Going Bovine (23 page)

“Well, isn’t that the point of books? To make you think about things? Come on. You have to have a copy of Don Quixote back there. It’s a classic.”

She whips open a drawer and pulls out a stack of papers stapled together, which she runs through until she finds what she’s looking for. “Ah. Sorry. Don Quixote. Complicated ideas and language. Some people found it hysterical, but others felt inadequate about not understanding it right away. We don’t like to induce nonpositive experience feelings in people, so it had to go.”

“Catcher in the Rye?”

“One Holden Caulfield, sixteen, very angry, very negative, visits prostitutes and says bad words.”

“Lord of the Flies?”

“Too violent.”

“Comic books.”

“Wow—out on all counts.” She ticks off the points on her fingers. “Too dark. Too scary. Superheroes have unattainable powers, and are therefore not relatable and might make kids feel bad about themselves. Also, some suggestible kids might get ideas about jumping off buildings or trying to mind-meld the weather.”

“Ha—got one,” I say. “Winnie-the-Pooh!”

She shakes her head. “Bears don’t really talk. Might confuse the little ones.”

“Fine. I’ll take a copy of Don’t Hurt Your Happiness.”

She stamps the card and hands me the book. “You can turn it in at the end of the week. Or whenever, really. It’s just a formality. We find that requiring things of people and making them responsible is a big drag, and that is so not happy. Enjoy!”

Grumpy thoughts threaten to invade my new sunny-day brain. I push them away and settle into one of the ergonom-ically correct Day-Glo yellow chairs and open to page one. You are special, it says in big block letters. Everybody is.

“Hey,” I say to the guy sitting next to me. He’s totally into his CESSNAB electronic bowling game. The beeping digital score card shows three hundred perfect strikes in a row. “Have you read this?”

“Some of it,” he says, without looking up. “But I have friends who know other people who’ve read it and they told me everything.”

“Well, I was just wondering about this thing on page one: You’re special. Everybody is.”

“Yeah?”

“How can you be special if everybody is?”

“You’re just part of the specialness, I guess.” He makes another strike and the game congratulates him with an electronic “That is awesome, friend. Way to go!”

“Oh,” I say. “Thanks.”

“No problem.”

Page two: Happiness is the new Manifest Destiny. Go stake your claim on it!

Page three: If you start to feel unhappy, buy something.

Page four: Embrace the positive!

I look up for a second. Library Girl is staring a hole through me. I start toward her, and she quickly opens the books on the return desk, stamping them a little forcefully.

“Finished already?” she asks in a fake-happy voice.

“Yeah.”

“Was it enlightening? Life-changing? Mood-altering? Did it increase your happiness?” She fiddles with one of the ten earrings along her left ear.

There’s no doubt she’s playing me. There’s also no doubt that she’s pretty hot.

“I’m a-tingling with joy,” I say, matching her smile and wiggling my fingers like I’m on some highly caffeinated drill team. It’s sarcastic, and I know sarcasm hurts your happiness, but it feels kind of good to do it, like stretching a muscle I haven’t used in a while. The corners of Library Girl’s lips twitch into something resembling a smirk, an expression that feels one hundred percent real.

“Meet me in the bowling alley,” she whispers. “Five minutes.”

When I get there, the church is empty except for Library Girl. She’s perched on my favorite ball return, chewing a huge wad of pink gum and blowing bubbles she pops with loud smacks.

“So, tell me,” she says, sucking a dead bubble back into her mouth. “How do you like it here?”

“It’s great.”

“Yeah,” she says, staring at the ceiling and swinging one leg. “Great. Special. We’re all special.”

“Exactly.”

“Wanna put that to the test?” she says.

“What do you mean?”

“A little scientific experimentation. Go ahead. Bowl a perfect game. You can’t lose. If you believe you can do it …”

“… Then you can!” I finish.

“So why don’t you test it. Think the worst thing you could possibly think and let the ball roll. See if the universe gets mad.”

“If I get sad, the alarm will go off and the commandos will come in. So you can’t really test it,” I say.

“Huh.” She pushes up her sleeves, revealing a pair of kick-ass biceps. “Here’s a secret,” she says, looking around. “Sometimes, they’re busy ordering stuff and don’t watch. Like now.”

