16-ch9

“Wow,” says The Statistician as he peers into the blackened engine compartment of Hippie Avenger’s inherited Microbus, “How many miles does this thing have on it? Five hundred thousand? A million?”

“I don’t know,” Hippie Avenger says. “The mile-counter thingy has flipped over so many times that …”

“The odometer, you mean.”

“The mile-counter thingy, yeah.”

“Wow,” The Statistician says again. “I can’t believe this old engine still runs.”

Hippie Avenger glances at The Statistician and Time Bomb’s shimmering black Cadillac Escalade SUV, and then at the sad-eyed cartoon animals on the PLEASE DON’T POLLUTE OUR WORLD sticker on the front fender of the old VW.

“Not all of us can afford to drive the Death Star,” she says.

“Hey, a Star Wars reference!” The Statistician cheers. “Good for you!”

When he was a kid, Star Wars was The Statistician’s favourite movie, despite its obvious scientific flaws, like Han Solo referring to a parsec as a unit of time rather than distance, or all of those fiery explosions in the oxygen-free void of space. He and The Drifter, with their officially licensed action figures and plastic spacecraft, used to stage epic sagas on the top bunk in their shared bedroom.

The Statistician fastens the jumper cable clamps onto the terminals of the VW’s ancient battery, and says, “If our SUV is the Death Star, then your Microbus is an X-Wing fighter.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Hippie Avenger admits. She suspects that she has just been insulted, but she isn’t sure, since she’s never seen Star Wars, despite being made to feel as if the space saga was somehow her own generation’s Woodstock.

“The Empire,” Statistician explains, “were the bad guys. They had the big, expensive, technologically advanced Death Star. The Rebel Alliance, on the other hand, flew rickety, outdated, patched-together old X-Wing fighters.”

“And the people in the Rebel Alliance were, like, the good guys?”

“Indeed. Here on Earth, Luke Skywalker would be driving your Microbus into battle. And he would probably vote for the Green Party, too.”

Hippie Avenger smiles. So he meant it as a compliment. With The Statistician, she is never sure.

He taps a knuckle on the faded “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” sticker affixed to the front bumper of the Microbus between the “Impeach Nixon!” and “Free Leonard Peltier” decals.

“And,” he continues, “in addition to being the good guys, the Rebels were being environmentally conscious by reusing old space fighters, instead of wasting precious raw materials building new ones.”

Hippie Avenger’s smile disappears. “Are you mocking me?”

“No! This is one of the few bumper stickers on your van that I agree with. The Earth has finite resources, so we can’t go on digging and burning them up infinitely.”

“Then why the friggin’ Battleship Escalade?”

“It’s hers, not mine.” The Statistician says, gesturing toward the sleeping Time Bomb, whose face is pressed against the passenger window of the enormous SUV. “I usually just take the subway to the university, but she refuses to use public transit at all — too many ‘allergens and toxins’ in the air, apparently.”

He raises the long, heavy hood on the Escalade and connects the jumper cables to its massive black battery.

“I thought she should get a nice, efficient little Honda Civic to run around the city in,” he continues, “but apparently people who live in our neighbourhood don’t drive Hondas. Apparently she feels ‘empowered ’” — he makes quotation marks in the air with his fingers — “by driving something large enough to generate its own gravitational field. Personally, I blame the feminist movement.”

“Hey! Buying a gas-guzzling tank has nothing to do with …”

“Aw, relax. I just said that to annoy you. Her mother bought it for her. She’s got one, too, so they’re both very empowered. Now, jump into your VW and we’ll see if we can get you empowered, too.”

Hippie Avenger climbs onto the frayed driver’s seat of the Microbus and turns the key. After a few wheezy, laboured turnovers, the little engine sputters, coughs, and then begins running earnestly. Its irregular burbling is music to Hippie Avenger’s ears; she won’t be trapped in the suburbs for the weekend, nor will she have to endure the trip to the cottage in the Death Star with The Statistician and Time Bomb.

“Shit!” cries The Statistician from within the SUV’s cavernous plastic and fake-wood interior. “Everything’s gone dead! What the …?”

Time Bomb’s eyelids flutter, and she mumbles sleepily, “Jump-starting another vehicle can trick the ATS into disabling the onboard computer so the engine won’t run.”

“ATS?”

“Anti-Theft System.”

“You didn’t think to tell me this until now?”

“You need a special electronic gizmo to reset it,” Time Bomb says. “It’ll be tough to find a mechanic who can do it, since it’s the long weekend. I guess we’ll just have to stay home.” She pauses before adding, “Darn the luck.”

Hippie Avenger wanders over beside the open driver’s-side window of the Escalade. She offers tentatively, “Well, like, if you two want to ride with me …”

“In that thing?” Time Bomb gasps. “My God! Does it even have CCAPS?”

“See-see-what?”

“Climate Control and Air Purification System! Air conditioning, for God’s sake! My hair will be a disaster in this humidity.”

Hippie Avenger says, “The Microbus comes equipped with a top-of-the-line NAS. It’s an older technology, but it always works.”

“NAS?”

“Natural Airflow System.”

Soon the old VW is rattling along a northbound highway, humid summer air blasting through its open windows. Hippie Avenger is behind the wheel, and The Statistician rides shotgun.

Time Bomb sneezes three times, “Ah-shee! Ah-shee! Ah-SHAH!”, then curls up in a fetal position on the rear bench seat. She grumbles something about “toxins and allergens” before falling into a drooling, snoring slumber.

