3. Traffic Demon

            Drinking at your parents’ house is always a tricky balancing act because you want to drink enough for them to be tolerable but not so much that they question your maturity.  I figured two glasses of wine was an appropriate weight-distribution stick to carry across the tightrope.  That’s right, I didn’t plan to get drunk, so no, I had not arranged for a DD, but unbeknownst to me, I would be encountering one of a different sort later that night.

            I guess I should go ahead and clear this up now: I will be referring to my parents by obviously pseudo ‘nym’ names as well.  They will be Papa Nym and Mama Nym, and yes, as I thought through this naming convention, I had a good chuckle and a few minor regrets.  It’s a pity that my father doesn’t have a sister who could be Auntie-nym.  Get it?  Like antonym.  Maybe she could be Papa’s diametric opposite.  Or if I had a gay twin brother who sounded just like me…  But I don’t.  Which, actually, is kind of why I was at my parents’ house in the first place.

            A nasty thought had been festering in my mind for several days after my encounter with the mall demon (though at the time I didn’t know that this was what she was) but even once I had planted myself at the kitchen table of my youth, it took me over an hour and two glasses of wine before I was able to spit it out.  The question, I mean, not the wine.

            My mother was talking ad infinitum about work at the food bank and how frustrating it is when people turn in food that is well past its expiration date, or submit seemingly sealed boxes where the inner bag has already been opened.  My father had no doubt heard this complaint at least a thousand times more often than I had but he still fixed his understanding eyes on her and nodded empathetically.  I, meanwhile watched those eyes and that nod, and tried to determine how Cage-y they actually were. 

            “How come sometimes when a bag of Lindt truffles get hot, they melt out of their wrappers into a bag of mush, but sometimes it’s just the insides that turn into liquid?”

            “Very interesting,” I said, “But what I want to know…”

            Mama fixed me with a disapproving glare, and Papa affected a smirky little half-smile, curious to see how this potential argument played out.

            “Sorry,” I said, “I guess it just doesn’t seem like starving people need Lindt chocolate truffles in the first place.”

            “Well, they don’t usually get them.  Some employee always nabs them first.”

            “Oh, well that’s good then.  Or… How do you know the insides turn to… sorry, I was wondering… I don’t, I mean… there’s no possible way I have a sister, is there?

            Mama brayed like a donkey.

            Papa hung his head.

            “So, that’s a no?  OK, that’s what I thought.”

            “Why?”

            “Well, it’s nothing really.  I just ran into a girl the other day and I thought she looked a bit like…”

            “And you figured you should make sure you weren’t related before you…” Papa thinks he’s funny.

            “Don’t you dare cheat on Daisy.”  Mama doesn’t.

            “I wouldn’t.  I was actually at the mall buying Daisy a gift when I saw this…”

            “Can I see it?”

            “No, mom. But anyway, the girl looked a lot like, well, us, but no sister.  That answers that.  You’re sure?”

            “I would know, sweetheart.”

            Obviously.  But now she and Papa were making weird eye contact and he seemed to nod slowly.  Holy shit!  Was he confessing an affair to her?  I poured a third glass of wine and thanked the heavens that I hadn’t described the face-shifting bimbo in more detail.  What if dad used to have a blonde big-boobed secretary in the years after my birth?  I didn’t remember ever meeting her, but then, I wouldn’t have, would I?  Did carpenters have secretaries?  Jesus Christ…

            “Your birth was a miracle, sweetheart,” said my mom.

            I drank some more wine.

            “Your mother and I never planned to have children,” added Papa.

            Miracle, accident, potato, potahto.

            Mama took a deep breath and continued, “I had a condition when I was young, and the doctor’s told me that I had… that I had lost all of my eggs.”

            “Her internal Easter bunny did too good of a job,” said Papa, reminding me where my sense of humor came from, and I don’t mean a rabbit in my mom’s vagina. “But apparently he missed one.”

            “We were really scared when I started to… you know, show.  But then we realized what was happening and we… well, we warmed up to the idea.  The doctors said it didn’t make sense, that the chances were insanely small of any viable eggs remaining, of one actually being fertilized, but now it seems obvious… you’re one in a million.  That’s why we named you ‘Craig’.”

            (An aside: Obviously that sentence makes no sense with my nym name, but for the sake of journalistic integrity, I’m leaving her speech intact.  And to you demons out there, if you’re able from that to figure out what my name is, well… I’ll see you soon.)

            “And you’re sure that…”

            “We did research,” said Papa, “That’s what you do when something doesn’t make sense.  And consider that this was before the internet.  I called clinics, I sent off for medical papers.  I wanted to know how it had happened.  I wanted to know how we had been… blessed with you.”

