Or the Highway

You can see the backdrop of my loneliness from the interstate. Today it’s an advertisement for the World’s Largest Truckstop, take exit 284. There were other messages before. I’m up here on our billboard’s platform, listening to my Discman, draped in the scratchy plaid blanket dad keeps in the trunk of our car in case of emergency. I could make this an emergency. But I won’t.

Dad has no idea what an emergency would entail here in the Midwest, he just has the vague notion that he should be prepared for it. We aren’t rural people, we’re suburban ones interloping. We know where to take our vacuum to be fixed, but we haven’t learned how to do anything ourselves. I’m from Columbus, then Pittsburg, then Denver.“We go where the money is,” dad says, meaning his. He takes whichever finance job will pay him the most. Mom and I are capitalism’s collateral damage.  

The money now is in a cornfield in Iowa. We have no connection to this soil: it is only real estate to us. Dad rents it out to local farmers who grow crops I can see from up here—corn mostly, but there’s something in the far corner nearly out of eyeshot I’m not familiar with, maybe soybeans, judging from what I’ve heard some kids talk about at school. They talk in a language I can’t decipher, some strategic plotting of agriculture, of how to continue recovering from the flooding that happened around these parts a few years ago. The dirt here means something to them in a way I wish I could understand. I’ve never known land as home.

I seem to have a lot more time on my hands than the rest of the high school students. They’ve all got jobs or chores or 4-H. I’ve got the new Gin Blossoms CD and the latest issue of Billboard magazine. I bought a subscription for my dad as a Father’s Day present. A truly funny joke that went unappreciated. “It’s passive income, Jason!” He said, defending our I-80 eyesore. “Just like the land is.” Then he cleared his throat and launched into a lecture about how I should be creating my own revenue streams rather than making fun of his.  

I hadn’t been making fun of the billboard, he’s just sensitive still from that time I had Alison over.“You live here?” She had said, even though she already knew where I lived, everyone did. “I can’t believe you have this sky trash erected.” She gestured needlessly toward the window, toward the giant proclamation that Abortion Stops a Beating Heart. “It’s super embarrassing,” I had said meekly. After she left, dad made sure to find me to tell me my friend was a real Lady Bird Johnson type. I had no idea what that meant except that I should believe it an insult. Turns out the first lady had promoted the Highway Beautification Act, limiting—among other blots on the landscape—billboards.

Alison is in art class with me, her mom’s the teacher. Art is my favorite class and every day I think I’ll come up with something witty and smart to say to Alison, but she always beats me to it. Mostly with snipes about the billboard. “I see you updated your yard’s visual pollution,” she said today. “From anti-women to pro-capitalism. So progressive.” The abortion sign had been papered over with Joe Camel. “Very cool of you to get all the zoo animals into nicotine.” She was so clever so quickly, I don’t know how she did it, but I wanted to teach her something just once, to know something before she did.

Alison paints, but not as well as Mrs. Thompson does. Mrs. Thompson thinks I have real talent for creating. She said that. She said, “I see students who like the idea of art and I see students who have something to say. You, Jason, have something to say.”

“Tell my dad that,” I mumbled under my breath, but she didn’t hear me. Not that I think she wanted to talk to him anyway.

When I got home from school, I pulled out my charcoal pencils, still riding high from Mrs. Thompson’s compliment. I sat down at the kitchen table and turned to a fresh page in my sketchbook. I began to shade the bottom of the clouds I saw yesterday from the billboard. All those different types of gray.

“Where’s Jason?” I heard dad holler from the other room. I adjusted my headphones and turned up the volume on “Follow You Down.”

“He’s in here fiddling with his pencils again,” mom yelled back from right behind me. 

“Tell him to come in here.” 

He wanted to show me the article he was reading, point out that the national average ACT score had risen a point from last year. “The average is still only 20.9. You’re gonna do better than that, aren’t you? I don’t know if I ever told you, but your old man got a 31.” 

He had told me. He was very proud of his intelligence, his business acumen, his car, my mother’s commitment to dieting, everything, it seemed, but me. 

Dad didn’t notice when I didn’t answer and slipped away from the house, into the field, back to the billboard I am always drifting toward. I climbed the ladder again, my footing sure by now. Up here, the cars look like toys. They are full of people going or leaving somewhere, and I have the thought that maybe the drivers and passengers are all just being played with. I put that same song back on and watch traffic, sure as always, the need to be anywhere else pulling people in all directions.

I used to construct stories about them but now I watch the sky cross over me. The shadows the clouds cast on the corn stalks—nearly full-grown now—are something I want to recreate on paper. I should repaper this billboard with a mural of something beautiful, something useful. 

My music is loud but not too loud to hear the screech of a hard brake and the crushing of metal against metal. Then slammed doors and screams and I see a woman flailing her arms at a man twice her size—at least I think he looks much larger than her, but both of them look so small from here. I think for a second of climbing down. Alison would, I tell myself, she would be a witness for that woman to make sure she didn’t end up paying for damage she didn’t cause. But I feel too immense up here on my perch to be bothered with trivial details. That life is not mine, I think.

I wonder if there is a god, how lonely he must feel, with no one equal, everyone beneath him. If no one could ever understand me, I would have to make isolation a cure for loneliness rather than its curse. Mrs. Thompson had just finished telling that expression is the opposite of depression. I pull a utility knife from my back pocket, sharpen my pencil, press its tip against the billboard paper.  

Dad punished me by forbidding me to go to school for a week. “People are putting the wrong ideas into your head!” he bellowed. He also took my bedroom door off its hinges, carried my mattress out to the garage. The only thing he didn’t take away from me was my Discman, which I had stashed inside my pillowcase.

When I returned to school, Mrs. Thompson stopped me first. “What you made was stunning,” she said. I was twisting a piece of paper in my hands, looking at the floor. “Just stunning,” she repeated, looking at me until I met her eyes. I think I’ll draw them next.

When I saw Alison, she smiled at me. No snarky comments whatsoever. She simply quoted, “the clash of ideas is the sound of freedom.”