She flips a switch and the balls come to life, bouncing along on their well-oiled, shiny grooves. My favorite purple ball is within reach. I haven’t had any unhappy thoughts for days. I’m out of practice. I’m sort of annoyed at Gonzo for what he said earlier but not enough to really work myself up about it. Dulcie pops into my mind, the way she just left. And then a thought I have no control over works its way into my brain: What if I never see her again?

“Oooh, you look pretty bummed. Let her rip.”

I throw the ball at the lane. It bounces and skitters across the smooth, polished wood, careening unpredictably. By all rights, it should hit the gutter, but it doesn’t. Instead, it scoots right back to the center and delivers a perfect strike.

“Try again,” Library Girl urges.

I imagine all sorts of things this time: Mom and Dad and Jenna back at the hospital. Kids too poor to have Christmas. Beloved pets being put to sleep. Losing all my Great Tremolo CDs. Pep rallies. Still I hit strike after strike after strike. I couldn’t lose if I tried, and I am definitely trying.

“Not so fun anymore, is it? Now for the rest of our experiment …” Library Girl pulls a magnet from her pocket and does something to the console with it. Then she uses the magnet on the other lanes. “This time, do what they say: embrace the positive.”

I close my eyes and say my mantra: You can do it if you think you can. You deserve to win.

When I launch the ball, it rolls down the center and drifts off to the side, sliding into the gutter and out of sight without knocking down a single pin. “Whoa. What just happened?”

Library Girl holds up her magnet. “They’re magnetized. There’s a little magnet in the ball and another in the gutters. They repel the ball. Like I said, you can’t lose. You achieve every time.”

“But it’s not an achievement if the game’s rigged.”

Library Girl holds up two fingers on each hand, making quote marks in the air. “Failure doesn’t increase your happiness.”

I give it six, seven more tries, and the best I can do is take out four pins. “Maybe you made the game too hard now,” I say.

“Or maybe you’re just not that awesome, special, and perfect all the time.”

“That’s harsh,” I say, even though my gut says she’s right; I’ve sort of gotten used to hearing only the good stuff. “But what about what they say here, that competition hurts your happiness. We have to get rid of our bad feelings to be happy.”

She rolls her eyes and lets out a growl. “You can’t ‘get rid’ of any of your feelings! We’re human beings! When some jerk pisses me off, I have the urge to kick the living shit out of him. But I can’t, because if we went around kicking people all the time, we’d never be able to buy groceries or take the dog for a walk or eat out. It would be complete chaos. That’s why we have civilization. And table manners.”

“Exactly! But that’s why this church exists. To make us better people. And to be better people, we have to get rid of all our negative feelings.”

“No. We have to learn to live with them. What if those so-called negative feelings are useful?” Library Girl spins the shiny pink ball that’s sitting on the metal grid waiting for a game. It wobbles like the Earth on its axis. “I mean, suppose you take your anger and you channel it into a painting. Pretty soon, you don’t care about getting back at that idiot who pissed you off anymore because you’re totally into your painting. And then maybe that painting hangs in a gallery someday and it inspires other people to find their thing, whatever it is. You’ve influenced the world not because you wanted to hug it and cuddle it and call it sweet thing but because one day you wanted to beat the crap out of somebody but you didn’t. You made a painting instead. And you couldn’t have made that painting without that feeling, without something to push off against. We human beings can’t evolve without the pain.”

“What do you mean?”

“Bad stuff happens.” She flicks out a switchblade and cuts through one of the commando ropes that’s been left hanging after an earlier sadness incident and wraps the length around her wrist. “People fail. They get dumped. They bomb tests. They lose the big game or screw up in a hundred small ways or get rejected or have to start over. They feel confused and scared. Or sometimes they just don’t feel like they fit in. They’re part of some kind of primal, universal loneliness and that’s just the way it is and you have to learn to deal and a big vanilla smoothie is not the answer, you know?”

“But what if we didn’t have to feel that?”

“But we do! It’s what makes us human.”

“So you don’t think human beings can be made happy.”