They have been on the road for nearly an hour when The Statistician abruptly says, “‘Meat is Murder!”, quoting the translucent sticker affixed to the windshield above the dashboard in front of him. “Actually, killing another human being is murder. Meat is food.”

“Vegetables are food, too,” says Hippie Avenger, knowing that she’s chomping on the former high school Debating Champion’s bait.

She remembers the time that The Statistician passionately advocated atheism to Teens Need Truth co-chairs SuperKen and SuperBarbie, and then turned around and argued for the existence of God with the vociferously atheist Psycho Superstar. When everyone else proclaims to be liberal, The Statistician is conservative. When they are warriors, he’s a pacifist. When they are socialists, he’s a capitalist.

“Humans are omnivores!” he says, the volume of his voice rising. “We’re designed to eat vegetables and meat. It’s why we’ve got incisors in our mouths. It’s why we come equipped with the enzymes and acids particular to our digestive system. It’s why …”

It’s the same argument they’ve been having since high school, and Hippie Avenger inevitably runs out of ammunition before The Statistician does. She’s not in the mood to fight this battle yet again, so she says, “I didn’t put that sticker there. My parents did.”

“But you’re a vegetarian, aren’t you?”

He might as well have replaced the word vegetarian with idiot.

“Actually, I eat a bit of meat once in a while now.”

“Oh,” he says, deflating.

To The Statistician, a good debate is as essential to a road trip as the road itself. When they were kids, sitting in the back seat of their father’s Buick Skylark en route to some horrible tourist destination like the World’s Biggest Ball of Twine, he and The Drifter would wile the time away arguing about almost anything; whether Spider-Man was more or less than half as strong as Superman, would Mario Lemieux have scored as many goals as Wayne Gretzky if he hadn’t been hampered by injuries and illnesses, would it be better to colonize the Moon or Mars, and so on.

“So you eat meat now, eh?” The Statistician says. “That’s a sudden change in philosophy, indeed. What about all the cuddly, friendly animals?”

Hippie Avenger says, “I was becoming iron deficient.”

“Anemic,” says The Statistician.

“Yeah, iron deficient. Like, especially during my menstrual cycle. When all that blood gushes out of your body, you lose a lot of iron, and, like … or would you rather I didn’t get into the details?”

“I’m married, remember? Believe me, I know all about the magic and mystery of the menstrual cycle.”

They both glance back at Time Bomb, who is still snoring on the bench seat. Hippie Avenger wonders if Time Bomb is having her period right now, or if she’s always so distant and irritable.

“So, how often do you go carnivore, then?” The Statistician wonders. “A few times per month? A three-to-one ratio of vegetarian to omnivorous meals?”

“Oh, just about every day,” Hippie Avenger says, “but it’s not like I order the twenty-four-ounce porterhouse or the triple cheeseburger. Only a few ounces at a time, and, like, not for every meal.”

She is surprised when The Statistician says, “That’s pretty sensible, really. Each meat-producing animal consumes way more than its weight in corn, soy, and other grain, which could just as easily be eaten directly by humans. North Americans in particular consume much more meat than they need to, which is not efficient use of food energy. It’s simple mathematics, really. You don’t expend five units of food energy to create one unit.”

Well. This is hardly the adversarial debate she expected.

“I only buy free-range, grain-and-grass-fed meat,” she says, with an intentionally haughty tone. “I will not buy factory-produced meat products, like, no matter what. Penning up animals, and force-feeding them chemicals and semi-edible waste until they’re slaughtered is just wrong.”

That ought to get him going, Hippie Avenger figures. But rather than trotting out the familiar counter-argument that corporate agricultural methods are more economically efficient, or the rationalization that livestock are food, not personalities, The Statistician agrees with her.

“Indeed,” he says. “Meat factories consume enormous amounts of energy, pollute water supplies, and generate ridiculous amounts of greenhouse gases. And all those antibiotics and hormones they pump into the animals get passed onto the consumer. And, besides, the animals are much better treated on free-range farms. There’s no reason they need to be tortured before becoming food.”

“Like, when did you become so reasonable?”

“I’ve always been reasonable. Reason is my forte.”

“So, you mean we, like, actually agree on something?”

“Indeed we do.”

They ponder this for a while. As they travel farther from the city, through farm country, the smell of tarmac and exhaust fumes in the air is replaced by dust and manure, and the road becomes bumpier and noisier.

“So what else do you want to talk about?” The Statistician says. “Good conversation makes a long trip seem shorter.”

“I don’t know. What do you guys usually talk about?”

“Whenever we go anywhere, she takes an antihistamine, two ibuprofens, a Gravol, and an Ativan, and she’s asleep before we leave the driveway.” The Statistician shrugs. “Oh well. At least she isn’t complaining about anything when she’s unconscious.”

“At least you’ve got somebody.” Hippie Avenger says wistfully. “At least you’re not travelling alone.”

Even someone as literal at The Statistician knows that Hippie Avenger is speaking metaphorically. He wants to say something soothing, so this is what he comes up with: “Well, as Oscar Wilde once said, ‘Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside equally desperate to get out.’ Indeed, Oscar Wilde. Indeed.”

Hippie Avenger sighs. “Actually, I think it was, like, the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne who came up with that one.”

“Indeed,” comes the shrill voice of Time Bomb from behind them, “It, like, was de Montaigne.”

The Statistician winces; his wife was only pretending to be asleep.

For the remainder of the trip, nobody says anything else.