He waits until around Missouri to ask me what it’s like to have found myselves. I tell him that when he says it so quick like that it sounds like “mice elves,” and then I tell him the truth. That to know I’m not just me is fantastically grounding and gets me out of bed. It puts me in the mind to agree to things like this, driving some strange and individual boy across the country on the whim of his mother, a family friend. Everyone is someones, she’d told me. Everyone in this country at least. My sister had called her a few days ago, breathless from the hospital bed, with a need to announce that her new baby and this boy now in the car just seemed so much the same that if they didn’t meet right away we’d be doing irreparable harm to the both of them. My sister lives in California and, well, I’m the one with a car.
I tell the boy not to get so moody about things he can’t control, and that it should be nice to be his kind of alone. His condition got him a segment on 60 Minutes that was pretty interesting to watch. Being maybe the only boy on the East Coast not to have found himselves by eleven years old made him famous. I tell him I’ve never been on 60 Minutes. And then he doesn’t speak to me until we find somewhere to stop.
It takes about six hotels to get from Maryland to San Bernardino at a casual pace. I live in an Anne Arundel apartment with my girlfriend and a good view of the harbor. When I told her about the trip she said, Imagine if we had a kid, if he was so alone. Imagine a you that had some sympathy for a kid like that. And so I didn’t make much more of an issue of the thing, but then we did spend the night talking about all the things that our kids wouldn’t be, like so lost, if we could help it.
I did almost have an angle to connect with him though. I don’t want to make it out like I haven’t been trying. I told him about this moment in the bathroom of a hotel in Columbus, Ohio, where I walked in on myself taking a shit. And we both gasped since we weren’t sure who had been there first but by the time I was able to work up a greeting I had already left.
But so you see, I told the boy later, having yourselves all over the place isn’t so nice all the time. He didn’t understand though. He just asked me what it was like. He asked me to tell him about myselves, and then my sisters’, and my parents’.
I told him over dinner that my father is like most people—he repeats every 200 miles or so. And his Meeting is every mid-June. My mother is more rare—every 250 miles. Her Meets are in the fall. Our fridge gets covered every year with all these pictures, from inside a convention center that’s usually somewhere on the cheaper side like Charlotte or Denver on a bad timeslot. They’re of my father posing with forty or so others who look just like him except for the clothes; my mother’s got a tighter-knit group but there’s a few less of them. And they’re always looking at least semi-happy but mostly worn out since the Meetings last all day. It’s not all handshakes and board games, I told him.
The boy said that it still must be nice. The Foundation takes care of all the expenses. There’s usually a chef in the group or someone who brews their own beer. Everyone can sit and compare their divergent lives from year to year and end up with a pretty full picture of what it means to be themselves. Ok, well he doesn’t phrase it exactly like that. But I tell him that he’s right—I tell him that it is pretty nice.
In Flagstaff he gets me into a fight. It’s free breakfast at the Ramada Inn and we’re eating our eggs at a high table up against the big windows and the shadow of the blinds falls across the boy in just such a way that, from the outside, it must look like it’s only me and a dark chair. That must be what the couple sunbathing in the courtyard can see.
The boy says, Look out the window. Don’t they look like me?
And when I look the woman is topless on her beach chair like there aren’t about a hundred people within viewing range. So I try to tell the boy not to stare like that.
But he says, It’s the hair, and then he ruffles his own. The way it’s curly like mine. And our nipples are the same color.
I tell him that I don’t want to see his nipples and he lets go of his shirt, but then I try to crane around the divider in the glass to see just what color nipples we’re talking about in the first place. My eggs go cold. My coffee goes cold. The boy says that he knows how to help and then he knocks as loud as he can until the woman turns full around and after that the guy looks up and tosses his magazine on the ground hard like he’s that finished reading. And then it’s just him and me and my dark chair and this naked woman turning herself over and the door from the courtyard that does not require card access.
The boy explains later that he is sorry I was thrown into the bushes and the concrete wall, but he needed to make sure I wasn’t taking all of his people for myselves.
Let me say that when you’re crossing the Mohave Mountains the range peeks up out of this green mist of scrubland and the Hardee’s all change to Carl’s Jr. and it is beautiful. I can understand some things about my sister leaving. We’re nearly there. At a rest stop in the desert the boy picks out some wooden Indian-souvenirs to give to her; a few little painted coyotes; he hasn’t brought any money. But the gesture is insistently polite in that way that would make me an asshole to say no. It’s only another hour until our trip is over.
My sister accepts her coyote gifts and puts them with about a dozen identical ones in her living room, on a mantle that’s never had a fireplace. She touches the bruising on my face and asks me not to tell her what happened. We all sit down for some iced tea and television and wait for a coo from the baby monitor. I ask her, Where’s the husband and the kids? And she says that they’re out driving the dogs into town. She sent them away so she could have the boy meet her baby in peace.
They don’t look a thing alike. While the boy stares as hard as he can into the crib waiting to be struck with the bounty of existence, my sister takes me aside and says that there was a letter from the Foundation already; her new kid repeats every 150 miles. Another common kid after all. I tell her that he’s beautiful, that I love him, and then I ask what the hell she was thinking, with all this. She says that it’s worth it to see if they might take to each other anyway. That she needed to do something, that knowing about the boy weighs at her heart and that we all deserve a break from ourselves, and then the baby makes a noise and she asks me if I think her son might see some resemblance that we all maybe missed.
The boy turns one of the plush infant toys in his hands and he says, This kid’s got a long way to go until he’s a me.
So then I lie to the both of them that, Yeah. Don’t we all.