Once More Into the Abyss Read Free Page B

seem to sleep either. He’s not half-grown, already bigger than Avatar, but he’s all legs he can’t get to work together. He’s a clumsy, excitable boy. But once we hit the road something magical happened. I suspect this is his first highway drive with the windows down. Ollie always wants them up. Horatio stares into the wind, transfixed, his ears aflutter. His gyrating nose sucks down the smells until he’s numb with the smell of Everything! Bliss!
    With Katyana at the wheel, the windows are cracked so we can all smell the night air, hear the screeching rush of our passage! Be where we are! That was Dad, when the weather was nice, or we were driving through something he wanted to smell—flowers, horses, the dawn—crack would go the windows. As a kid, I used to close my eyes and imagine I was on a rocket ship bound for Heinlein’s Mars. What a swell place that was. Ollie used to complain he couldn’t hear himself think and Dad would reply in the shout necessary to make himself heard over the roar, like a voice out of a whirlwind— Don’t you get enough of your own thoughts already? Maybe you should listen to the wind instead of your busy little brain.
    I know Ollie didn’t like having his brain called little, because it certainly wasn’t, but the point Dad was trying to make went right by him. It was often like that with those two. Dad would try to pass on some wisdom to Ollie who could give a shit, while I hung on his every word. Those were great times. But this is better. Everything is perfect.
    Here and now. You can’t beat it.
    I look out across the desert landscape of west Texas and think about death. I know the eighty-year morbidity statistic isn’t like a law or anything. I don’t have to die then. Or I could die sooner. I could die right now.
    So what else is new? Death and I have met. He doesn’t scare me anymore. In fact, I often ask myself, If I were to die right now, how would that be? It’s made me a better and happier man. Seconds are precious.
    Ollie’s asleep, which is what I should be doing—we’re due to reach the abyss at dawn—but I can’t sleep—not usually a problem for me this time of night. The dogs and I typically rise early and doze off early. We’ve crossed a time zone, but the dawn’s chasing us. Pretty soon the dogs and I will need to stretch our legs. They’re slow these days but seem to enjoy their long, snuffling walks. They haven’t lost their sense of smell.
    As a kid, one of my first realizations of how weird and unusual my parents were was their attitude toward pets. If we brought it home, and it didn’t belong to somebody else and wasn’t dangerous—no scorpions or poisonous serpents—we could keep it and take care of it, get to know it. But not too many of any one kind. A new species was a shoo-in. Mom ended up doing a lot of the caretaking, of course, but what we weren’t allowed to do was neglect them. If you weren’t willing to hang out with a pet once in a while, maybe they might have something better to do with their lives than live it in a cage.
    We had a fair number of dogs and cats, but never more than two of each, except for the occasional litter we fostered. Mom was crazy for kittens. Same with turtles, lizards, gerbils, rats. There were fish tanks until Mom rebelled on that one. I can’t blame her. How many ecosystems can you watch collapse, leaving a sea of fetid corpses? I’m guessing there weren’t fish on Mom’s home planet. She couldn’t connect with fish, though she certainly tried.
    With every other pet, however, Mom and Dad were full of information about what they were thinking, feeling, hoping for. To them, all species were sentient creatures. Not like Disney animals but weird and goofy and fun. Complicated.
    Because of the cats, we never did birds—though Mom always chatted up crows wherever they turned up. The