PART TWO Scenes 19 & 20

Blinky has begun to subject Myron to M. Darryl’s lunatic disquistions on interplanetary horseplay. Myron can bear no more.

“What is it with you and normal life?” demands Myron. “Why can’t you have a job and a house and not like your work? You go in for all this goofy exotic stuff.”

There’s a very long pause, that begins to feel serious. Myron looks over at him.

Blinky tries to respond. Almost gravely. “Because,” he offers, “I have. . . a fervor. . . that I don’t know what to do with.”

Blinky presses on his hat.

“I don’t like it, that all the milk comes in cartons. You can’t get honey, except in plastic containers. I want it from the bees, or like, right from the cow.” Blinky looks at his hands. “I don’t know. I want to fly, too.

“I want, like, a super-actual existence.”

Out of nowhere, the car begins to hiss. Smoke pours out from under the hood. The temperature gauge is buried in red. “Goddammit!” shouts Myron. Luckily, they’re on top of an exit. “Damn, damn, damn!” Myron guides the 1986 Buick Century onto the ramp, and coasts all the way into Tom’s Fuel King. Myron is pounding on the steering column. “Why have a plan, if you don’t follow the plan! What is a plan for? An orderly result! Florida! It’s such a simple thing!” He’s winding himself up into a genuine tantrum. “I want my Goddamn plan back, Blink! I want it back!” He’s bellowing inside the car, which has come to a stop next to the gas pumps.

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20

Exit 49. Looking down on it, you’d see a light-colored line marking the interstate against the browned-over fall fields. A weaker, thinner line would demarcate the state road running perpendicular to 70, making a cross like package string on the bottom side of a box. Irregular rectangles of pavement would be laid out cattycorner to each other at the crossing point. It would hardly occur to you to think that the exit, dressed in low cheap architecture and sectional wire fences, would provide a setting for anything, let alone biographies of compulsion, tales of danger, and time traveling historical figures. It would just look like a half-hearted and three quarters-thoughtless arrangement of crap.