“I didn’t say that,” she says, fashioning the rope into a sort of double bracelet with a sliding knot. “I just don’t think happiness is a sustainable state. You can’t have it all the time. That much happiness makes people unhappy. And then they start looking for trouble. They start looking for the next thing that’s going to make them happy—a happiness fix.”

I feel like a balloon slowly settling to earth, slightly deflated but kind of glad the trip is over. It’s weird, but it’s sort of a relief not to have to be happy all the time.

“So if you don’t believe any of this, why are you still here?”

“To do what needs to be done.” Library Girl strokes the side of my face. “Cameron, you are a really nice guy. And that’s why I’m sorry about this.”

“Sorry about what?”

Superquick, she slips the rope bracelet over my wrists and tightens the knot so I can’t move my hands.

“Hey!” I tug but it only tightens the knot.

“Don’t struggle, Cameron. It’ll be easier.”

“What the f—”

Alarms go off at an earsplitting volume, louder than I’ve ever heard them.

“What’s that?” I say, wishing I could cover my ears.

“That, friend, is the beautiful sound of revolution.” Library Girl tugs on the rope, and all I can do is follow her.

Pandemonium has erupted in the rest of the Church of Everlasting Satisfaction and Snack ’N’ Bowl. People in varying degrees of CESSNAB dress run through the halls, screaming that we are under attack. The walls are crawling with commandos. It’s like some kind of extreme soap-on-a-rope. Five teens with a shopping cart pass us by. At first, I think they’re from CESSNAB because they’re wearing the big yellow happy face shirts, but then I see it’s really a sad face, a mad face, a stoned face, and a face with a raised middle finger under the chin. The shopping cart is full of books and newspapers, which they toss at anyone they see.

A guy brandishing an open newspaper screams, “The world’s fucked up! Stop ordering jeans and pull your heads out!”

“Happiness is a fascist state!” one of the hurlers yells. It’s Thomas. “What if I don’t want to chill, huh? What if I miss my dog, Snuffy?”

A guy in a CESSNAB sweatshirt zigzags by, hugging himself frantically. “Embrace the positive! Embrace the positive!”

Library Girl looks up into the ceiling camera. With a wicked grin, she leans over and kisses me hard on the lips.

“Whoa,” I gasp.

“Come on,” she says, dragging me into the radio station’s recording booth. She bolts the door behind us, and for a split second, I have the crazy idea I’m about to pop my cherry under the weirdest of circumstances—a total coup de virginity. But Library Girl cuts my hands free of the rope handcuffs and abandons me for the console. Switches are flipped, knobs are turned, the volume is set at ten.

“Hand me that backpack that’s under the CESSNAB locker,” she says.

Still kiss-dazed, I bring it to her and she pulls out a well-worn copy of Anderson’s Anthology of English Literature and opens to a bookmarked page. Her voice zips into the micro phone and floats out into the compound.

“Shakespeare, people. Complicated. Beautiful. Sad and violent. And the language is a bitch. Let me blow ya minds with a little Hamlet:

“To be, or not to be—that is the question:

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them? To die, to sleep—

No more; and by a sleep to say we end

The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to? ’Tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;

To sleep, perchance, to dream, ay, there’s the rub;

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come—”

The door shakes with pounding. An ax bites into the wood, scaring the shit out of me, but Library Girl keeps her lips pressed to the mike:

“… who would fardels bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death—

The undiscover’d country from whose bourn

No traveller returns—puzzles the will,

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?”

The door bursts open with a sick splintering sound, and Ruth stumbles in. She takes one look at me there with Library Girl and her lower lip starts to quiver. “Cameron. You are so hurting my happiness right now.”

Daniel’s right behind her, brandishing a torch. He speaks into his bracelet. “Roger one-niner, we have a situation in the radio room.”

“Roger one-niner? Isn’t that airplane code?” I ask.

His lips go tight. “It makes me happy to say it.”

A commando squad, all wide shoulders and, holy crap, honest-to-God guns this time, arrives on the scene. They grab Library Girl, who tries to hold on to the microphone. The commando picks up the mammoth anthology and brings it down hard three times on her hands, making her scream in pain till she’s forced to let go.