I noticed we were hovering in a ditch on the side of the highway. I gripped the wheel again.
“We’re staying off the main roads until I know what’s going on,” I said. “I could be walking into some kind of trap. And you don’t want to run into Carl again, I’m guessing.”
J.Lo winced. “Her name is not Carl. I did not to know her at all.”
I almost said I know, and then I almost nodded, but in the end I just sat there. I guided Slushious up an embankment, dropped her onto an access road, then began snaking my way through the city streets of what used to be Jacksonville.
Then I said, “So you’re not the chief maintenance officer, huh?”
J.Lo waggled his head. “No. I was more what you would to call…ah…fixing person….”
“Handyman?”
“A HandyBoov, yes,” he said sadly. “I was at to the antenna farm to change the antennas for using by the Boov.”
“You said that before,” I reminded him.
“Yes…but I was not telling then that I made very big mistake with the antennas. I did not to do my job correctly. Now I must stay away fromto the Boov. Hide with the humans.”
I might have told J.Lo that the humans probably wouldn’t be any happier to have him than the Boov were, what with him stealing their planet and all, but the subject was driven from my mind by a building ahead of us.
Had it been a moonless night, I might not have seen it at all. It lay just beyond the pool of my headlights. I swiveled the car clockwise and aimed for the blue scrawled letters on the side of a Potato Potentate restaurant:
UMANS-HAY—
O-GAY OO-TAY THE INGDOM-KAY—
EET-MAY UNDER-WAY THE ASTLE-CAY
—BOOB
Boob?
“What does that to say?” asked J.Lo, leaning against the dash.
I stared at him for a moment, frowning.
J.Lo glanced at me, then cast his head quickly back to the wall.
“Is it…is it the English? So many little lines.”
It was a secret message of some kind, of course, but from whom? It was hard to believe anyone would be so naive to think Pig Latin might fool a Boov. And it was even harder to believe that it did. Then I finally put it together.
“You can’t read, can you?” I asked. “You can’t read English.”
J.Lo puckered his fingertips together, over and over.
“Mmmmm…no.”
“You were never taught? You never”—I grimaced at what I was about to say—“learned from my mom?”
“Almost no one of us can read the humans words. Is very difficult. Nothing like the Boovwords.”
“Why not?”
“Hm…most humans have…little flat pictures, and each of this little picture is meaning a part of a word. Liketo…building the word from different bricks.”
It took a second before I understood what he was talking about.
“Letters,” I said. “You’re talking about letters. They build a word.”
“Yes! Yes. We are not having these things. All Boov words are made of bubbles.”
“Bubbles.”
“Yes. They are bubbles in the air. How big are this bubbles, or how thick, or how joined unto each other; this is how we know which word is what.”
I recalled the odd bubble formations I’d seen floating here and there. They were only writing. They were signs.
“So most of the Boov cannot to read the humans words. Is supposing to be a big secret.”
Of course it is, I thought. If we knew, we could leave each other messages in Pig Latin, right out in the open.
“So why are you telling me,” I asked, “if it’s such a big secret?”
J.Lo shrugged. “What does these humans words say?” he asked again.
I looked at the message once more, hastily composed in spray paint, the favorite medium of anyone afraid of being caught.
“It says we need to go to Orlando,” I said. “Which we’re doing anyway.”
“Oh, good,” said J.Lo.
And that was that. There’s a saying we use these days; maybe you future people don’t say it anymore. When someone’s easily tricked, we might say that it’s “like taking candy from a baby.” The saying doesn’t mention that tricking the baby may be easy, but the candy tastes gross.
We were still about ten miles away from Happy Mouse Kingdom when I fell asleep. I don’t know how long I slept; I was really tired. J.Lo was already snoring in the seat beside me, Pig curled up among his legs, but up to now I’d been pretty alert on account of a couple of close calls with patrolling Boov. I had only the parking lights on, and I’d managed to click them off before being seen by a scooter Boov on a side street. A few miles later I had to veer away from another, a big Boov with strange orange balls like shoes on the ends of his eight legs. I don’t know if that one saw me or not, but he (she, it) was on foot and couldn’t give chase.
