That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote (22 page)

He comes up with obvious things like grass, sky, AK. He ought to know it when I pretend I can
’t guess. He would’ve known before.

I choose a spot with a spreading cover of pines for our lunch stop. After we
’ve eaten I try a little math with him. What’s four plus three? Twenty-one plus five? Eleven minus seven? Right, right, wrong. He can do addition and easy multiplication, but can’t subtract or divide, which worries me. I tell him, you’ve got to be able to say, well, I can live on a tin and a half a day, and I’ve got eight tins, so I’ve got enough for five days and a morning, and within that time I’ve got to get to a farm. When I get there I better understand ‘kilos of shit per tin’ and know how many kilos I need to shovel for the maryjanes and make sure the floor boss writes up the right amount when it’s weighed, because as sure as shit is soft and warm they’ll cheat you if they can.

I tell him meat doesn
’t grow on trees. I say like I’ve said before, You think you can survive in the world without knowing how it works?

He looks at me with his stupid little button eyes and I know he doesn
’t understand.

I feel too tired to try to teach him subtraction for the umpteenth time or even to be angry at him for not trying harder to understand the things he needs to know. The sun
’s getting hotter, even in the shade, and last night’s lost sleep is threatening to find me. I’m thinking I’d better get up before I nod off when he suddenly starts playing I Spy again. He hardly ever starts a game off on his own. I smile as well as a mouse can to show him I’m pleased. I don’t honestly know how well he can read my looks. As far as I can tell, his eyesight’s about as good as mine – all right at seeing within about a hundred feet in daylight. But I’ve checked my face in still water and I have to say, it isn’t all that expressive. For a while I tried making up gestures to show emotion with my ears and whiskers, but he never remembered them.

Something beginning with P, he says.

At first I think he means me.

Pa, I say. He says no. Pebble? Pack? Pig tin
?

Nope, none of those. Not poplar, of course. I figure he
’s made a spelling mistake or is just being stupid. If he’s kidding around, that’s at least showing a bit of spirit, I guess.

I tell him his mouse dad gives up.

Potatohead, he says, and points at me. Says it again. Potatohead.

If only he
’d smiled or laughed, but the way he said it, I knew he wanted it to hurt. He’s never tried to hurt my feelings before. Ignored them, yes, but never tried deliberately to wound them. But this, it was just as if he wanted to say that he thought of me the way he thought of the angel. As a monster. A big bad thing in his world. I don’t want to believe it, of course, so at first I just stare into his face, beady eyes looking into beady eyes, trying to show the love I feel for him and trying to see just a little bit of it reflected back.

Nada. I
’m looking at two bullets in a ball of dough.

So I have to hit him, not out of hurt feelings, of course, but because there
’s no way I can look after him and keep him safe if he doesn’t respect me and do as I say. Back before, when we just had our weekends, discipline didn’t matter so much. It matters now. Not just discipline of action, but discipline of the heart. If the inside slips, the outside will eventually slip too. For his own safety he has to respect me, not just pretend to. I shouldn’t have cut him that slack when I thought he was sulking.

I wrap my big hand around his snout to keep him quiet while I teach him his lesson. After I
’m done and he’s done sniffling and we’ve both calmed down a bit, I remind him about the discipline of the heart. Every now and then I try to teach him. I haven’t given up hope that he’ll understand one day. Not giving up that hope is one of my rules.

Well, of course he doesn
’t take any of it in. Sometimes I get to thinking he must be pretending to be dumb, as a way to cause me pain. It even passes through my mind that maybe he really got a lot smarter and tougher when he changed, and developed his own kind of sick discipline, so that he makes this non-stop pathetic act just so that he can watch my ridiculous mouse body sag as I try to carry the burden of hope for both of us – a hope that’s all the heavier for having no long-term purpose, just a load of my wanting him to be the best he can be and have the best life he can have, even under these circumstances.

I don
’t know whether that thought counts as paranoia or wishing. It might be better if he was smart and nasty. Then at least I wouldn’t have so much reason to pity him.

His eyes still look like bullets in dough. Sad bullets now, drooping down at the corners. If you tried to think of a creature that was just made in every way to look sorry and miserable and always fearful, you
’d get pretty close with him. If it’s an act, it’s brilliant.

Time to move, anyway. I make like my pack weighs nothing, striding ahead on my strong short legs. As long as I can hear him panting I know he
’s keeping up.

II.

Life is full of surprises, and not every single one of them is a shower of shit. I discover the hut behind a coppiced woodlot when I happen to notice the wall of trimmed logs through
a gap in the trees.

It
’s a tiny place, maybe a hunting shelter. One room with a linoleum floor. Two windows. Glass in one, a square of blue oilcloth with a pattern of tropical fruit tacked over the other. The smells inside are all ordinary animal, mainly fox and raccoon. There’s a black vinyl sofa with busted cushions, an empty fridge without a door, and a TV on a stool, all nearly as brown as I am with a coating of gritty dust. For decoration there’s an orange plastic shoe and some dry fox turds lying together in a corner. No sign anyone’s been here in a long time.

It
’s the first hut I’ve seen since I upped and went walking with the kid. I wonder if it’s unique, like we seem to be, or if there are more of them around about the place, like there are pig farms and volk rally halls. I can imagine a whole lot like it lying out in the back country, each one with the same sofa, fridge, TV and shoe, too far from roads and farms to be practical for living in.