            Interesting.  I pushed back from the table.

            “I should really head out,” I said.

            “But you’ve barely touched your food,” bristled Mama. 

This wasn’t true, I’d touched it quite a lot, pushing it back and forth on my plate to create the illusion of eating, a deception which had apparently failed.  It’s not that my mom is a terrible cook, though she is, but I was distracted by thoughts of my potential siblings, my problematic patronage, and by the troubling prospect that my father had perhaps been unfaithful.  I shook my head.

“Did she really look that much like us?” she asked.

No, I thought, just like dad.  And me. 

Then he read me’s mind.

“After you were born,” Papa added, “The possibility of another surprise child weighed heavily on us.  But we knew it wouldn’t happen.  It was impossible, but then, so were you.  Still, to make it a certainty, to ease our expectations… when you were still a baby, I had a vasectomy.”

I think my mother misinterpreted my sigh of relief as a half-gag of disgust, because she said, “Woah, TMI, honey.”

And even though this was LI than the ovary-bunny, I still finished off the last of my wine and headed for the door.

“Hold on,” Mama Nym called after me, “If you’re not going to eat dinner, at least take some desert.”

She placed two Lindt chocolate truffles in my hand.  I pocketed them, gave her a hug, and shook Papa Nym’s hand.  He locked eyes with me in an ‘I just talked to you about my penis’ kind of way and said, “Be careful out there.”

I assured him that I would.

But it’s hard to focus on the road when your mind is filled with unwanted thoughts about your parents’ genitals and I reflected that perhaps I could transfer this focal subject to something newer, younger, and better.

“Call Daisy,” I requested of Siri as I turned my car – yes, I was still driving a car at this point – out of my parents’ neighborhood and onto the highway.

“Hello.”

“Dr. Jones!” I over-said, “Discover anything exciting today?”

“As a matter of fact, beneath the top layer of dust I located a second, equally fascinating layer of even more dust.”

“Sounds like my dick.”

“What?”

“You know?  Because I haven’t been using it lately.  Obviously.  Because you’re out of town.  Sorry, I’ve got dicks on the mind.  But at least it’s my own now.  Could be worse.  Could be my dad’s.”

“Do I even want to ask?”

“No… perhaps not.”

“OK then, I won’t.  So, aside from dusty dad dick, how’ve you been?”

“Not great.  Not bad.  I thought for a moment I might have a sister, but it turns out I don’t.  And though my dad didn’t have an affair, or at least, not a fruitful one anyway, I learned that my mom probably steals Lindts from the food bank, so I guess I do descend from morally dubious stock.”

“Well, glad to hear it about the sister thing.  I guess.  I do have a sister, but you knew that already.  You said your mom steals lint?  Like pocket lint?”

“Actually…” I tapped my pant-leg then shifted to my left butt-cheek while shoulder-pinning my phone to my ear as I fished one of the chocolates out of my pocket.

“Hey Craig,” Daisy said, vaguely questionish, “Do you feel like there’s something wrong?  It just seems like you’re distant.”

“Well, geographically I am.  But sorry, no, we’re good.  I just got distracted by a chocolate that I’d rather not have melted in my pocket.  Figure I’ll eat it to help me visualize how insanely sweet you are. Anyway, how’s the dig going?”

“It’s fine.  Not much to do out here for fun though…”

She kept talking right through that ellipsis, but my listening trailed off as the truffle ejaculated molten chocolate all over my chin and shirt.  I shoved the remaining hemisphere of dripping sweetness into my mouth then grabbed the nearest piece of fabric I could find – a torn extra-small shirt – to try and get the brown lava off of my actual shirt before it stained.

Of course, in the process of doing this, my attention to both Daisy’s train of thought and the speed limit had lapsed, so when I saw the blue lights approaching in my rearview mirror, I metaphorically shat myself in much the same way that the troublesome truffle had literally just shat my shirt.  I merged into the right lane, braked just hard enough to look suspicious, and dropped Daisy into my lap just in case there was some kind of no-phones rule in whatever parish I passing through. 

The blue lights were joined by a left-hand turn signal as they followed me into the right lane.  Either he had signaled backwards, or those three – why did I drink three!? – glasses of wine had affected me more than I thought.  This was bad.  The turn signal blinked off as the lights approached rapidly then were joined again, this time by a right hand signal, which signaled to my lungs that I should breathe a sigh of relief as this officer wasn’t pulling me over.