I was beginning to relax again when I had to slam on the brakes to avoid hitting a parade of goats in tiny cars. Just as it occurred to me how weird that was, I blinked and the cars weren’t there anymore.
“I’m going nuts,” I whispered.
I sort of remembered reading somewhere that if you’re cracking up, the best thing is to just close your eyes for a few seconds, so I did, and that’s when I realized I wasn’t driving at all. I was at school. I couldn’t imagine why I thought I’d been driving; I was just a kid, after all. There was nobody else at my school, which was also Happy Mouse Kingdom. I’d forgotten, but it was. I knew I had to find my mom so I could tell her not to get the plastic surgery. She was having her face changed to look just like Happy Mouse, because she thought it would make me love her more. When I found her, she was standing next to the Snow Queen’s Castle, and it was all right, she still looked like Mom. But no; it was too late. She did look like Happy Mouse. She was Happy Mouse, standing in the dark, as tall as the castle. When I opened my mouth to speak she put a fat, gloved finger to her grinning lips. Then with her other hand, she pointed straight down at the ground, and suddenly I tripped, and then I awoke to find we were about to drive through a Pricey’s store window.
I stood up on the brake pedal (actually the gas pedal), and we rattled to a halt just inches from a row of naked mannequins. J.Lo snorted and shouted “Habish?” for whatever reason. Then he was awake, too.
“What…what happens?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I was just…testing something.”
“Ah,” said J.Lo, nodding. “Did it work?”
“Yes. Perfectly.”
“Good. I am thinking we should stop for sleep.”
I nodded, and a few minutes later I found an underground parking garage in which to stay the night. I coasted down the ramps to the lowest level and parked against a wall. J.Lo and Pig settled into the backseat again, but I stayed perched in the front, thinking.
“Time for beds,” J.Lo said. He was staring at me from the back.
“Ummm…I think I’m going to have a look around,” I said. “On foot. I’ll be back soon; I just want to see something.”
There was a pause.
“I will come with Gratuity.”
“No…no, that’s fine. You sleep. I won’t be long.”
J.Lo’s eyes grew. He kept looking at me, and I couldn’t stop talking.
“It’s just that…about a half mile from here is this place my…mom and I used to visit a lot. I’d like to go see it. Alone. Ha-ha.” I laughed a little too loud. “Maybe she’ll even be there!”
I hadn’t really thought of that before now, but there were a lot of stranger places I could have found her.
“What is this place?” asked J.Lo. It was a perfectly reasonable question.
“Happy Mouse Kingdom,” I said. “It’s a…theme park, based on all these movies and cartoon characters. Happy Mouse, of course, and Sailor Swan, and Mister Schwa…” He was still looking at me. “The Snow Queen…” I added. “Puncinello…”
“It is a themed park?”
“Yeah. Like…a big park with rides and people in funny costumes and really expensive food. But of course, the rides don’t work now, and there aren’t any people to put in the costumes,” I said. “And there isn’t any food.”
I wanted to be careful not to make the place sound too attractive. I might have bad-mouthed it some more, except that I noticed J.Lo’s eyeballs were sort of quivering at this point. The phrase “Devastating Eye Lasers” passed through my mind, but then he just started wailing.
“You are leaving me now, aren’t you?”
I blinked. “Leaving? What, you mean leaving leaving? No, I—”
“You are! You are leaving me!”
“I promise, I’m—”
“YOU HATE ME!”
“Well, that’s—”
“You are always have hating me and now you are to leaving me all alone—”
“Oh, c’mon, I wouldn’t just leave…the car. Or the cat…”
His face looked like one of those tragedy theater masks, and he made a noise like,
“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
EE—”
“Hey, look, keep it down, okay?”
