Idiot! the tiny man yelled, and I believed him this time.
Nothing else really happened until we arrived in Montreal.
Father McNamee had booked us into a fancy hotel where we parked underground and could swim on the roof, because there was a heated pool that was half outdoors and half indoors. Max and I scouted it out, but we didn’t swim because I don’t know how to swim—I’m actually terrified of water—and neither Max nor I had a bathing suit.
Standing on the roof deck, watching the heat rise up out of the pool and into the winter air, Max said, “How the fuck are we going to pay for this? Elizabeth and I are broke! This hotel has to cost a lot of fucking money! What the fuck, hey?”
“Father McNamee said God will provide,” I said.
“You really fucking believe in God?” Max asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Do you really believe in aliens?”
“Fuck, yes,” Max said.
“What will you do after we visit Cat Parliament?”
“Don’t fucking know,” Max said. “We brought all our clothes. Left our fucking keys in the apartment. Skipped out on the last month’s rent. We’re fucking homeless.”
“Aren’t you worried?”
“Fuck,” Max said, nodding and lifting his eyebrows.
“I’m worried too.”
“Why are you fucking worried?”
“Because I don’t know what to do without Mom. I’m not even sure how my bills are getting paid. Like electricity and water and cable and all of the other bills Mom used to take care of.”
“You don’t pay those fuckers?”
“No.”
“Someone’s paying those fuckers. Or they would have shut you down by now. Fucking nothing is free.”
“Who would be paying?”
“How would I fucking know that?”
Every time I had thought about this in the past, my head started to hurt.
Just as soon as I knew who was paying my bills, I’d owe a real person money. Since I had no money, I wasn’t exactly eager to end that mystery, truth be told.
I turned around and gazed out over the city of Montreal.
“It’s pretty remarkable, our being here together. You have to admit,” I said. “Extraordinary, even.”
Max nodded.
“I never thought I’d see Canada.”
“Me fucking neither.”
We were standing on a shoveled concrete deck of sorts with our backs to the pool, looking over a five-foot wall.
“I guess for many normal, regular-type people, this wouldn’t be any big deal,” I said.
Max nodded again, and then he said, “Why the fuck do you think we ended up being so fucking different from everyone else? Do you ever fucking think about shit like that? People like you and me and Elizabeth—why do we even fucking exist?”
I thought about it and then—after searching my entire brain for the answer to Max’s first question and finding none—I answered the second by saying, “All the time.” After a minute or so I had a thought, and so I said, “Maybe the world needs people like us?”
“What the fuck for? We don’t fucking do anything! I just rip tickets at the fucking movies! Anyone could do that!”
“Well, if there weren’t weird, strange, and unusual people who did weird things or nothing at all, there couldn’t be normal people who do normal, useful things, right?”
“What the fuck, hey?” Max squinted at me.
“The word normal would lose all of its meaning if it didn’t have an opposite. And if there were no normal people, the world would probably fall apart—because it’s normal people who take care of all the normal things like making sure there is food at the grocery store and delivering the mail and putting up traffic lights and making sure our toilets work properly and growing food on farms and flying airplanes safely and making sure the president of the United States has clean suits to wear and—”
“Little help?” a voice said. “It’s too cold for me to hop out!”
When we turned around there was a beach ball at our feet.
A family must have swum out from under the glass divide and into the outdoor open-air water behind us.
“What the fuck, hey?” Max sort of whispered as he kicked the brightly colored ball toward the man.
The man caught the large ball between his two hands, lowered it so we could see his face, and said, “Thanks!”
He looked like a younger version of you, Richard Gere. Handsome, confident, many muscles in his stomach and chest and arms. Shaggy hair that—even though it was wet—looked like it cost a lot of money and effort to style and maintain. He also reminded me of those underwear models you see in the ads that fall out of the Sunday newspaper. His wife was wearing a green bikini, and while she was no Cindy Crawford, she was just as beautiful as Carey Lowell, which is pretty lovely, as you well know. They had a boy and a girl between them—maybe five and seven years old, both blond with pearly white teeth, the type of kids you see smiling a lot on TV while eating breakfast cereals—and they were all throwing the beach ball around, laughing and trying to catch snowflakes on their tongues, which was when I realized it was indeed snowing.
The steam that rose off their bare skin looked like their souls rising up and mingling above their heads in a playful harmonious dance that made my chest ache.
“What the fuck, hey?” Max whispered again as his index finger pushed his huge glasses to the top of his nose, and it was like he was saying what I have thought many, many times: What is wrong with us? Why are we so strange? Why does that—the normal family in the pool—seem so right, and what we have and are seem so wrong in comparison?