But instead of going right, he merged back into the left lane and flew past me blaring his horn.  I assume his intent was to give me a hands-on lesson about the Doppler effect, which I appreciated almost as much as the realization that this guy wasn’t actually a cop, but rather one of those tools who buys blue headlights for absolutely no reason.

“Hey, sorry about that,” I said as I lifted the phone back to my ear.

“Are you OK?” Daisy asked.

“Yeah, this guy is driving like a lunatic and I got chocolate on two of my shirts.  No big deal.  Extra-small, in fact.  Anyway, what were you saying?”

“What was the last thing you heard?”

“Uhhhh… most of it.  You’re bored.  And do we have a problem.  We don’t.”

“Ok,” she said, “I was just saying that we got a new group of researchers at the site today and they seem like an OK…”

I had now slowed considerably to avoid further scares as I continued to try and clean my shirt, but found that I was still gaining on Honky – I mean this acoustically, not racially – the pseudo-cop at an alarming speed.  Once I was close enough to read his assorted bumper stickers, he switched on the right hand turn signal again, and slowed down further, forcing me to do the same.  I considered passing, but cars treating the speed limit like a Buzz Lightyear slogan were zipping by in the left lane.  Besides, I was going slow anyway, and why not wait the extra few seconds?  That would give me a chance to listen to whatever Daisy was now saying about her degree of career satisfaction.  Or I could read the bumper stickers.

One of them seemed to be written in Braille, and another said, “Be glad your parents weren’t pro-choice.”  I’d seen this bumper sticker before and I had always hated it.  Talk about a major assumption there, honky.  Not every pro-choice woman aborts every pregnancy.  I had always commented to whoever was passenging with me when we passed such a sticker, that it should have a clause that read “if you weren’t a planned pregnancy, like I was.”  Except now I’d just learned that I wasn’t.  Maybe the bumper sticker should read ‘Be glad the doctors tricked your parents into thinking that they didn’t need to use birth control.’

            As my thought process moved steadily forward, my car didn’t, for though the other car’s turn signal was still on, he had yet to turn.  Cars behind me kept waiting for openings then darting out to pass me on the left. 

            And then, just as I had countered the driver’s rightwing bumper sticker, he now contradicted his right-hand turn signal and merged into the left lane, cutting off a car that had just snuck out from behind me.

            “Are you kidding me?” I muttered.

            “I know, right?” said Daisy.  Well that was lucky.  And so was the guy who managed to brake just in time to avoid reading a Braille sticker with his front bumper.

            I accelerate back to a little below the speed limit and returned to cleaning my shirt as Daisy continued talking about whatever it was I had just agreed with.  I genuinely tried to listen, but I kept getting distracted by the endless honking.

In front of me, the cone of my headlight colored headlights were hanging out with a matching light-blue set, and a glance to my left revealed that Honky – who I now saw was a heavyset black man – had matched my speed.

Except Honky wasn’t the one honking this time.  No, the cacophony I was hearing came from the rear where a dozen cars and counting had collected behind our slow moving vehicles, which now blocked both lanes.  I speculated that perhaps the pseudo-cop had slowed to avoid harassment from a real cop.

“Hey, can you just call me back when you get home?” asked Daisy from where she had again fallen to my lap.

“Yeah, sorry,” I said, pressing the phone, and a splotch of muddy chocolate to my cheek.

I glanced over at the neighboring vehicle and saw that he was looking at me.  Did he want to get over?  I suppose we had already established that he was turn signal impaired.  I slowed to let him pass.  He slowed to match me.  The cars behind us accelerated the frequency of their honks.

I sped up.  He matched me again.

I glanced over again and did a double take.  I wondered if his fixed stare might be the result of the unintentional partial blackface that Mama’s Lindt had put on my cheek, an oddly ironic yin yang type scenario, since his black face had now turned white.  He saw me staring, and I think he knew what I was seeing, because he finally accelerated. 

As his taillights cleared my hood, he flipped on his left turn signal, and perhaps because I hadn’t caught on to his directional dyslexia, what he did next caught me totally off-guard.  He cut to the right, right in front of me and I cut off the road caught a guardrail.

I sat there in my car, staring out at the passing traffic in shock.  I was horribly confused, not by the Braille bumper sticker, not by a sighting of a rare black republican, but instead by my encounter with yet another Nicholas Cage who now, 60-seconds later, was gone.

There was no way Papa could have fathered the man I just saw, but vasectomy aside, he had seeded an idea in my mind.

“Research,” he had said, “That’s what you do when something doesn’t make sense.”

And research I would.  But first I needed a tow-truck.