Very Far Away from Anywhere Else Read Free Page A

don't know. Maybe. Something. Depends on where I go to college, I guess."
    "Where do you want to go?"
    "MIT"
    "Mental Institute of ... Texas..."
    "Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Or else Cal Tech. Science. Laboratories, acres of laboratories. White rats. Dedicated men in white coats laboriously sneaking up sideways on the secrets of the Universe. Frankenstein's monster. All that."
    "Yeah," Natalie said. She didn't say it questioningly, or agreeing-without-understanding, or mocking, or meaning nothing. She said it firmly. That's it. Yeah. "That's neat," she said.
    "It's also expensive."
    "Oh, well," she said, "you can always handle that."

    "How?"
    "Scholarships—working—That's why I'm giving lessons. So I can get to Tanglewood this summer."
    "Tanglewood, New South Wales?"
    She gave a laugh-snort and said, "It's a music school thing."
    "Near the Mental Institute of Texas. Yes."
    "Right."
    It was my stop. I got up and said, "So long," and she said, "So long," and I got off in the rain. Only after I got off I thought I could have ridden on two more blocks with her, to her stop, and we could have sort of finished the conversation. It had ended so fast. I jumped up and down in the rain doing the ape act as the bus started up again, but she was on the other side of the bus; nobody saw me but the Director of Siberian Prison Camps, and he looked away quickly and winced.

    T HE REASON I HAVE reported that conversation on the bus with Natalie Field so exactly is that it was an unimportant conversation that was extremely important to me. And that's important, that something unimportant can be so important.
    I guess I tend to think that important events should be solemn, and very grand, with muted violins playing in the background. It's hard to realize that the really important things are just normal little happenings and decisions, and when they turn on the background music and the spotlights and the uniforms, nothing important is going to happen at all.
    What stuck in my head after that conversation was just one word, the most commonplace, meaningless word. It wasn't the way she looked, or the way she looked at me, or my acting like a clown and making her laugh, or it was all that, but all sort of compressed into one word, "Yeah," the way she said it. Firmly, certainly. Yeah, that's what you're going to do. It was like a rock. Whenever I looked into my head, there was this rock.

    And I needed a rock. Something to hold onto, to stand on. Something solid. Because everything was going soft, turning into mush, into marsh, into fog. Fog closing in on all sides. I didn't know where I was at all.
    It was really getting bad. It had been coming for a while, for a long while I guess, but it was the car that really brought it on.
    You see, in giving me that car my father was saying, "This is what I want you to be. A normal car-loving American teen-ager." And by giving it to me he had made it impossible for me to say what I wanted to say, which was that I had finally realized that that's what I wasn't, and was never going to be, and I needed help finding out what I was instead. But to say that, now, I had to say, "Take your present back, I don't want it!" And I couldn't. He'd put his heart into that gift. It was the best he could possibly give me. And I was supposed to say, "Take yourself back, dad, I don't want you"?

    I think my mother understood all that, but in a way that wasn't any use to me. My mother was and is a good wife. Being a good wife and mother is the important thing in her life. And she is a good wife and mother. She never lets my father down. She rides him about some things, of course, but she never sneers at him or cuts him down, the way I've heard women do to their husbands; in all the big things she backs him up—what he does is right. And she keeps the house clean and cooks really well and makes extra stuff like cookies and granola, and when you want a clean shirt there is one, and when Muscular Dystrophy