His runtship is happy sniffing around the TV. The excitement of finding it seems to have blown the sulky clouds out of his head. He pushes the power button like he expects it to work. When it doesn
’t, he goes scrabbling between the sofa’s cushions.

It won
’t be there, I start to say, but fuck me if he doesn’t come up with the remote. Nothing happens when he tries it, of course. He shoves it into my hand.

I look into his poor face, now beginning to show the bruises from the beating I gave him. I show him that I can
’t make the remote work any better than he can, doing my best to explain that there’s no broadcaster and no electricity running to the hut, while I flick the power point for the TV on and off. There’s nothing coming through it, I tell him, almost laughing. Maybe if you could steal a methane generator from a farm you could rig it to the fridge and make it work, if you had tools, but nobody has tools, which is a bitch, but not a crisis, because nothing needs fixing anymore, nothing breaks down or wears out.

I start pacing around and waving my arms as I go over the batch of facts I
’ve told him a thousand times before, hoping he’ll eventually catch on. I explain the simplicity of the world as it is now. It isn’t exactly an elegant simplicity, but if deros and trogs can understand it, I tell him, so can a mouse and a gopher thing. In the middle of the new world order – and don’t ask me who ordered it – is the fact that maryjanes have pig farms. They make food for you and me and deros and trogs and methane for the pickups and the farm machines. Maryjanes have moms and pops who have stores where you can buy useful staples like bennies if you have credit from jobbing in the meatworks or the shitworks. Deros and trogs and dogs live in towns, cats roam. Dogs and cats hunt everything except angels, bactyls and dreams. Volk hunt big game, raid towns and hold rallies. Pigs eat anything dead except angels, and bactyls eat anything dead and anything alive that doesn’t move fast enough to get away. Dreams hunt everything, eat anything. Angels don’t eat, but they kill, which comes to the same thing for you and me. And that’s all. It isn’t so much to keep in your head.

I tell him again how there aren
’t any big, complicated systems anymore, no long involved whys and wherefores, therefore no electricity, no TV networks, no shows. I finish by throwing the remote back down on the sofa. Right away he grabs it and tries to make me take it again.

Then I remember our game, where we pretended the buttons did other stuff, like turn my car into an F1 Ferrari, or make us able to fly, or nuke his teacher
’s house.

He always said it was just our game, he didn
’t play it with his mama.

Is that it? I ask. You want me to push this button and do some magic?

I look at him looking up at me, and as if I’m seeing inside his scrambled head, I know he’s thinking I could use the remote to put things back the way they were. Including her. That’d be part of it, naturally.

Or maybe he isn
’t so scrambled as all that. Maybe he’s actually making a fairly reasonable guess based on the facts he knows, namely that we turned into rodents, she turned cat, and the world filled with monsters. Given that, is it entirely batshit to think that magic might be possible?

Scrambled or not, I can see this much: while he doesn
’t want to believe what I’ve told him about the serious things that really matter and require hard work and endless daily effort, he sure wants to believe in me now that he’s thinking we’ve lucked upon an easy way to fix all our problems.

But I
’m touched, all the same, that he suddenly shows this trust in me. He didn’t try to mend the world himself. He gave the remote to me. On the flip side of that, of course, if – when – it doesn’t work, the failure can be my fault. Still, maybe I finally got through to him, and now he’s trying to show he respects and trusts me. I’d like to believe that, though I shouldn’t let myself just yet.

I
’m supposed to be the adult, the one who knows shit from clay. But before I can act in step with what I know, I’m stricken with stupidity, just like him. It’s got to be because I haven’t slept enough. But I can actually see, like a madman would, the zany possibility of making our own hoodoo happen. The belief suddenly gets a hold of me like some kind of holy running shits.

Overwhelmed by this diarrhoea of faith, I point the remote at the window with glass, aiming it at everything out there. I put my other hand on his shoulder and close my eyes. Go back, I tell the world, to the way you were before. Or better. But the same would be quite ok.

Since there’s nothing wrong with the yellow and red leafy corner of things that the window lets me see, I can indulge for a moment in the wildly retarded idea that I’ve changed everything outside that needed changing, so that all I have to do now is change us two.

I say, Ready?

His funny face does a funny smile.

Ok, I tell him, we
’re gonna go back. Everything’s gonna be just normal again, ok? And after we’re normal, maybe we’ll see what other magic stuff this remote can do.

It occurs to me then that according to the logic I
’ve been following, I’ve already fucked up. If I’d changed the world back, then magic wouldn’t work anymore, so we’d have to stay as rodents, even if everything else was ok. I have to stop this bullshit and get back to reality, obviously. But the belief hasn’t run out of me. I let myself indulge just a little longer, closing my eyes again as I point the remote at him and command him, in my big squeaky voice, to go back to being just the kid he was. Smart, no guts. Whatever. To myself I say, Be a man again.

I open my beady eyes. He opens his beady eyes. Well, that
’s that. As for the world, if it’s all fixed up, there’ll be a power line running to the hut from somewhere and the TV will work. I only have to turn the power point on and push the button to check. Push it a few times.

Yeah, well
.

My ears pick up whining engines in the distance over on the volk side of the hills. Another rally. Early arrivals.

I must be much too tired, or I wouldn’t be slipping like this. But he doesn’t look dejected. Maybe he hadn’t really thought it was going to work.