J.Lo composed himself for a moment, but I noticed his eyes were starting to look wet. Which might have meant he was about to cry, but it bears mentioning that his face was also slowly turning yellow, so I don’t know.
“Look, J.Lo,” I said, “this is just something I have to do. My mom really loved Happy Mouse Kingdom, and…I miss my mom. She thought it was the most perfect place in the world. So clean and happy all the time, and…good.”
J.Lo sniffed.
“I just want to go and make sure it’s still there,” I said, “and then I’ll come back and go to sleep. I promise. I’m not up to anything. Or anything.”
I found I had to look away when I told him this.
In the end he suddenly got very friendly and cooperative again, and agreed I should go. He dug through his toolbox and made me take this thing that looked like a miniature turkey baster.
“If you runs into troubles,” he said, “like Boov patrols or somesuch, you squeeze this, and it to sends up noisy bubbles, and I rescue you!”
I said okay and took it. I showed him where the spare car key was, stuck with a magnet under the bumper, and then I walked to a flight of stairs that would take me up to the street. I made sure not to look back, but I didn’t have to look to feel J.Lo’s gaze clinging to me like a wet dog as I began to climb.
I could barely handle this Florida weather. Even at night I felt like a glazed ham. But I was comforted by the familiar landscape—the short trees piled thick with dark leaves, the tall, naked trees with green tufted heads. The tidy little pools and lakes that appeared over grassy hills with golf-course regularity.
It wasn’t far to Happy Mouse Kingdom, and there were still signs everywhere. I passed seven billboards, and every one was for a theme park, or a resort, or a theme park/resort. They boasted about being the most magically fun, or wildest, or most penguin-filled. They claimed to have the biggest this or the most water-slidingest that. And I thought it would make sense if everyone ended up here. We could live out the rest of our fake lives amid the fake kingdoms and worlds, the lands and resorts and outlet malls. Wasn’t this an outlet-mall America now? Just like the real one, only smaller and not as good.
A few blocks from the parking garage, I turned a corner to see a Boov walking in the same direction on the next street. He wore blue, like J.Lo, and was carrying a toolbox, and I almost called out to him to stop following me. I don’t know what it was that told me suddenly to hide—something about the way this Boov moved, maybe. Maybe it was those orange ball things on the ends of his feet. But it wasn’t J.Lo. I dropped like a stone behind a mailbox, landed right on my tailbone and bit my lip as the pain shot right up my back, all the while praying I hadn’t been seen.
The Boov that wasn’t J.Lo took something like a little rubber dome out of the toolbox. I don’t know what he pressed or pulled or said or did, but suddenly a long, straight shaft sprouted from the top, and I thought, Oh, a retractable toilet plunger.
The Boov pointed the business end of the thing at a savings bank across the street. Then, without a sound, the bank began to disappear. He started at the bottom, so soon there was plenty of noise as the building toppled forward and crumbled to pieces. The Boov just continued working on the rubble, waving the plunger from side to side until there was nothing left but a bank-shaped hole in the world.
I really hoped he didn’t feel the same way about mailboxes as he did about banks.
As I watched, the Boov skittered over to the now vacant lot and pulled something else from a loop on his uniform. It didn’t look all that different from the turkey baster in my pocket, and with good reason. Bubbles percolated from its end, one at a time, some big and some small. He was like a conductor, and the bubbles danced at his command, joining together to form a tall, boxy shape, then a ring around the middle like a Hula-Hoop. I wondered what it said. Then he scattered a handful of Ping-Pong balls over the lot, watered them, and covered each with a little jar. Satisfied, he toddled out of sight, and I heard the sound of an antler-spool scooter speeding away.
I got up from the sidewalk, rubbed my butt, and walked over to the closest jar. The ball inside had already sprouted like an onion, and transparent pencil-thin tubes slowly snaked skyward. I couldn’t tell if it was food or architecture. Maybe it was an antenna farm.
