand, stamped his jackbooted foot and told Cade to GET OUT of the classroom immediately.

  Man! The only thing that could possibly have made Mr. Nossik look more like Hitler at that moment would have been a toothbrush swath of black hair on his upper lip.

  And Cade, all innocence and self-pity, said, “Can I wait a couple minutes before I stand up, please, Mr. Nossik? Seriously, this thing is ridiculous!”

  We all laughed again.

  And Mr. Nossik—in a voice reminiscent of the most fiery Nuremberg Rally oratory—stamped and shrieked, “GET! OUT!”

  So Cade Hernandez, smiling slightly, completely unashamed, stood and walked across the room to wait outside the door while the quaking Mr. Nossik composed himself.

  Of course, everyone looked to see if Cade really did have a boner.

  I’m not saying.

  And Mr. Nossik, our Gestapo kommissar, didn’t actually have a stroke that morning, but I believe some crucial arteries and shit inside vital parts of his body got dangerously close to their bursting point every time Cade Hernandez put pressure on Mr. Nossik’s hair-trigger nerves.

  • • •

  Cade Hernandez and I both played baseball for the Burnt Mill Creek High School Pioneers baseball team.

  O Pioneers!

  Cade was our pitcher—a lefty who’d been scouted by the majors, extremely talented—and I played the outfield, usually right. I would not want to play a position like pitcher, where there is such a high likelihood of making costly mistakes.

  Costly mistakes, like sexual confusion and nuclear weapons, which by the way are both legacies passed down from the greatest generation—the guys who whipped Hitler—are strongly related to extinction.

  Who wants that?

  Cade’s nickname was Win-Win, but it had nothing to do with his record as a starter. I will explain later, since I wanted this part of the story to be about me: Finn Easton.

  TWENTY MILES PER SECOND

  Here is what I believe: Distance is more important than time.

  The earth travels about twenty miles every second.

  It’s easy enough to figure out: π, our distance from the sun, three hundred sixty-five days, and there you go.

  Twenty miles per second.

  In the same amount of time it takes Cade Hernandez to drive us from my house in San Francisquito Canyon to the town of Burnt Mill Creek and our school, Planet Earth carries us about eighteen thousand miles from the exact spot where we were when we started out. It’s equivalent to driving three-fourths of the way around the world at the equator.

  Think about it: That’s quite a commute to get to school just to see some withered old man dressed up as Charles Lindbergh or Betsy Ross.

  Oh, yeah: Mr. Nossik was never afraid of cross-dressing.

  Cade picks me up every day because I am not allowed to drive. I have seizures and blank out sometimes. I call it “blanking out” because things don’t get “black,” like some people might say. When a seizure comes on, to be honest, everything looks especially beautiful.

  I don’t have them too often, and I am told there is a good chance that I will grow out of the condition.

  I believe I will miss it.

  My seizures always begin the same way: I smell flowers. Then all the words empty out of my head, and everything is just there: a chaotic jumble of patternless, nameless clusters of atoms.

  Beautiful.

  My condition is a souvenir from the day a dead horse fell out of the sky and landed on me and my mother.

  • • •

  I was born on the anniversary of the first-ever atom bomb explosion on Planet Earth.

  A gift from the greatest generation—the guys who saved the world!

  July 16.

  Some of those atoms—when set free in 1945 into the atmosphere above the New Mexico desert—found their way into me: my hands, my head, and my heart.

  My atoms have been on this Finn trip for almost eleven billion miles.

  Just about every individual atom in the universe, every last bit of the stuff that builds me, is nearly fourteen billion years old. Think of that distance: fourteen billion times all those hundreds of millions of miles.

  I hold together pretty well, considering how much my atoms have been through.

  These are things I think about sometimes.

  • • •

  Look: I realize now that I wasn’t only trapped inside my father’s book; my father also did not want to let go of me. Maybe that’s an egotistical thing to say—we are all centers of our personal universes in any event—but it was ironically obvious to me; and my father had told me straight out, anyway.

  He said to me, “Finn, I wish you would never grow up and go away.”

