The End of FUN (32 page)

I asked if we could maybe listen to the radio or something, and Evie put on NPR because of course. It was some kind of quiz show about the news. She and Isaac kept shouting out the answers and laughing together at the same parts, and it was sort of cute and embarrassing and confusing all at once—confusing because there wasn't anything to laugh at. I'm telling you,
none
of that show was funny. And yet every once in a while they'd just bust up. Not ironically, either. They were really into it.

We headed leisurely in a southeasterly direction—15 mph tops—tracing the eastern slope of Ass Mountain out past the mobile homes, turning finally up the dirt road that parallels the Humboldt River. One of the panelists on the NPR quiz show was being supposedly hilarious about some movie I hadn't seen, and I was starting to get kind of sleepy, but then we rounded a bend and there was Shiloh, leaning against her red Jetta, in a tie-dye shirt and jeans. We stopped to let her in, the plan being to drive up to the turnaround in Evie's car, tube back down to Shiloh's car, and then drive it back up to retrieve Evie's.

“Morning!” She slid into the backseat.

“Purple Jolly Rancher?” said Isaac.

“Um, OK.”

Shiloh took it and opened the wrapper and popped it in her mouth. I watched her suck on it. Then I was like,
Dude, stop watching her suck on that Jolly Rancher
™
. The car shuddered over a cattle guard, scaring up a pair of crows from the brush. Around the next bend the land opened upon a wide flat area, ringed by aspen, where the cows had been. This was our spot. We got out, and Isaac began inflating the tubes with the little electric pump he'd brought along.

“How much pressure do we want here? Forty P.S.I.? Fifty? We are aiming for a fine balance of buoyancy and resiliency. I imagine there are pointy objects lying in wait.”

“Truly,” said Evie. “Prickers and thorns. How's that one look, dear brother?”

“What, the tube? It looks fine.”

“There we have it! Confirmation from the master himself. Now everyone gather round—it's sunscreen time!”

My sister squirted a fat dollop on my hand, then Isaac's, then Shiloh's.

“Be liberal in your application. For the sun's rays do burn the flesh.”

“Truly,” said Isaac, smearing lotion over his ears.

It was pretty embarrassing, this loverspeak of theirs, like some kind of foreign language, like the kind you'd have to study using Rosetta Stone
®
(YAY!), the gold standard in computer-based language learning.

Shiloh and I looked at each other and kind of simultaneously rolled our eyes—and that was kind of cool.

Then it was time to float. But Evie wasn't ready yet.

“You men travel onward. Shiloh and I must tarry here a moment to discuss…lady things.”

“Verily,” said Isaac. “We will travel slowly that you might apprehend us.”

“We would be honored.”

So then it was just me and Isaac and the river traveling verily slowly. The current was lazier than I'd seen it in a long time. We drifted side by side like two widgets on the world's slowest conveyor belt. It was going to be
hours
before we made it back to the car. I suspected Evie had put me out with Isaac so we could “get to know each other,” and I gave it my best, but I have to say we were on two different levels. The river drifted in a lazy
S
and widened, and we found ourselves stopped at a shallow spot, a sort of sandbar made up of little rocks. We sat in our tubes and waited for the ladies to catch up, and I unzipped my backpack and took out the booze. “Want a drink?”

“Um, OK.” He took a sip, made a face, handed it back to me. “What is that?”

“Dead man's liquor.”

“Never heard of it. Regional brand?”

“Pretty much.”

I gave it a sip. It was pretty nasty, all right.

“So Evie said you're a biologist?”

“Environmental impact engineer. I'm studying the Avis Mortem.”

“Bummer.”

Isaac nodded. “The Avis Mortem is very distressing. My firm has been contracted to investigate the possibility of electromagnetic radiation as a contributing factor. So far, results have been inconclusive, but there's some promising evidence. Our suspicion is that the specific waveform utilized by full immersion reality generators—like, for example, FUN
®
—may have something to do with it.”

I felt obligated to ask a question, so I was like, “How's that work?”

“Well, in order to transmit information safely to an embedded subcutaneous receiver, the F.C.C. required an extremely low frequency and modulation signal. All well and good, except for the fact that it's beginning to look like the migratory navigation system evolved by birds may utilize the
very same signal
.”

He paused for dramatic effect, and I knew I was supposed to say something at this point, so I did. “Huh. Interesting.”

“Isn't it? Our hypothesis is that the signal-to-noise ratio is being raised to the point where certain vulnerable groups are unable to maintain a cohesive migratorial integrity. We aren't sure of the exact mechanism, but based on autopsies in the field, we believe it has something to do with a low-frequency signal and the avian nictitating membrane.”

At which point the dude basically lost me as far as details went. But I understood the overall point.

“Basically, the birds are getting lost and dying because of FUN
®
.”

“Yes. Exactly. I was being unnecessarily abstruse, wasn't I? You know, we sometimes jokingly refer to the field as ‘Chinese algebra,' which is actually relevant, as the majority of the research is out of China. At any rate, if you aren't acquainted with the jargon, it can seem pretty convoluted. But yes, exactly what you said: we think the birds are dying because of FUN
®
.”