Ten minutes later I reached the edge of the Kingdom. The parking lot was a graveyard, each empty plot marked off with white paint and a low, wide headstone. It stretched out a quarter mile, divided into sections named after cartoon characters. I walked through Rumpelstiltskin, Doofus, and Duke Elliphant on my way to the big bright old-fashioned train station that made up the front gates, and as I looked around the lot, I thought, It’s clean. After everything, it’s still clean.
Mom could never shut up about that. It was part of what made Happy Mouse Kingdom the Nicest Place on Earth. It was so clean, and everyone smiled, even when they were sweeping up trash or picking up half-eaten food. I’d made a game of trying to catch one of them looking unhappy, or just normal, but when I saw a teenager beaming like a beauty queen while she cleaned vomit off the side of the Big Rock Candy Mountain, I knew it wasn’t a game I was going to win.
“This place is just perfect every time,” Mom had said as we waited to pay our sixty dollars to get in. It was maybe the third time we’d been to Happy Mouse Kingdom together, and maybe the twelfth time I’d heard this speech. “And even after thousands of people walk through here today, even after all the ticker tape and the Invisible Hobo Parade, it’ll be perfect tomorrow, too. You’ll see.”
I would see, too. We were buying a two-day pass. So while she was paying, just to prove her wrong, I carved a bad word into the paint on the base of the ticket booth. I used my house key, and I was careful not to be seen. Look, I know it was stupid, but I was just a kid, and I was going through this phase. Anyway, I was sure the swear word wouldn’t be noticed, and I’d see it the next morning, and I’d be right and she’d be wrong.
There were a lot of people there that day, and they dropped a lot of things. There was a lot of ticker tape and balloons, and of course the twice-daily Invisible Hobo Parade. And the next day it certainly looked clean. I had to give them that. But they couldn’t have thought of everything.
“Where are you going?” Mom asked as I broke away from her and ran to the ticket booth. “We already have our pass, we don’t have to pay again.”
“Just want to see something,” I called back. She probably didn’t hear me, but it didn’t matter. It would only take a second, then I’d have the rest of the day to gloat.
I pushed through lines of people and ignored their irritated looks and clucking tongues and knelt dow
n at the base of the booth.
“No way,” I whispered.
I had the wrong booth, that was the only explanation. I dashed one row down and tried again. There was nothing there.
And then I knew I’d been right the first time. It was the booth directly in line with the Duke Elliphant sign; I’d made certain of it the day before. I went back to look again.
“What’s going on?” Mom said behind me. “Did you lose something?”
I stared in disbelief at the flawless ticket booth paint. You couldn’t even tell they’d touched it up.
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess so.”
I mention all of this now to explain why, in the middle of the night in the Happy Mouse Kingdom parking lot, I walked to the empty ticket booth in line with Duke Elliphant and crouched down. It was just one of those things. It’d make a funny story to tell Mom when I found her.
Down at the base of the booth the word FART was scratched into the paint.
I leaned in closer. I squinted. I remembered the goats in tiny cars I thought I’d seen earlier, so I traced the word with my fingertip. I felt the shallow trench my key had cut two years before, and tiny flakes of paint stuck to my skin.
“I am crazy,” I told myself, and nodded. “Probably have been for a while.” I poked the booth again and picked away the paint so you couldn’t read the word anymore.
“There wasn’t even any alien invasion, I bet. I’m just nuts. Most likely I’m strapped to a hospital bed right now, drooling and making animal noises.”
It was a nice thought, but I didn’t really believe it. I stood up and walked through a turnstile into the park. At some point I would find the rest of the human race, and eventually I’d track down someone who worked at Happy Mouse Kingdom, and they’d explain about the really interesting ticket booths that sometimes said FART and sometimes didn’t. There wasn’t anything else to do.
The inside of the park was not so clean. There was garbage all over the walkways, in the buildings and shops, plastic bags hanging like bagfruit from the skeletal trees. I caught sight of stray cats and at least one peacock. Broadway was the name of the main thoroughfare, lined with little stores that once offered Gifts from Other Lands. Now they were pretty much just full of rats.