Chuck Palahniuk - Doomed

These two fellow travelers—the pencil scribbler and the blue-ink vandal—had become my reading companions, always present to share the Beagle book with me. Their snide, insightful comments leavened my own reaction to the many otherwise tiresome depictions of lizards and thistles.

In what was clearly a child’s hand, another penciled notation read, Patterson says to start collecting flowers for my husband’s funeral someday .

A squiggle of blue pen said, Leonard wants me to pick some flowers for my dad .

As if to illustrate these notes, pressed between the pages were buttercups. Yellow buttercups. Purple violets. Proof of long-ago free time and long holiday strolls and fresh air. Brown ribbons of ancient grass. A record of sunshine. Bits of physical evidence documented a vanished summer. And not just the colors of summer… here were the smells as well! Dried sprigs of rosemary, thyme, and lavender. Rose petals still pungent! These layers of paper and words had preserved them, like an armor. Each primrose and morning glory I came across I was duly careful to leave intact.

From her station at the stove, my nana said something, her words ending on a high note, a question.

I responded, “Excuse me?”

Taking the cigarette from her lips, exhaling a plume of smoke, she repeated, “How are you liking that The Call of the Wild ?”

I looked at her, my eyes wide with incomprehension.

“The novel?” she prompted, nodding at my book opened on the kitchen table.

Obviously she hadn’t seen the cover closely enough to know its actual title.

She asked, “Did you read to the part where the dog gets himself kidnapped and took to Alaska?”

Yes, I nodded. My eyes returning to my reading, I agreed that the dog lived a very exciting life.

“Did you read to the part…,” she asked, “…where the collie dog gets took by Martians in a flying saucer?”

Again, I nodded, saying the scene in question was quite thrilling.

“And,” my nana prompted, “was you scared when the space aliens impregnated the Irish setter with radioactive chimpanzee embryos from the Crab Nebula?”

Automatically I agreed. I said that I simply could not wait for the film version. I glanced up just to check the sincerity of her expression, but my nana merely stood there, her dour peasant body garbed in the usual calico apron worn over a shapeless gingham Mother Hubbard, the latter liberated from all style and color by a lifetime of launderings. I made a mental note that this Wild book must be a real humdinger.

As she dipped a second taste from the bubbling pot, lifting the spoon to her pursed lips and blowing to cool its steaming contents, the telephone in the parlor began to ring. As she’d done countless times, my nana set aside her dripping utensils and waddled out the kitchen door and down the short hallway. The springs of the divan squealed as she settled herself. The ringing stopped, and she coughed the word “Huh-lo?” Her distant voice dropped to a conspiratorial hush, and she said, “Yeah, she went and grabbed the evolution book, all right. That Maddy’s a pistol.” Between coughs, she said, “Yeah, I told her about the island….” Choked and breathless, she said, “Don’t you fret none, Leonard. That girly is more than ready to do battle with evil!”

Here, Gentle Tweeter, I turned a page in my Beagle book and discovered more ancient words. Handwritten down the margin in blue ballpoint pen, they said, Leonard promises that one day I’ll raise a great warrior as my daughter. He tells me to name her Madison .

Gentle Tweeter,

So it was, that summer of my exile to tedious upstate, that now-vanished sunny yesterday, I found myself standing at the fraying asphalt margin of State Route Whatever, the outer edge of six northbound lanes packed densely with horn-blasting, gear-grinding tractor-trailers. The morning air smelled wretched, polluted with axle grease, tar, hot oil, and the smoke of burning dinosaur juice.

No explorer had ever set forth to ford more dangerous seas.

My own path would lead at cross-purposes to the flow of automobiles, their momentum, the hiss and growl of their radial tires, the stuttering thunder of exhaust brakes. Through this deadly parade of speeding metal I could see the opposite shore, my destination: the island where vehicles parked to void their occupants, and those occupants hurried to the cinder-block restrooms to deposit their own excremental contents.

With one step I would be committed to cross the entire roadway. A single step, and I would be fully invested in taking the half hundred additional strides needed to deliver me to safety on the distant restroom isle. There, pet dogs strolled, leisurely staging their feces in small piles, as judiciously as any endangered tortoise laying its precious eggs.

How strange I must’ve appeared to the drivers, an eleven-year-old girl wearing denim trousers and a blue chambray workshirt, the tails of which hung to my knees, the too-long sleeves rolled back to my chubby elbows.

My arms were crossed over my chest, hugging the Beagle book and a frail, unwieldy gallon-size jar of my nana’s windowsill tea. The murky tea sloshed and shifted, heavy inside its fragile glass. Prior to requisitioning the tea I’d dropped untold sugar cubes into the golden liquid, and as it leaked along the jar’s ill-fitting lid my hands and forearms grew sticky. The skin of my fingers gummed together as if they were webbed, as if I were evolving for some new aquatic purpose. So thusly was I glued to the heavy jar that even if my grip failed I suspected the sloshing glass vessel would remain fixed to the chest of my blue chambray shirt.

Once I entered the flow of traffic the smallest pause would place me dead center in the path of pulverizing impact, to be hurtled through the hazy, torpid summer air, my every bone broken. Or to be overridden, the girlish blood crushed out of me and tracked for miles down the highway in the zigzagged, lightning-bolt tread patterns of mammoth black-rubber tires. Any hesitation would mean my death, and in those bygone days I was still highly prejudiced against being dead. Like so many living-alive people I aspired to stay breathing.

Drawing one deep breath, quite possibly my last, I plunged forward into the chaos.

My Bass Weejuns slapped the hot pavement as garbage trucks raged by on every side. Sirens wailed and horns blared. Vast tanker trucks brimming with flammable liquids… roaring log trucks… these behemoths blasted past me, buffeting my tiny self with such force that I spun like a cork in heavy seas. Dragging their great waves of stinging grit, humongous Greyhound buses peppered me with a buckshot of sharp gravel. In the wake of flatbed trucks, blistering siroccos tore at my skin and hair.

People with happy home lives do not board ships bound for Alaska and the Galápagos. They do not take leave from their loving families in order to sequester themselves in lonely workshops and studios. No psychologically healthy individual would expose herself to X-rays, Marie Curie–style, until they poisoned her. Civilization is a condition which unsocial misfits impose on the rest of popular, easygoing, family-oriented humanity. Only the miserable, the failures, the outcasts will crouch for days to observe the mating habits of a salamander. Or to study a boiling teakettle.

The avant-garde in every field consists of the lonely, the friendless, the uninvited. All progress is the product of the unpopular.

People in love—with nurturing, attentive non-movie-star parents—they would never invent gravity. Nothing except deep misery leads to real success.