So that was a bummer of a thought, but then Evie and Shiloh drifted into view. They bumped up onto the sandbar, both of them grinning and wiggling their legs. The tie-dye was gone. Shiloh had on a bikini now. The top was yellow and the bottom was blue with yellow polka dots, and my eyes traced the acute angle where it disappeared between her legs. Above this, streaming upward were a series of tattoos. Stars. This series of inky blue stars, 10 of them, like a map of a distant galaxy. A tattooed Latham sister! It was hard to not look.

The river was low, and we kept bumping up onto sandbars, or more like mudbars, and then at one point it widened into another giant field of rocks, all glittery with water around them, and it looked like
miles
before the river might be floatable again. We waded across the rocks, carrying our tubes over our heads like refugees from a water park. Evie kept apologizing, but it really wasn't necessary. Everyone was having a good time. I kinda hung back to take in the view. Blue sky and sparkling water. Sagebrush and fence posts. Shiloh kept sliding her fingers under her bikini bottom to adjust it on her butt.

Funny. It was kind of turning into a beautiful day.

The river narrowed again, though still not quite enough that you could float it. The rocks were gone and it was all mud now, or more like
muck
, river muck, and at some point Shiloh's flip-flop was sucked into the muck and I stopped to help her dig it out—and by the time we made it to where you could float again, Isaac and Evie had drifted away on a current of love and river water.

As we floated down the river I could tell Shiloh was having a lot of FUN
®
, skin all glistening in the light, so I left her alone and YAY!ed Sunsoft
®
PureRadiance
™
moisturizing sunblock. After a while the current became a little less slow and we came to the cool part of the river, this wide ravine with sandstone cliffs, where people had spray-painted their names. Way up at the top where eagles soar, and partially covered by a newer tag, you could still see Oso's old signature, the creeper skull. I turned to Shiloh to point it out, but her gaze was blank, hands gliding through the air, off in her own little world.

As the walls rose above us, the FUN
®
began to flicker and Homie
™
popped up to say,

Shiloh blinked in the light like she'd just woken up.

“You lose the signal?” I asked.

“Yeah—you?”

“Yeah.”

“How are you sitting like that?” she asked. “Like, all the way in your tube? This valve thingy keeps getting me. No matter how I sit, it's either jabbing me in the butt or in my back.”

“Flip the tube over so it's facing down.”

Shiloh laughed. “Duh.
Flip it over
. I'm so dumb sometimes! I guess I'll just have to wait until it's shallow again.”

“Nah. You could get out and flip it right here. I mean, it's what, two feet deep at most?”

“You think? We're going kinda fast now.”

Not really. But she had the twitches pretty bad by this point, and when she got out of the tube, she wobbled for a second, then plunged butt-first into the water. Squealing, she righted herself and emerged dripping out of the water like some kind of sexy swamp creature. I guess I had a smirk on my face.

“That was
not
funny,” she said.

“It was
kinda
funny.”

She put her hands on my tube, pushed, and flipped me into the icy water.

“There! Now we're even!”

It was a pretty exhilarating feeling, being dunked by a Latham sister like that, and now that we were both wet and shivering and twitching, we started to have fun. Like, we just started talking about stuff. She'd heard about my little school escapade and asked me about living in San Francisco, and what the hivehouses were like, and if I missed my friends there.

“I didn't really have any friends. It was actually pretty lonely.”

“Oh. Really? I just thought because your last two moods were
LOVESTRUCK
and
LOVESICK
that there was maybe like a special someone….”

“Oh. Right. No, that was just—I was just goofing around.”

“Oh,” she said.

We floated down the river, twitching and chatting until we were back in service again, and then around the next bend was the parking area. I had a message from Evie. We'd just missed them. She and Isaac were driving Shiloh's Volkswagen up to get Evie's car.

We set our tubes on the grass and waited by the creek. Lazy current drifting by. Soft murmur. I unzipped my bag.

“Want a drink?”

“Um, I don't really drink.”

“Oh. I thought—”

“Well, I've
tried
it. But I didn't really
like
it.”

“OK. Fair enough.” I took a sip and coughed.

“But hey,” she said. “Just because I don't drink doesn't mean I don't do
other
things.”

“Yeah? Like what?”

“You know,” she said.
“Other things.”

“What, like you smoke weed?”

“No!”

Then what was it? Cigarettes? Pills? Shoplifting? What was she getting at?

Shiloh's brown eyes watched me with amusement.

And finally I was like (to myself in my head):

Holy shit! You idiot! Don't you get it? This girl—this Latham sister—she's hitting on you!

I couldn't believe it. But another look confirmed it. There was that electricity again, the spark, the same one I'd felt with Katie, only this time
I
was the one kind of holding back. Funny how that works. Well, but she was Sam's
sister
. And what about Katie? Did I not just give her a big speech about how much I liked her? But did I also not just say I was only goofing around with all the love stuff?

There was still time to pull back.

There was still time to end the fun.

But then Shiloh's hands were on the back of my head and I was touching her shoulder and the hormones were taking over and we were almost kissing and it was almost too much, the guilt and hesitation and desire. But then we
were
kissing—soft lips, sweet breath—and I forgot about all the other stuff because that wasn't me,
this
was me, and I was a signal-to-noise ratio and I was a cohesive migratorial integration and I was as hard as Chinese algebra.