  So that summer of the Perseids and the perigee moon, of Julia Bishop and the abandoned prison at Aberdeen Lake, of finding myself stranded so far away from home along with my best friend, really turned out to be a sort of scripted shadow play in which the epileptic boy could choose for himself whether or not he would ever get out of the book.

  What was I going to do?

  • • •

  I am an epileptic. I blank out.

  I also have heterochromatic eyes, which means they are different colors. Green and blue, if you need to know. People almost never notice it, because most people are afraid to look at other peoples’ eyes. I know that because when you have heterochromatic eyes, you always look at eyes—always trying to find someone else who is like you, like we come from a different planet or something.

  Cade Hernandez noticed it one day when we sat in my backyard hot tub together, the summer before eighth grade. Cade Hernandez wasn’t afraid of anything, especially not looking directly at another guy’s eyes.

  I have never found another heterochromatic set of eyes to look at, except for ones on the Internet. And they were probably Photoshopped, anyway.

  You know what they say about your imagination being limitless? Well, that is absolute horseshit. You can’t imagine anything if you don’t already have a word for it in your head.

  Trust me, I know.

  If you really want to imagine something, try imagining what it would be like to empty every word from your head and then look at the universe. You’ll see nothing at all that you could ever understand. There will be no separation or distinction between object, color, temperature, or sound; there will be neither borders nor edges, no limits or size, and you will smell things and not have any idea at all what is happening.

  I get that way sometimes. My head empties out, and I smell something like nameless flowers.

  • • •

  I have never been outside the state of California in the nearly seventeen years that my atoms and molecules have been stuck together, walking around and calling themselves Finn.

  Oklahoma, where Cade and I were planning to visit over our last summer vacation from Burnt Mill Creek High School, might just as well have been in a different galaxy as far as my atoms were concerned.

  There is actually more empty space between our atoms and molecules than anything solid. It’s as though we’re all clouds of gas, optical illusions—like how spokes on a spinning bicycle wheel blur invisibly into a solid barrier between hereandthere, thisside and thatside.

  It’s a wonder we don’t all just float away—pfft!—like smoke.

  At first, Dad tried to explain it to me as this: My mother simply floated away when I was seven years old.

  In truth, a dead horse fell on us.

  I know that is an absurd thing to consider—a dead horse falling out of the sky—but it actually happened.

  Picture this: We lived in a small cabin in the Sierras of northern California, at a place called Wheelerville, which is located on the Salmon Creek.

  Wheelerville was named for Wheeler Caverns, a cave formation. Near the entrance to the caves, there is a bridge across the Salmon Creek Gorge, popular among b
ase parachutists and other crazy people who like to jump from the edge of the span with enormous wrappings of elastic lashed to their ankles. The bridge is aptly named the Salmon Creek Gorge Bridge.

  Although I don’t remember it, the story went like this: My mother and I were walking along the creek beneath the bridge when a truck from a knackery, which is what some people call a rendering plant, overturned on the span above us.

  Look: A dead horse fell from the bridge. Nobody thought to lash bungee cords to the animal’s legs, or maybe equip it with a parachute.

  That would have been something to see.

  Things like that turn men into writers and other, worse things.

  I don’t remember it.

  After all, it happened more than five billion miles ago.

  The knackery truck was on its way to the plant after picking up a twenty-two-year-old Percheron gelding. The horse was dead, set to be rendered, to have its atoms turned into pet food and stuff like shampoos, lubricants on condoms, rubber tires, and explosives.

  Did you know they put dead animals into bombs?

  My father told me once, If that doesn’t make you a poet, Finn, nothing will.

  I would rather be a poet than end up inside a bomb or a bottle of shampoo.

  • • •

  There is something important in running a knackery.

  When you think about it, the universe is nothing but this vast knackery of churning black holes and exploding stars, constantly freeing atoms that collect together and become something else, and something else again.

  Here is what I think about that horse falling on us: I figure it took a little more than four seconds for the horse to travel from the span of the bridge, over three hundred feet above, to where my mother and I stood on the bank of Salmon Creek. During that fall, the earth moved approximately one hundred miles. If you were to walk a straight line for a hundred miles and drop a total of three hundred feet, you wouldn’t even realize you were descending in elevation at all.

  That horse fell one hundred sideways miles.

  • • •